From Japan to Canadian Museum Storage: Continuous History of Objects from the Japanese Ceramic Collection of William C. Van Horne (18431915)

This dissertation traces the social life of a group of Japanese ceramic objects collected by Sir William Cornelius Van Horne (18431915) in late nineteenth-century Montreal, and examines the ways in which the meaning of these objects has shifted through their spatial and temporal movements: from Japan to Canada, from commodities to a private collection and then to museum collection, and from the late nineteenth century to the present. These objects embody interpretational gaps, between their high reputation during the collectors lifetime and their ambiguous status in the museum storage today, as well as the misidentification of a genuine tea bowl made by a prominent Japanese potter of seventeenth century. While such interpretational gaps are often considered to result from a lack of proper knowledge on the part of the individuals who evaluated the objects, this dissertation takes a different approach, in which the meaning of objects is seen as a production of multiple interactions among people, institutions, and societies at given times and places. Tracing the trajectories of Van Hornes Japanese ceramics as a continuous history from origin to current destination, and investigating their meaning-construction in relation to the modernization project of Japan, to Van Hornes interactions with others and to the museum operations, clearly demonstrate that the interpretational gaps of objects emerge through an epistemological disjuncture between the imagined idea of fixed authenticity and the actual, contingent processes of the objects meaning-formation. Through the cross-referencing of the actual objects, archival material, scholarly publications, and my own professional experience at the museum, this dissertation reveals some of the covert and unconscious mechanisms at work in knowledge production. These mechanisms disclose that the meaning of objects is created in the gaps between major arguments surrounding the historiography of Japanese art, collecting and collection, and museology. By taking an interdisciplinary approach, this dissertation raises questions about post-colonialist discourses on the Western system of knowledge production of non-Western objects; the belief of collection as a mere space for the subjects identity-formation; and the discussion of cultural knowledge-production in museums solely through the politics of display.