Before global travel became easy and fast, materials connected the world. Thus, in recent decades, scholars have taken a material turn in global history, producing diverse inquiries in many fields including history, art history, material culture studies, and environmental humanities. For instance, historians of science have been using the framework of “material complex” to explore the transfer of matter and knowledge across Eurasia, while art historians have been examining transcultural objects and their impact on early modern visual and material culture. In these approaches, scholars emphasize how things, ideas, and knowledge are mutually shaped through exchanges between Asia and Europe. They write connected histories that foreground interaction and innovation, rather than confining themselves to origin stories or geographical frameworks such as “European” or “Asian.”

Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia builds on this interdisciplinary foundation. The book develops the concept of “EurAsian” established in Anna Grasskamp’s 2018 edited volume EurAsian Matters, conceptualizing EurAsian objects as “entangled” in multiple senses: produced and exchanged within Eurasian spaces, composed of both Asian and European elements, and reflecting and constituting artistic identities of both Asia and Europe. Art and Ocean Objects expands on previous scholarship in several ways. First, Grasskamp uses an understudied subject—Asian shells—to move beyond individual cases and beyond the boundaries of art history, extending into collecting history, knowledge production, and the erotic imagination of exotic lands and peoples. Second, she connects microhistory with macrohistory, situating these analyses within the larger contexts of European colonialism, the Chinese tributary system, and the intensified human exploitation of ocean resources. Third, by examining both European and Chinese contexts, she offers a more symmetrical picture of EurAsian exchanges.

Centering on shells, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach. Drawing on Lorraine Daston’s “object lessons,” Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter,” and recent sensory approaches to art history such as Jonathan Hay’s Sensuous Surfaces, Grasskamp introduces the concept of “clever objects” to argue that shells actively taught the human mind and inspired human craft. These transcultural objects shaped visual culture, transformed the early modern understanding of nature’s creation process, and forged intimate connections between shells, the female body, and various “foreign” realms, including the underwater world, distant countries, and mythical lands. In reconstructing these connections, Grasskamp demonstrates an impressive command of many languages and diverse sources, guiding readers across European and Chinese workshops, collections, natural history texts, and religious writings.

The book is organized into four chapters, each building on the last. Grasskamp structures them progressively, moving from relatively concrete examples—transcultural shell cups—toward increasingly abstract themes. Chapter 1 introduces the context of early modern global trade connections and the subsequent arrival of Asian shells in Europe. Grasskamp shows that shell cups in Europe were inspired by Chinese parrot cups, which are vessels in the shape of subtropical birds, made from shells or porcelain in the area around Guangzhou. She further points out that the Chinese parrot cups themselves carried exotic connotations within China, reflecting a Chinese imagination of the subtropical landscapes of South China and Southeast Asia, so by the time they reached Europe, these objects already bore multiple layers of exoticism. The exotic motifs were further adopted by European artisans, who creatively imitated and appropriated Chinese shell-carving craftsmanship. The resulting shell cups were ingenious objects that, in European Kunstkammer collections, signaled distant origins. The shiny and porcelain-like surface of the shells also became closely related to the bodies of foreign and mythological women, intertwining shells with notions of sexual seduction and adding a layer of eroticism to the exotic.

Moving from shell connections to shell bodies, Chapter 2 presents a shared ecological understanding of the creative agency of mollusks across early modern Eurasia. Using the framework of “vibrant matter,” Grasskamp defines shells as clever objects. The mollusks’ ability to construct their own homes led both Chinese and European artisans and collectors to interpret them as architects and producers. The intricate structures of shells not only sparked interest in geometry but were also seen as analogous to craft skills, informing both artisanal and scientific practices across Eurasia. In China, shells were believed to embody the power of the “fashioner of creations” (zaowu), capable of forming “terraces and towers” in the ocean. Knowledge about the ability of mollusks to generate pearls gave rise to associations between shells and birds across Eurasia, as both were seen as capable of generating eggs. Moreover, this pearl-bearing capacity reinforced connections between mollusks and the female womb.

Moving from shells’ creative agency to maritime microcosms, Chapter 3 brings coral into the picture, showing how both shells and coral evoked underwater worlds filled with unknown rarities in China and Europe. Through close readings of European visual culture alongside Christian texts, Greek myths, medieval travel literature, and Renaissance naturalist writings, Grasskamp shows how shells occupied a liminal space “between Europe and Asia, land and water, mythological realms and natural surroundings, past and present, bodies and things, organic and mineral matter” (128). Shells became associated with mermaids and beautiful, exotic women. The discussion then extends to coral. Red coral, native to the Mediterranean and introduced to China through Buddhism, was also a transcultural object associated with treasures of distant lands. Through readings of Daoist and Buddhist texts and paintings, Grasskamp demonstrates how coral and shells were connected to maritime worlds, distant tributary countries, and the mythological daughter of the dragon king. In both China and Europe, shells and coral served as gateways to imaginary foreign lands full of collectable rarities, including women. What makes the author’s argument distinctive is that she connects these connotations with European colonialism and the tributary system, suggesting that shells and coral were akin to trophies and tributary gifts; they represented the sourcing of maritime goods from abroad through an expanding network of trade.

