A Greenhouse Research Talk by Anna Grasskamp, Professor of Art History and Visual Studies (University of Oslo), Yixin Xu, PhD researcher (University of Oslo) and Sarah Chen Huang, post-doctoral fellow (University of Oslo).
This series of short talks gives insights into the project “An Ecological History of Eurasian Art: Natural Resources, Aesthetic Practices, and Early Modern Globalization” which seeks to illuminate the ecological interconnections that shaped artistic practices from 1500 to 1800 by examining key artistic sites across Eurasia through a geographic focus on under-researched regions of the so-called Global South. Two contributions will discuss material, terminological, and theoretical aspects of reuse practices in early modern art and material culture, while a third paper introduces amber as a case study. Drawing on China-Myanmar borderland mining maps, local gazetteers, and court memorials, it will trace how the decline of so-called “blood amber” imports from the increasingly depleted mines of northern Myanmar impacted the production of amber artifacts at the Qing court. Through the example of a carved amber miniature mountain inscribed with imperial poetry, it shows how amber was transformed from a geological substance into a literati landscape on the scholar’s desk charged with a range of ecological and cultural implications.
Anna Grasskamp (she/her) is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Oslo; her publications include Objects in Frames: Displaying Foreign Collectibles in Early Modern China and Europe (2019; second edition 2022) and Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia. Shells, Bodies, and Materiality published in the Amsterdam University Press series Connected Histories in the Early Modern World in 2021. Sarah Chen Huang (she/her) is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Oslo with a PhD from City University of Hong Kong who has been a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2021) and EALC, Harvard University (2022), and served on the advisory committee for the exhibition Growing and Knowing in the Gardens of China at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens (2024). Yixin Xu (she/her) is a PhD student at the University of Oslo with MA degrees in Asian Studies from Cornell University and the History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art who is particularly interested in how global objects act as storytellers revealing stories that connect craftspeople, consumers, and geographies across Europe and Asia.