Taiwan Today

At his recently renovated workshop in Yingge District in New Taipei City, northern Taiwan, veteran ceramic artist Hsu Chao-chung (許朝宗) showcases a wide variety of his works that range from painted porcelain to blue-and-white and celadon ware to multi-material designs. Hsu’s display pieces not only document the years of effort he has put into the craft, but also the changes the ceramics industry has undergone in Yingge, the sector’s main center in Taiwan.

Hsu did not set out to become an artist. “Initially, [ceramics] was mostly about doing business and making money; art was something that only happened much later,” he says. In fact, working with ceramics was not even part of his original career plans. Hsu was born in 1955 in Yilan County, northeastern Taiwan. He was the youngest of 12 children and remembers growing up poor. After he graduated from the Provincial Ilan School of Agriculture and Forestry (now National Ilan University) at the age of 17, Hsu decided to pursue a career in the military. In a sense, he was getting a head start by doing so, as military service was compulsory for all young men (and remains so today, although the length of service has been greatly reduced.) “There weren’t many jobs at home, and few employers were willing to hire a young man who would have to leave to perform his military service in a few years,” Hsu says. “I thought being a career officer was cool and paid decently, so I took the entrance examination and entered the Military Police Academy.”

Being an officer, however, did not turn out to be as cool as he had imagined, and after a year of training and four years as a military police officer, Hsu left the armed forces and returned to Yilan in 1977. He found a job at a local lumber shop and tried to maintain a long-distance relationship with his then girlfriend, who lived in Yingge. Before National Freeway No. 5, which connects Taipei and Yilan, was completed in 2006, a three-hour train ride was the fastest way to travel from Yilan to Yingge. Hsu took the train often to visit his girlfriend. He eventually decided to move to Yingge, and his girlfriend became his wife. “I guess that train ride was just too long for someone who was in love,” he says.

In 1977, it was only natural for Hsu to look for work in Yingge’s booming ceramics trade. He eventually took a job at ChinaArt Ceramics Co. Ltd., or Cena Porcelain as it is better known. “I knew nothing about ceramics when I started working there,” he says. “I realized the only way I could keep my job was to learn as much as I could and work as hard as I could.” The learning process, however, turned out to be slow. Hsu explains that the porcelain export market was so strong at the time that all of Cena’s craftspeople were too busy to teach anyone, so all he could do was to observe them at work and practice what he saw in his free time.

On the other hand, working hard was not a problem for Hsu, who spent virtually all of his waking hours on ceramics when he was at Cena. His effort paid off, as he not only managed to pick up the necessary skills, but was also promoted to become the head of the company’s manufacturing department.

As Cena has a reputation for taking good care of its employees, Hsu was content to work for the company for a few years. “The pay was not bad and the future seemed to be bright,” he says. Eventually, however, he realized that he wanted more. “Maybe it was because of the poverty I’d experienced in my childhood, but I started thinking I could make more money if I set up a business of my own,” he says.

Opportunity knocked when a few friends invited Hsu to join them in founding a ceramics company. In 1980, after giving the matter some thought, Hsu left Cena to help set up the company, which was named Jizhou Pottery. The new business endured a rocky start, however, and after a time all of the other investors decided to pull out. Hsu refused to give up, so he bought their shares and thus became Jizhou’s sole owner.

With a limited labor force and short of funds, Hsu was forced to reduce the factory’s manufacturing area to one-third of its original size. He worked on the production line and, as there was nobody else at Jizhou to do marketing, he also had to make frequent motorcycle trips to Taipei’s Zhongshan North Road, where he showed his samples to shops that sold porcelain to locals and foreign tourists.

According to Hsu, almost every ceramics factory in the early 1980s was making reproductions of painted porcelain antiques—vases and plates with colorful patterns, flowers, plants, birds and animals—as they were the most popular products on the market. One of the Zhongshan North Road shop owners put Hsu in touch with a Norwegian woman who was a frequent customer. The woman asked Hsu whether he could make reproductions of Song dynasty (960–1279) celadon ware, a type of porcelain characterized by a smooth, understated glaze. Hsu responded that he did not know much about making celadon ware, but was willing to give it a try.

After intensive research, assistance from glaze master Tsai Hsiao-fang (蔡曉芳) and a lot of trial and error, Hsu began reproducing celadon ware for his Norwegian customer and soon discovered that there were good profits in it. Making painted porcelain can be highly labor-intensive, he explains, as many craftspeople are needed to paint the different parts of an item such as a vase. The most important steps for celadon ware, on the other hand, are glazing and kilning, which require fewer craftspeople. Less labor led to lower production costs, and since a piece of celadon ware could sell for the same price as a painted item, there was more profit to be made in the former.

Jizhou did extremely well as the export market for celadon antique reproductions boomed in the 1980s. That success gave Hsu a financial cushion when low-cost competitors from mainland China began entering the market in the 1990s. Thus, at a time when falling revenues were forcing many Taiwanese porcelain companies out of business or making them shift production overseas, Jizhou was able to continue operating in Yingge.

