Taiwan Today

Though small, the township of Yingge at the southern tip of Taipei County is always full of visitors as it is the capital of Taiwan’s ceramics industry. Visitors can get an overview of the town’s ceramics history by touring the Taipei County Yingge Ceramics Museum, which opened in 2000. They can also walk the “old ceramics street” boasting stores selling all kinds of ceramic products, as well as artists’ workshops, before departing with the souvenirs of their choice. For enthusiasts, however, no trip to Yingge is complete without exploring Tai-hwa Pottery, which is a few minutes’ drive from the museum.

Established in 1983, Tai-hwa is a young company in view of Yingge’s 200-year-old ceramics industry, but the quality of its products has already earned Tai-hwa a reputation as the town’s “Palace Museum.” Founder and chairman Lu Chao-hsin recalls that when he left the construction industry to set up Tai-hwa, it was one of the many Yingge factories that were reproducing antique porcelain and making unglazed products for the export market. Business was good, giving rise to the local saying “Mix earth and water, and you’re nine-tenths of the way to making a profit,” but Lu sensed a looming crisis. “We had the advantage of lower production costs, but it wasn’t going to last forever,” he says. “When buyers turned to cheaper markets, we’d have to find some way to create high added-value products to stay competitive.”

Lu believed that added value could be created through developing products with their own special characteristics. At that time, such products had never been produced by Yingge’s ceramics industry, however, as local potters had been making imitations of antiques for decades. In the hope of gaining inspiration, Lu paid a few visits to ceramics centers in mainland China such as Yixing in Jiangsu province, only to return disappointed. “Just like factories in Taiwan, those famous kilns in mainland China had also become production lines,” Lu says. “The only thing that mattered to kilns on both sides of the Taiwan Strait was to meet the orders from some European hypermarket or American wholesalers.” By the mid-1980s Lu decided to forge his own path, turning down part of Tai-hwa’s orders so that he could shift some of the company’s craftspeople to research new techniques and develop new products.

Color Control

Since colored ceramics are his personal favorite, Lu set the company’s research focus on innovation in the areas of glaze colors and firing techniques. Liao Yi-sheng, Tai-hwa’s public relations manager, notes that in addition to working out formulas for new colors, the key success in the company’s glaze development continues to be developing glazes that can be applied like watercolors. He explains that the color of a traditional glaze changes after firing, but Tai-hwa’s “watercolor” glazes stay the same hue before and after firing. “It means that people who don’t have any knowledge of glazes can still have control of the colors,” he says. “That opens a lot of possibilities for developing new products.”

Those possibilities include collaborating with artisans from outside the ceramics industry, as well as extending the product range, as Tai-hwa’s watercolor glazes also have a much wider application than conventional colored glazes. Liao explains that traditionally, colored porcelain uses the low-temperature overglaze technique. The colors on the surface fade over time, however, and porcelain produced using this technique cannot be used for tableware or tea sets since metal oxide in the glaze can dissolve when it encounters heat. Tai-hwa’s colored porcelain uses the underglaze technique, in which the color is applied to the surface before an item is glazed. Such colors are very durable and do not dissolve when they encounter heat. Since the subsequent firing for underglazed porcelain is at a higher temperature, usually 1,300 degrees Celsius, the available color range has traditionally been more limited. But over the years, Tai-hwa has developed hundreds of underglaze colors that can be commercially produced.

Lu notes that as a business, the ability to develop glazes that produce consistent colors is essential for commercial production. “It’s not like in an artist’s workshop where the random success of a unique color can cause a product to sell for a fortune as a work of art,” he says. “We need to get them as stable as possible for commercial production.” It is relatively easy to find that stability with some colors, while others require numerous experiments. Lu is especially proud of a unique “joyful red” that took the company more than 10,000 failures over 13 years to achieve, finally increasing the success rate from less than 10 percent to 80 percent. According to Lu, Tai-hwa is the only company that can produce this color commercially. Last year, Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corp. selected Tai-hwa’s joyful red ceramic urns as a special-edition container for kaoliang, a sorghum liquor. Limited to 1,000 urns and priced at NT$36,000 (US$1,125) each, they sold out within a week, with many consumers thinking that the price was a bargain for the urns alone.

As Lu had predicted, the export market for Taiwan’s ceramics industry started to decline in the late 1980s, but Tai-hwa was ready to cultivate new markets. Since the average Taiwanese consumer was not really into collecting or using high-end ceramics, Lu initially targeted Taiwan’s five-star hotels and, with the innovative techniques that enabled a lot of new designs, quickly closed several deals. The Grand Hyatt Taipei, for example, replaced all its imported tableware with Tai-hwa designs. Several other hotels under the Grand Hyatt chain, as well as the Hilton Hotel chain and the Ambassador Hotel in Taipei, also commissioned Tai-hwa to design their tableware. Currently, Tai-hwa makes tableware for more than 30 five-star hotels worldwide.

Ceramics of State

In addition, Lu was also cultivating the government market. Since 1988, Tai-hwa’s products have been selected for use in the Office of the President, for state banquets and as diplomatic presents. The use of Tai-hwa products by the government became so prevalent that the company earned itself the reputation as Taiwan’s “official kiln,” which in the past referred to kilns that crafted porcelain for Chinese royalty only.

