The Pottery Workshop's 25th Anniversary celebration in Hong Kong

 

In early December members from all four locations of the Pottery Workshop (Hong Kong, Shanghai, Jingdezhen, and Beijing) descended on Hong Kong to celebrate its 25th anniversary with a weekend of festivities. It was great to meet the HK staff and see the original location in the basement of the Fringe Club. This small but quaint space has become the springboard for the largest privately held ceramic organization in the world. 

My travels took me by plane to Shenzhen, P.R.C and then by bus into the city. The hour long bus ride was a great chance to see the transition from the mainland to HK. The closer you get the more obvious the British influence becomes. The organization of the city, the street names, and the double decker trams all point to the 156 year British occupation of the territory. (For more HK history click here) It was refreshing to be in a western style city where the taxi drivers spoke English. I found myself starting to speak my broken Mandarin (which is doubly funny because they speak Cantonese) only to have them say in English "So where do you want to go?" 

Over the weekend I walked around the city soaking in the lights and the people. One afternoon I spent a few hours on a boat that was generously lent to us by a supporter of PWS. I was amazed at how quickly you could reach remote locations in the cluster of islands that surround HK. We cruised back to High Island to have lunch at a small beach-side seafood restaurant. With full stomachs we laid in the sun like iguanas and took a dip in the chilly South China Sea.Our weekend culminated with a large party at the Foreign Correspondents Club. Each PWS location gave a slide show and Caroline Cheng spoke about the development of the organization. At the dinner PWS unveiled a book that chronicles the history of the organization. We will have them at our NCECA table for anyone that wants to take a look.

As a side note, Shanghai is a much larger city (20 million) but HK (7 million) feels more dense. It is a vertical city with closely packed high-rise buildings. The city pushes up against steep hills that look very similar to the topography of the Caribbean islands. This picture looks down onto Stanley where we spent the afternoon at the beach.

This last image is from Webs of Significance

Happy New Year! - Holiday Tea and the White Elephant Exchange

2010 has passed. I feel like that statement should coincide with advertisements for hover cars or time shares on Mars. I had a great year with many changes that have not fully sunk in yet. Part of my great fortune has been meeting the amazing group of people that work at the Pottery Workshop Shanghai. 

We recently got together for a holiday party to celebrate the end of the year. We had an international potluck with sushi, chicken satay, and tasty home-made chicken wings. One of our studio renters performed a tea ceremony for all those in attendance. I have read many accounts of the ceremony but I had never participated until the party. It was great to see how a ceremony known for its quiet focus could be translated to a group of 20 people. We each took turns as Premala took us through the process of whisking the Matcha (powdered green tea), turning the bowl three times, and drinking the mixture in three quick sips. (For a better explanation of the ceremony click here or here) I appreciated Premala's willingness to teach us about the ceremony and its place in ceramic history.

The group picture above is with our White Elephant gifts. For those not familiar with this system of gift giving it is based on the idea that you can "steal" a gift from someone else at the party. At the party every person chose one pot out of our holiday sale based on a number they drew from a lottery. During the White Elephant, number two can take number one's gift, number three can take both one and two's gifts, and so on. With this system its best to be the final one to draw so you can pick from the largest group of objects. Once we got going it was fun to watch each persons excitement as they picked their pot. The best part was watching the early participants try to hide their pots so that no one could take them. We had a great time with lots of laughs. In the picture above we have students from China, Ireland, England, Denmark, Japan, Turkey, Canada and the US. One of my plans for our new studio space is to hang a small flag from every country where our students are from.

2011 will be a great year for the Pottery Workshop Shanghai. We will be moving to a newly remodeled studio this week. Ill post pictures of the new space as soon as we are in. Ill be traveling a large amount in the next few months and I look forward to posting more about that also. Happy New Year to everyone! Please come visit, China is fantastic.

Pots as far as the eye can see-Pt.2

It is very common to see carts of pots being pulled through the streets of Jingdezhen. They might be going from the pottery to the decorators, or from the decorators to the kilns. There are large gas car kilns spread through out the individual factories. (By factories I mean the pottery producing neighborhoods that have grown out of old state run factories. It is common to see families living above their workshops so these factories become small villages within the larger city.) The community kilns are rented by the cubic centimeter to individual artists/shops. After the pots are fired they are unloaded and wrapped in grass bundles to be transported to other parts of the city to sell.

One advantage of large scale commercial production is that glazes have been tested and retested to fit the clay bodies perfectly. You can buy a pristine Celedon that doesn't craze on the local porcelain. Copper reds, rutile blues, and crystalline matts are at your disposal for ridiculously cheap prices. The glazes are sold premixed in liquid form so that all you must do is apply them. If you wanted to be extra lazy you can hire a glaze person to come and glaze them for you. This highly specified division of labor allows international artists to come to Jingdezhen with designs and have them realized in a relatively small amount of time.

