The Wereldmuseum, Amsterdam, holds a group of batik textiles that include book covers, a tea cosy, a handkerchief and head wraps. Matched to strikingly similar batik textiles held in the Smithsonian Institute collection, these items can be attributed to the prison labor of women during Dutch colonial rule of the Indonesian island of Java in the early decades of the twentieth century. By uncovering the circumstances of the labor which made these particular textiles it has been possible to recover evidence of incarcerated women’s sharing of textile knowledge acquired before incarceration, recognize that even from the perspective of the Dutch colonial government at least one carceral batik workshop was not solely a venture in profit-making, and trace acknowledgement both by colonial officials and the women incarcerated of the not-to-be-underestimated skills necessary to produce batik.

From the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, the European empires and other polities including Japan shipped tens of thousands of convicts and prisoners of war from metropolitan centers and around their colonies. European, Asian, and African convicts subjected to penal transportation were put to work and prisoners of war (POWs) were detained in colonies in the Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and Pacific worlds. Despite the violence and oppression of regimes driven by the imperial desire for the expansion and consolidation of overseas territories, convicts and POWs were able to find spaces of self-expression through the retention, transmission, and adaptation of language, religion, and cultural practices. Straddling unfreedom, labor, and agency was convict and POW manufacture of a wide range of objects. In this roundtable, we attempt to make meaning of this convict and POW craft, considering the circumstances of its production, sale, and use, how it is represented in museums today, issues of authenticity, and in what ways productive legacies might linger (and vary in different locations) now.

Taking as its point of departure the personal experience of finding a discarded rope on a remote beach, this essay describes the way found objects assert agency to become craft materials, and how, through the process of making, this changes both the found object and craftsperson. This mutual transformation is described here through three periods of interaction – finding, making, and the thematic development of an artwork – all varying lengths of time during which a found object influences a craftsperson’s actions, learning, ideas, and future making decisions. With reference to Michael David Kirchhoff’s concept of “agential condition,” in which objects are held to transform and mediate our understanding, and Jane Bennett’s theorizing on nonhuman entities acting as forces with their own tendencies, this essay proposes that an object’s ability to assert itself as a new craft material is influenced by a craftsperson’s heightened state of receptivity within the parameters of environment, available time, and a willingness to adapt a creative practice. Craftspeople often utilize and transform found objects in their work, but how they are changed by such materials isn’t always clear. Tracking an object’s assertion of agency throughout a multistep personal making process provides insight into such mutual influence and transformation.

This article gives a brief overview of the development of Vietnamese lacquer painting, a unique art form, which came into being due to French and Vietnamese artists collaborating in the 1920s and has continued to flourish throughout the ensuing periods of war and independence. Under-theorised and relatively obscure, the use of layering, combining mixed media and sanding processes, differed from lacquer arts in other Asian countries at the time, and can be used create a spectacular array of textures and finishes. While the impact of the political context on artistic expression has been explored elsewhere, this study has focused on the processes, techniques and modern styles in the context of the global art world.

This article explores the Tushanwan workshop, a male orphanage and art industrial school established by French Jesuit in Shanghai, China that appeared in at least ten domestic and international expo events works during the global craze for world expositions from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Chinese architectural models featured prominently in these exhibitions. This article provides historical context for Tushanwan’s participation in various expositions and compares and analyzes the similarities and differences between Tushanwan’s architecture and traditional Chinese architecture, using the Chinese Pavilion and Chinese Archway as key examples. Tushanwan’s exhibition journey is like a multi-faceted prism of culture, reflecting not only the changes in Chinese arts and crafts and education influenced by westward trends, but also the intersection of modern Sino-West cultures.