The New White

A Canadian born in China, Hua Jin reveals her unease in respect to the threat to traditional cultures posed by globalization. For this project, she took her inspiration from the famous blue and white porcelain of the ancient Ming dynasty and from the fifteenth-century horizontal scroll Travelling in Wu in the Museum’s collection. Painters of porcelain had to master the art of brushwork in order to transfer designs on silk and paper to the new medium. The insipid patterns on these porcelain pieces reflect the gradual disappearance of that age-old art. The white becomes dull, and the loss of artistic value stemming from contemporary mass consumption becomes obvious. Such new creations, often of poor quality, are the result of the high global demand that comes from foreign collectors’ taste for the exotic, as indicated by the traditional porcelain works in museum collections.