“The title is meant ironically,” curator Andrew Nicholls tells me about , drawn from a Robert Copeland comment on Chinoiserie – the Western appropriation of Asian aesthetics. “Copeland was talking about the early days of Britain's commercial ceramics industry, and there was nothing ‘gentle’ about their mimicking of Chinese aesthetics. Designs such as the iconic Willow pattern (which many people still assume is an authentic Chinese pattern) were created in England to steal the market away from China, which
