Ornamentalism

by Anne Anlin Cheng

Li’s fragmented plates and teacups—his reassembled “Chinese details,” this weighty, nonhuman embodiedness—suggests that it may be in this very transition from mere thing to ornament (that is, the technology of ornamentalism) that things Chinese can maneuver for value. Entwined with the trauma of authenticity enacted by this sculpture dress is therefore the further possibility that this twenty-first-century Asiatic porcelain body made for an Euro-American audience may be seeking to outmode itself to continue to be relevant on the modern stage. Like a treasure dealer who is also a dumpster diver, Li compels us to consider our national and temporal assumptions about what modernity imagines is lost to it. Here the “ethnic detail” offers temporal recapitulation via the crafted insistence on its own death and lostness, as if to say “I am relevant today because I am no longer relevant.” Indeed, like dead languages, Li’s fragments can seem to become untranslatable, atavistic, Oriental, beautiful, and modern all at once.28