By Evan
*Click here to see all our nifty Jingdezhen pictures.
**This article was meant to be posted weeks ago, but was badly delayed due to author incompetence and a Wordpress bug.
During the last week of 2009, despite ever-dropping temperatures, we had decided ostensibly against common sense and the self-preservation instinct to actually ride back north (see route page here just in case you weren’t sure we’re crazy) just for the historical significance of visiting one of the premier sources of China’s ancient wealth and the cradle of porcelain culture all over the world, Jingdezhen. From the Ming Dynasty vases Indiana Jones threw around in the German castle to the invaluable relics stored in Taiwan’s National Museum down to the fine china my grandma used to sell in her gift shop in Florida, just about all of the world’s fine porcelain owes its heritage to the little city in northern Jiangxi.
Considering its weighty cultural value, we hoped Jingdezhen would be a pleasant surprise, or at least that’s what we told ourselves as we pushed up across the cold provincial highway leading thither (the ride through Wuyuan county was at least visually rewarding in its own right). What we discovered when we arrived, however, was just more of the same, only more so. On our way through the eastern edge of the city, we came across the “New Campus of the Jingdezhen Institute of Ceramics,” which in its brown brick boxes of buildings looked more likely to contain a remedial boys school than an academy of one of China’s oldest art forms. Further into the city, past the sprawling, state-owned complex of Changhe (昌河), a car and helicopter manufacturer and the city’s largest single employer, the urban landscape emerged as a muddy, uniform mess. The streetlights were decorated in the style of old painted ceramics, in homage to the city’s tradition, but they only made the run down tenements stand out more. And the place was everywhere covered in mud, the kind of mud you spend ten minutes cleaning from your boots at night. Suffice it to say, from our highly disappointing first impression, we could scarcely predict how positive we were to eventually feel before leaving.
This scene from downtown Jingdezhen really says it all. Photo by Alexis
After a night of New Year’s Eve celebration and a day of New Year’s recovery, it was time to start looking for some porcelain culture. Following a tip from our breakfast noodle man, we traversed the street from our hotel, crossed a giant open construction site into a muddy alleyway network known as “Imitating Ancient Street (仿古街).” There were little shops in the first floors of all the buildings along the narrow ways selling all manners and sizes of ancient-looking porcelain ware. I asked the patron of one of the stalls if we could see where the magic happened, which I assumed must be just upstairs. His response was that it was made in his family’s workshop elsewhere in town, but that we’d have no trouble finding a workshop anywhere since in Jingdezhen, “every family is producing (家家户户都在做).”
This woman in her shop on "Imitating Ancient Street" has mastered the three P's of Jingdezhen: Porcelain, Painting, and Pajamas. Photo by Andy
On "Imitating Ancient Street," porcelain representations of really horrible things that happened during the cultural revolution. I can't imagine going to Germany and seeing little figurines of SS agents executing Jews, but such is the collective incredulity of China. Photo by Alexis.
It took less than fifteen minutes of trudging through the mud of “Imitating Ancient Street” to realize that it was full of mostly low-quality replicas and shrewd hawkers interested in making quick sales. We exited past a wall covered in flyer ads for STD clinics and one announcement offering a million yuan to the man who could successfully impregnate a 30-year-old woman (and 200,000 yuan just for trying… man, what a gig) and headed to the area of high ceramics density around the Wal-Mart (how’s that for ancient Chinese charm?).
Our friend Cathy, who was in visiting us for New Year, at this point commented that Jingdezhen was essentially one giant trinket market. From what we had seen so far, she was right. It was like the Beijing Dirt Market on crack — just loads of kitsch in every direction you looked. Once we saw a man in one store around the commercial district putting stickers on vases, we knew it was time to test the waters elsewhere.
The commercialized shop area around the Walmart was just full of kitsch you'd expect to see in one of the gaudy tourist markets of Shanghai or Beijing. Photo by Alexis
To this day I am dying to know who shows up at the ceramics market street in Jingdezhen, sees a framed picture of Hu Jintao's smile-less mug, and thinks, "Well, I came for some porcelain, but wouldn't that piece add that final touch of je-ne-sais-quoi to our living room?"
Accordingly, we hopped in a cab and asked the driver where we could find the “art of porcelain” and not just some commercialized pile of it. “The area around the Ceramics Institute and the Sculpture Factory (陶艺学院、雕塑瓷厂附近)” are the places to be, said he, and so there we sped. Upon first glance, it was evident we had finally found somewhere different. The buildings were all new, but built in the whitewashed, dark roofed, graceful style we had seen on the road in from Wuyuan (婺源). Fortunately when we arrived, the Saturday morning student porcelain market was in full swing, with a crowd picking over booths full of surprisingly high quality ceramic wares.
A nice young girl who served us good coffee (a welcome change) in the artsy Pottery Studio cafe informed us that the area was named after old Sculpture Factory, which had previously been a giant-scale state run factory during the days of the planned economy. After Reform and Opening, when the state-owned enterprises went bust, a bunch of young porcelain artists, mostly graduated from the Institute (the juvenile detention center we had passed on the road in was the new campus of the old Institute, which was just around the corner from the Sculpture Factory), took over the neighborhood.
