Chinese porcelain shards salvaged from a famous shipwreck are being reimagined in Malaysia, hundreds of years after the Portuguese vessel is said to have sunk in battle.
The smashed 17th-century crockery was almost consigned to the scrap heap before Malaysian artist Alice Chang saw the potential to transform the shattered plates and cups. After chancing upon a social media post selling the porcelain fragments, the 57-year-old bought about 50kg for more than 10,000 ringgit (US$2,370). Her recent solo exhibition “Me, Then Blue” at her studio in Ampang, a suburb of the capital Kuala Lumpur, turned the porcelain into sculptures representing submerged dreamscapes.
Her materials are fragments of a once-great cargo of blue-and-white pottery made in Jingdezhen, China’s renowned porcelain capital. The cargo was carried by a Portuguese merchant vessel that sank around 1625, likely due to a battle off Malaysia’s coast. It was discovered in 1998 after pottery appeared in fishermen’s nets, with the vessel then named the Wanli after the Ming Dynasty emperor who ruled when the ship sank.
Photo: AFP
It was hailed as one of the most significant maritime finds in Southeast Asia and is now recognized under UNESCO’s Silk Roads Programme. But while intact porcelain pieces were preserved in museums, Chang said the broken shards were “cast aside as useless.”
“The 400 years of broken porcelain tell a story of our past and a look into our future. If nobody wanted them, they would be thrown away, and that is such a waste,” Chang said.
She used the shards to create the “ambience of this exhibition like it’s immersed in the deep blue sea,” Chang said. “This is part of Malaysia’s history... its maritime legacy often goes unrecognized, and this discovery felt like a forgotten chapter waiting to be told,” she said.
Photo: AFP
‘BEAUTY IN BROKENNESS’
At the heart of Chang’s exhibition stood 11 sculptures, adorned with salvaged shards, accompanied by 20 oil paintings.
Working with the broken porcelain pieces was “deeply personal” for Chang, a second-generation Malaysian with Chinese roots who often felt culturally unmoored.
“Through the Wanli shipwreck and working with the pieces, I feel reconnected... I have been told I’m not very Chinese because I’m married to an Italian. So I’m neither here nor there,” she chuckled. “This project reconnected me to my Chinese roots. I actually travelled to China to search and understand my culture.”
Some of her sculptures evoked ornate vases while others resembled cascading waves, with mirrors beneath them mimicking the glimmering seabed.
They show “the beauty in brokenness,” Chang said.
“Depending on your perspective, you can turn brokenness into something beautiful.”
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