"This fascinating study is meticulously researched and presented with verve. Anna Grasskamp is a rare scholar who is equally conversant with the European archives and the Chinese ones. Her examination of shells and other maritime organisms as collectible transcultural objects casts new light on these objects, and reveals attitudes towards alien creatures, faraway places, and the natural world that are quite different from modern attitudes."
- Dorothy Ko, Barnard College

“Grasskamp’s exquisitely illustrated study …offers interpretations of individual objects and the Chinese and/or Occidental symbolism associated with them, while at the same time, she tries to embed her findings in larger cultural patterns, variegated forms of local belief, and neglected traditions. … Conchophiles who wish to find out why and how the well-to-do adored nautilus shells and similar specimens will discover many fascinating details in Grasskamp’s account. … Art and Ocean Objects … will inspire scholars to explore the story of marine products in new ways; it is a lively contribution to the field of Euro-Asian (art) history and cultural exchange.”
-Roderich Ptak, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 2023, 86, 2

“Drawing on fields as diverse as art history, object studies, the history of science, and area studies to inform its robust methodology of material culture, the book brings much-needed nuance to the study of the transregional material culture of early modern Europe and China through the maritime world. …Drawing on this new perspective on connected maritime history, the book distinguishes itself by paying almost equal attention to the visual and material cultures of early modern Europe and China, at times articulating their connectivity through objects such as nautilus cups carved in Guangzhou and mounted in Europe, while also comparing patterns of knowledge and gendered imagination generated by shells in the two regions. Although connection and comparison are well-established methods in transregional and global history, Grasskamp adds nuance and complexity to them by way of (transmedial) materiality. …Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia successfully portrays seashells as boundary-crossing objects that went far beyond (re)connecting Europe and China to challenge the entrenched binaries of inanimate things and living organisms, reality and fantasy, secular and religious worlds, and human and non-human entities.“
- Kyoungjin Bae, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, CAA Reviews , 2023, June

“In "Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia", Anna Grasskamp beautifully shows that the world of the sea was thematically and materially ever-present in the daily lives of early modern people around the globe. Grasskamp reads deftly across European and Chinese sources to elucidate the many complex ambivalences that animated early modern perspectives on the ocean and ocean objects: alluring and threatening, commodified and sacred, and foreign and familiar, to name a few. She excavates an 'inside-out geography' in which the depths of the oceans that connected far-away lands were abundantly rich with materials and meanings that shaped people's views of other places, and of themselves. In doing so, Grasskamp models an art historical methodology for ascribing degrees of agency to a variety of organic matter that indelibly marked modes of (meaning-)making in early modernity … By way of her thorough and impressive research across European and Chinese archives, Grasskamp indubitably proves that seas and oceans can no longer be 'voids' within global art histories. She unearths the ways in which the ocean has shaped our conceptions of the world, of gender, and of art.”
- John White, Princeton University, SEHEPUNKTE, 11, 2024