New Export China: Translations across time and place in contemporary Chinese porcelain art (1996-2016)

Abstract

Porcelain has long been a global medium, exported from China to markets around the world. Over the past two decades this historical prestige has been enhanced by the work of contemporary Chinese artists for whom china, the material, is emblematic of China, the country, and an ideal means to interrogate such identification. Taking Ah Xian, Sin-ying Ho, Liu Jianhua and Ai Weiwei as case-studies, this dissertation analyses the reasons for their shared decision to use porcelain, proposing an original interpretive paradigm for their work as a form of "New Export China".

Works by these artists are analysed in five chapters, each dedicated to a defining feature and artistic motivation. The first chapter analyses the tension between artists' attraction to the historic and cultural aura of porcelain, and their desire to question this authority. The second examines the tension between their use of mass-production technologies, and their need to distinguish their work from that of the artisans they employ to produce it. The third chapter traces the tension between a desire to reconnect with a lost sense of Chineseness and the realisation that cultural identity is a composite fabrication. The fourth exposes the tension between the superficial appeal of porcelain and the depths of meaning that can be concealed beneath an attractive facade. Finally, the fifth chapter analyses the tension between an isolating exoticism and the bodily desires that express our shared humanity.

Underlying each of these tensions is an enduring awareness of the mobility and flexibility associated with porcelain, as a medium long exported around the world. These artists and their work exist in an interstitial space of artistic practice, in between cultural and historic contexts, yet they are grounded not only by their specific life experiences but by a fascination with the locality of Jingdezhen, China's "Porcelain City". In addition to the much-needed attention given to a material that has yet to receive sustained analysis as a medium for contemporary artistic expression, the innovation of this thesis is therefore to propose an art-historical model in which the assumption that works by Chinese artists are solely derived from or reflective of a Chinese context is displaced by a recognition of the multiple contexts and frames of reference in which they gain meaning, across both space and time.