Chinoiserie Visual Culture In Early Modern Europe

The research of European Chinoiserie is less than enough and has hardly become the formal part of traditional art history; however, as a strong visual culture having lasted for over 200 years, its value of research is more than obvious. This article discusses the role it played and the information it conveyed in terms of the visual culture and from the point of view of globalization in early modern period of European history. It is argued that Chinoiserie was the expression of the aesthetics of globalization, which had its important influence on the formation of European new culture in early modern period. Further, if we expand our view broadly, we might find out that Chinoiserie was the natural sequence in the stream of globalization in visual culture that had started hundreds of years earlier, such as the Hellenization by ancient Greeks, Westernization in ancient China and Arabianization in the Middle Ages. This research of Chinoiserie is an experiment of research of art history deviating from Eurocentrism.