When Wu Rhang-nung (吳讓農) sits down at his potter's wheel, he is never completely sure what kind of shape will emerge. He describes the process as if it were a mystical experience, with the clay having a life of its own: “As the wheel turns and turns, I feel the wet paste transforming under my fingers. At a certain moment, I am seized by a sense of confusion. I don't know any more if it is me molding the clay, or the clay is molding itself. My mind is entirely blank. I am sunk into a state of oblivion. Suddenly, I feel like stopping the wheel, and an unexpected shape jumps into my sight.”
Even as the form is taken from the wheel, brushed with glaze, and carefully set inside the kiln, its final look is still a mystery. When the door of the kiln is opened many hours later, the color and texture of the final piece may well be entirely different from the artist's intentions or expectations. For Wu, the unpredictable changes that are part of this process are the most fascinating and fulfilling part of his art. And it is perhaps this sense of the unexpected that has sustained his passion for ceramics for half a century.
Wu has spent most of his career perfecting a style that focuses on simple, traditional forms and unique, difficult-to-achieve glaze effects, created by firing the works at high temperatures.
As one of the first ceramic artists in Taiwan, and a seminal figure in the early development of the field, Wu started out in a barren age – when good – quality clay, equipment, techniques, and even mentors were almost nonexistent on the island. He arrived in Taiwan in 1948 after graduating from the ceramics department of the Peking College of Fine Arts, where he studied molding and glazing techniques and developed an appreciation for ancient Chinese ceramics. He came here on a scholarship awarded by the president of his college, the famous painter Hsu Peihung (徐悲鴻), who assumed that Taiwan had inherited many advanced ceramic techniques from Japan during its fifty years as a colony.
In fact, the island's ceramics industry was far below Hsu's expectations. It was still at a very basic stage, with little more than small factories turning out crudely finished pots and bowls for everyday use. There was little opportunity for making or selling finely crafted ceramic vases, delicate porcelain, or anything of any true aesthetic value. But by that time, the Chinese Communists had taken over the mainland and Wu dared not return home. Instead, he set about contributing what he could to raise the quality of ceramics in Taiwan.
His first job was hardly what someone of his background and interests could hope for. He was given a position at the Peitou Ceramics Factory in charge of developing new casting and installation methods for what are known in the industry as sanitary wares – or toilet fixtures. “The first modern toilet in Taiwan was successfully installed by my hands,” Wu says matter-of-factly.
In 1954, he established his own ceramics company and made decorative ceramic ware. But he couldn't earn enough to keep it going and had to close down after only eight months. To make a living, he began teaching art classes at a junior high school in Yingko, southwest of Taipei. The location proved ideal, as there were also a number of ceramics factories in the area where Wu could fire the works that he continued to make on his own after hours. In these early pieces, he concentrated on using painted images that were brushed onto white vases with a cobalt glaze. One fine example from this period is a simple vase decorated with patterns of primitive dancers and hunters inspired by Taiwan's indigenous tribes.
The shape of a vase is essentially composed of just two symmetrical lines, but, as Wu says, “these simple lines hold great potential for variety.”
In 1957, Wu landed a position that was closer to his interests, teaching ceramic-making in the department of industrial arts education at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) in Taipei. Another career milestone came four years later, when he took temporary leave to attend a six-month program at a well-known ceramics institute in Seto, Japan. After returning, he installed a wheel and an electric kiln in his teacher's dormitory room – and from that room he really launched his career as a ceramic artist.
For the first time, he began to stamp his own name seal on his works, an indication that he was finally achieving a level of quality and individuality that he could be proud of. Although he continued to teach industrial ceramics at NTNU until retiring this past February, he also became one of the first ceramists in Taiwan to establish a clear distinction between factory-produced industrial ware and ceramics as a creative art form. In 1968, he held the first major individual ceramics show at the National Museum of History, a watershed event for the development of ceramic arts in Taiwan.
Critic Ku Hsien-liang finds that Wu's work is strongly Chinese in character – “It reveals the chi-chih of traditional ceramics in China.”
Limitations in material and little public acceptance of ceramics as an art form kept Wu from producing prolifically, but he did begin to develop his own style of stoneware using high-temperature firing, which gives the clay a dense quality and creates unique glaze effects. By now he had abandoned the techniques of carving or painting pictorial designs onto a vessel and instead adopted a freer, more abstract style of splashing and pouring glazes onto the surface – a technique that he continues to perfect today. These thick glazes create a sturdy, strong-bodied vessel with a highly textured surface marked by fine cracks or tiny, dense bubbles that generate a drizzly luster.
Although Wu's works have a contemporary air, he still maintains strong stylistic connections to the past. He is particularly influenced by ceramics of the Sung dynasty (960-1279), especially Chun ware, known for its unadorned elegance and purity of line and form. He has a clear distaste for ornate touches, such as those found on ceramics of the Ching dynasty (1644-1911). “The gaudy colors and elaborate decorations of Ching ceramics almost efface all trace of the ceramist's touch,” Wu says. “The works end up lifeless and stagnant.”
Wu believes that the basic shape of a ceramic vessel can in itself express a sense of character, without the aid of decoration. He lifts up two pieces to prove his point: “Even though these are both vases and their forms are basically composed of two symmetrical lines, these simple lines hold great potential for variety. One has a sober air, yet with a humorous touch, while the other is delicate and graceful.”
