Ornamentalism

by Anne Anlin Cheng

As if in answer to this bracing realization, we find the dress in plate 56 as well in the Blue Willow assembly. Here aesthetic congealment has grown into full-bodied edifice. The to-be-used Chinese female body seems to have petrified into domestic and collectible things (pieces of teapots, cups, plates) whose value now resides in their aggressive uselessness. At the same time, this congealed and fractured domesticity, offering repurposed purposelessness, transcends its own quotidianness to lay claim to art. Made by contemporary artist Li Xiaofeng (b. 1965), this piece is clearly not human, but nor is it entirely a thing. The weight (of material, history, domesticity, femininity) implies petrification, but the form suggests flight. Is this dress or armor? Winged victory or the madwoman in the attic? A tribute to monumentality or a concession to the mundane? What has died here, the human or the ornament? And finally, has the human outmoded itself or has the object outrun the human demand?