Back in June last year I posted a piece about Ma Jun, a ceramicist working with models of modern day consumer goods executed in porcelain and decorated with chinoiserie motifs. (Here’s a small pic to remind you, and save you the trouble of leaving this page and coming back here to read the rest of this article):
Television, 2005 by Ma Jun
But here’s an eerie echo that has just crept above the radar:
Porcelain, 5 by Lei Xue, 2007. Trashed aluminium cans in the porcelain style.
If I can surmise correctly, he was a participant in the animation festival, Anima in 2007, with a short called “Moment by Moment”. Hard to find any footage online, unfortunately.
Porcelain at Martina Detterer
There’s a portrait of the artist as a young man at the bottom of this page (It’s a frame, really).
He and his fellow countryman, Ma Jun, must soon be running out of domestic objects to decorate in the Chinese style. May be they could apply their treatment to… who knows? Plates? Cups? Bowls?
2 Comments
I think this is great art. It links the past with the present and questions the whole concept of consumer culture. The cultural interplay is also very subtle, Chinese porcelain originally was used as ballast in the ship used to import tea. By the standards of the day these items were cheap and throwaway until the taste for Chinese ceramics developed and was copied by Europeans.
The cans are the modern equivelent, but the use of material is juxtaposed, the metal can copied in clay but reflection the buckling qualities of Aluminium. The reference to blue and white in relation to the drive of chinese modernity. I love a work that get the mind racing.
Tony, I agree that this is great art, and I hope my title for this post was not misleading in any qualitative way. I was merely pointing out the divergence of the noble aspect of production versus the vulgar nature of the objects being portrayed in 3D.
Secondly, I was pointing to the thematic similarity of subject matter and technique of two artists who seem to come from the same part of the world, where questions of authorship and ownership of intellectual property have a different cultural interpretation from what is current in other “Western” countries.
I love the ambiguities embedded in these art objects, too. That’s why they feature on this blog!