UC Berkeley

This dissertation closely examines the art and craft workshops at the French-Jesuit-run orphanage of Tushanwan in the first decades of the twentieth-century. Founded in the 1860s, the workshops taught Chinese orphaned boys a wide range of vocational skills from painting to shoemaking in preparation for their entry into adulthood in a rapidly modernizing China. Using different art objects and projects created at the major workshops as my primary subjects of investigation, the dissertation analyzes the transmission, translation, and reinvention of modern Euro-American aesthetic ideologies and techniques at Tushanwan and their receptions. In the process, I question the nature and motivation of commercial workshops like Tushanwan beyond the monetary and reframe its practices and operations in terms of the religious, institutional, cultural, and historical legacies of the Jesuits in China. I also expand the global scope of popular late-nineteenth-century European aesthetic movements such as the Arts and Crafts by accounting for the reinterpretation of those ideologies within the local context. Through the works and practices from the workshops, I describe a collage of interactions between China and the world united by a sense of common spiritual identity that supposedly transcended national and state boundaries, but instead reified and maintained the heterogeneity of identities.