Apart from Chun ware, Wu also admires the tricolor ceramics of the Tang dynasty (618-907), which like his works are characterized by glazes that flow and drip down the surface. But he hopes that his pieces will do more than simply emulate the external appearance of Tang ceramics. He is trying to absorb their eternal elan and sense of dynamic fluidity. In one high-necked blue vase splashed with white glaze, the color flows freely from top to bottom, evoking the same vivid yet natural style of Tang ware. The fusion of different glazes also produces a subtle cloudy effect. But unlike Tang ceramists, who used cadmium yellow, malachite blue, and equally bright greens and warm browns, Wu prefers to combine a narrow range of colors and often chooses colder tones such as cobalt blue, grayish-green, and jet black. His favorite ferrous oxide glazes, however, sometimes undergo a transmutation in the high temperatures of the kiln, turning from blue or green into purple or crimson.
Wu's works also differ from earlier styles in their stronger emphasis on surface texture. His favorite pieces are mottled vases with glazes that crack and separate into small, disconnected mounds. The effect sometimes looks like unchained pearls or like stalactites in relief. These organically shaped mounds seem to contain an energy that is about to explode or to take on a new form, yet they have congealed just before the moment when such a change might have taken place. Although fixed into position, the glaze still conveys the illusion of movement.
Wu explains that this special effect is produced by the contraction of the glazes during firing, a process that he tries to enhance. For example, he adds metal oxides such as magnesium carbonate, which make the glazed surface expand at different rates. He also alters the thickness of different glazes to vary their flowing and dripping qualities. Yet even with fifty years of experience, Wu still cannot control precisely how a glaze will contract and separate. The firing process still has a life of its own that even the most expert ceramist cannot entirely manipulate. Wu stresses that a ceramic work is as much a natural object as it is an artifact.
Although the kiln can, at times, completely eradicate the artist's intentions, it is sti II the artist that has the final say. Wu once opened the door of his kiln to discover that the base of a brown-glazed vase had developed an unsightly fissure. But he liked the form and color of the vase and didn't want to just dump it. Instead, he decided to improvise by cutting off the base of the vessel to make a drum. “I had just brought back a large boa skin from Swaziland,” he recalls. “So I wrapped the defective vase with part of the skin and tightened it with a cord. The imperfections disappeared and the vase was transformed.” The motley brown markings of the boa skin and the interlaced cord that cuts the vase's round form into geometrical triangles ended up enriching the monochrome glazed surface.
Wu's idea of making a vase into a drum turned out to have more than aesthetic appeal. He used the remaining boa skin to make eight more small ceramic hand drums. Some of these he loaned to the Taipei Municipal Chinese Classical Orchestra along with several uncovered ceramic bowls of various sizes. The outcome was a presentation this May of classical Chinese concertos played on ceramic instruments, which produce a clear, crisp sound. “Actually, in the Tang dynasty, ceramic bowls were popular musical instruments,” Wu says. “The Tang musicians used to bind ceramic drums around their waists to play them.” Wu's original inspiration for making a ceramic drum, however, had nothing to do with the Tang dynasty. “It was pure improvisation,” he says. “Without the boa skin and the defective vase, I wouldn't have made it.”
Another traditional art form that Wu more consciously links to his work is Chinese ink painting. He finds that the flowing and splashed surfaces of his works often evoke the atmosphere of painted landscapes, and he has tried to expand this relationship by covering flat ceramic planks with glaze and hanging them as paintings. His second solo exhibition, in 1973, included about a dozen such glaze paintings in blue and white mottled colors. “A small drop of glaze seen under light can produce a variety of colors and lustrous forms that make it almost a world of its own,” Wu says. “I wanted to magnify a small part of my glaze patterns to highlight this effect.”
Wu has expanded the repertoire of his glaze patterns by using them to create the effect of an abstract painting.
In the years since Wu started out designing toilet fixtures, ceramics has made tremendous progress in Taiwan, with numerous artists working in the field today and both small and large-scale exhibitions held on a regular basis. At the comprehensive Taipei International Exhibition of Ceramics 1994, which featured an overview of industrial, reproduction, and artistic ceramics in Taiwan, Wu's works were among hundreds of others being shown. In the Taiwan Exhibition Hall, viewers could see everything from the most traditional and austere vases and teapots to evocative abstract sculptures and puzzling installation works.
In today's diverse milieu, Wu is sometimes faulted for not being daring enough or for working in an outdated style. For example, he says, younger ceramists criticize him for still making prunus vases, a popular twelfth-century style of vase with a large belly and small opening often used to display branches of plum flowers. But Wu is not deterred from drawing on past styles that he believes have achieved a sense of permanence. And he believes that his works still bear his own signature touch. “I am not merely copying, but creating,” he says. Unlike ceramists of old, who aimed to achieve anonymous perfection, Wu pursues a handmade quality that expresses his own personality. “For instance,” he says, “I deliberately leave my own marks on the unfired clay, which would have been absolutely incredible to the ancients.”
Art critic Ku Hsien-Iiang (顧獻樑) finds that Wu's combination of traditional inspiration with his own touch has created a body of work that, while contemporary, is still unmistakably Chinese. “It reveals the chi-chih (氣質) of traditional ceramics in China,” he says, using a philosophical term that translates roughly as “temperament” or “character.”
Wu himself explains that this term actually has a actually dual meaning, the second word, chih, meaning concrete and tangible characteristics and the first, chi, referring to intangible qualities. “In the field of ceramics, chih can be said to be the clay paste or glaze of a work,” Wu says. “Chi is something form less and abstract, but eternal. It can be described as the sober, placid, profound quality radiating from Chinese ceramics.”
Wu adds that the techniques and materials of ceramics are continually evolving. For example, new ways are developed to throw clay or mix glazes. “So when it comes to chih, we can demand changes and innovation,” he says. “But when it comes to chi, we should stay close to the essence of Chinese ceramics. Just as a person is rooted in and influenced by the environment in which he lives, an artistic work should not detach itself from the soil which conceives it.”