Shanghai Museum East

CeraMIX: A Dialogue Between Chinese Porcelain and Dutch Delftware

The Shanghai Museum is among China’s leading museums of art and cultural history, internationally renowned for its collections of ancient bronzes, ceramics, jade, painting, and calligraphy. Founded in 1952, the museum has expanded considerably over the decades. Its impressive new location, Shanghai Museum East, opened in stages beginning in 2024 in the city’s Pudong district, providing a spacious and contemporary setting for its collections.

Among its many galleries, CeraMIX offers a particularly interesting perspective on the history of ceramics. This permanent exhibition explores the exchange of ceramic traditions between China and the rest of the world, tracing how objects, techniques, and decorative ideas traveled across continents and influenced potters far beyond their countries of origin.

For admirers of Dutch Delftware, the exhibition holds a special attraction. Several seventeenth-century Delftware objects are displayed alongside Chinese ceramics, illustrating the close artistic relationship that developed between the two traditions.

During the seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company imported large quantities of Chinese porcelain into the Netherlands. Its brilliant white surface, cobalt-blue decoration, and unfamiliar forms made an enormous impression on European consumers. Dutch potters responded by developing their own interpretations in tin-glazed earthenware, creating what would become one of the most celebrated ceramic traditions in Europe.

The exhibition includes several particularly appealing examples of this exchange. Among them are two seventeenth-century blue-and-white dishes decorated in the so-called Kraak style, a decorative tradition associated with Chinese export porcelain of the late Ming dynasty. Characterized by rims divided into ornamental panels surrounding a central composition, Kraak porcelain provided Delft painters with a readily recognizable decorative framework.

One dish depicts a deer in a landscape, while another features a lion standing within an architectural setting (Fig. 1). Although their borders closely follow Chinese precedents, their central compositions demonstrate the freedom with which Delft painters interpreted and adapted these imported designs. Rather than producing exact copies, they created objects that combined Chinese inspiration with European subjects and artistic preferences.

Other notable examples include a seventeenth-century covered jar decorated with alternating panels of figures and flowering plants, and a blue-and-white vase depicting figures in a landscape (Fig. 2). Both illustrate how Chinese decorative conventions were adapted to the forms and techniques of Dutch earthenware production.

An attractive display of blue-and-white ceramics arranged in a wooden cabinet further recalls the enthusiasm with which such objects were collected and displayed in European interiors (Fig. 3).

What makes CeraMIX especially interesting is the opportunity to consider this history from a Chinese perspective. While the development of Delftware is often discussed in terms of the Dutch response to imported porcelain, the Shanghai presentation places these objects within a broader international history of artistic exchange.

The presence of Dutch Delftware in Shanghai brings this story full circle. More than three centuries after Chinese porcelain helped transform ceramic production in the Netherlands, Delftware is displayed in China as evidence of the remarkable international influence of Chinese craftsmanship and design.

CeraMIX is a welcome reminder that the history of ceramics is also a history of encounters between cultures, in which familiar forms and decorations continually acquired new meanings as they traveled around the world.