Speaking of Chinese pottery, you may first think of the world-famous Jingdezhen ceramics, speaking of Yunnan pottery, your first reaction may be Jianshui purple pottery with the status of "China's national geographical indication products", yes, Jianshui County, which has unique pottery resources, to some extent, is famous for pottery. But in fact, next to Jianshui County, there is also a low-key pottery county, where a group of low-key potters are hidden, and pottery with practicality and sublime artistry is sold overseas. This low-key "Tao Township" is Huaning County, Yuxi City.
Huaning County, a county under Yuxi City, Yunnan Province, is located on the southern edge of the lake basin area of the Central Yunnan Plateau, and belongs to the Zhongshan type landform. It is bordered by Mile County to the east and Jianshui County to the south. During the Hongwu period of the Ming Dynasty (1369), Che Peng, a native of Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province, went to Huaning to open the first pottery production, laying the foundation for the innovative development of Huaning clay pottery afterwards. For more than 600 years, Huaning pottery people have inherited traditional crafts and committed themselves to the development of pottery, and the ancient pottery art has been full of vitality.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="6" > "leading enterprise" of "international arts and crafts masters" - Huaning County Ningzhou Shushi Pottery Co., Ltd</h1>
Huaning Ningzhou Shushi Ceramics Co., Ltd. was incorporated by Mr. Shu Wenzhao (male) in June 2006 and served as the chairman and general manager of the company. The company covers an area of 41.73 acres, with a total investment of 30.563 million yuan, more than a quarter of the land is mainly used for the construction of Huaning pottery production process workshop, firing workshop, machinery and equipment workshop and other standard factories, of which, the construction of Huaning pottery exhibition center covering an area of 2556.58 square meters, Huaning pottery leisure theme hotel, but also the construction of 30.0361 acres of agricultural leisure tourism demonstration garden, has been transplanted of various varieties of fruit tree seedlings more than 4,000 trees.
Photo by Zhu Jing
In 2021, Mr. Shu Wenzhao, the founder of Shu's pottery, was awarded the honorary title of "Yuxi Craftsman", before that, he had received numerous awards of large and small sizes, for example, in 2018, he was rated as "International Master of Arts and Crafts" by the China Arts and Crafts Master Evaluation and Promotion Committee of the International Career Planning Appraisal Center...
On the basis of inheriting and carrying forward the art of Ningzhou ceramics, through his many years of practical experience and bold artistic creation, Shu Wenzhao's pottery has formed its own distinctive and unique local characteristics and simple artistic style. He takes the unique clay of the local area as the main raw material, and uses unique techniques such as piling, carving, skeletonizing, carving, painting, and scraping, and his works are unique.
Today, the main product series produced by Shu's pottery are black pottery, black pottery color carving craft products, black pottery color carving tea box, tea set packaging products, Huaning old glaze, green glaze, green white glaze tea box tea box tea packaging products, agate glaze, Tianmu red, emerald and other tea box tea set products, all kinds of high-temperature glaze color, wood-fired series tea boxes, tea sets and other series of products.
It is understood that the company's products in the design concept, focus on the combination of practicality and artistry, the combination of old glaze and new glaze, and constantly develop new products, drive the inheritance of new pottery talents, to create a set of research and development, processing, leisure, experience as one of the agricultural tourism demonstration park. With unique craftsmanship, they constantly introduce new products to meet the needs of customers, and can also be processed according to customer requirements. After the appraisal of China Quality Certification Supervision and Evaluation Center, Huaning County Ningzhou Shushi Pottery Co., Ltd. was rated as a first-class qualification in the industry.
Shu Wenzhao said that some of the teapots of Shu's pottery have sold for tens of thousands of yuan and are in short supply, and continue to be sold overseas. It can be seen that Huaning County Ningzhou Shushi Pottery Co., Ltd. has indeed walked on the road of adding bricks and tiles to the development of Huaning pottery industry and gradually moving towards the international market.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="74" > "leading enterprise" of "non-genetic heirs" - Huaning Baitashan Architectural Ceramics Co., Ltd</h1>
Huaning Baitashan Architectural Ceramics Co., Ltd. is most famous for "Zixuan pottery", which is named after a person, and the protagonist is Mr. Li Zixuan (gender female), a leader in the ceramic industry and arts and crafts industry in Yunnan.
Courtesy of the picture
Li Zixuan, born in January 1946, native of Huaning, has been committed to the development of Huaning pottery for many years, and its research and development and firing of pottery products have an orderly heritage, excellent craftsmanship, and have created good sales performance while enriching the historical and cultural connotation. Li Zixuan is a leading figure in the ceramic industry and arts and crafts industry in Yunnan, who has made outstanding contributions to the inheritance and innovative craftsmanship of Huaning pottery, and has won many national, provincial, municipal and county-level commendations and awards, breaking the tradition and becoming the first female pottery maker in Huaning.
