Seizing Civilization

Seizing Civilization uses the Shanghai Museum as a case study to examine an extraordinary process of art appropriation that persisted from 1949 to 1996 in the People's Republic of China (PRC). At the heart of this story is the museum's destruction of the preexisting art market, its wholesale seizure of privately-owned antiquities, and its sale of these objects on the international market. My findings show that museum employees used these events to create public art collections in the PRC. The Shanghai Museum pioneered the techniques that Chinese museums use to transform craft objects, as well as select ancient paintings, ceramics, and bronzes, into canonized cultural relics. I argue that the application of these techniques explains the erasure of provenance at Chinese Museums, and demonstrate how state cultural institutions render acquisition ledgers, private collecting records, and connoisseurship disputes invisible.