This folding screen with eight s was made in the city of Canton in the twentieth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many houses and spaces of power were decorated with a multitude of artistic Chinese pieces to create spaces that mimicked the interiors of Asian palaces. Many European palaces included porcelain rooms where folding screens and partitions coated with Chinese lacquers covered the walls. Domestic settings were not left behind; they also set aside smaller rooms to accommodate Asian decoration. In the nineteenth century, one might even speak of an oriental movement. Parlors, lounges or smoking rooms brought together folding screens, porcelain jars, silks, rugs and lacquer furniture, all with the purpose of recreating exotic spaces in the Chinese style, where western reinterpretations played an important role.
This was a phenomenon of greater dimensions; many western countries copied the interior spaces of the Peking court. As commerce with the Philippines and Canton was supressed in 1821, a multitude of Chinese objets d'art arrived in the city of San Francisco in the United States, destined for American consumers. There, through intermediaries and trading houses, the city dwellers of independent Mexico were inundated with these types of luxury household items, which often commanded hefty price tags. These were social prestige goods. They were used to decorate and enliven the domestic spaces of Mexican households in the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth centuries. It was even the trend to dress in Asian fashions.
Although the palace scene that appears on this folding screen was executed in exquisite detail, it is disted and the remainder of the representations are mundanely schematic. In this case, the water portion has been reduced to its minimum expression. Numerous personages from the Peking court are visible with their guards. There are also representations of weeping willows, flowers and Chinese birds. It is curious for a Chinese folding screen to show clouds in a reminiscence of the schematics of Japanese Namban art, present in some Novohispanic folding screens. Black lacquer predominates in the background of the scenes.
This folding screen with eight s was made in the city of Canton in the twentieth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many houses and spaces of power were decorated with a multitude of artistic Chinese pieces to create spaces that mimicked the interiors of Asian palaces. Many European palaces included porcelain rooms where folding screens and partitions coated with Chinese lacquers covered the walls. Domestic settings were not left behind; they also set aside smaller rooms to accommodate Asian decoration. In the nineteenth century, one might even speak of an oriental movement. Parlors, lounges or smoking rooms brought together folding screens, porcelain jars, silks, rugs and lacquer furniture, all with the purpose of recreating exotic spaces in the Chinese style, where western reinterpretations played an important role.
