Een muziekdoosje, een handicap en representatie in kunst

What does “chinoiserie” mean in Dutch?

Chinoiserie is one of those words Dutch borrows from French and never naturalises. It names the European fashion (peaking in the 1700s) for furniture, lacquerware and porcelain decorated with imagined “Chinese” motifs: dragons, pagodas, blossoms. The Dutch East India Company made the Netherlands one of Europe’s main importers, which is why the word still surfaces in Dutch art-history class without translation.

In this Brainwash monologue the speaker describes a childhood trinket box (“een soort zwart glimmend bootje met oriëntaalse motieven”) as chinoiserie van de meest goedkope soorten, then catches herself: she only loved it because the broken-armed dancer inside looked like her. Loanword, decorative style, pivot to disability representation.