David Clarke’s Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World is composed of six essays in three sections: “Trajectories: Chinese Artists and the West,” “Imported Genres,” and “Returning Home: Cities between China and the World.” Earlier versions of five of the essays have appeared before, as has some of the information in the first. It is a good idea for a scholar to bring together individual essays and chronologically discontinuous views in a single volume since these then become more easily available for reference and present a kind of informational penumbra for the topics they discuss. The usefulness of this effort is vitiated if, as here, there is no separate, integrated bibliography in European languages and Chinese, no illustrations’ list, and no list of characters for Chinese names (some of these, romanized in a non-pinyin system, represent dialects other than putonghua for which the characters are a significant identifier). The reader cannot quickly identify what is new scholarship as one would expect with essays written between 2005 and 2010.

The most important essay and one of permanent value is the first, “Chitqua: A Chinese Craftsman Portrait Sculptor in Eighteenth-Century London.” It is based on substantial museum and archival research in Britain, the United States, and Holland, and cements very clearly Chitqua as among the first, if not the first, Asian artist/artisan to, however briefly, become part of a European art world in the late eighteenth century, including exhibition by invitation at the second Royal Academy exhibition in 1770 (31; n. 44, 220). Chitqua is also shown at the left-hand side of Johann Zoffany’s The Academicians of the Royal Academy (1771–72), painted for George III (32, fig. 4). Sketches also survive of Chitqua by Charles Grignion (34–35, figs. 5 & 6). Clarke carefully illustrates, documents, and contextualizes what can now be known of Chitqua’s reception, work in London, and exhibition. Doing this for the first time and so comprehensively is a significant contribution to art history.

It may be that before the arrival in the Netherlands of Raden Saleh from Java in 1829 to study with two Dutch painters, Chitqua is the first major Asian artisan whose name we know to work in a European capital. His presence is the burgeoning sign of a quite pronounced, if not necessarily before the 1850s very extensive, interchange between different Euro-American and Asian art worlds. It is fascinating how even the early relation between Chinese port painters and sculptor artisans and Western influences was paralleled by, and in all probability was integral with, the movement of Chinese painters on glass. They were instructed in the technique in the 1740s by the French missionary Jean Denis Attiret. Thereafter, the techniques and the craftsmen who made them spread to Japan, Java, Manila, Bangkok, the Coramandel Coast, and Western India where a reverse painting on glass of the Governor of Surat is known from circa 1790.

I carefully say “artisan” since under the now-received and art-historically reinforced notion of pre-modern Chinese art discourses, Chitqua could not be accepted as an “artist” because he was not, it would appear, a member of the literati class with its discourse of script-image interfaces and their elaborated cultural and aesthetics codes. Yet he was literate enough to comment on Chinese books in the British Museum in 1770 (29).

Clarke’s later constructions of “Chinese” and “Western” art and artists will be called into question by the extensive and flourishing transfer of artists and media, albeit not those of the literati, between “China” and the “West” that occurs when a much more extensive appropriation of “Western” discourses in China takes place. This will be on a different scale from earlier contacts between Tang and Song China with medieval art, or the structure of reception in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with late Renaissance art. Not only are the questions of what is an artist and an artistic discourse with cultural affiliation in “China” and the “West” called into question, but essentialist notions of a “Chinese” and a “Western” cultural discourse are also rendered problematic. If these differences were so large, then the exchanges would have been much less possible and indeed, over time, much less fruitful.

These issues recur in another guise in Clarke’s essays on the body in Chinese art and on abstraction and modern Chinese art. They hinge on the identification of European painting as iconic because of its wish to make “the represented space and its occupants as immediately present to the spectator as possible” (116), a discourse where indexical signs are suppressed because “they are disruptive of the illusion of presence” (116). In Chinese “literati painting and calligraphy” (notice this is not “in Chinese painting” or “in Chinese visual discourses”) indexical signs are foregrounded and “the space of making” is emphasized. These positions, variously extrapolated from Norman Bryson’s Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), have the interesting semiotic property of post hoc rationalization of the cultural or art discursive difference they are ab initio supposed to define; in short they are circular and risk essentialism.

This circularity also allows the discrimination of “Western” and “Chinese” as antithetical, as mutually differentiating cultural or art-discursive others. It does not permit one to ask how much of the “other” is included, but also suppressed or occluded, by the antithesis. In fact, Clarke’s own work indicates, and much other research is increasingly demonstrating, that neither was all of “Western” representational art “mimetic,” nor Chinese art “trace-presenting,” as these antitheses so conveniently encode. One feature of art discourses is how naturalized they become, how conveniently and consistently they conceal or put aside their own motivations in the Saussurian sense. As I have discussed in Modern Asian Art (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), it is a bit of a problem for cross-cultural analysis to elide or even confuse this motivation with the modalities of historically conditioned practices—such as mimetic oil painting or calligraphic brush work—by which they are enacted.

This occurs even more so when “Western” art imports or accepts the hints of indexical trace found in Chinese painting and calligraphy to produce its own “abstractionism.” Or, conversely, Chinese art adopts hints of the geometric and scientific analysis of pictorial space and color denotation by which, anti-mimetically, “Western” art in part (re)discovered abstraction and indexicality in the latter nineteenth century. In turn the “Western” trajectory went on to an abstraction of the “qualities” of indexical marks in the twentieth century. These apparently culturally disparate approaches are in so much contact with the end of European mimeticism and the transfer of its representational functions to photography (present since the 1860s in many parts of Asia) that they can scarcely be conceived as two separate discursive fields. These will be defined by culturally disassociated specificities after the 1940s, particularly in the hands of many artists who travel, or whose image-world is no longer conditioned by what is simply “differentially ours.” Thus, the task of art-historical and theoretical understanding from the late 1940s should have been to understand how these art discourses are actually connected, or to map their unseen homologies, to constitute one set of differentiated discourses but with historically conditioned kinds of position. It is a sign of the late awareness of globality that was certainly present by the mid-nineteenth century and in many cases much earlier, but mostly ignored due to a fused identification of culture and nation, that allows art and its historians to articulate difference in terms of unique national-cultural systems instead of systems incorporating or encoding an accepted difference.

The final two chapters are perhaps Clarke’s most interesting and enjoyably idiosyncratic contributions, ones enlivened by many of his own photographs (although unfortunately these are not as large or as well-laid out and printed [see those on 193] as the author’s text merits). His first subject is contemporary Macao—with its bizarre confection of ex-Sino-Portuguese gangster-grandee families, casino importations of Venice via Las Vegas, and academy-trained artists, like Konstantin Bessmertny (from Vladivostok, who is almost too aware of the curious fabulisms of nineteenth-century faux primitif painting applied to China’s now self-colonized periphery)—a massive entertainment zone for the better-off fractions of the new consuming masses.

Clarke’s last subject is of Hong Kong as a city stage haunted by the theatrical shadows of its urban others: Silicon Valley, the Sydney Opera House, Singapore’s Merlion sculpture, and a replica of the Monument to the People’s Heroes (circa 1989) make brief walk-on appearances. His analysis of the theatrical dilemmas of Hong Kong’s projected presence against the imagined backdrops of its proposed peers is full of insights, perhaps delivered a little too tongue-in-cheek. The idea of Norman Foster covering the whole of the West Kowloon project with a translucent canopy (199, fig. 112) speaks of a totalitarian posing which might have come off if China really did have untrammelled control over Hong Kong. But that would have produced another art history.