The Creation of Fine Arts and Crafts in Tushanwan from the Perspective of Modern Expo
Liu Lixian
School of International Education / Silk and Fashion Culture Research Center of Zhejiang Province, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou 310018, China
Abstract The industrial revolution in the 1860s boosted social productivity. With increased needs for raw materials and capital accumulation, western colonists started their expansion strategy on a global scale, and held the world’s first large-scale Expo—the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851 to display the achievements of the Industrial Revolution and show off their comprehensive national strength. Since then, the World Expo has become a regular international event. Tushanwan Arts and Crafts Orphanage also took the Expo as a venue to promote its products to the world. As the center of the Far East Diocese of the global missionary work of the Catholic Church in the 19th century, Tushanwan Arts and Crafts Orphanage started as a subsidiary site of Catholic missionary salvation. From 1864 to 1958, it successively opened many core workshops including carpentry, art, printing and hardware, and adopted a cooperative way of arts and crafts creation. Since the World Expo in Paris in 1900, the orphanage participated in the World Expo for many times, bringing huge fame to a number of Tushanwan arts and crafts which merged Chinese and Western characteristics. As a good specimen of the history of East-West arts and crafts exchange and the transformation of modern Chinese design education, Tushanwan Arts and Crafts Orphanage first served missionaries, and then strove for survival during the war by finding domestic and foreign customers. As its art and crafts won many awards at the World Expo, it expanded its business in the international market. The artistic creation and operation mode of Tushanwan Arts and Crafts Orphanage would bring us some inspiration on how to inherit our national arts and crafts at present, which is also an examination of the contemporary value of Chinese arts and crafts in the context of arts, creativity and national cultural strategy. This paper examines the complex history of Tushanwan arts and crafts and recaptures the religious, cultural, artistic and technological exchanges between China and the West a hundred years ago. Tushanwan arts and crafts not only mirror how the western missionaries localized Catholic arts in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, but also reflect their interpretation of Oriental arts from a Western perspective. All the Tushanwan arts and crafts that won awards or received orders like “A Hundred Chinese Pagodas”, “Wood Figurines” and “The Chinese Palace” merged Chinese and Western artistic creation techniques. The overseas Tushanwan treasures are even more a witness of history. Among them, “A Hundred Chinese Pagodas” made by a team of western missionary artists and Chinese orphan craftsmen was exhibited at the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915 and won the gold medal. It is a collaborative work of carpentry, hardware and art workshops of Tushanwan Arts and Crafts Orphanage, and was a product merging Chinese and Western architectural arts. Created in wartime China, “A Hundred Chinese Pagodas” was deeply imbued with the characteristics of the times and with those of the church-affiliated orphanage, becoming a work of artistic craftsmanship which integrated the original intention of creation to serve the missions of the church with the later, Chinese style to satisfy the curiosity of Westerners. The emergence, development and ending of Tushanwan Arts and Crafts Orphanage lasted for nearly a hundred years (1864-1958). During its operation, it adopted a unique way of art and crafts creation and inheritance, indirectly promoting the exchange of art and crafts between the East and the West and inspiring Chinese design education in its transitional stage. It also reflects the transformation in China’s artistic creation and the output of national image of Chinese arts and crafts in the context of the Western “China craze” and the “world view” in the late Qing Dynasty.
Liu Lixian. The Creation of Fine Arts and Crafts in Tushanwan from the Perspective of Modern Expo[J]. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2022, 52(6): 120-132.
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