Guest Lecture by Mattes Lammert

Mattes Lammert

Wednesday, May 21, 2025, 12:45-13:45
University of Zurich, Rämistrasse 59, 8001 Zürich
RAA-E-27

Abstract:

How did the objects displayed and stored in our museums end up here in the first place? While provenance research has long focused primarily on acquisitions made during the Nazi era, the question of how objects from colonial contexts were collected has increasingly been raised in recent years. However, the current debate on the provenance of non-European artefacts in Western museums is characterised by a strong focus on objects from Africa. While there are also large collections of East Asian art in Europe and America, their provenance has not been adequately investigated thus far.

With the forced opening of Japan, China and Korea by Western powers, an international art market for East Asian art developed from the middle of the 19th century, resulting in hundreds and thousands of objects entering international collections. Today, the Museum Rietberg alone owns 1,700 objects of Chinese art, without even taking into account permanent loans. Nevertheless, it is often difficult to trace how exactly these objects ended up in the museum since most of them were donated or acquired on the art market. There is no doubt, however, that some objects of East Asian art only came onto this market as a result of looting and plunder, such as the destruction of the Old Summer Palace in 1860 and the bloody suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.

The displacement of objects, primarily from Korea and China, is not limited to Europe and America alone. Many of the objects in question were relocated within East Asia as part of Japan's imperialist expansion. The current presence of the objects in one place and their simultaneous absence in another cannot be reduced to the legal and moral issue of the rightful ownership, but also raises the question of interpretive authority. Research into the translocation of East Asian art represents a new field of provenance research, which is of particular relevance to the way art history is written, and might therefore contribute to a better understanding of the objects in question.