The Chinese Pavilion at Wrest Park, Silsoe, Bedfordshire, Photo taken by Tian Pan
This SAHGB - IHR seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place online and in person at the Institute of Historical Research, Pollard N301 (3rd Floor, North Block of Senate House, Malet St, London WC1E 7HU).
Abstract:
This study moves beyond traditional frameworks of national identity and political history, exploring the unique role of personal encounters in constructing Chinoiserie architecture in 17th- and 18th-century Britain. Through a psychoanalytic examination of travelogues, on-site sketches, and personal diaries of British travellers, artists, and architects who experienced China firsthand, this study reveals how these individuals introjected their real taste of China into British Chinoiserie architecture.
This study argues that Chinoiserie is a ‘double project’ in C17th-C18th. On the one hand, it can be understood within the symbolic order of the British Empire, where Chinese-inspired forms—such as pagodas, dragon motifs, and lattice windows—resonate with British audiences of the exotic projection. On the other hand, there is a hidden project within the pre-symbolic, capturing the unconscious of British travellers, artists, and architects who encountered China. This deeper layer reflects a shared unconscious, revealing a void within modernity and repressed desires.
The institutionalisation of ‘taste’ in British Chinoiserie reflects the transformation of personal, sensory encounters in China into an imperial aesthetic framework. British travellers, such as George Anson, William Chambers, and William Alexander, experienced a visceral ‘taste’ in China—a blend of sensual, bodily experiences outside the symbolic order, evoking raw emotions and physicality. However, upon their return, these impressions were sublimated into symbolic Chinoiserie forms, aligning with British cultural expectations and imperial narratives. This sublimation sanitized and detached the initial experiences, framing Chinoiserie as a mark of cultural capital and national prestige, a refined ‘Taste’ signifying social status. Figures like Horace Walpole exemplified this shift, where Chinoiserie became an exotic fetish of desire and later, a nationalistic gesture. Ultimately, this ‘Taste’ functioned as a colonial tool, reducing Chinoiserie to symbols within European Enlightenment modernity, while repressing the authentic, irreconcilable experiences of the travellers’ encounters.
The specific psychoanalytical approach taken in this research towards the interpretation of personal, experiential and material evidence to construct and reconstruct historical narratives will be further contextualised in a lineage of architectural histories that shared the psychoanalytical impulses and prompts since the late nineteenth century.
Speakers:
Tian Pan is an architectural historian whose work explores the global circulations of desires, embodied knowledge and multispecies encounters — plants, animals, and micro-ecologies — across early modern architectural and urban landscapes, attending to how such movements have shaped architectural epistemology of identity, alterity, and postcoloniality. Her research has been published with Invisible Actants, Interjectures, Journal of Engineering Science & Technology Review, funded by The AA Fund and Ministry of Education, PRC. She holds a PhD from the AA and an MA from UCL.
Doreen Bernath is an architect and a theorist trained at the University of Cambridge and the AA. She is currently the Executive Editor of The Journal of Architecture, Head of AAVS ‘Urbanity from the Ocean’, Honorary Secretary of the Society of Architectural Historian Great Britain, and a co-founder of research collectives ThisThingCalledTheory, Translocality, and Interjectures. In parallel to teaching widely at different institutions and publishing internationally, she is current a Director of Studies in the AA PhD programme, Unit Master of AA MArch studio Dip 22, and a tutor in History and Theory Studies and across postgraduate programmes. She was a founder-director of the interdisciplinary platform DEZACT, AAVS Uncommon Walks ‘Pedestric Radicals’, and co-led MArch research and design studio ‘Cinematic Commons’ at Leeds School of Architecture.
Registration:
Register using the form below. You will be emailed prior to the seminar with a reminder of the joining information shown on the following screen.