La Maladie de Porcelaine: Liu Jianhua's Regular/Fragile (2007) at Oxburgh Hall and the History of Massed Porcelain Display in English Aristocratic Interiors

In 2007, Chinese artist Liu Jianhua (b. 1962) presented his work for the first time in the United Kingdom with an installation of porcelain pieces at Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk. Following successful displays of this installation at the Singapore Biennale (2006), MC1 International Biennial of Contemporary Chinese Art (2005), and 50th Venice Biennale (2003), the exhibition seemed predestined to succeed. Yet Liu Jianhua: Regular/Fragile attracted more criticism than acclaim, so ardent that curator Sook-Kyung Lee was forced to close the display four weeks earlier than anticipated. This paper offers one possible answer to the question: why did Liu Jianhua: Regular/Fragile attract such criticism? The motivations identified uncover an impulse central to the parallel activities of collecting and curating: the desire to impose order on accumulations of objects that might otherwise be disorganized, chaotic and disruptive, and the need to contain a potentially threatening alterity within defined limits. By positioning the exhibition as a contemporary manifestation of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury massed porcelain displays, as well as their dissolution in public auctions of the same era, it is proposed that Liu Jianhua: Regular/Fragile provoked public complaint because it revealed an essential inability to impose boundaries on material, conceptual and cultural excess.