Yingko looks at the future of ceramic arts

Since its inauguration on Nov. 26, 2000, the Yingko Ceramics Museum (台北縣立鶯歌陶瓷博物館) has set out to reinvent the pottery town as something more than a place to pick up faux-imperial Chinese crockery. Last August, the museum held a large-scale exhibition titled The Beauty of Glazes in Yingko Ceramics (鶯歌釉彩之美) which documented the development of glazing technology in the town. Now, playing host to the International Asia-Pacific Contemporary Ceramics Invitational Exhibition (亞太地區國際現代陶藝邀請展), which opened yesterday, the museum is spreading its wings still further.

While the conventional wisdom is that Yingko became famous as a pottery center due to the clay found nearby, Wu Chin-feng (吳進風), the director of the museum, points out that prior to Taiwan's retrocession, Yingko was in fact a rather minor pottery center, and its fame did not really become established until the 1940s and 1950s. "It is all about location," he said. "With the relocation of tens of thousands of troops from the mainland when the KMT fell back to Taiwan, demand for pottery products in the capital skyrocketed. Yinko was conveniently located near the capital and was able to meet this need."

Location will also be the key to plans to revamp Yingko as a center of pottery and ceramic art in Taiwan. Located only half an hour by frequent commuter train from Taipei, it is an ideal day trip, especially now that the museum and the Old Pottery Street are now in full swing as tourist destinations. This is part of the reasoning behind the early opening of the Contemporary Ceramics Invitational. "We hope that people will have the time to enjoy the exhibition over the Chinese New Year," said Chiu Chin-chuan (邱靖娟), a public relations officer for the museum.

The Contemporary Ceramics Invitational is the largest international exhibition that the museum has hosted in its short history. In total, there are 103 works by 83 artists from eight Asia-Pacific territories. Taiwan will be contributing 27 works, with others artists from from Korea, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii. In addition to the works on display, the museum will be hosting a series of seminars on the ceramic arts in which many of the exhibiting artists will be taking part.

One mandate of the exhibition is to define regional qualities to the ceramic art in this age where the rapidity and ease of information movement has blurred such traditional distinctions. According to Chen Cheng-hsun (陳正勳), a Taiwanese potter taking part in the exhibition, as far as technology goes, there really is very little difference between artists. "All the artists selected for this show are established in their field, and on the technical side, their craft is very well honed," Chen said. "There is very little distinction in this area."

For Chen, potters clay is simply a material for sculpture, and he hopes to transcend the conventional idea of this material being used simply for the making of utilitarian vessels. This is no surprise as he originally studied sculpture and sees pottery bound by too many conventions. In fact, although pottery and ceramic work have long histories in China, "`contemporary ceramics' is actually an idea imported from the West. It is not a continuous development from the tradition of Chinese porcelain," Wu pointed out.