Li Zixuan was forced to drop out of school in his early years, and at the age of 17, he entered the pottery club to work, at first he was only engaged in heavy kneading, kicking plates, frying plaster, etc., and later she taught herself to overcome the difficulties of low cultural level, as small as pinching mud copying shapes, frying plaster to make molds, stepping on mud, rubbing mud, etc., and learning every process thoroughly. In June 1980, the Central Ministry of Light Industry held a nationwide ceramics training course in Qinzhou, Guangxi Province, and she was the only student from Yunnan Province. Three months of study allowed her to broaden her horizons, gain a deeper understanding of pottery knowledge, and the road to faience glazed pottery began. After hundreds of experiments, in 1987, the green and white glaze experiment was finally successful. Today, she has produced more than 30 glaze colors. The white glaze of the Ming Dynasty, the sauce of the Qing Dynasty, and the green glaze of the Republic of China period that is as green as green and cracked as ice can also be achieved to the extreme.
At the end of 1981, her husband Wang Peizu and more than 20 other people took advantage of the former site of the fertilizer factory, which is where today's Baitashan Architectural Ceramics Co., Ltd. of Huaning County is located, with an investment of 27. 30,000 yuan to build a new pottery factory as a branch of Huaning Pottery Factory. In 1984, she was renamed Huaning Pottery Factory No. 2, and in this year she was seconded to Huaning Pottery No. 2 Factory as the deputy director of production technology, and was responsible for glazing technology, product sales, etc. Under the leadership of the husband and wife, the small factory after several twists and turns, the production scale increased from the original annual output of more than 300,000 pieces to 7 million pieces, and the products formed 4 series and more than 600 varieties of architectural pottery, craft art pottery, daily life pottery, and garden architectural pottery. In just a few years, the sales revenue of the factory has grown from more than 30,000 yuan to more than 300,000 yuan. The superior quality and good reputation of the products have won a broad market and are exported to the United States, Germany, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and other countries.
In Li Zixuan's office, the glaze, balance and the bottles and cans used for the preparation are placed in a fixed corner, and sometimes the preparation work will be carried out late, leaving only the seventy-year-old man's office in the factory area. Li Zixuan said that in the process of preparing glazes, the whole person is very happy, and he will not feel tired at all, which is to create a rare work of art. Whenever a new glaze is successfully fired, she is happy like a child.
For more than 50 years of pottery making, she has led more than 1,000 apprentices, including more than 40 heads of newly built pottery enterprises and craftsmen who master various processes of Huaning pottery, almost all of whom have been trained by her, and many of them have become masters in the field of pottery. She said more than once, "What I want to do is to cultivate more successors, let Huaning pottery carry forward, and don't let Huaning pottery's pottery craftsmanship be lost." ”
Under the influence and cultivation of Li Zixuan, her son Wang Dawei became the inheritor of county-level intangible cultural heritage and a senior arts and crafts artist in Yunnan Province through his own talent and unremitting efforts. Since graduating from Kunming Normal College in July 1997, he has been committed to the inheritance and development of Huaning Pottery.
In March 2008, Wang Dawei established Huaning Ningzhou Pottery Development Co., Ltd., she hopes that on the one hand, she can make Huaning pottery bigger and stronger and revitalize the pottery industry; on the other hand, she can do a good job in the collection and research of Huaning pottery, so that the pottery culture can be carried forward.
In August 2009, he founded the first private thematic museum in Yuxi City, Ningzhou Pottery Art Museum, covering an area of more than 1,000 square meters and exhibiting more than 2,000 pieces. Yao Zhonghua, a famous painter in our province, personally inscribed the name of the museum for the museum, which has attracted tourists and artists from all walks of life since its opening, which can not only show the world the history of Ningzhou pottery for more than 600 years, but also become a platform for exchange and research of Huaning pottery lovers.
Generation after generation of sons and daughters of this family have entrusted their life's work to Huaning Pottery, which is not only a fortunate thing, but also a fortunate thing for the inheritance and development of pottery.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="83" > the art hall of "Romantic Masters" - "Jinyao"</h1>
In 2017, a pottery artist named Deng Hongjin launched the Huaning Folk Handmade Pottery Sculpture Project in Yuxi to train landless farmers and unemployed women in the county to make pottery by hand, and so far, the folk handmade has four public welfare classes covering four villages. In the past few years, more than 1,000 farmers have received technical enlightenment, and more than 300 people can create pottery sculptures. Among them, the works of seven peasant disciples have won national and provincial awards. Farmer craftsman Li Huijin received the 2019 Yunnan May Day Labor Medal.
