Ongoing exhibition shares stories of China-foreign craftsmanship exchanges

The ongoing exhibition includes several works that attest to this two-way exchange. Among them, a lacquer fan, a rectangular box with a parcel-wrapping motif, and a handled teapot with floral decoration — the latter two from the Qing imperial collection. In these pieces, gold set against black, whether a delicate sprinkling or in painted petals, speaks to the adoption of Japanese lacquer artistry by Chinese practitioners.

Meanwhile, by the 18th century, Chinese lacquerware already played a significant role in shaping the European taste for Chinoiserie — a style that draws on imagined or adapted elements of Chinese art, reinterpreted through a Western lens — its distinctive visual language finding expression across a range of media, from furniture to interior decoration. In this context, lacquerware also formed part of the imperial gifts presented by the Qianlong emperor to the Macartney Embassy of 1793, a British diplomatic mission sent to the Qing court in hopes of expanding trade between the two countries.

Yet the embassy did not achieve its immediate aims. The Qing court, confident in the sufficiency of its system, saw little need to accommodate such demands, while British interests lay less in objects of refinement than in the expansion of trade on terms favorable to their own commercial ambitions, which would, in time, be pursued through invasion.

The Qing court's loss in the Opium Wars led to the signing of unequal treaties and the opening of ports. Set against this broader trajectory, the lacquerware once presented as diplomatic gifts appears in a more complex light: not only as an expression of aesthetic accomplishment, but as a quiet prelude to a changing world in which the balance of power had decisively shifted, redefining the terms of cross-cultural encounters.

"In lacquerware, utility and beauty are never apart: it holds, it adorns, it endures. It is a bearer of daily use and of histories long past," Xi says.