Les Seductions du Palais

A clear path that unwinds around style and ritual, amid precious tableware and eccentric and dubious recipes and takes us right up to the present day; Les Seductions du Palais is a deliciously designed exhibition that resembles a high-society banquet. Jean-Paul Desroches, general heritage curator at the Musée Guimet, is the maitre d' of this transference of expertise, that with its magnificent loans from Chinese museums offers the public a lesson in cookery and anthropology.

On the mezzanine of the Musée du Quai Branly — a city museum that has always paid great attention to the material culture of humanity — is an array of splendid pieces ranging from the Neolithic hearths of the Far East to the culinary delicacies of the last of the Chinese emperors. Through what appears as a highly conceptualised selection of art for the table, assembled on the basis of its timeless characteristics as well as the stylistic quality of the forms and materials, what we are told is a true culinary history of Asiatic culture.

Important anthropological passages: from raw to cooked, from terracotta to bronze to fine materials such as lacquer and gold. The exhibition portrays the journey from primitive hunger to Imperial banquets, codified rituals are analysed that emerge with the creation of the urban system. The opening of the Chinese empire towards other cultures becomes the archetype for the birth, specialisation of prototypes and cultural forms and art of the table that evolved to become cookery as we know it today, governed by the pace of the media.

These stories are examined through a mesh of material culture and specific histories, such as that of tea; a real story within a story recounted as a set text through gold, lacquer, ceramic and forms of gaiwan. Here, the visitor is at the dawn of the minimal aesthetic and much of the ceremonial mythology of the art of today. Case after case displays prodigious production and interweaving of styles, minimalist lines of a phenomenology of taste, its expansion and iconic persistence, amidst products that have evolved through everyday use. Fast chopping and cooking, the introduction of animal and vegetable fats as inducers of taste and warmth, and continual cross-referencing takes us straight to the liturgy of modern molecular gastronomy. The presentation of different types of food and their aesthetic transformation is a story of dishes and ceramics — what the Anglo-Saxons sum up in the word China — but is more precisely a history of alimentary regimes.

In the pedagogical approach of this exhibition, away from the standard clichés about Chinese food, the visitor learns that the ever-present chop-sticks appeared relatively late, and only because the transformation and temperature of servings made it impossible to use hands. Even the current trend for finger food is a declination of the modes of the dining table of the Imperial age. With the precise control of the form and ritual described in the evolution of cups, jugs, ovens, bottles, as well as in the magnificent and simple display of porcelain stoneware, antique lacquerware, designs and motifs of peonies, chrysanthemums and peaches that still persist today in cheaper versions or designer reworkings, a critical interpretation of our food consumption is outlined.

"China is near", it has been said, and it is closer than ever in the gastronomic revolution of our times. The exhibition catalogue opens with a lovely essay by Jean Paul Desroches that goes from the needs of the stomach to the seduction of the palate and closes with a fine selection of delicious recipes; meanwhile the space given over to the exhibition — if you know how to interpret it — is a manifesto of the joy and politics of the dining table. Ivo Bonacorsi

Through 30 September 2012
Les Seductions du Palais
Musée du Quai Branly
Paris