There is a long story behind LiuliGongFang. In 1987, Yang Hui-shan and Chang Yi, award-winning Taiwan actors, put their film careers on hold to learn an art of making liuli, which at that time was only mastered by the French. The skill is called pate-de-verre production method. Hoping that this skill could help Chinese express their own thoughts and feelings through liuli artifacts, they founded LiuliGongFang studio.
With little expertise, over the next few years most of their experiments failed.
Originally, they thought that liuli craftsmanship originated from the West and they could only learn the art through reading foreign books until they found that Chinese were making liuli in the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220). Yang Hui-shan, Chang and their colleagues turned to learn from Chinese historical documents and since then they have made great improvements.
Today, the products of LiuliGongFang are not limited to the artifacts of ancient adornments and are gradually expanding to products for daily life. Yang Hong said that the products that imitate ancient adornments are pure art creations, but the daily life wares are for general consumption. In recent years LiuliGongFang has made considerable profit and has opened branches on the mainland of China.
In March 2007, LiuliGongFang held a liuli exhibition at the Leo Kaplan Modern in New York, and one of their creations was collected by the Corning Museum of Glass of the United States. To LiuliGongFang, this was a milestone and showed that the world has recognized their efforts and quality.
"Reviving the art of liuli is to express our feelings to life through glass works and to study the history and culture of our nation once again," said Yang Hong.
(Beijing Review, China.org.cn's partner September 3, 2008)
