Exchange and its Consequences

Efforts to integrate Asian art into a global history of art have tended to emphasize processes of exchange—the role that networks of trade, pilgrimage, and diplomacy have played in the circulation of images, techniques, and materials. They have, in short, highlighted objects that can be readily related to the processes of military and economic conquest whereby the world became global. I use artworks in this way in my Arts of Asia survey. But I also discuss objects that illustrate the uglier consequences of what can, especially in a wide-ranging survey without an explicit political perspective, come across as a triumphalist account of ever-increasing integration. In this talk I highlight one of these objects, a twelfth-century Yaozhou celadon bowl whose impressed design and olive hue can be linked to changing fuel regimes and the broader processes of ecological change that resulted from the expansion of East Asian trade networks. By tracing the deep history of anthropogenic climate change embedded in such objects, I endeavor to sensitize students to the visual traces of long-term processes whose consequences are now being felt around the world.