Border rossing, collecting, gravitating: small narratives of three ordinary collectors in the Chinese diaspora in South Africa since the late 1980s

Shifting away from the conventional viewpoint that confines art collecting predominantly to established structures like art institutions, markets, and exclusive collector networks, a trajectory historically influenced by Western collecting traditions and museology, this thesis takes a radical turn by delving into the small narratives of three ordinary Chinese collectors, namely Shengkai Wu, Yiyuan Yang and Shudi Li, who immigrated to South Africa since the late 1980s. The focus on Chinese collectors and migration resonates with my positionality as a recent Chinese immigrant in South Africa and aligns with Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s approach to proximity in knowledge-making, which emphasises ‘knowing with’ and ‘walking alongside’ the subjects of study. The selected immigrant collectors were chosen based on their current low-to-middle economic status in South Africa. These three individuals have decades of living and artcollecting experience in the country, having held professional backgrounds in China prior to their immigration. The number of collectors was determined through an in-depth qualitative biographical research method, taking into account the niche field of art collecting and the relatively small Chinese population within the broader South African demographic. It approaches collecting as a method of pursuing clues and explores it as a socio-cultural practice by collaging the biographies of three ordinary collectors as micro-histories. Details of these ordinary lives are entangled with the lives of objects that traverse China and South Africa. The use of non-official data, at times fragmented and partially obscured, is employed to craft a narrative that weaves together diverse and complex perspectives. The aim of this thesis is to attempt to shift from elite collecting narratives to a more diverse understanding of the global circulation and appropriation of art and cultural objects in relation to grassroots migration. This shift is explored through the unique insights derived from recovering the personal narratives of ordinary immigrant collectors and their associated objects in overlooked geographical locations and states of transformation within the context of China– Africa relations. I engage China–Africa relations within the framework Global South, seeks to address the limitations of describing the multi-dimensional interweaving of low-profile individual and objecthood, unofficial and official, historical and ephemeral relationships in the burgeoning field of China-Africa relations. The investigation unfolds through two interconnected aspects embedded in the development of each collector’s biography. Firstly, it delves into how the collecting practices of these three Chinese collectors are interwoven with their experiences in both China and South Africa. Secondly, it examines the agencies of the collectors and the relationships they establish with the objects they collect. I approach these collectors as curators of their autobiographical exhibitions in the process of preliminary data collection and subsequent thematic and object-oriented interviews. Through the analysis of collectors’ oral, visual and written narratives, as well as the biographies of objects, this PhD thesis in Art History uncovers a multilayered influx of crossways of knowledge-making by the collectors on the ground. Inspired by practical material re-ordering and personal interests, these collectors engage in configuring the border-crossing process within the Chinese diaspora in South Africa. Recurring narratives of critical socialist experiences in Maoist China are linked to their suppressed agency and subsequent recovery through emigration to South Africa. They negotiate a complex diasporic terrain marked by engaging with socialist philately materials, persistently gravitating towards China. Concurrently, they transcend conventional nation-state framework, accentuating the convergent aesthetic qualities inherent in transnational artefacts and community-based art practices. The collectors’ engagement with exported Chinese “specialised arts and crafts”, and unconventional artefacts, such as philately materials, creates a bottom-up fresh interpretation of what constitutes collecting Chinese art in the context of South Africa. Fragments of British colonial history on the Rand, Chinese semi-colonial history, and contemporary printmaking in both China and South Africa, embedded in tangible material artefacts and in intangible visual connection, become visible through their logics of collecting and affective approach from the bottom up. Highlighting the often-overlooked Chinese agency in the creation of these objects, this research illustrates how individual mobility between China and Africa can contribute to the nuanced role of aesthetics through collecting, redefining what is visible and meaningful in the context of the Chinese diaspora and art collecting in South Africa. Specifically, discourses on the border poetics of Zheng He, colonial postcards and notices on the Rand, visual connection in printmaking, and Chinese semi-colonial artefacts of a converged “Chinese–British” aesthetic and a controversial Tang blue-and-white dish are instances where ordinary Chinese collectors in the Global South strategically mobilise collecting as a means to migrate towards an alternative politics of hope, as conceptualised by Chiara Brambilla. This hope presents a “strategic Southerness,” cultivates an “alter-geopolitics of knowledge” (Simbao 2017) that, pushing against the often-dominant representation of spectacle within the structured frameworks of art institutions, markets and networks of elite collectors. I argue that these emerging themes and objects in the collectors’ narratives represent a grounded, localised knowledge-making from below, unfolding practices underpinned by the material conditions of ordinary collectors of art and material culture in the Global South, aspects that have not been given adequate attention in history. In the process of encountering, reassembling, and appropriating these material objects and associating people in South Africa, I argue that collecting becomes not only an act of diasporic agency in constructing memories of the past, but also offers insight into the complex Chinese diaspora within the dynamics of a rising Chinese presence in Africa. On the one hand, these ordinary collectors employ collecting as an act of resistance against the aftermath of political turmoil and the epistemological inequality imposed on grassroots communities. Their emergence has contributed to transforming the residual colonial culture of the “othering” in the landscape of art collecting in South Africa. On the other hand, their agency intersects with Chinese diasporic nationalism, which lingers in the tension between internalised Eurocentric exploitation and romanticised appreciation and cultural preservation, a question that awaits for further investigation.