Motif Migration and Visual Sovereignty: Chinese Export Porcelain and Early Modern Global Exchange

This article examines Chinese export porcelain as a site of transcultural image production and proposes motif migration as an empirically grounded framework within global art history. Focusing on the Maritime Silk Road from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the study moves away from diffusionist and hybridity‐based explanations that frame decorative imagery as either copied or stylistically merged. Instead, it treats motifs as mobile visual units whose meanings change as they move across materials, places, and social settings. The study combines digital museum data with close visual analysis and network‐based historical reconstruction. A comparative corpus of export porcelain was assembled from open‐access collections of the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Rijksmuseum. Motif‐level annotation was used to examine iconographic sources, modes of visual translation, and circulation contexts. This approach makes it possible to trace decorative change through concrete material evidence rather than interpretive inference alone. A focused case study of a mid‐18th‐century Jingdezhen dish depicting the Judgment of Paris shows how European classical imagery was reshaped through workshop practices, maritime trade, and elite display cultures. The visual changes observed are not signs of technical limitation or incomplete copying. They reflect deliberate processes of selection, adjustment, and reinterpretation embedded in ceramic production and commercial exchange. By following the full trajectory of a single motif—from textual narrative and printed image to porcelain painting, overseas transport, and cabinet display—the article reframes questions of authorship and agency in early modern art. It argues that Chinese export porcelain functioned as a medium of visual sovereignty, through which local artistic systems actively reorganized foreign imagery. From this perspective, the Maritime Silk Road appears not only as a route of trade, but as a shared infrastructure for the making of global images.