With frequent exposure of its products in the media and through its connection to government banquets and other functions, Tai-hwa itself also became one of the must-see destinations for foreign visitors. Lu noticed that when tourists came to Yingge, however, there was not any interaction between them and the artisans in the local ceramics industry. Visitors usually just bought what they liked and then left, as many kilns were unwilling to let their customers look around. Lu explains that restricting access to a pottery workshop was a long-held, unwritten rule of the ceramics industry in Taiwan that was meant to prevent competitors from having the opportunity to steal ideas or techniques.

But Lu took a different approach by opening up Tai-hwa’s factory fully to all visitors. “Consumers are usually more willing to buy if they know the company and the production process better,” Lu says. “Keeping the door closed isn’t a good way of doing business.”

Lu recalls that in the early 1990s, 80 percent of the visitors to his factory were foreigners and 80 percent of them left with purchases. But to provide an opportunity for local people to learn more about ceramics, as well as cultivate the domestic market, he built a ceramics classroom where tourists, along with teachers and students on field trips, can try their hand at the craft. Tai-hwa fires what the guests have made and mails the results to the creators. Such factory tours and DIY courses are not uncommon nowadays, but they were quite new when Tai-hwa started the program nearly two decades ago.

Moreover, at Tai-hwa, all visitors can inspect every detail in the manufacturing process. They are free to take pictures and their questions—even those on production techniques and specifications—are answered, thoroughly refuting the unwritten rule designed to prevent ideas and techniques from being stolen. “We don’t have any trade secrets here,” says Liao, who has guided numerous factory tours.

A major reason Tai-hwa is not afraid of sharing its manufacturing details is that it is always developing new techniques, new glaze colors and new products. Relying on its own workforce in all these development projects, however, has its drawbacks. “Admittedly, this is not an industry that attracts as many creative minds as the high-tech industry does,” Lu says. “What we can do is to become creative by forming alliances with talented people from other industries.” The “alliances” are formed in two ways. One is to work with designers from other fields. Over the years, Tai-hwa has worked with architects, calligraphers, graphic designers and seal carvers with great success. For example, the Square Earth, Round Sky collection—a set of tableware that has a rounded outer shape, but is decorated with an inner square, hence the name—was developed by Tai-hwa and graphic designer Chen Jun-liang and was not only chosen for state banquets, but also won the highest award at the 2005 Design for Asia competition held in Hong Kong, as well as another eight international prizes. According to Lu, tens of thousands of sets of the collection have been sold and sales are still going strong.

Into Production

For designers with no previous experience in ceramics, it can be difficult to grasp the limitations of the medium fully, however. One problem, therefore, in working with people from outside the ceramics industry is that the resulting designs are sometimes hard to mass-produce due to technical or cost considerations. But Lu thinks that such challenges help his company to progress. “The discussions—or even debates [about new products]—help our craftsmen better understand the ideas behind them and promote their sense of design,” he says. “That pushes them to overcome problems and come up with solutions that can both satisfy the designer and still be mass-produced.”

The other kind of “alliance” is formed through an artists’ workshop on the third floor of Tai-hwa’s factory. Here, artists are invited to play with patterns and experiment with new ideas, while Tai-hwa supplies unglazed pieces and company craftsmen fire the resulting works. Since its opening in 1993, the workshop has transformed the works of hundreds of famous artists into porcelain, including those by Cheng Shan-hsi, Kuo Borjou, Hsiao Chin-hsing and Hong Chung-yi to name a few.

Chi Wei-yi, a well known traditional Chinese ink painter who has been a regular at the workshop for 10 years, thinks that the watercolor glazes and Tai-hwa’s firing technique are the main factors for the lasting relationship. “Shifting from working on paper to something dimensional may take a little getting used to in the beginning, but other than that, it’s all good here,” Chi says. “I paint, Tai-hwa takes care of everything else, and everything comes out as it should be.”

Another possible reason the relationship works is that there are no contracts between Tai-hwa and the artists, who can come and go freely, take away their works by paying for the raw materials, or leave the works with Tai-hwa for sale. “It’s pressure-free here because I can paint whatever I want and there’s no deadline to meet,” Chi says. “Just leave the things I’ve completed whenever I’ve completed them, and collect the money at the end of the month.”

In 1999, Lu built the Tai-hwa Art Center next to his factory to showcase and sell the works produced by the collective efforts of Tai-hwa and the artists. These works sell fast, as each of them is a unique piece by an established artist. “You don’t really need a sales pitch to sell artworks, because they sell themselves,” Lu says. “And for us, having so many works by so many established artists displayed together in a gallery is more effective than any advertisement in attracting people to come to us.”

The art center also doubles as a place for visitors who have toured the factory to take a break by having a cup of coffee in a one-of-a-kind cup created by an artist they have just met. Lu also likes to spend a little time here chatting with his guests about ceramics or arts. Pleasantly, he finds that these days 80 percent of his guests are locals, and 80 percent of them do not leave Tai-hwa empty-handed.

Write to Jim Hwang at jim@mail.gio.gov.tw