Hsiao Fang Pottery unifies art and craft to bring elegance to everyday life.
The Hsiao Fang Pottery center in Beitou district at the northern tip of Taipei City is a delightful hillside mansion with a panoramic view of the city. A fragrant camphor tree by its entrance marks the way to a rich collection of porcelain ware, ranging from vases to tea sets. The porcelain is modern but reminiscent of 1000-year-old artifacts, and is the remarkable signature of its creator, Tsai Hsiao-fang.
For many years, the site has been home to everything that is valuable to Tsai. He designed this building some 15 years ago so he could live and work in the same place, along with his wife and four children, and display his wares in a three-story gallery. Tsai says the building, in front of a number of kilns he designed, used to be the heart of his small pottery community where dozens of potters worked. When the owner of the property, a church, decided to terminate the lease a few years ago, the kilns and potters found a new home farther north in Bali, a town by the Danshuei River.
Tsai would like to see the Hsiao Fang Pottery studio in Bali expand into a complex where he may again bring his life and work together and entertain his guests. His eyes glow when he shows the site plan and model to visitors. Pottery has been his sole passion for three decades. He is master of this small porcelain arcadia, fanning the fire that has kept the kilns warm and productive for all these years. "I need a larger place for more research," he says. "Pottery is very interesting, strenuous, but interesting."
"He pursues his art with the spirit of a scientist," says Chen Yu-ping, chief executive officer of Hwataoyao, a pottery studio in Miaoli County, south of Taipei. "He's fully dedicated to the study of form, material and function, interpreting the art form from the perspective of practicality. He had difficulty finding his own style at the beginning of his career. But now he has surpassed his predecessors from the golden ages of Chinese pottery through his hard work, particularly in his mastery of glaze."
Chen points out that Tsai is best known for his proficiency in the use of celadon--a smooth, limpid, understated glaze developed and perfected by Song Dynasty potters--and the sumptuous blues of the Qing Dynasty. "What he does is reproduce the old-style glaze effects," she says. "But his success doesn't stop there. By employing and mastering modern techniques, he not only brings antique beauty to life, but pushes his artistic achievement beyond boundaries. It's widely recognized that the quality of his work is by no means less than that of the antiques on view at the National Palace Museum."
Tsai says the process of producing new glazes involves a lot of detail that many people find tedious and annoying. "But I'm not the kind of guy who looks for simple, routine jobs," he says. "It takes time, care and attention to get the work done." He gets so engrossed in his experiments that he often forgets to eat or loses sleep. Tsai says sometimes he wakes up--after having had trouble coming up with a particular glaze he is trying to perfect--with the solution fresh in his mind. "What's on your mind during the day often appears in your dreams, occasionally with an answer."
His effort has certainly paid off. Hsiao Fang porcelain comes in rich colors and hues: monochrome glazes in turquoise, bright yellows, celadon greens and varieties of red, and the Qing-style fencai (decoration with opaque enamels where the colors do not mix but are kept within outlines) and doucai (decoration with opaque enamels on top of a fired glaze within outlines). Tsai combines these colors and forms eloquently and consequently has been dubbed the "master of today's imperial kilns." There are five types of Song imperial ware: Guan, Jun, Ge, Ding and Ru (all named after the kilns' geographic locations).
Tsai says of all the works from the past thousand years, he finds the simple yet elegant forms of Song Dynasty porcelain most attractive. "I think it has much to do with my personality," he says. "I like plainness. Song-style porcelain is what I would want to use every day." Even with bright colors, he seeks to render them in tone and quality that is calming rather than tiring to the eye. "Some people believe that porcelain made without a shiny surface doesn't wash clean easily," he says. "Ours does."
That shows Tsai's faith in the mastery of his craft, and he is confident that pottery manufacturers in China, Japan and Taiwan who copy his work at best achieve 60 percent of Hsiao Fang's quality. Some local businessmen buy Tsai's work as samples for manufacturers. Tsai says for some items, the more they copy, the better Hsiao Fang Pottery's business gets. But Chinese copies, which come in great quantity at 1ow prices, affect his business by attracting the untrained eyes of cost -conscious customers.
"I'm not too worried about business, as long as I can make ends meet," he says. What really hurts him is the local manufacturers' unwillingness to invest time in studying the craft while wanting to gain quick returns. "Somehow they don't think it's necessary to cultivate their fundamental skills," he says. "I don't spend all the time studying nothing." Indeed, what makes Tsai stand out from the crowd has been his willingness to research the craft so thoroughly.
Tsai did not set out to be a potter. He was initially interested in studying fire-resistant materials, and that led to his fascination with pottery. Born in 1938 in central Taiwan's Cingshuei Township, Tsai grew up with several family members who were interested and talented in the arts. Tsai's parents advised him to avoid the arts when he was considering what school to attend, so he entered the Provincial Taipei Institute of Technology to study electrical engineering.
