Willemijn van Noord

Dr. Willemijn van Noord is Curator China at the Wereldmuseum. Her main research interests are Chinese art and material culture within global history, the role of material culture in representations and perceptions of China, and histories of collecting and display.

Bio

After completing her studies in archaeology and sinology at Leiden University and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, she has worked as trainee-curator at the British Museum and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, focusing on Ming dynasty (1368–1644) porcelain and Qing dynasty (1644–1911) glass and snuff-bottles. In 2024, she successfully defended her PhD thesis Materialising China: material culture and perceptions of China in the late seventeenth-century Dutch Republic at the University of Amsterdam.

Selected publications

2021. “Between script and ornament: Delftware decorated with pseudo-Chinese characters, 1660-1720,” Journal of Design History 34 (1), 2021, 1-20.
2020. “De Van Gulik collectie in het Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen: Chinese schilderkunst, kalligrafie en scholars objects” [The Van Gulik collection in the National Museum of World Cultures: Chinese painting, calligraphy and scholars objects], Aziatische Kunst 20 (2), 2020, 13-21.
2020. “The ‘unhappie ruines’ of Mary II’s lacquer screen: Constantijn Huygens’ plea to preserve a Chinese artefact, 1685-1686” in T. Weststeijn (ed.) Foreign Devils and Philosophers: Cultural Encounters between the Chinese, the Dutch, and Other Europeans, 1590-1800, Brill, Boston & Leiden (2020), 148-204.
2019. “Nigulasi Weitesen cang Zhongguo Han jing de quanqiu liuchuan guiji 尼古拉斯·维特森藏中国汉镜的全球流传轨迹” (trans. Yang Jin 杨瑾 ), Minzushi wencong 民族史文丛 (Collection of Ethnic History Studies) 1 (1), 2019, 67-96. Chinese translation of: W. van Noord & T. Weststeijn. “The Global Trajectory of Nicolaas Witsen’s Chinese Mirror.” The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 63 (4), 2015, 324-361.
2018. “Nicolaes Witsen’s Chinese mirror and the logistics of translating Han dynasty seal-script at the turn of the 18^th century” in T. de Graaf, W. Honselaar, et. al. (eds.) The fascination with Inner Eurasian languages in the 17^th century: The Amsterdam mayor Nicolaas Witsen and his collection of ‘Tartarian’ vocabularies and scripts, Pegasus, Amsterdam (2018), 579-602.
2020. "De Van Gulik collectie in het Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen: Chinese schilderkunst, kalligrafie en scholars objects" The Van Gulik collection in the National Museum of World Cultures: Chinese painting, calligraphy and scholars objects], Aziatische Kunst 20 (2), 2020, pp. 13-21. Aziatische Kunst, 20(2), 13–21. The Van Gulik collection in the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen | Research Center for Material Culture