“Clay can be anything,” says ceramist Ah Leon, and his works certainly prove his point. Few artists can claim to be his peer when it comes to fooling the eye into believing that clay is, well, something else...
When Ah Leon’s teapot traveled to the United States in 1987, he had no idea that his creation was destined to bring about a remarkable change in his career. Ah Leon is the professional name of ceramist Chen Ching-liang, whose girlfriend (now his wife) took the pot with her when she went to study painting at State University of New York, Brockport (SUNY). One day, she showed the teapot to a number of ceramics scholars. They lavished praise on the piece, and Ah Leon was invited to SUNY to exhibit his works and talk about his technique. Ever since then, the ceramist, who hails from Pingtung County in southern Taiwan, has been slowly building up an international reputation, with other exhibitions in the United States and subsequently in Europe.
For most artists, the road to self-realization is never an easy one, and Ah Leon was no exception. Growing up in an agricultural community, he was expected to become a farmer and help his parents. No one imagined that the hayseed would aspire to a college education, which was regarded as something of a luxury at that time. But Ah Leon soon became restless, and there came a moment when he resolved to break out and follow his dream. There was a big family row, culminating in a serious fight with his older brother, who gave him a thorough drubbing. After that he ran away, going to Taipei without seeking any financial support from his parents. In 1972, he passed the entrance exam set by the National Taiwan Academy of Arts (the forerunner of today’s National Taiwan College of Arts) and entered its Department of Fine Arts. He was just nineteen.
Painting was his college major, and he soon discovered that he preferred surrealism to any other style. In those days (the early 1970s), ceramics was still not recognized as a suitable subject for scholastic study--it was relegated to the status of a craft--and in any case, Ah Leon had not yet developed much of an interest in pottery. Nevertheless, his years of exposure to surrealism were to have a profound effect on his subsequent career as a ceramist, because the works on which his reputation largely rests share surrealism’s fascination with attention to surface detail and texture.
The big change of direction came in 1976, not long after Ah Leon graduated. He rapidly discovered that it was virtually impossible to make a living out of painting. Taiwan was not yet an economically sophisticated society, and people simply did not have the money to invest in unknown, untried artists. He also came to the conclusion that both Chinese and Western styles of painting styles were burdened by tradition, which made them neither challenging nor fulfilling. The young artist decided to abandon his paintbrushes and try to find another medium where his imagination could have greater play.
Ah Leon at last found magic in the combination of fire and earth. “Clay can be anything,” he explains. “It isn’t so difficult to copy paintings, but it’s impossible to produce two identical ceramic works. This form of art is quite unique. Besides, ceramics last much longer than paintings. It will be two or three thousand years before the colors of a pot start to fade. You can’t say that about a painting!”
To improve his technical skills, Ah Leon sought out apprenticeships with experienced ceramists in various places around the island, including Yingko, a small town near Taipei that is famous for its wide range of high-quality ceramics. The first stage in the process of transforming this beginner into a ceramist lasted from 1978 to 1982. In retrospect, Ah Leon sees this as the foundation of his career, a time when art and technique combined to mold his individual style while giving him the combination of skills he needed to establish his reputation.
At first, he concentrated on functional ceramics, since they could find a market much more readily than purely artistic pieces. Before long, he had narrowed his focus to teapots, recognizing the important place they occupy in Chinese culture. Now anybody who is interested in teapots and teacups sooner or later discovers Yixing, a city in mainland China’s Jiansu Province, which has been noted for its production of small, unglazed ceramic teapots made from reddish-purple clay since the closing years of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Ah Leon was no exception, and it was mainly thanks to the cultural legacy of Yixing that he eventually became known as “the originator of Taiwanese ceramic teapots.”
Ah Leon sought out expert potters who could teach him something about the Yixing style. At the same time he started to build up a collection of Yixing tea services, while devoting himself to a study of traditional Chinese tea-drinking etiquette, as well as Chinese culture and art in general. In 1986, he became associated with the island’s Tien Ren Tea School, a private organization set up to cultivate interest in China’s tea-related traditions, where he taught for six months. But it was not until 1990 that the artist was able to realize his ambition of traveling to Yixing to see the source of his inspiration for himself.
Over the years, Ah Leon has gradually developed his own individual technique. When he began to make pottery in the Yixing style back in 1982, he found that the most popular local clay, which is to be found in central Taiwan’s Miaoli, was not quite the same color as Yixing’s. Nevertheless, the iron-rich, red-and-buff clay of Miaoli gave him the means of self-expres sion that were to make him unique. “Nearly all Taiwan’s potters use Miaoli clay,” he says. “For me, it’s just right.” And it has to be just right, because Ah Leon specializes in a particular technique, now his hallmark, that makes his artworks seem indistinguishable from natural wood. Miaoli clay may not be perfect--it is high in sand content and is not particularly plastic --but it is almost ideal for Ah Leon’s purposes. “It takes a long time for a beginner to master,” he says. “But I’ve had more than ten years’ experience now, and I know how to handle it.”
