SESSION: Aqueous Worlds: Art, Fluidity and Empire c.1600-1900
Water is a key enabler of movement, no more so than in the late early modern period. Water was a means to carry people and things across the world – accommodating intercultural exchange and hybridity, as well as facilitating colonial atrocities such as war, European imperialism, and the mass trafficking of enslaved people. The ocean also provided a wealth of ecological materials that could be utilised and exploited for artistic and everyday means, such as oil, pearls, coral and various dyestuffs. However, although water was a key enabler of wealth and empire-building, it was also inherently fluid and ungovernable. The sublime power of water was a constant source of anxiety; being at sea could result in shipwrecks, unexpected attacks from both human and marine life, and the possibility of being lost at sea or even trapped in ice.
Building on themes of aquatic mobility, fluidity and power in relation to colonialism and empire, this panel calls for 15-minute papers focused on any intersection between visual and material culture and water, broadly conceived, within the period c. 1600-1900. We are particularly interested in papers that encompass global geographies, and/or that utilise ecological and blue humanities methodologies.
Session Convenors:
Emma Pearce, Glasgow School of Art
Speakers:
John White, Princeton University
An Amphibious Art: Carving Ivory from Land and Sea in Early Modern Northern Europe
This paper argues that we must conceive of ivory as an ‘amphibious’ material, one that came from animals of both land and sea. Historically, ivory has been aligned rather exclusively with elephant tusks. Indeed, the German word for ivory (‘Elfenbein’) has the elephant etymologically built into it. However, tusks from walruses, hippopotamuses, and narwhals (a type of whale), which are also made of ivory, were worked by artists into fine carvings across various historical periods. This paper focuses in particular on the seventeenth century, when systematized trade and hunting in and around the Baltic Sea brought walrus and narwhal tusks to ivory carvers in northern Europe. First, I will describe the aquatic origins of these materials from the north, in contradistinction to elephant ivory’s origins from the south. Rather than viewing ivory as coming from across the sea as merely a superficial site of passage, this part of the paper grants the ocean depth as a space from which people extracted the lucrative material. Second, I will analyze narwhal ivory objects made for northern European courts that contain carvings of far northern indigenous people. I will look at such objects alongside texts that sparked an ethnographic interest in Scandinavia in mainland Europe. These objects show how ivory mobilized a courtly desire to name and control foreign places, animals, and people equally on both the scale of the global south and on the more local scale of the not-so-distant north.
Junjie Zhang, University of Pennsylvania
Picturing Power on Water: The Imperial Fleet and Symbolic Order in Qianlong’s Southern Inspection Tour
This study examines the eight-masts adorned with yellow and red flags depicted in Scroll IV of the Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour (1770, Metropolitan Museum of Art, painted by Xu Yang). Through visual, historical, and comparative analysis of other Southern Tour paintings and Qing archival records, it identifies these ships as components of the imperial fleet rather than anonymous or foreign craft. The yellow flags were reserved for imperial use, symbolized Qianlong’s authority, and marked the vessels as part of his entourage within the Qing court’s ritual hierarchy. Comparison of imagery from the Southern Tour series during the reigns of Kangxi (1661–1722) and Qianlong (1736–1796) reveals a consistent visual system that employs colour and composition to signify imperial power on water. Figures in yellow jackets and leopard-tailed guards exemplify the fleet’s dual role as both logistical and security units, which protected the emperor while reinforcing the ceremonial spectacle of sovereignty. The visual prominence of the vessels’ masts in Scroll IV, positioned at the transition from land to river at Huai’an, further symbolizes imperial control over waterways and the projection of majesty across the empire. Ultimately, the research situates Xu Yang’s depiction of the royal fleet within the broader discourse of Qing imperial visual culture. It argues that these vessels depicted in the court painting materialize the union of functionality and symbolism in the Southern Tour, transforming statecraft into art and embodying the Qianlong emperor’s vision of a unified, orderly realm governed by the spectacle of power.