Intending to look more closely into fire-resistant materials, he signed up for the China Productivity Center's first training course in kiln engineering after graduation. Finishing among the top trainees on the program, he got a job at a ceramic tile factory in Beitou. The next year, at the recommendation of one of his teachers, he went to Japan to further his education at the Government Industrial Research Institute of Nagoya's Ceramic Technology Department. His teachers there included the highly respected ceramic artists Kato Etsuzou and Kaneoka Sigeto.
From then on, his life was closely connected with ceramics. He returned home to work at the same factory, directing production and solving technical problems that arose during the process. It was there that he created the first flambé glaze ceramic tile in Taiwan. At the same time, he was invited to teach pottery at the Shih Chien College of Design, now Shih Chien University. The longer he worked in the field, the more ceramics piqued his interest, and his own home became an after-hours ceramic laboratory.
He used materials he could acquire easily, such as ash, shell and rice chaff, to produce glazes on test pieces and fired them in different kilns. In 1974, he hand-built his first kiln on the landing of the staircase in his rented house and produced his first piece, a ruby-red glazed cup. He took this cup to a number of antique dealers to get their feedback.
The cup was welcomed warmly: dealers began to place orders with Tsai, and this boosted his confidence. While his exploration of the craft went well, his career got off to a slow start. He left the factory where he had worked for 10 years and became the managing consultant of a ceramic manufacturer in Yingge, south of Taipei. He changed jobs several times and eventually entered a partnership to produce pottery. Before long he ran out of money to keep up with the company's expansion and had to abandon the venture. He then started his own studio, in a small rented space of 23 square meters and used nearby kilns for firing.
Because of Tsai's new glaze effects, his reputation spread so fast that several uninvited guests broke into his studio looking for his production notes. Tsai and his wife were forced to move to a place with a yard, this time back to Taipei's Shihlin District. With limited resources, the Tsais managed to produce good quality porcelain that attracted buyers from home and abroad. Their product catalogue expanded to include reproductions of classic Chinese styles such as Jun ware, underglazed blue-and-white ware and Yue celadon, and they had to hire help to keep up with incoming orders.
During this time, Tsai often went to the National Palace Museum to study antique porcelain, and his enthusiasm caught the attention of the ceramics department curator. Tsai told the curator about his interests and, with the curator's help, he was able to study one of the museum's finest treasures up close, the Guanyin Vase in Red Glaze from the workshop of the Qing emperor Kang Xi.
"Many of the techniques that once produced fine Chinese porcelain have been either lost or forgotten," Tsai says. "The colors, glazes and forms of these artifacts are well worth studying. Why not come up with new ways to recreate their beauty?" After plowing through tons of books over the years, he did not hesitate when the National Palace Museum asked him to reproduce the historic artifacts it houses.
"I was bold when it came to this reproduction project," Tsai says. "There are two things crucial to the job: confidence and patience. I knew I could pull it off when I said yes. Once you've studied long enough, you only need the first experiment to figure out what the next step is. Your experience helps you see the whole picture, then you rely on your heart, your knowledge, your skills and some talent. Everything is possible."
Hsiao Fang Pottery moved to its present location in 1977 after a flood wiped out everything in the Shihlin studio. There Tsai began to entertain a string of foreign guests, a large portion of them Japanese. The fallout from all this fame is that people underestimate Tsai's range of work. "Many people mistakenly think that I only produce replicas," he says. "I never limited my research to just antique Chinese porcelain--I'm interested in modern and foreign artists as well."
A large part of Tsai's business is generated by his wide variety of tea sets. "Tsai's tea sets are mostly innovations, not reproductions," says Hsieh Chih-chang, who teaches the art of tea making. "Hsiao Fang tea sets aren't just aesthetically pleasing; they enhance the whole experience of drinking tea. Tsai may have started with the old styles, but he's mastered them so successfully that now everything he makes is in the 'Hsiao Fang style.' He doesn't make reproductions."
Hsieh says Tsai is very receptive to advice and often incorporates it into his work. "He never stops thinking," she says. "Every time I visit Hsiao Fang Pottery, I'm surprised. When I see a slight change in nuance, I realize Tsai takes our advice seriously and is always looking for ways to improve."
Aside from attracting tea experts, Tsai's work draws many celebrities to the gallery, either to indulge themselves or to pick out presents for their friends. His clients include Taiwanese political heavyweights such as former President Lee Teng -hui and former Vice President Lien Chan, as well as world-renowned figures like former American President George Bush. Hwataoyao's Chen says Tsai deserves more respect. "Many people draw a clear line between art and craft," she says. "They think less of an artist who produces his work in quantity. They don't understand that Tsai's work has erased the line between art and craft."
Regarding such criticism, Tsai says artistic circles should be more tolerant of other people's work. On hearing Tsai's response, Chen says Tsai is too modest and far too valuable to give such remarks much weight. The significance people place on ceramic art also defines Tsai's value, she says. "He has taken technique, aesthetics and creativity to the highest level and at the same time made the art form, which in the old days was restricted to the imperial world, available to ordinary people."
Despite whatever is said, Tsai keeps on doing what he usually does. He says some people have suggested that he retire now that his son and three daughters have all completed their studies and can work for him. "If you knew how wide and infinite the pottery world is, you would understand that there's no such thing as retirement for me," he says.