18 Oct. Yijun Wang (NYU)
4:00-5:15 Yijun Wang “Creating Guangdong-style Pewter: Innovations and Transmissions of Technology in the Context of Maritime Trade in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” …….. Here is the reading.
Yijun Wang is an Assistant Professor of History at NYU. Her research interests include material culture, history of technology, and gender in early modern China. Yijun is especially interested in the connections between knowledge, technology, and power. Her current book project, tentatively titled From Tin to Pewter: Craft and Statecraft in Qing China, examines the transmissions of technology and changes in the culture of statecraft in China from 1700 to 1850s. By tracing the itinerary of tin, she explores how imperial expansion and global trade affected knowledge production and transmission, gradually changing the culture of statecraft from Confucian didacticism to technocratic statecraft. Yijun has contributed an article to The Silver Age: Origins and Trade of Chinese Export Silver (Hong Kong Maritime Museum, 2017).
Abstract: China became the “world factory” since the seventeenth century. Its luxury commodities, such as silk, porcelain, and furniture, influenced European consumer culture and fashion, and even led to the emergence of Chinoiserie—a style inspired by Chinese decorative art. This presentation, on the other hand, discusses the influence of European art and the impact of global trade on a kind of mass-produced, everyday objects—the Chinese pewter. In the eighteenth century, artisans in Guangdong began to create heavily decorated, silver-like pewter objects, which are in a hybrid form that shows both European and Chinese influences. These pewter objects were called Guangdong-style pewter, and they widely circulated in both domestic and international markets. This presentation examines the creation of Guangdong-style pewter to show how the introduction of tin from southeast Asia led to innovations in metallurgy, and how European commodities inspired stylistic changes and technological innovations. I am going to contextualize the innovation of pewter artisans in the trade networks, local craft traditions, and local ecology to show that technology was embedded in the assemblage of social, economic, material and ecological networks. I argue that the creation of Guangdong-style pewter shows the local adaptation of new forms and styles, the negotiations between materials and practices, and the entanglement between the global trade network and the local craft community.
October 18, 2019
Presenter: Yijun Wang (NYU)