ABSTRACT
Art Deco’s decadence betrayed modernism’s social agenda, its visual flamboyance reflected a tawdry self-consciousness, and its popular appeal was interpreted as crass consumerism. Despite modernist historiography’s denial, China has played a key role in the formation of modern art, whether through the early phases of eighteenth-century chinoiserie or as twentieth-century reinterpretations of Chinese poetry, literature, painting, textiles, and furniture, which included Art Deco. For Hillier, Art Deco comfortably included the ‘‘architectural nudism of Le Corbusier” and the Bauhaus, despite their modernist disciples taking a very different view at the time. The World Congress in Shanghai in November 2015 was the first time since the inaugural event in Miami in 1991 that the organizing body, the International Coalition of Art Deco Societies, had traveled to Asia. China’s bond with Art Deco was cemented, if little acknowledged at the time, at the Paris Exposition.
