Fine China: Yee I-Lann’s Tabled and the Nationality of Objects

In 2013, Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann created Tabled for an exhibition at the Museum Van Loon in Amsterdam. The focus of Yee’s installation is a set of fifty pieces of “fine china” displayed on the former dining table of a prominent family whose wealth came from the Dutch East India Company, the transnational trading company responsible for importing china – initially from Japan – to Europe. The histories of Delftware and Asian porcelains reveal intricate webs of encounters that disrupt essentialist mythologies of national origins and authenticity often tied to objects and identities.

In this paper, I will analyze Yee’s art installation through the lens of Ien Ang’s theory of hybridity. By hybridity, Ang means “the fundamental uneasiness inherent in our global condition of togetherness-in-difference.”[1] Printed onto the fine china plates are not characteristic genre images, but rather quotidian scenes of Malaysians and Indonesians, some of whom, like Yee herself, are likely of part-Chinese descent. The images suggest a complex perspective into transnational circuits that is rooted in “the orbit of what ordinary people...think, believe and do in their local situations.[2] Yee’s project suggests that, like fine china, what is “Chinese” – or any other nation-bound identity - is contingent less upon authentic and centered histories and more upon circuits of encounter and exchange.

[1] Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West (London: Routledge, 2001), 200.

[2] Ang 72. Ang is referencing: Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1996), 153.