Speaking Up for Ornament: My Work with Chinoiserie

Among the many ornamental styles that have flourished in the history of Western art and design, chinoiserie has always stood out to me as a form uniquely invested in fantasy. It is not merely a decorative tradition inspired by Chinese visual culture; it is a style about ornament.

Chinoiserie’s origins lie not in direct cultural exchange but in projection and myth. Since the thirteenth century, when Marco Polo returned from the court of Kublai Khan with tales of unimaginable splendour, the idea of “Cathay” — later absorbed into the broader European fantasy of “the East” — became a site of indulgent speculation. By the sixteenth century, Portuguese trade routes brought Chinese porcelain, lacquerware, and silk to European elites. These objects were rarely appreciated for their cultural specificity; instead, they were prized for their strangeness, their opulence. By the eighteenth century, chinoiserie had become a full-blown fashion — gilded pagodas, stylised flora, and frolicking figures decorated salons, gardens, and tableware.

This fascination with “the East” was shaped less by understanding than by cultivated distance. Chinoiserie was appreciated for its otherness — a decorative language unburdened by intellectual or moral seriousness. It came to signify luxury, leisure, and a fantasy of carefree abundance. In the West, it was entwined with long-standing tropes that equated the East with pleasure and ornamental excess, as opposed to Western ideals of rationality and austerity.

Even today, despite a century of scholarship and growing intercultural understanding, chinoiserie continues to circulate largely unchanged. It appears uncritically in fashion, interior design, and visual culture — recycled as a shorthand for exotic whimsy and elegant indulgence. The motifs persist, but their meanings are rarely reconsidered. As a style, chinoiserie has remained strangely impervious to critique, clinging to its reputation as ornamental frippery.

It is precisely this legacy that draws me to it. My use of chinoiserie is a deliberate decision to engage a visual language weighed down by associations of the superficial, the fanciful, and the insubstantial. In doing so, I confront a persistent Western habit: the dismissal of ornament — and of cultures of ornament — as lacking seriousness or meaning.

At the heart of my practice is the belief that ornament is never arbitrary. Every motif, every flourish, is encoded — it carries a message, a logic, a narrative, even a philosophical proposition. This is certainly true of authentic Chinese art, with its long and richly symbolic ornamental traditions. While I am deeply interested in that authentic language, I approach it through the historical filter of chinoiserie — the Western misreading of it — because that side of it is the tradition I’ve inherited.

My work reanimates the intercultural hybridity that chinoiserie has always represented — arguably its most enduring value — but I do so with critical intent. I treat these motifs not as exotic decoration but as components of visual riddles, studied, understood, and recombined to provoke thought. The result is a kind of graphic wordplay — intricate and layered — that rewards close viewing and historical literacy.

My engagement with chinoiserie is both homage and correction. I honour the aesthetic seduction that once made the style irresistible, but I aim to ground it in the intellectual and cultural rigour it was often denied. I want to invite viewers to see ornament not as excess, but as a complex, meaningful language — one capable of wit, ambiguity, and critique. In this, I hope to restore a measure of dignity to the ornamental and reconnect contemporary practice to a lineage of meaning-making that spans centuries and continents.

Improved Flowers

This conceptual approach finds perhaps its clearest expression in one of my faience works developed in collaboration with Royal Tichelaar, the Netherlands’ oldest ceramics manufacturer. The piece is a cone-shaped vessel, fully ornamented with four flowers of profound symbolic importance in East Asian art: the orchid, the lotus, the peony, and the chrysanthemum. But for me, these are not merely decorative motifs — they are the starting point of an inquiry into the intersection of symbolism, science, and beauty.

I began by researching each flower’s traditional meanings. But rather than treating them as static emblems, I posed a provocative question: what would it mean to improve a flower according to the logic of its symbolism?

To explore this, I collaborated with Agriom, a Dutch firm specializing in the genetic development of ornamental plants. Together, we imagined genetically enhanced versions of each flower — modified forms that would better express the symbolic ideas they traditionally embody. This speculative exercise in botanical semiotics led to a second collaboration, with Li Xiaoqian, a Chinese painter trained in the refined Gongbi style. Li translated our imagined flowers into exquisitely detailed paintings, merging classical technique with conceptual invention.

Only after this multi-stage process — involving symbolism, genetics, artistic translation, and intercultural dialogue — did I begin to design the faience decoration. The final ornament, hand-painted by artisans at Royal Tichelaar, is not an illustration but a kind of critical misreading — a deliberate and thoughtful reframing of historical forms.

May Your Divorce Be Happy

Another work, equally dear to me, extends this approach to the emotional terrain of modern life. On a square porcelain panel, I engage with the traditional Chinese visual lexicon of marital happiness — symbols such as paired mandarin ducks, blooming flowers, bats, and the God of love. These are familiar motifs, often found on wedding gifts and dowries, affirming fidelity, harmony, and romantic permanence.

But instead of reinforcing those ideals, I chose to subvert them — gently. The panel reads: May your divorce be happy. This isn’t irony or mockery. It’s an affirmation of change, of new forms of love and freedom. The ducks face away from one another, the flowers begin to fade, the bats drift apart. The meaning has shifted, but the beauty is retained.

For me, this is what ornament can do. It can speak to contemporary emotions, it can acknowledge evolving social structures, it can offer beauty with substance. And in this sense, it becomes not just a decorative language, but an ethical one — responsive, adaptive, humane. This is my contribution to the ongoing life of chinoiserie. I don’t deny its historical entanglements with fantasy, projection, and frivolity. But I also refuse to abandon such a rich visual language to those limitations. By activating its semantic potential, I hope to reinvent chinoiserie as a critical style — ornament, now adorned with the power of speech.