Golden Finish

The ceramist knew, however, that he needed to come up with new products if his business was to remain viable. He eventually decided to focus on making porcelain ware painted with a coating of real gold. Chen Miao-feng (陳妙鳳), a researcher at the Yingge Ceramics Museum, explains that artisans have been painting gold on porcelain items for centuries, but were forced to choose between either a matte or glossy finish for each piece. Hsu’s breakthrough, Chen says, was his development of a technique for crafting a single piece with both finishes. The trick lies in first painting a transparent glaze on parts that should be glossy, firing the piece, painting it with gold and then firing it again. The result is that areas that are coated with transparent glaze turn glossy, while the other areas have a matte finish.

Hsu did not keep the discovery to himself and by the mid-1990s, every factory in Yingge was making gold-painted porcelain ware that combined matte and glossy finishes. “It was something different and the market liked it,” Chen says. “Hsu’s technique has really helped Yingge enter a ‘golden era.’” In fact, the Yingge Ceramics Museum viewed Hsu’s breakthrough as so important that it was quickly added to the museum’s history of the local ceramics industry.

The artist sees the imitation of his designs, glazes and techniques as a driving force that pushes him forward, so while others were still focused on the gold rush, he moved on. This time, however, he decided not to focus solely on what would sell. “At that stage, making money wasn’t the first priority for me anymore,” he says. “I’d done a lot of things the market liked, and it was about time to create something for myself.” Hsu’s new emphasis on self-expression became apparent in the 2000s as he started making items with non-traditional shapes and introducing new glaze colors.

Unique Glaze

To master the intricacies of glaze, Hsu spent a lot of time studying its use and formulation in different eras. His research was so extensive that those in Yingge’s ceramics community began referring to him as a human encyclopedia of glaze. Hsu, however, merely viewed his research as the logical next step. “You have to know the old to create the new,” he says.

In the early 2000s, Hsu developed one of his best-known glazes, which, through a unique formula and kilning technique, yields a rough surface and dark color that resemble rust. Hsu likes the glaze a lot, saying that it imparts a “peaceful, dignified, almost Zen-like sense.”

In his recent works, Hsu has also experimented with combining other materials with ceramics. Some of those creations mingle gold sculpture with his unique rust-like porcelain ware. After learning techniques for sculpting gold from celebrated nature artist Wu Ching (吳卿), Hsu began placing bees, water lilies and other objects sculpted from pure gold on porcelain ware with the rust-like glaze. The sharp contrast between the gold and the dark, rough surface of the glaze produces a striking visual effect.

“Creating art, in the world of ceramics, is usually not as profitable as churning out commercial products,” Hsu says. “But as a ceramist, I find more joy in creating a work of art than in designing a product.” These days, he leaves most of the commercial product design and manufacturing to his managers at Jizhou and spends the bulk of his time working on fine art pieces.

Many government agencies have purchased Hsu’s works as gifts for high-ranking foreign officials. His sophisticated craftsmanship and creativity have also been recognized with numerous awards, including two National Crafts Awards, Taiwan’s highest honors in the field.

Receiving the National Crafts Award also automatically qualified Hsu to work as a university lecturer. He has been more than willing to share his knowledge and has taught design at National Taiwan University of Arts and Chihlee Institute of Technology, both of which are located in New Taipei City. He has also taught the techniques of making porcelain ware at New Taipei Municipal Yingge Vocational High School for many years.

The more Hsu teaches, however, the more he worries about the future of the craft. The problem, he says, is that university design students have a lot of creative ideas, but not enough hands-on training in working with raw materials. “Mastering the craftsmanship takes lots and lots of practice, and a few hours a week just won’t get you much further,” Hsu says. “Most of the students who are interested in ceramics and are willing to spend time on it want to be artists instead of working in a factory.”

The Ceramic Engineering Department at New Taipei Municipal Yingge Vocational High School is currently the only academic institution in Taiwan that is wholly devoted to the field. That focus does not give Hsu much comfort, however, as few of his students go on to make a career of ceramics. The problem is simply that there are not enough job opportunities for their specific skill set, he says. Instead, many of the department’s graduates pursue university degrees or look for work in other fields.

Hsu recognizes that the employment decline in the ceramics sector has been repeated in many of Taiwan’s other traditional industries. “Individual workshops have replaced production sites,” he says. “Look at Yingge, which now has more ceramic artists than people who work in ceramic factories.”

Such large industrial trends are difficult to reverse, but Hsu does what he can by teaching and offering a few jobs at Jizhou. His hopes for the future lie in his youngest daughter and a few lucky graduates from the Ceramic Engineering Department, all of whom are currently working for the company. Large-scale ceramics production may be a thing of the past in Taiwan, but having such protégés around is likely to extend Hsu’s romance with the craft for many years yet.

Write to Jim Hwang at cyhuang03@mofa.gov.tw