Musquiqui Chihying Brings Cultural Tokens to Life in Paris

Musquiqui Chihying b. 1985, Taiwan Follow +

Musquiqui Chihying re-imagines the lives of stolen Chinese artefacts across European museum collections.

The taotie mask, a panther-like beast from Antiquity often found on ritual bronze objects, illustrated the 1929 poster for a Chinese art exhibition hosted at Berlin‘s Akademie der Künste, one of the first Chinese art exhibitions in Europe. Its stylised and cartoonish likeness is the sole protagonist of The Phantasmagoria (2022), which brings the image to life using 19th-century magic lantern projection techniques.

The animation is serenaded by a soothing but mechanical, algorithm-generated musical accompaniment. Appearing against a dark background, its mouth chants a midnight dialogue between objects from the 1929 Chinese art exhibition, as imagined by British scholar Francis Ayscough, who visited the show at the time.

The title of the exhibition, On the Faience of Your Eyes, is inspired by Victor Hugo’s 1851 poem ‘Vase de Chine’, which is dedicated to a Chinese girl whom Hugo compares to Chinese porcelain.

This title foreshadows the tone of the exhibition, which attempts to imagine and reconstruct the lives and perspectives of Chinese art objects across European institutional collections—ancient artefacts that tend to be nameless, with no artist attribution and vague fabrication years.

The gallery’s main space is dimmed and occupied by a single installation, The Vitrine (2022): three large display cases emitting flashing neon lights, but devoid of artworks and with their dark glass panels seemingly broken. The overall effect is that of a crime scene—an uncanny ambience extended by white fumes emitted into the space.

Around these light boxes, the voice of a narrator recounts different chapters from the lives of objects such as jade carvings, enamel pieces, and snuff bottles. These include their looting from Beijing‘s Old Summer Palace by European soldiers in 1860, marking the agonising decline of the Chinese empire amid the colonialist expansion and plunder of others.

Those stolen objects were appropriated into the French imperial collection. They were also mounted and gilded in European workshops to be repurposed into lamp stands, among other things, to decorate European homes, later resurfacing in auction sales, described as ‘ormolu-mounted Chinese porcelain’—a process the artist calls a ‘colonial pastiche that is a near-perfect display of the celebration of violence’.

Another chapter in these objects’ stories recounted in the narrator’s soundtrack, is their theft from Empress Eugénie de Montijo’s collection in the Chinese Museum at the Château de Fontainebleau in 2015.

Amplifying that sense of mystery amid an intersection of crimes, is The Shelf (2022), a large vertical graphite drawing of cartoon-like vases with inquisitive eyes, inspired by historical documentation of Chinese vases fitted on customised shelves in European museums.

“The uncanny ambience is extended by white fumes emitted into the space. The overall effect is that of a crime scene.”

Positioned like observers on the wall, each section of the drawing shows the shadow of a vase that has maintained only its shape. Each one is imbued with eyes, and thus a life of its own, as they look out onto the gallery, both judge and jury confronting the orientalist gaze.

The artist learned about the Old Summer Palace spoils at the Château de Fontainebleau while researching African collections in France and was surprised to note that these Chinese items seem to be largely excluded from the ongoing and heated debates on the cultural restitution of objects such as the Benin Bronzes.

This overlooked fact seems especially pertinent as the Akademie der Künste in Berlin is currently one of the venues hosting Kader Attia’s 2022 Berlin Biennale, which focuses heavily on decolonisation and restitution.

Of course, colonial looting not only applies to objects; living things are victims of this displacement, too, as evidenced by one holographic projection of a memorial coin designed by the artist in the gallery’s mezzanine space.

The Looty (2022) features the head of a Pekingese dog that was reputedly brought back by British and French troops after the Opium Wars, and adopted by the British royal family. Apparently, they christened him ‘Looty’.

The artist’s interest in memorial coins extends to earlier works like ‘The Cultural Center’ (2018–2022), a series of memorial coins featuring several Chinese-funded architectural projects that serve as cultural institutions in African countries.

Such projects speak to the artist’s long-term interest in exploring the provenance of Asian and African objects in Western museum collections and the creation of systemised knowledge in these spaces. Chihying also attempts to do so outside the familiar binary between ‘the West’ and ‘the Other’ by highlighting connections at the peripheries.

But while the coin is a traditional token of exchange and an artefact preserved through time, The Looty is a daring addition that takes the artist’s research further. Beyond a holograph hovering in the gallery like a spectre, it appears as an NFT, breaching into the world of cryptocurrency to commit Looty’s story to the supposed immortality of the blockchain.

Although the conspicuous and heavily criticised provenance of Western museum objects is nothing new, gestures like these set questions of restitution against complex and ever-evolving sociopolitical backdrops. In doing so, the artist seeks different ways to understand and negotiate the value and function of cultural tokens as they circulate. —[O]

Main image: Exhibition view: Musquiqui Chihying, On the Faience of Your Eyes, LIUSA WANG, Paris (19 May–30 July 2022). Courtesy LIUSA WANG.