A student of the Jingdezhen Institute of Porcelain sells his wares at the Saturday morning market, by Alexis
The area, as promised, was full of little porcelain studios spinning, drying, glazing and selling all sorts of porcelain. Behind the bright red Chinese flag-themed door of the China Rhino studio, one of the colorful shops partitioned out of one of the Sculpture Factory buildings, we found young porcelain master Xu Ning (徐宁). “This area,” he explained, “developed in a similar way to 798 in Beijing, except that these factories have always been used to produce porcelain.” Before Reform and Opening, all the talent of Jingdezhen had been herded into several of the giant factories in town, which mass produced various time-tested products but didn’t allow any innovation on the part of the artists. Since the decommissioning of the factories, Jingdezhen had mostly reverted back to the old style of individual masters running small studios. The difference now is that most of the “masters” are comparatively young — we later found one master running his own shop of seven employees who was only 25!
Xu Ning and his "China Rhino" studio have been doing well since a recent exhibition in Beijing's 798 put him on the map. Photo by Alexis
Xu, hailing from a nearby village, had moved to Jingdezhen several years earlier. His display room was a hodgepodge of rhino statues of various sizes (his bread and butter) and funky modern art designs. The workshop of the young Ceramic Institute graduate, out back, was something quite different. His old mother sat finishing her lunch next to coal fire burning in an old metal bucket. His five year old daughter ran around between the back room of drying rhinoceros statues and the open yard where a graveyard of fading SOE ceramics were piled unceremoniously. Xu, who had recently gotten nation-wide recognition after a successful exhibition in 798, had set up his highly creative design studio right in the skeleton of the passion-less ceramics assembly line.
Behind Xu Ning's workshop, a recently abandoned statue of a woman's body covered in Braille sits in a graveyard of mass-produced statues leftover around the Sculpture Factory from its days as an SOE. Photo by Andy
Remnants of darker days gone by weren’t limited to piles behind Xu’s studio. Everywhere in the brick walls around the Sculpture Factory, creepy leftover mass produced statues were cemented into the walls. More than that, the cafes, small workshop operations, and little shops were full of color and personality — and they played music! It was oddball in the way an artist’s enclave ought to be, and a refreshing break from the monotony of the rest of the city.
The walls around the Sculpture Factory area were all full of eccentric art, some leftovers from the area's SOE planned economy era, and some pretty inexplicable like these. Photo by Andy
A sculptor in a workshop in the Sculpture Factory area reels off tea cups en masse. Photo by Andy
On another tip, we then made a move to Old Factory Street (老厂街), another center of porcelain activity and reputedly the best place in town to pick up quality glazes. The very first studio we saw turned out to be exactly the sort of place we were seeking. An old man sat before a table, attention completely focused on quick, delicate brush strokes across a two-foot-high, white vase. In front of him sat several completed vases on which were painted exquisite scenes between beautiful traditional designs, and all in the radiant blue that is one of Jingdezhen’s most popular flavors.
As we entered his shop, Master Jin, 70 years old, we saw that the scene he was so intently painting was an old man quietly fishing (水乡渔翁), but surprisingly he was working in gray paint, unlike the bright blue finished vases on display in front of his work desk. The blue-and-white paint (青花漆), he explained, goes on dull gray but finishes brilliant blue after kilning. When I asked the price of the finished product, his wife, who was standing at his side polishing another vase, responded for him, “1500 yuan, but he has a Master’s Certificate (大师证)!” Master Jin then produced said document from his desk drawer and explained that he had been trained in fine painting in his home of Nanjing, where he had been a professional painter most of his life. Five years ago, he retired his post as professor at an art college and came to Jingdezhen to open his small atelier. “Painting is my passion,” he said by way of explanation. As far as he is concerned, the money he makes from his works, which are sold to dealers in far away Shanghai and Guangzhou through distributors, is inconsequential as long as he gets to keep refining his art. I was moved equally by his passion as by the enchanting nature of his old fisherman painting, as it evoked memories of a calmer time in China that I can only imagine, since I’ve yet to see it myself. I would have bought it on the spot if it weren’t for our pesky habit of touring China by bike.
70-year-old Master Jin spends all his days painting porcelain in the old Jingdezhen style because it's "his passion." It's a rare treat to find that attitude around here. Photo by Andy
Master Jin's hand-painted "Fisherman in a Watery Region (水乡渔翁)" made me feel like I had shot back in time hundreds of years to a China where such scenes were common. After it's fired, it will be bright blue like the rest of the "blue flower" style vases. Photo by Alexis
The rest of Old Factory Street, however, was less inspiring. The muddy, litter-strewn alley ran maybe a half mile toward an open garbage heap. The porcelain workshops and glaze stores were interspersed between various disorderly shops selling cheap goods. A long, brick wall was flyered over in want ads for “experienced spinners” and “glaze specialists,” among others, as well as for STD cures. Along the train tracks at the back of the street, hundreds of freshly spun ceramics in clusters of identical shapes sat drying under the sun. The owner of one of the little workshops, a middle aged man watching television on the bed in the corner of a large room completely filled with identical vases, had a less passionate relationship with his ceramics. He explained that his family, one of several in a long row, all produced roughly the exact same product en masse all the time. One of his vases, which he could spin in minutes but which required another two days of drying, reshaping, and kilning before it could be sold to an artist to paint it, would make him between five and six yuan of profit. We spent the rest of the day drifting between different factories mass-producing decal-ed, porcelain baijiu bottles, but found nothing else of an artistic nature.
