Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2022, History of Art

In the 1930s, a miniature jadeite pagoda traveled to several international expositions. Commissioned by the Shanghai jade merchant Zhang Wendi 張文棣 (1886-1961 or 1964), the pagoda seemed to captivate everyone who encountered it. When a group of bankers, politicians, and businessmen in Shanghai prepared a display for the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, this object became a critical component of their contribution. The carving, the Altar of the Green Jade Pagoda (翡翠寶塔, created between 1923-1933, collection of the Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art), never traveled to France. However, the vibrant “social life” of the pagoda—to use Arjun Appadurai's term—over the course of 1937 functions as a unique case study to investigate the role of jade culture in the waning years of the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937). By employing the jade pagoda as a case study, I analyze the socioeconomic conditions that shaped its desirability across a vast range of social groups in the late 1930s. In the introduction of this project, I sketch the history of the 1937 Paris Exposition, the history of jade in the material culture of present-day China, and the events in 1930 that preceded the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). In so doing, I draw together ostensibly disparate narratives through which to understand the pagoda's social life. Chapter 1 analyzes the interest in the pagoda from a Shanghai-based group known as the Association for China's Participation in the Paris International Exposition. Their earnest attempts to secure Chinese representation of the pagoda at the Parisian world's fair ask us to analyze the factors that primed the positive reception of the carving. In Chapter 2, we remain in Shanghai, where numerous print culture materials disseminated images of the pagoda. The localizing function of these images and articles grounded a pre-Paris exhibition of jade objects firmly within a Shanghai-specific cultural ima (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jody Patterson (Committee Member); Julia Andrews (Advisor) Subjects: Art History