When she started working on this commission, Dagmar Rauwald asked questions such as: How did artworks find their way into museum collections? As storehouses of knowledge and objects, can museums still have a role in an era of digitalization? How can a historical collection of Chinese art be made visible and tangible today to the world audience? What do we experience in the museum? What different impressions do we gain by looking at the actual artworks compared to seeing photos in social networks? With such questions in mind, Rauwald developed the site-specific room installation Ongoingness that was inspired by the spectrum of vibrant and distinctive colours used in the display of mainly Ming dynasty (1368–1644) porcelains in the East Asian collection. Rauwald placed sheets of transparent plastic underneath a selection of porcelain objects. On these sheets, she splashed colours that appeared sometimes in harmony and sometimes in conflict with the colours painted on the porcelain objects that sit on top of them. In some instances, she reversed the display of a certain object, such as a Ming plate, to reveal the name of the royal kiln that fired the porcelain, and labels of its previous collectors on its bottom. Rauwald further refurnished two showcases with famille verte and famille rose porcelain from the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) that replaced the popular Ming dynasty blue and white porcelain in the export to Europe. Her choices of colour pigments for her paintings on foil, and her attempts to juxtapose them next to the antiquities, which bear extremely vibrant colours themselves, were aimed to create a new aesthetic language within the gallery, highlighting the artist’s aspiration to dialogue with the rich history of Chinese porcelain. With some showcases, Rauwald sealed off an entire section of a cabinet from outside with a sheet of painted foil and hung a scroll of her painting on plastic in front of a cabinet so that the viewer would have to walk around the hanging sheet to see the display of porcelain.
Carol Yinghua Lu Director of Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum, China