UC Berkeley

“Metamorphic Medium” offers a new approach to the question of how objects can elucidate connections between local and global contexts, by centering the very material of early modern globalization. The dissertation is a social art history of silverwares that moved through the southeastern Chinese port city of Guangzhou. During the late Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) periods, silver exploited from mines in Latin America flowed into China through southern coastal ports, transforming the empire culturally and economically. Silverworking was a handicraft trade which relied on material, technical, and artistic knowledge to produce wares for both Chinese and foreign markets with connections to the region. Art historians have overlooked this topic due to the limited survival of Qing-period silverwares in China outside of court collections, and art-historical investments in literati and court art over vernacular, “export,” and ephemeral forms of art and material culture. Further, while silver is often evoked as the archetype for global commodity exchange, there has never been an object-based study of how silver circulated across incommensurable systems of value.

This dissertation asks how the production and transaction of silver objects illuminate connections between craft and mercantile knowledge, consumer tastes, and the power differentials of value negotiated across oceanic distances. It converses with art histories of global exchange, commodity histories, and histories of globalization. It views silver objects not as permanent works of art, or rationalized units of uniform value, but rather as contingent crystallizations of a mutable and heterogenous medium. At a historiographic level, the study traces how local and global forces have shaped art history. It argues that silver during this period was interpreted and claimed as something other than Chinese, due to the separate agendas of, as well as interactions, between Ming-Qing literati canons of taste, and the foreign and primarily European appropriation of global commodities and their histories. At a historical level, the study positions regional Chinese silversmiths as powerful agents that impacted silverware production, consumption, and history in regions often viewed as the global centers of metalworking innovation. Finally, it argues for approaches to art history that regard the ongoing material transformation of objects and their points of social transaction as primary methodological concerns, in order to expand the subjects studied and histories produced by the field.