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Toxic transmogrification
Published in Fiona Allon, Ruth Barcan, Karma Eddison-Cogan, The Temporalities of Waste, 2020
Indeed, Chinese porcelain continues to be highly valued (Pierson 2012, 9), and Ming vases in particular are distinctive symbols of wealth and culture as well as commodities that circulate and are traded in global markets. As Kate Davies notes: “Ming vases are particularly iconic objects of high value as well as being artefacts of international trade” (quoted in Howarth 2015). In the last few decades, Chinese porcelain has sold for millions of dollars at auction, partly driven by newly wealthy Chinese looking to invest in their collections. It also continues to have aesthetic value in art practice. Artist Ai Wei Wei, known for his political and humanitarian work, has taken up traditional Chinese ceramics in his pieces, including Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), Ghost Gu Descending the Mountain (2006), Bubbles (2008) and Field (2010). Blue-and-white porcelain continues to be a symbol of taste and wealth as it moves in the global flows of trade, politics, taste and art.
Imperial models: technology and design in state-controlled porcelain manufacture in early modern China
Published in History and Technology, 2022
The multi-ethnic regime of the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) witnessed the state’s elaborate bureaucratic structure of handicraft-related departments. Fragmentary textual evidence proves the state’s regulation of porcelain production in Jingdezhen, in the form of a ‘porcelain bureau’ in early Yuan. Yet debates over the nature – or even existence – of an Imperial Porcelain Manufactory shows scholars’ uncertainty about the state’s hands-on control of regional factories. A kind of milky white glazed porcelain wares inscribed with ‘shufu (Bureau of Military Affairs)’ marks were presumably commissioned by bureaus in the central government but they were also sold beyond the palace, discovered as far afield as Southeast Asia.16 Since particular porcelain stones were needed to create the pure and warm white colour, the state is believed to have restricted private access to this raw material.17 And human unrawing of the porcelain clay by adding kaolin might have taken place much later on.18 More certain is the point that the state’s intervention facilitated cosmopolitan collaboration in ceramic production, especially Persian craftsmen’s presence in Jingdezhen and the state’s deliberate promotion of producing porcelain for export.19 The invention of blue-and-white porcelain would not have taken place without cobalt blue minerals imported from West Asia and decorative patterns brought from the Islamic world, and probably Persian craftsmen’s direct participation in production in Jingdezhen.20