Since this time, glass craft production has largely been freed from large-scale industrial settings and has been able to tap into techniques unknown to artists in the old days. More importantly, this novel technology offers an unprecedented opportunity for individual artists all over the world to explore glass as a medium for artistic creation, now that they are able to use smaller, studio-sized furnaces.
In 1988, a Taiwanese movie-director-turned-glass-artist Heinrich Wang (王俠君) returned from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. He made use of the lost-wax-casting method to create glass artifacts which had a Chinese cultural context. Wang's works were so remarkable that his glass art company Tittot (琉園), founded in 1994, now manages more than 70 outlets globally in addition to 17 stores in Taiwan. It employs more than 400 art workers.
The phenomenal success of Wang and his associate Yang Hui-shan (楊惠珊), an award-winning movie-star-turned artist, sent shock waves through the declining traditional glassware community in Taiwan. Soon enough, a demand for new insight and the expression of modern artistic forms in the field of craft design led to the development of a Taiwanese version of the US Studio Glass Art Movement. As a result, traditional glassware craftsmen and artists from other fields responded to Wang's timely call to master contemporary artistic designs. Individual ceramic and glass art studios or workshops sprang up like mushrooms all over Taiwan.
Y. S. Wang (王永山), CEO of Tittot, said his team of artists has managed lost-wax casting so well that Taipei has now become one of the major world centers in terms of lost-wax art in the last five years, surpassing perhaps even the reputation of French company Daum's products.
"The ability to produce world-class designs in glass art by local artists will lift Taipei's status and allow it to compete shoulder to shoulder with Prague, Venice and Seattle within the next decade," Wang said, adding his staff's abilities compare favorably with international standards in the sphere of glassware design.
Leadership, modernity and idealism are the three qualities held dearly by Tittot. Its success and emphasis on modern artistic designs have created a ripple effect that has spread to other media and is leading Taiwan's cultural enterprises to a new and bright horizon.
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