It turned out that Deng Hongjin's relationship with pottery began at an early age, according to her, she loved to watch and collect utensils since she was a child, and in high school, she was already a regular visitor to the local old goods market. She often uses her pocket money to buy back a bunch of bottles and cans, and conducts profound research and "communication", in Deng Hongjin's eyes, the aesthetics of the utensils reflect the philosophy of life of the era it produced, the process of pottery making, but also a process of self-expression, she believes that she can turn the innate enthusiasm and turbulent sentiment of life and the eternal love and understanding of beauty into utensils.
In 2007, Deng Hongjin, who was looking for tea utensils because of his collection of Pu'er tea, began to collect Jianshui pottery and did marketing work for Jianshui pottery. In this process, she began to learn ceramic appreciation and design utensils, but the utensils she created did not match her inner expectations after being made by other pottery workshops, she felt very distressed, so in 2014, Deng Hongjin visited Mr. Xiang Yongqing, who came from the Huaning pottery family, as a master, learned the traditional color glaze process from him, and began an almost crazy reading and experimental process. After reading more than 60 books on the history, scholarship, and formula principles of color glaze, in 2016, the series of color glazes she developed passed her own scrutiny, so Deng Hongjin was a color glaze pottery began to appear, and was sought after by people in various exhibitions.
With her own prerequisites for being very sensitive to the lines, shapes and colors of the utensils and her own continuous hard work, Deng Hongjin has won many awards, "Yunnan Provincial Senior Arts and Crafts Artist, Yunnan Ceramic Craft Master, Jingdezhen University Higher Education Research Institute Distinguished Researcher, Yunnan Huaning Pottery Handicraft Representative Inheritance Master, Yuxi City 'Xingyu Skill Master'", are her well-deserved honors. She is not only a talented potter, but also a "cultural businessman" with feelings.
In 2014, she was officially invited to set up Jinyao in Huaning County, and in the spring of 2017, by chance, she learned that there were 580 residents in the Dianwei resident group, among them, there were many young adults who could go out to work, but most of them could not go out to work because there were old and young people in the family, so a large number of villagers who had the ability to work but did not have stable work were idle at home, and their lives were stressful. Under such circumstances, Deng Hongjin asked the village committee to help gather the students, and all the villagers who were interested in pottery animals and were interested in learning could sign up for free study, and the Jinyao kiln distributed clay and tools to the students free of charge. In the first training, more than 40 villagers came, the youngest being 16 years old and the oldest being 62 years old. She and the other teachers in the team taught the art of hand kneading and molding by hand, and then purchased qualified ceramic blanks to apply glazing, firing and selling uniformly. In this way, the employment problem of a large number of farmers without stable jobs in the village is solved, and they can learn to do pottery sculpture and employment at home to achieve zero-cost entrepreneurship, for them, the most important thing is to work to make money while also taking care of the elderly and young children at home.
Talking about her own operation of folk handmade pottery sculpture activities, Deng Hongjin said: "What she does is also a professional artist to give back to the people and reach a new era of interactive relationship with the folk", in her view, the seeds of art are always hidden in people's blood. Awakening the potential of the people is a favorable attempt to achieve both material and spiritual gains. Second, the cultural fertility of the folk is very strong. In addition to the inheritance of excellent cultural traditions in a region, folk inheritance is also very important. Third, when a farmer seeks a dignified life through his own hands, then he will consciously walk on the road of self-education and seek continuous growth. Fourth, in "craftsmanship", because in addition to "work" there is also "art", which contains aesthetic activities and factors of spiritual life, which will have a good impact on the peasant craftsman and his family. Fifth, by turning the peasant into a craftsman, a difficult group can become a resource group. Sixth, create a new generation of craft folklore. Any folklore, any kind of history, has its beginning day, and history needs to be created.
She believes that this is also one of the ways for a small enterprise to expand its business team, and micro enterprises can solve the problem of the business team by taking the art belt to agriculture, and will also effectively assume corporate social responsibility. The peasant-turned-craftsman thing still has a long way to go. In the process, her inner ideals and simple peasant craftsmen are constantly inspiring her.
Huaning County Ningzhou ceramics has a long history, has the reputation of "pottery township", Ningzhou ceramics after more than 600 years of development, has a number of pottery enterprises with Ningzhou characteristics, Huaning pottery to the unique high-quality white clay as raw materials, beautiful shape, bright color, its glaze yellow as pure gold, green as jadeite, white as mutton fat, orchid as gemstones, purple as sword qi, green as pine smoke.
After the creation of a batch of ceramic "craftsmen", today, Huaning pottery products have developed from the initial single life pottery to more than 700 varieties of architectural pottery, garden pottery, craft pottery, living pottery and Dongba cultural pottery, and reached an annual output of more than 6 million pieces of pottery. After the quality certification reached the national GB9179~88 standard, it was rated as China's first consumer trustworthy product.
It is believed that in the near future, they will also produce more colorful pottery with higher artistic conception and more in line with the needs of the times, and the stage belonging to the pottery of Huaning will eventually bloom.
Text/Zhu Jing