Art Canon and the cultural gaze : A postcolonial comparative analysis of the work by W.G. Gulland and Osvald Sirén

This study examines how W.G. Gulland and Osvald Sirén, two influential figures inthe early Western engagement with Chinese art, constructed cultural authoritythrough different professional positionalities. Gulland a non-academic merchantcollector,derived authority from connoisseurship, access to collections, and socialnetworks, while Sirén, an academic art historian, grounded his authority in scholarlytraining, archaeological fieldwork, and institutional affiliation.Gulland’s writing emphasises material qualities, dynastic prestige, rarity, and visualappeal, framed through European tastes and selective use of sources. His approachillustrates the commercial and curatorial construction of authority, where collecting,display, and circulation determined which objects became canonical. The absence ofChinese voices and reliance on European intermediaries reflect dynamics identifiedby Said’s Orientalism, Spivak’s subaltern silences, and Chakrabarty’s critique ofhistoricism.Sirén’s scholarship situates Chinese art within historical, stylistic, and archaeologicalframeworks, translating Chinese visual culture into categories legible to Westernaudiences. His work demonstrates the academic and institutional construction ofauthority, combining comparative methods, textual evidence, and collaboration withChinese specialists, while also reflecting Eurocentric assumptions and essentialistinterpretations.Together, Gulland and Sirén illustrate complementary modes of Western authority,commercial and scholarly, that converged to embed Chinese art within Europeanmuseums and epistemologies. Their practices shaped the Western canon of Chineseart, influencing how it was interpreted, collected, and preserved.