Ah Leon first stepped beyond Yixing’s mainstream tradition when he started to give his services greater functionality. The artist-inventor created a ceramic kettle made of flameproof clay with a steam vent placed low at the back, opposite the spout. Only when the vessel is half empty does steam issue from the hole and the spout, letting teahouse waiters know in good time that a refill is required. In 1983, the artist was granted a patent for this invention, one of three he has acquired in the course of his career.
The year 1987 saw a major turning point for Ah Leon, when he made the trip to SUNY and met with the North American ceramists to whom his girlfriend had displayed his work. His teapots made such a good impression that they invited him to become an artist in residence at the school the following year. At that time, Ah Leon’s ceramics were still largely functional in nature, but exchanges with American ceramists and exposure to their art led him to experiment with something he had long been familiar with, the classical Chinese teapot. “You could say that I received a second education in the United States,” he says.
After several visits to North America he came to understand that clay can be made to emulate more or less anything, because it is capable of adopting another material’s surface texture. According to Ah Leon, this ceramic art form is still relatively new to Taiwan, but it has been around in the West for decades. Today, the most popular phrase to describe this kind of plastic art is trompe l’oeil--“But when I changed direction in 1990 and started doing it, I’d never even heard the words,” says Ah Leon, who adds that he only learned their meaning in 1992, after he was invited to New York City for his first solo exhibition in the United States.
Ah Leon’s works in the trompe l’oeil idiom for the most part have the distinctive appearance of tree trunks, branches, or railroad ties. Many people looking at his creations for the first time are astounded by the closeness of the resemblance to wood--to say nothing of the fact that this seeming offcut from a tree has a handle, a spout, and a lid. “You don’t know it’s made of clay until you touch it,” Ah Leon says. “If you hesitate even for a second before deciding what it’s made of, then it’s not a good trompe l’oeil work.” The secret of success lies in the firing of the pot, which is where the bark-like hue comes from. Ah Leon collects and photographs branches and tree trunks as study aids before sculpting his clay into true-to-life knotholes, gashes, and growth rings.
Ten years have passed since he first set out to explore the world of trompe l’oeil. The effort has obviously paid off. His works have been collected by museums around the world, including the National Palace Museum in Taipei, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
It is impossible to discuss Ah Leon’s work without mentioning Bridge, which he regards as the apogee of his career. “Bridge began as Ah Leon’s challenge to himself to work on a monumental scale and hone his trompe l’oeil ceramics skills,” observes David Wible, an American scholar-ceramist who is now teaching in the Graduate Institute of Western Languages and Literature at Taiwan’s Tamkang University. “But the project gradually matured into a vision of creating a sculpture that so perfectly resembled wood that the line between illusion and reality would disappear altogether.”
Approximately sixty-five feet long and three feet high, Bridge was always going to be impressive for its sheer size, if nothing else. It took Ah Leon three years and ten months to perfect the giant work, consuming about five tons of clay in the process, although the finished piece, at three and half tons, weighs less than that. This dilapidated, lifelike “wooden” foot bridge was entirely fabricated from clay, even down to the rusty “nails,” and is actually a combination of several different ceramics, each of which can be admired for its individual verisimilitude.
“The effect of Ah Leon’s obsession with scale here is not simply to stun viewers but to move them,” Wible says. Indeed, it takes some time for a conscientious spectator just to walk the length of Bridge while admiring the innumerable clever details. But that is in itself a virtue, because it gives the viewer a chance to ponder on the bridge’s story--probably a sad one, to judge from its dilapidated appearance. The work’s Chinese title reinforces that impression. Bi lu lan lü literally means “firewood carts and rags,” although the words are usually rendered “The Hard Life of Pioneers.”
Ah Leon’s masterpiece made an enormous contribution to his rising international reputation. Sections of Bridge had already won him applause before the work was revealed in its entirety to admiring viewers attending its 1997 inaugural exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Bridge stayed in the United States for two years in all, and was displayed in Madison, Wisconsin, and Phoenix, Arizona as well as Washington D.C. It now enjoys pride of place in Ah Leon’s personal collection.
Today, as collectors of contemporary ceramic art are beginning to appear on the island, Ah Leon no longer has to fashion functional teapots to pay the rent. But the trompe l’oeil tradition is still comparatively alien to Taiwan, says Yu Shu-jou, the planning consultant to the gallery that exhibited the artist’s work. In her view, Ah Leon is far more famous in the West than in Taiwan. “He hopes the situation will change,” Yu says. “He wants his works to find homes in foreign collections, but also here on the island, too.”
Ah Leon has proved himself to be a determined artist with the ability and the will to succeed. There can be little doubt but that his pioneering spirit will drive him to expand his artistic frontiers for many more years to come.