Taiwan Today

At first glance, the intricately detailed artworks produced by Hsu Dan-li (許丹麗) appear more like oil paintings than ceramics. It often takes first-time visitors to her studio in New Taipei City’s Yingge District a moment to realize that the framed pieces adorning the walls are ceramic panels rather than canvases and paint. This recognition is generally followed by a brief period of silence as guests ponder how one might go about creating such artworks. “Her pieces may look like oil paintings, but they’re much more challenging to produce,” says Liao Yen-kai (廖彥凱), a board member of the New Taipei-based Xushi Culture and Education Foundation, an organization that promotes Taiwanese artists at home and abroad. “Despite an artist’s best efforts, there’s always the possibility that the colors on a ceramic painting may end up distorted once it’s fired in a kiln.”

In many ways, Hsu’s artistic career is a result of her family’s decision to move to Yingge in the late 1970s when she was 18 years old. The area has been closely associated with the ceramics industry for hundreds of years. According to the Yingge Ceramics Museum, the town’s proud tradition in the field can be traced back to the early 19th century, when entrepreneur Wu An (吳鞍) moved to the area from mainland China and started a business producing pottery wares.

Wu’s venture, and the numerous others that followed, thrived due to the town’s combination of rich clay and abundant coal, which was used as fuel for the kilns. Today, Yingge remains the hub of Taiwan’s ceramics industry, producing a wide range of porcelain goods ranging from artistic creations to basic household items. “Few other towns globally make such a variety of ceramic products,” notes Tony Hsu (許元和), former head of Yingge Township, which became Yingge District in 2010 when Taipei County was upgraded to the special municipality of New Taipei City.

“I developed a strong interest in ceramics almost as soon as my family settled in the area,” Hsu Dan-li explains. “More than that, I felt an urge to use the medium to portray scenes from everyday life.” Eager to pursue a career as a ceramic artist, Hsu hoped to enroll in an art school. However, she was dissuaded from this course of action by her father, who believed that a fine arts degree would offer his daughter few career prospects.

Around that period, Yingge’s ceramics industry was booming amid huge international demand for low-cost porcelain wares. This meant that there were ample employment opportunities at firms in the area. After leaving school, Hsu found work at Horng Jou Ceramics Co., a local manufacturer known for making floor tiles. Though she was hired as an office worker, she managed to convince the company to give her a more hands-on position. “Horng Jou wanted me to do accounting work, but I asked them to give me a job in quality control,” she recalls.

Her decision to work on a bustling factory floor rather than in a comfortable office perplexed many of her colleagues, but it paid off. Hsu learned a huge amount about ceramic production techniques during this time. And despite being engaged in what some would consider the monotonous task of checking finished goods for errors, her love for ceramics only increased, and she began dedicating much of her free time to perfecting her artistic skills in the medium.

Hsu’s knowledge of manufacturing methods grew further in the mid-1990s when she took up a position in the research and development division of Hocheng Corp., or HCG, Yingge’s foremost ceramics company. Established in 1931, the enterprise makes a huge variety of porcelain products, from bathroom furnishings to decorative plaques. HCG supported Hsu’s growth as an artist while she worked for the company by allowing her to use its kilns to make artworks, and it has continued to give her access to its production facilities since she left.

In 1998, Hsu made the decision to try and forge a career as a professional artist. Over the course of her adult life, she has remained unwavering in her desire to use ceramics to depict scenes of everyday life in Taiwan. For this reason, she increasingly gravitated over the years toward creating ceramic paintings as it is easier for viewers to study images painted on flat panels than on plates, vases or other common porcelain works. Once she committed herself full time to creating such artworks, it did not take long for her strikingly detailed pieces to garner attention, and in 2001 she held her first solo exhibition at an event that also marked the opening of the new Yingge Town Hall.

Hsu has also become known for producing items with crack patterns that resemble rose petals. In 2004, she was awarded a Taiwan Good Craft Certificate by the Council for Cultural Affairs, the predecessor of today’s Ministry of Culture, for a plate featuring such a design. Still her popularity mainly derives from her ceramic paintings. “Many artists have tried their hands at this technique, but few have made it a signature part of their portfolio,” says Kuo Tsung-ren (郭聰仁), a senior ceramist based in Yingge. “Hsu’s works in this medium vividly capture people and scenery due to the precision of her brushstrokes.”

At the beginning of her career as a professional artist, Hsu exclusively made small ceramic paintings, but she later shifted to producing bigger pieces at the request of collectors. To date, she has created more than 50 large ceramic paintings, most of which depict small-town life or rural scenery, such as a piece showing residents whiling away the day in the Old Street in Sanxia, a neighboring district to Yingge in New Taipei. She has also produced works portraying famous Taiwanese attractions or sites, such as the Alishan Forest Railway.

Hsu’s works are quite unique in terms of subject matter as typically images on ceramic artworks and wares in Taiwan are inspired by traditional Chinese paintings of birds, flowers and mountains. “It’s quite challenging to depict real-life scenes on ceramic pieces,” she notes. “The colors and lines on these works must correspond to how objects look in real life, so any flaws that appear during the firing process are easily discernible.”

This does not mean, however, that Hsu has completely broken with tradition. One of her largest creations, produced in 2002, is a ceramic version of a famous 14th century Chinese ink painting, Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains. Consisting of 11 panels, each measuring 170 by 90 centimeters, this artwork is now on display in the lobby of a technology company in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan.

As an artist, Hsu possesses a meticulous attention to detail and relentless pursuit of authenticity. Before creating a ceramic painting of farmers planting seedlings in a rice paddy, for instance, she visited some local agricultural workers and studied their postures as they worked. And while preparing to create a piece showing the traditional Hakka method of making pickles, Hsu learned all of the processes involved in the practice and produced her own batch of the specialty food from scratch. “You have no room for error when you’re recording aspects of local culture or history,” she believes.

Hsu’s creations will stand the test of time not simply because of her accurate depictions of local culture, but because of her use of underglaze, a method of decorating ceramic works in which the pigments are applied to the pieces before they are glazed and fired in a kiln. Underglaze ceramics are more durable than works made using on-glaze, which involves decorating ceramics after they have been glazed and then firing the pieces.

Since becoming a professional artist, Hsu has developed a reputation as one of Yingge’s finest ceramists, and has held several exhibitions of her work at the Yingge Ceramics Museum. In 2011, the museum granted her a New Works Award, part of a project initiated by the institution in 2008 to promote local artists and ceramics, for her work A Scene from the Charcoal Kiln. The artist has also taken part in shows in mainland China and was one of 15 Yingge-based artists and companies that participated in the West Japan China Ware Festa in Fukuoka, Japan in 2004.

Ceramics production in Yingge has fallen significantly since low-cost competitors from mainland China began entering the international market in the 1990s. Despite this, the former head of the township, Tony Hsu, believes that the area has a bright future due to its abundance of gifted ceramists such as Hsu Dan-li and the tireless efforts of these individuals to promote the art form and local culture. During a solo exhibition in late February at the Sanxia History Museum, the artist displayed some 30 ceramic paintings, including one depicting the facade of the building that hosted the event. “Hopefully, the exhibition will inspire young people to follow in my footsteps and record Taiwan’s cultural beauty through ceramics,” she says.

Write to Oscar Chung at mhchung@mofa.gov.tw