Between the Chini Khana and the China Room: The Architectural Reuse of British Transferware in Nineteenth-Century India

Thursday 1PM EDT

Title: Between the Chini Khana and the China Room: The Architectural Reuse of British Transferware in Nineteenth-Century India

Speaker: Heeryoon Shin, Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, Bard College

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Description: nineteenth-century India, blue-and-white transferware from Staffordshire found a new life as affixed ornamentation in palace interiors. Set into walls in original form, or broken into flat, rectilinear pieces to meticulously cover walls, niches, and balconies, British transferware plates and their luminous blue-and-white surface effectively framed gods and kings and created a multisensory experience of space. Taking the two late nineteenth-century sites of Juna Mahal in Dungarpur and Junagadh Fort in Bikaner as points of departure, I explore how the design and materiality of British transferware as well as their display acquired new meaning and purpose in Indian palace spaces. Evoking the tradition of tiled ornamentation and the display of ceramics in the chini khana (“China room”) in India, while also referencing European porcelain rooms, the transferware-covered walls reveal the complex cultural negotiations and material and political aspirations of nineteenth-century India. By examining the Indian reuse of British transferware, this talk complicates the conventional narrative of West looking East and highlights the nonlinear and multidirectional flows of ceramic culture.

Speaker: Heeryoon Shin, Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, Bard College. Heeryoon Shin is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College, New York. Her current project explores architectural revival, mobility, and cross-cultural exchange in early colonial India through the lens of temple architecture in the pilgrimage city of Banaras. She is also developing a second project on the global circulation of blue and white ceramics and their interaction with local production and use in South Asia.