Pots as far as the eye can see-Pt.1

I am fascinated by the shear number of pots that are made in Jingdezhen, P.R.C. The unofficial numbers are that 40% of the local economy is ceramic based. (Thats roughly 400,000 people!) Some of these people are potters, some are decorators, some fire kilns, some process clay, and others are in the packing/shipping portion of the economy. The division of labor is very specific with each step of the process being handled by separate groups of workers. (To see an older post of throwers click here. To see decorators click here) While people hand throw a variety of forms most of the pots are slip cast. The images above are of a mold maker and a pair of slip casters. The day we visited pots were lined up down the edge of the train tracks. A train came through which surprisingly didn't cause enough vibrations to knock the pots over.

While the parents work the smaller children attend an open-air Kindergarden located on the same street. I had a great time playing peek-a-boo with the kids. The kids that look blurry in this image where my partners in crime. They would duck under their desks and giggle when I held my camera up. I had to hide behind the edge of the building so they would come out again. The teacher didn't seem to mind so I kept it up for about five minutes before we went on to see the rest of the potteries.

The Patterned Streets of Jingdezhen

On a recent trip to Jingdezhen I found myself photographing mundane objects like walls, gates, and windows. These everyday architectural fixtures are filled with layers of pattern that continually interest me. After hours of carefully painting pots I find it comforting to look at the irregular erosion on a brick wall. It feels refreshing because the surfaces are not intentional. They are biproducts of many variables acting upon each other over a long period of time. I try to replicate this aged surface in the way I dip my pots in thin white slip. When the application is just right you can see a red halo on the edge of handles and slip trailed lines. This type of ghost line is something I'm trying to master in my own work.

City Weekend Article on Cass Hayes

City Weekend just did a spot on one of our students, Cass Hayes. Its a great look into what a community pottery center can provide someone in a big city. Click here for the complete original.

 

We caught up with Cass Hayes to find out all about the Pottery Workshop. Cass tells us all about her involvement in the classes at the workshop and how it's become her oasis of calm.
How long have you been here?
Two years now, with two more to go. My husband and I married in August ’08 and moved here in September of the same year, so it was an interesting way to begin married life. I’ve been going to pottery for over a year now and have never looked back. I think the workshop saved my sanity, and I’m not kidding.
What got you interested?
I wanted to do something creative but also something very active that would take my mind off my homesickness. Shanghai is bustling and I needed an oasis of calm. I’m finding pottery is mentally, physically and emotionally exhausting so I feel like I’ve really achieved something when I leave each day. My progress is also very clear, from my first pinch pot teapot–(which was pretty rubbish–I made the spout too low so it only holds a thimble full of tea)–to my massive wheel-thrown pasta bowl which I use all the time.

Turkish Ceramics at PWSSH and Jingdezhen Ceramic Fair

The Pottery Workshop will been hosting an exhibition of contemporary Turkish ceramics for the month of November. The thirty four artists were chosen by Zehra Cobanli, the dean of the art faculty at Anadolu University, Iskeshir, Turkey. The work in the exhibition represents a large cross section of styles and techniques including saggar firing, salt firing, intricate slip casting, and traditional wheel throwing. Its great to see how much of this work relates to Turkish ceramic history.

I had the pleasure of hosting Zehra, Lale Demir Oransay, and Onur Mustak Cobanli for a week long trip through Jingdezhen and Shanghai. Our visit to Jingdezhen coincided with the International Ceramics Fair. The exhibits were somewhat lame from an art perspective but it was an interesting cultural event. Their were elaborate opening/closing ceremonies, a ceramic fashion show, and every kind of blue and white porcelain you could imagine. It was presented like a trade show with hundreds of individual booths selling pots. There was one international exhibit that featured work from international artists, including a few sweet pots from American potter Mike Jabbur.

Our tour culminated with the opening of the exhibition in Shanghai. The reception was packed and we had many distinguished guests from the local Turkish community. The Consul General of Turkey, Murat Ulku, came and gave a nice talk about China/Turkey relations. Our director Caroline Cheng also spoke about silk road trade connections and their affect on ceramic design.

I hope to do a series of posts on the areas we toured in the near future. My favorites were the Longua Temple in Shanghai and the Sanbao ceramic village outside of Jingdezhen. I took hundreds of pictures so they will trickle out on the blog as a sort through them.

Ivo Sassi at the Pottery Workshop

We recently hosted Italian sculptor Ivo Sassi for a week as he finished one of his monumental sculptures.  He was in Shanghai to present his sculpture as a gift to the local Chinese government. In collaboration with Gao Yifeng, Sassi built a totem that was 4 meters high. His 50 years in clay have yielded a very direct and immediate approach to manipulating form and surface. He reminded me of an Italian Peter Volkous as he was attacking the clay with a fettling knife and runny slip.

Sassi spoke no English so we had lots of funny lost in translation moments. At one point a Chinese TV crew came to the studio. With the help of his son we explained that if he was going to be on TV he had to put his shirt back on. (He was a fan of working with just his shorts and apron.) It made for a good laugh between all the English speakers who were witnessing this request being translated from Chinese to English to Italian and back again.