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All roads lead East

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 13th August 2008

Andrew Lambirth on our continuing fascination with the Orient

Almost everywhere you look these days there’s an exhibition to do with China or the Far East. Tinselly young oriental artists are fêted as if they were better than their limp-brained occidental counterparts, and scarcely a considered brushstroke between them. The East is Big Business and there’s more than one specialist agent concentrating on bringing over Chinese contemporary art to deluge the already schmaltz-surfeited English market. The old-established dealers, such as Eskenazi (10 Clifford Street, London W1), are world-leaders in the field of Chinese art, and show historical work of the highest quality, such as the earthenware horse and rider from the Tang period or the exquisite sandstone panels of musicians (Tang — Five Dynasties period). These glorious objects will be part of their forthcoming show Chinese Ceramics and Stone Sculpture (30 October to 28 November), timed to coincide with the annual event, Asian Art in London, which brings together exhibitions, auctions, receptions and lectures on the subject. It’s not the historical work I have a problem with, it’s the intellectual and aesthetic poverty of the contemporary stuff I object to. We have enough of our own without importing more.

The main show of the summer at Tate Britain has been The Lure of the East, in the Linbury Galleries (until 31 August). This deals with British artist–travellers to the Orient from the 17th to the early 20th centuries, and how visions of the East changed and developed — or didn’t, as the case may be. It was the increasing availability of steamboat travel in the 1830s that really opened up the prospects. In those days, the East meant the Near East rather than the Far East, and consisted essentially of the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean — Turkey, Syria, Palestine and Egypt. The exhibition leaflet boldly asserts that the paintings in this show ‘cannot be viewed in isolation from their wider political and cultural context’. With this I take issue — oh, yes they can. Irrespective of creeping political correctness and whingeing anti-colonialism, these pictures can and indeed should be seen as works of art, not historical documents.

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