▲ Vase (pottery) Gleason Perry
Ceramics are the art of mud and fire. A piece of mud in the hand can be made into a bottle and a sculpture through different firing methods, different shapes and decorations... So, how do you define a pottery work? At present, many people think that modern ceramic works have nothing to do with the morality and concept of Chinese aesthetics, resulting in many different emotions, and some people are very extreme: "What is this art, we don't need it." Some people find it novel: "How can it impress me so much, more than the artifacts in daily life." Some people will think, "How do you read these works?" ”
Our view of time and space
All art forms have their reasons for their existence, and when we bring modern Chinese ceramics into the history that is closely related to us to understand, we will have a sense of belonging to it, which is an emotional dependence. The same is true in the West, when modern art originated, it actually had its own history, its own laws, exquisiteness and norms.
We can see many paintings, sculptures and ceramics in the history of Western art, which have also survived under the norms of civilization and have been continuously examined and judged. Therefore, do not easily think that the novelty of Western modern pottery is lawless, and we should objectively look at Western modern pottery and Chinese modern pottery with our feelings for traditional Chinese art. We need to understand what kind of era this is, so that Western, Chinese art can enter the contemporary cultural context.
If we think about it in a large space-time background, many problems actually do not exist, and what we need to understand is the internal relationship between modern ceramics and modern life and modern civilization.
If you want to answer what modern pottery is, it is not that we can answer it by seeing a lot of novel works, modern pottery is actually closely related to the life of our time. All art reflects the truest and warmest atmosphere of that era, and only such art can become a classic that our descendants will follow. "Traditional" is true in China, and "modern" is also true in the West.
"I'm very modern"
Looking back at this 100-year history, when it comes to Sigmund Freud, we often don't feel ancient, but when it comes to the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, it will feel very far away, because our era has undergone too many magnificent changes, almost reborn.
At present, it has entered the era of reading pictures, people flip through WeChat and Weibo on their mobile phones every day, and the amount of information is so large that they have no energy to read. Linear life makes it difficult for us to understand the relationship between time and space behind a picture, but if you do not leave this relationship, it is difficult to confidently say that you understand contemporary art, China, and the world.
Walter Gropius was the founder of the German Bauhaus. He ushered in a new era of art education, a new art discipline related to design, logic, and ergonomics. His greatness lies in the hiring of the world's most outstanding artists and designers at that time, such as kandinsky, the representative of abstraction, and the "abstraction" we know is actually derived from Kandinsky's artistic creation in 1910, and it is difficult to believe that abstract art has a history of more than 100 years.
When we have this macro idea, space-time classifies us like a jigsaw puzzle. Where is art, and where are we today? Advanced does not mean that you use the world's most advanced Apple mobile phone, sitting in an advanced plane can say "I am very modern." It can't be said that we have used these devices to synchronize with the people who designed and created them, in fact, our way of thinking and acting may not have followed up.
The diversity of art and the genes of civilization
After looking back at the history of modern art, the history of modern ceramics, and the brief history of Chinese ceramics in the past 100 years, and then returning to pottery, we will understand that the aesthetic education of ceramics that we have always received is single, and those upbringing come from museums, but we lack another thing, that is, the diversity of art.
When it comes to diversity, strictly speaking, we don't yet have a museum that focuses on world civilization. Many small countries in the West have museums that focus on the history of world art, such as works from China, Japan, Korea, the United States, Australia and European countries in Austria. Not to mention some of the big Western powers, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Louvre, the art of the Two Rivers Valley and Asia alone can't be seen in a day. As we all know, art plays an extremely important role in the basic quality education of the people. The author once said in the keynote speech "Museums are the space for storing the genes of human civilization": Human civilization is not only the civilization of the country. But China's museums basically store the genes of their own civilization, and most of them are imperial history and imperial art, which brings about the problem that it is easy for people to only know themselves, but it is not easy to understand others more fully. Therefore, the perception of diversity in civilizations is important to us.
▲ Spinning (pottery) Wang Xin
The "Virtues" of Ceramics
Back to ceramics, we must return to the spirit of ceramics. The reason why ceramics are beautiful and why people cherish them so much is because of its fragility, fragility enhances the appeal of beauty, which is common with life.
Ceramics are fragile, but ceramics are also eternal, fragile and eternal exist in ceramics at the same time, perhaps we can say that this is the "virtue" of ceramics.
For the appreciation of modern pottery, we must first pay attention to the problems of technology and art. This is especially important in the appellation, which cares deeply about technology and considers technology to be synonymous with art. Technology is important, but as long as it can meet your creations and meet the needs you want to express, it is enough. We will improve our technology through time precipitation and diligent practice, which is why there are many skilled workers but few engineers. The same is true of art, which cannot be achieved by hard work, because art is related to human nature, creation, and aesthetics, which are grasped by emotion, and it is not entirely simple one plus one equals two. In the relationship between technology and art, of course, "art" comes first, and "art" comes later, which is related to creation.
Second, material and expression. Are ceramic materials just used to express containers, to express tradition? How do we understand tradition? Modern pottery attaches great importance to the expression of materials, clay has its own language, when the soil becomes porcelain clay will become pure, when the soil becomes crude pottery, there are also requirements for simplicity, we can not impose on them can not withstand or contrary to the requirements of the clay, so modern art is more of a human emotion-led, to discover the material, to guide the material to express various possibilities.
Again, aesthetics and imagination. Aesthetics are our experience. Many insights and memories of the past form experiences, and when there is more experience, the imagination is weak. How to achieve strong experience, but also without solidification, but also have imagination and sensitive mentality, "natural work" and "man-made" is actually a topic worth exploring.
In fact, the above three points are also related to the traditional and contemporary, and the relationship between them, and the combination of craftsmanship and artificial creation.
Civilization is a river. Why is civilization a river and not a riverbed? Because the core is not the riverbed, it is the endless flow of water. The yellow river water that is still flowing today is not the Yellow River in Li Bai's poem, and the rolling Yangtze River is not what Bai Juyi has seen, but what people see today, and our descendants will look at the Yangtze River and the Yellow River again, nor what you and I see today, the water is fresh.
When we talk about modern pottery, we are to maintain a childlike heart and tolerate all aesthetic differences, including Western art, our traditions, and our future.
(The author is the director of the Department of Ceramic Art design of Tsinghua Academy of Fine Arts)
Source: China Culture Daily