The connections built in the previous chapters among shells, women’s bodies, and the imaginary of the distant, foreign world lay the foundation for the final chapter, where Grasskamp discusses images of women with shells across Eurasia. The chapter is divided into three parts, analyzing “women on shells” (including Botticelli’s famous The Birth of Venus), “women in shells,” and “women with shells.” While all three categories connote sexual seduction, desire, and distant lands, Grasskamp’s nuanced discussion reveals the negotiations at play in artistic creation: between materiality and corporeality, intimacy and distance, eroticization and moral didacticism. In one shell cup, we can see the artistic representation of ambivalence between a seductively posed Prudentia and an erotic merman. In Christian art, shells carried both erotic and charitable connotations, alluding to female seduction and desire as well as the nurturing bosom of the Virgin Mary. In China, Buddhism tamed such imagery: Female beauty, transformative power, and exoticism fused in images of Guanyin or ladies emerging from shells. Most fascinating is Grasskamp’s tracing of the images of ladies on shells across Eurasia. In Europe, the trope of Venus or Fortuna sailing on a shell-shaped vessel, using her veil as a sail, had roots in the Hellenistic myth of Galatea’s boat. Yet in the hands of Chinese artisans, this image lost that association and was reinterpreted as purely erotic image catering to European customers. As a consequence, as shown on the book’s cover, Delft artisans, despite their familiarity with the visual language of Galatea’s boat, reproduced the Chinese “misinterpretation” in their Delftware, catering to the European market’s appetite for eroticism in Chinese export porcelain.

Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia presents connections among Asian shells and the early modern imaginary of foreign lands, unknown but abundant treasures, and women’s bodies. Grasskamp reminds us that these connections were not merely represented in artworks and artifacts; the multi-layered associations, especially the erotic dimension, also permeated naturalists’ collecting activities, themselves highly gendered. Male collectors’ touch and desire shaped understandings of collectables. Moreover, by contextualizing shells within the frameworks of colonial expansion and the tributary system, the author highlights that collecting practices and knowledge production were imperial enterprises, constantly shaped by the relationship between imperial centers and peripheries.

The book is well organized, with abstracts and succinct conclusions in each chapter that helpfully guide readers. Each chapter includes its own bibliography—a feature particularly useful in today’s ebook environment for readers who may only read one or two chapters. Although the author draws on a wide variety of sources across a vast geographical scope, her explanations are remarkably clear, making the analysis accessible even to readers unfamiliar with European art and history. Grasskamp’s use of recent theories in material culture studies, such as “vibrant matters” and “object lessons,” is precise and concrete. Her detailed visual and textual analysis show how to apply these frameworks, making the book an excellent learning model for graduate students and young scholars seeking to approach object agency. The images are beautifully reproduced. Even a painting with faint ink from the Freer Gallery is rendered with fine detail.

Beyond these strengths, a slight unevenness between the European and Chinese narratives emerges. The significant transformations that Asian shells brought to early modern European material culture are well presented, but a comparable shift in China during the same period is less apparent. Grasskamp does effectively demonstrate the impact of early modern transcultural exchanges (through Jesuits) in Qing palace albums of animals and sea creatures; however, much of her discussion of shells in the Chinese context draws on earlier materials, such as parrot cups in Tang-dynasty (618–907) poems. Her use of Yan Liben’s Tang-dynasty Zhigong tu (a painting of foreign envoys to China) rather than Qiu Ying’s Ming-dynasty version—presumably due to copyright restrictions—similarly diminishes the specificity of the early modern period. What changed, visually and materially, after the fifteenth-century consolidation of the Ming maritime tributary system and the intensification of trade with Southeast Asia following the relaxation of maritime prohibitions in the late sixteenth century? If early modern tribute trade increased access to Southeast Asian marine resources, one wonders whether similar changes occurred in Chinese collecting history, connoisseurship, and consumer culture. Was there a new desire for and aesthetic appreciation of maritime animals and objects, comparable to what emerged in Europe? It is also worth noting that the tributary system and the founding of overseas colonies operated quite differently, even though both increased access to Asian shells. As a book on material and visual culture, Art and Ocean Objects lacks space to elaborate these nuances fully, although this does not significantly detract from its overall argument.

The book opens up promising new directions, encouraging scholars to further explore the connections among maritime animals, ecology, art, and history. The sources of the shells—Southeast Asia and South Asia—lie beyond the scope of this book. As maritime treasures became globally desirable and human exploitation of nature extended into the deep sea, what transformations occurred in those regions? How did the large-scale extraction of marine resources change local socio-economic structure and ecology? These questions deserve further scholarly inquiry. Overall, this is a well-researched and beautifully produced book. It should attract scholars interested in material culture, transcultural exchanges in art and craft, the history of science, animal history, and environmental humanities.