A muddy alley in the Old Factory area sports a railway and several small porcelain workshops. Photo by Andy
These women spend every day of their working lives putting the same blue stickers on the same spots of the same bottles to be filled with the same baijiu. I just can't imagine that existence, but baijiu drinkers worldwide sure are happy to have them around.
The next day we returned to the Pottery Workshop cafe next to the Sculpture Factory. Incidentally, it was here that we met a few other foreign visitors to Jingdezhen, some in town to study ceramics, and one European artist overseeing the production of her own line of porcelain. After a few more good coffees (nectar from heaven, I swear), we took one last tour around the area for conversations with the young artists.
In the 0798 shop (0798 is Jingdezhen’s calling code), inside a busted, funky room we found wrap-around display cases full of vibrantly colored tea sets of all shapes and sizes. On a couch in the corner sat a young couple wearing identical pink coats labeling them “music lovers.” The man, Little Zuo, entreated us to sit down for ginseng tea and proceeded to explain his operation. Zuo, a native of Hunan and recent graduate of the Institute, had pooled resources with four other friends to open the business six months earlier. Their model is simple, he explained. All five of them make teapots, cups, and bases however they see fit and put them on display. Occasionally they get a walk-in like us to buy an individual set (which run 150-300 yuan), but more usually it’s a distributor who makes an order for between ten to upwards of several hundred of one style he thinks will sell. Naturally I assumed this meant he would make a mold for whatever designs were profitable. “Oh no,” he said in the stereotypically bubbly manner of a young artist, “molded pots have no character!” He grabbed a pot from under his desk that had been made from a mold and had us touch it. “Do you feel how it’s uniformly thick all over? Now feel this one,” he said, handing us one of his own 100% handmade pots. “You can feel the extra thickness where I joined the spout and the body. It has its own personality, and that’s what gives it value, not just the style!” After another ten minutes of fervent explanations, and we were convinced: the man was passionate about pots.
I again naturally assumed that he had been making tea pots his whole life, and had for that reason been accepted to the Institute. “No no,” his slightly more reticent girlfriend Little Ge fielded the question. “We were both just interested in art growing up and knew that Jingdezhen was a good place to learn one of China’s traditional art forms.” Both Ge, a native of Hubei and a second year student majoring in “ceramic art design,” and Zuo had been admitted to the Institute after passing an entrance exam that tested their painting and literary skills. Ge, petite and sporting the really intense bangs that young Chinese girls are so fond of, still had no idea what the future may bring. As for the Zuo and the team at 0798, they are in what you might call the “starving but energetic artist” phase, scuttling between large-scale exhibitions in Jingdezhen, Shanghai, and Guangzhou to show their work to potential distributors. Zuo’s plan for the future is to continue developing his art and gaining recognition. His hope is that after attaining status as a master, instead of running around self-promoting, by building the better tea pot, the world will beat a path to his door.
The rest of the shops in the area were mostly owned by recent graduates not over 30 years old. One such artist/owner surnamed Xu (许), a native of China’s Northeast who at the age of 27 had been in town for 6 years, had filled his shop with a superb collection of his own handcrafted statues, plates, and vases. Taking notice of one of his finer vases, I asked if the cracked, green style was traditional or his own idea. “The technique comes from ancient times, but we’ve improved upon it. This is better quality than what you’ll find in the museums.” What do you mean it’s been improved on? “Glaze makers never stopped improving their formulas and techniques.” Not even during the Cultural Revolution? “There were years where no progress was made, but even then the masters of the trade never lost the art.” I was blown away to hear that porcelain in Jingdezhen, far from being a dead art to be mimicked cheaply and sold for a quick buck across from the Walmart, is in fact alive and evolving!
The experience in Jingdezhen left me hopeful. Yes, most of the city was more worn down, muddy, and oppressive than many of the cities we’ve visited so far, and yes, it was crawling with charlatans peddling mass-produced replicas. However, real, passionate artists like Xu Ning and Master Jin, and the thriving community emerging around the Sculpture Factory give me hope. If Cathy was right in her comment that art never dies, then like saplings rising through the ashes of a cultural forest fire, Jingdezhen seems to be on the way to rebirth. That is, of course, if external forces (i.e. a meddling government and/or overcommercialization — see the case of 798 here and here) don’t rip the fragile saplings out by their roots during this crucial phase.
