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This article constitutes a new Foreword for James Elkins’s Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History. Reflecting on this work a decade after it was first published, this Foreword seeks to position Elkins’s text with respect to current debates about appropriation, decolonization, race, whiteness, privilege and a problematic, colonialist, EuroAmerican notion of ‘the global’. Now the questions I asked ten years ago in response to Elkins’s text are more pressing than ever: how can the history of the art of non-western cultures be figured in their own terms, and how might such a project operate without transposing the object of inquiry entirely into western epistemological frameworks and strategies of academic inquiry? This article seeks to consider how Elkins’s text both de- and re-centres the discipline of art history so that the western tradition alone no longer dominates its master narrative and serves as sole source of its conceptual lexicon. Moreover, this article posits that from Elkins’s text we might contemplate a future in which the western tradition might become marginal within the discipline of art history, its established terms, discourses and practices incommensurate with newly centred analogues drawn from non-western cultures.

Medieval art refers principally to the art of Western Europe. Objects, however, complicate its chronology and geography. To begin to understand the fast, fluid, and far-reaching currents of the human transmission of European medieval art, this essay studies objects made by and/or for expatriate Europeans resident in China under Mongol rule. A unique part of Yuan visual culture, European ways of making and seeing objects existed in Sino-Mongol contexts-namely for court, merchants and the Church-like those of Europe. European ways of making and seeing objects were not wholly discrete from Sino-Mongol ways of making and seeing objects. Rather, by examining the cases of a French goldsmith active at the court of Möngke Khan (ca. 1208-1259), of tombstones made for the children of a Genoese merchant, and of pictures made by and for Franciscan missions, this essay attempts to show, in a limited way, how European objects in Yuan China spoke languages-firstly, of mimetic form; secondly, of iconography, pictorial convention, and text; and, thirdly, of materialitythat made them meaningful to local audiences, delimited spheres of expatriate European medieval visual culture, and participated in a transregional European medieval art.

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