We often make presumptions about where objects come from, or what lives they’ve lived, based on their appearance. It’s an easy trap to fall into in museums, where tightly packaged label texts are at times the only guides at our disposal.

Perhaps because of their ubiquity in our visual world, coupled with my fatigue with seeing “Asian” used as a hazy, interchangeable term applied with ease to everything from food to fashion, dense displays of blue-and-white ceramics in historic settings easily make my eyes glaze over. Usually the only context I’m offered in these situations is that the objects merely reflect Western fascinations with a so-called “Asian” aesthetic.

Yet sometimes we encounter objects that are so defiantly inscrutable and unruly, they compel us to look closer and confront the slipperiness of the categories we construct. Take this bowl, for example. Its serene blue-and-white surface is covered in enameled motifs with a kind of brazenness reminiscent of graffiti. At times, the lines are conscious of the form’s curves as they articulate bands around rim and foot. Elsewhere, they seem to betray little recognition of the botanical scenes rendered in blue. A basket overflowing with flowers and flying insects are emblazoned across the surface in red, green, and gold.

The overall effect is bewildering, to say the least. It appears almost as if two distinct bowls, of the same size and shape but with completely different aesthetic ends, morphed into a single body. The vessel makes no attempt to reconcile the two idioms, making visually explicit its identity as a hybrid object.

Produced for the European market, this blue-and-white porcelain bowl originated in Jingdezhen, China, likely around 1750. It then made its way to the Netherlands, where enamelers added the overglaze decorations. This practice, where Dutch artisans modified export ceramic works by layering colorful enamels reminiscent of Japanese and Chinese imagery, was known as Amsterdams bont (“Amsterdam multicolored”).

In Anglo American spheres, the term “clobbered” emerged in the 19th century as a catchall descriptor for export ceramics embellished with European enamels. Though the word raises violent connotations to our contemporary ears, at the time it referred primarily to a cobbler’s work of buffing out creases and cracks in leather shoes—an act of restoration and renewal.

A ceramic piece could be clobbered for a number of reasons. Adding enameled decoration could obscure imperfections on a lesser-quality glaze or a slightly damaged piece. It also enhanced pieces that European audiences considered too plain or dated, and refreshed them to meet the latest trends in porcelain at a lower cost.

The details on this bowl reflect the vivid hues and dense patterning of Imari ware, a popular strain of export porcelain produced at kilns in Arita, a town in southern Japan. But after the clobbering, the object’s journey was only halfway complete. Once garnished with motifs, the bowl then traveled across the Atlantic to Suriname, then a Dutch colony along the northern coast of South America. As one of the trading posts most frequented by New England merchants in the pre-Revolution decades due to its lax restrictions, Suriname’s capital of Paramaribo was a charged site of exchange where people traded livestock and lumber for sugar, molasses, and other commodities harvested and produced by enslaved labor.

Luxury goods like ceramics and spices that arrived vis-à-vis European ports also found their way onto trade ships, which is probably what happened to this bowl. An enterprising merchant likely purchased the bowl in Suriname in 1757, then it finally made its way to Rhode Island, years after it was created.

Within the social world of the Providence elite, a bowl like this would have likely held punch, a communally enjoyed concoction of sugar, water, citrus, spices, and rum thought to have been popularized in the Western world by British sailors who picked up the recipe during their travels to Asia. Rum, produced by distilleries throughout New England using the very sugar and molasses generated by the plantation economies in the Caribbean, was both a profitable export and a popular spirit domestically.

This bowl, colored with stories of interaction, exchange, and movement, is a palimpsest. On its surface, the amalgam of decorations reflects not only how quickly tastes evolved in an increasingly globalized economy, but also the nimbleness of artists as they adapted their practices to meet shifting demands. It also bore witness to the sprawling networks of exchange that spun out across the globe in the 18th century, fueled by extraction, exploitation, and other profit-driving mechanisms that drew equivalences between objects and people as commodities.

The contemporary art collective CFGNY espouses a concept it calls “vaguely Asian”—a form of cultural production that rejects Orientalist impulses to delimit a singular, “authentic” conception of Asia as defined by otherness. Instead, the term embraces the plurality and blurriness inherent in a diasporic world, looking to relationships rather than categories as ways of understanding cultural experience. I’ve found it a generative way of thinking about objects like this bowl, which resist tidy categorization, especially as I work with colleagues on reimagining the MFA’s 18th-century Art of the Americas galleries.

Embracing the “vagueness” of this bowl gives us the space to confront and dwell in the cultural complexity that lies at the core of the Americas. Refusing to be contained by a single identifier, the bowl overflows with stories of the people and places it’s encountered across the globe, eager to tell us of the myriad histories that shaped its path to our galleries today.