Emma Piercy-Wright, University of Exeter
Imperial Iridescence: Envisioning Empire in Enlightenment-Era Mother-of-Pearl
Ocean-derived, hidden within a shell, and neglected from art historical scholarship, mother-of-pearl (or nacre) – a remarkably resilient, mutable substance whose kaleidoscopic beams simultaneously bewitch and befuddle – is an especially apt and exceptionally vivid means of revealing, exploring and problematising concealed colonial narratives. Furthermore, as a ‘waste product’ – stripped from its conchological abode; severed from its self-generated, more lucrative ‘offspring’; and manipulated by hands eager to exploit its magical properties – this otherworldly material deftly embodies obscured stories of forced migration, imperial violence and ecological destruction, displayed in its pockmarked patina and enacted in its insistent iridescence.
Oft utilised in combination with gold, pietre dure, and other precious materials to create exquisite, opulent treasures which came to epitomise the artifice, privilege and hedonism of the pre-revolutionary era, unadorned, in all its shimmering fury, mother-of-pearl frankly vocalises peripheral colonial histories and proudly displays its life scars. Via exploration of two ‘marginalised’ eighteenth-century nacreous objects, this paper posits reclaiming this metamorphic medium as a site of resistance, a radical space where both margin and centre are visualised and thus alternative, new worlds can be imagined. Might a battered box depicting two enslaved females, alongside a French ‘transliteration’ of a Chinese fan, help us to establish a decolonial critical framework for decoding such aberrant artefacts? What would this interpretative methodology look like? And how can the blue humanities aid us in our endeavours?
Senah Tuma, Open University
Womb, Tomb, Spoon: Shimmering Evidence, Co-Presence and Possibility in the Hold of Empire
[content warning for discussions of slavery and violence]
The slave ship, as form and force of the late-modern transatlantic empire, lingers as a central locus within visual, affective, and material cultures; these monstrous containers both ennobled and staged the governance of life-and-death regimes–necropolitical racial technologies. Within the hold’s thick, coerced co-presence, life was rendered precarious, yet shimmering worlds of relation also took shape. The hold simultaneously contains and disperses, witnesses and collaborates in the death-logics of empire, while giving rise to fugitive intimacies that empire sought to erase.
This paper traces and teases out the fugitive and life-giving entanglements of relations under duress; it works to unsettle official imperial archives through decolonial and affective theory, object-analysis, and engagements across time and memory. I draw on Phanuel Antwi’s theorisation of the racial hold, Christina Sharpe on afterlives, José Esteban Muñoz’s theorisation of ephemeral queer evidence, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney on fugitivity and fantasy, understood from J.M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship to the Brookes slave ship diagrams.
When we open ourselves to different evidentiary possibilities, how might we retheorise the hold–not merely as a container or arid zone of non-being, but as saturated, relational, and teeming with generative multiplicities? Such work enacts a decolonial methodology by expanding the research sensorium of visual-material culture, enabling a more nuanced theorisation of the [after]lives of empire, making visible the alternative modes of sociality, desire, and survival that emerge within and against structures of domination, complicating the limiting felt-lived registers of the racialised subject.
Xu Hanyin, Academy of Malay Studies, Universiti Malaya
Fluid Identities: Water, Resistance, and Artistic Agency in Southeast Asia’s Borneo
This study focuses on water spaces in Borneo, Malaysia. These spaces were both “flowing corridors” for European colonial powers to expand trade and extend influence, and “battlefields for negotiation” for local political entities to maintain sovereignty and negotiate interests, exploring the interweaving of colonial legacies and contemporary artistic practices. Against this backdrop, how do local artists respond to water-mediated colonial pressures and indigenous traditions through “locality” in their creations? And how does water mobility shape the unique form of Borneo’s political culture and the subjectivity of artistic expression? Based on humanistic theories and eco-material culture research methods, combined with visual symbol analysis and fieldwork retrospection, the study finds that water spaces are not only historical battlefields for negotiation between colonial and indigenous regimes but also generative arenas for contemporary artists to address environmental justice and identity politics. Sarawak artist Alena Murang uses traditional sapeh and video installations to reconstruct the “flowing sovereignty” of Dayak communities around river memories. Kalimantan artist Jimmy Ong employs floating sculptures and estuarine wetland installations to expose the lasting impacts of dams and extractive industries on tribal migration and land loss. The 2025 UK-Malaysia collaborative project “River Journeys” transforms colonial-era “water anxiety” into contemporary “water identity” through archive reuse and water sound sampling. The study concludes that through local practices of materials, narratives, and arenas, contemporary art not only continues the water-space politics in Borneo’s history but also provides a Southeast Asian perspective for global research on the locality of water civilizations.