Masterpieces of Chinese Export Porcelain and Related Decorative Arts from the Mottahedeh Collection
中国外销瓷及相关装饰艺术精品展

To mark the two hundredth anniversary of the commencement of U.S.-China trade this exhibition featured sixty-seven objects from the renowned Mottahedeh Collection, including porcelain, ivory, reverse paintings on glass, and a painted fan, produced in China for the Near Eastern, European, and American markets from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. The Mottahedeh Collection of some two thousand items was assembled over half a century by Mildred R. Mottahedeh and her husband, Rafi Y. Mottahedeh. Inspired by their own collection, as well as museum collections, the Mottahedehs produced faithful modern copies of traditional ceramics and became one of the most important sources of museum reproductions in the 1960s and 1970s, even fabricating some of their ceramic wares at the kilns of Jingdezhen. The exhibition was part of “U.S.–CHINA 200,” a yearlong city-wide celebration of the trade bicentennial that was coordinated by China Institute in America.