How About

Exhibition
03/05/2008 - 02/11/2008

Chinese Whispers is the first major exhibition [for more than 70 years] in Britain highlighting the impact of chinoiserie on style, fashion. décor and social behaviour, over three centuries.  Spectacular displays, including major loans from all over Britain, complement and contextualise the extravagant interiors of Brighton’s pleasure palace, the Royal Pavilion. The story of chinoiserie in Britain is a dazzling example of contact between two very different cultures.  English merchants who traded with China returned with silk, porcelain, tea and lacquer. These fabulous objects inspired local craftsmen to produce their own fantastical pieces using the fanciful imagery of an imaginary China. Chinoiserie is exotic, stylish, and above all fun. In a chinoiserie interior fantastic mountainous landscapes with fanciful pagodas and fabulous birds are peopled with exotically clothed mandarins and haunted by dragons and phoenixes.  Brighton’s flamboyant Royal Pavilion provides a suitably hot-house late flowering of the style and provides the inspiration and focus for this major exhibition. With loans from national museums and private collections, Chinese Whispers will include some of the earliest Chinese and China Trade objects exported to Britain. It will also display imitations of Chinese objects and furniture, ceramics, silver and textiles in a pronounced Chinoiserie style, from the late 17th century right up to the use of Chinese motifs by designers in the 1920s and 1930s.

For further details, please contact Brighton Museum on 01273 292 882.

OPENING TIMES: Open Tuesday 10am-7pm, Wednesday-Saturday 10am-5pm, Sunday 2-5pm; Closed Monday (except public holidays 10am-5pm)

 ADMISSION: Free.

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• 中文媒体垂询，请联络:
  时代中国北京办公室
  北京市建国门外大街乙12号双子座大厦东塔2605
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