Provenance and current location

2025
06:40 minutes
film installation, silent, looped

Provenance and current location is a comparative study of eighteenth-century chinoiserie artefacts from Empress Maria Theresa’s Habsburg Empire and decorative objects from Emperor Chien-lung’s Chinese Empire. The film shows historic Chinese-inspired objects from Vienna currently held at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and Liechtenstein the Princely Collections in Vaduz and Vienna. These slides are intersected by images of artefacts from the Ching Dynasty at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. By juxtaposing these chinoiserie and Chinese objects, the film raises the question of cultural authenticity and explores Chineseness as a visual language being fluid across cultures.

Moreover, the artefacts in the film bring to the fore their diasporic trajectories: where they were made and where they are currently. At the end of the Chinese Civil War, the Nationalists relocated from China to Taiwan in 1949, bringing with them a huge quantity of royal Chinese treasures from the National Palace Museum Beijing. These artefacts, including the ones in the film, have since been at the National Palace Museum Taipei. On the other hand, the Viennese chinoiserie gems were collected by private collectors and have become part of the overseas museum collections in which they are now.

This film was created as part of Clare Chun-yu Liu’s Postdoctoral Artist Fellowship at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology.