TFAM puts itsold pots on display

If touring Taipei Fine Arts Museum's latest exhibition of ceramic works by foreign artists from the permanent collection sounds strictly like a rainy-day activity, it is. It's not that the exhibit is uninteresting or uninformative, but it's not unlike flipping through a photo album of someone else's family.

That's because the pieces on exhibit -- 81 of them in total -- were mostly donated by international artists when TFAM first opened its doors nearly 20 years ago. Others were donated following a 1995 international ceramics exhibition -- the museum's first -- which featured 266 works by 165 artists. And while each of the pieces represents what the artist considered to be his or her best, TFAM was not at that time in a position to turn down the artists' donations. The result, when laid out on shelves two decades later, is an exhibit curated largely by the artists themselves.

TFAM's June Chu (朱紀蓉), who served as one of the curators for the exhibit, points out that the number of works on display is insufficient to represent the full picture of ceramics of the day, but has lessons to offer nonetheless. "It's a kind of review of what we have," she said. "These works were never shown after the first time. They've been sitting in our storage for a long, long time. ? Now that it's summertime, we hope to have more students coming in to see how these pieces differ from more contemporary forms."

Educational it may be, but as most of the pieces were produced two decades ago, any claim of being "cutting edge" has long since dulled -- while all the pieces are original, you can't escape the feeling that you've seen similar works adorning the shelves of boutiques throughout Taiwan's more touristed townships. For the most part, you have.

One exception is found in Kosho Ito's eight plates of alumina. Ito, who was born to a gold engraver in 1931 and operates a pottery studio with his wife in Kasama, Japan. His White Solid of Alumina series is a mixture of white alumina and ceramic industry standard quartz fired at 12,500℃ then set in a wooden box and fired again until the box was incinerated resulting in the collapse of solid materials to emphasize the natural state of ceramics materials. Think of a southwestern American landscape in white miniature.

It may not sound all that exciting -- and perhaps alone it's not -- but contrasted against a room filled with 80 other pots, plates and who-knows-whats, it begs attention despite having been relegated to the corner. Whereas the other abstract pieces in the exhibit are the products of their creators' imaginations, Ito's plates of alumina differ insofar as he allowed his materials to create their final form.

Another piece that shines is Kutani Koyo's Celadon Jar with Landscape (an interesting aside: the most striking pieces in the exhibit are largely the work of Japanese artists). Koyo's hand-thrown jar is a full shape decorated on the outside with graduated mountain forms in cobalt oxide. Blue porcelain glaze gives the vessel luster and brushed ferrous oxide adds a touch of auburn at the rim of this piece, easily the most stately and elegant in the exhibit.

The large remainder of the exhibit is unfortunately forgettable. For the record, though, Chu says TFAM is now quite a bit pickier about what pieces they accept into their permanent collection.