Hai Chen is a natural at turning clumps of clay into art. From her small studio in Shanghai, she is molding herself into one of China's foremost contemporary ceramists. Working with clay is sensual, visceral and messy. For the professional ceramist, however, a little clay under the fingernails is just part of the process of creation.
Hai Chen is a professional potter, and she wants to share her passion for her art. Since moving to Shanghai from Beijing last year, she has started a "ceramics salon," which will hold lectures, small exhibitions, workshops and pottery sales.
Hai Chen gained recognition with her Japanese-style dishes and utensils. She is now the art director of HAP Potters' Studio, brainchild of Chinese-born American businessman I-Chi Hsu.
The art director's full name is Wang Haichen. But she prefers to use Hai Chen as a brand on her work and a close approach to her audience.
Her work is an "artistic exploration with a contemporary Chinese interpretation." Her blue-and-white porcelain ensemble piece, "Garden Blues," features four traditional Chinese stools, each distorted. One bristles with thorns, another is cracking, the third features animals, and the last is encircled by a belt. The abstract, illusory shapes provoke the imagination.
Hai Chen's small studio, dominated by a poster of Peter Voulkos, a contemporary American ceramist, contains deceptively playful works, objects that one can scarcely imagine being made of clay. The shapes - lyrical, suggestive and difficult to create - evoke to the artist's vision.
She produces traditional blue-and-white ceramics, following a long and revered tradition in Chinese pottery.
At some point in the late 13th or early 14th century, potters began to exploit the pure white of the clay, producing the blue-and-white ceramics still associated with Chinese porcelain today.
A rebellious youth, 29-year-old Hai Chen declined to follow in her painter father's footsteps after graduating from the Middle School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Instead, she chose another medium: ceramics, studying at the Ceramics Department of the Central Academy of Art and Design.
"I have always been searching for something that merges East and West, traditional and modern, hardship and pleasure, real and unreal," she says.
"As I searched, I found something which could embody all my romantic ideals - ceramic art."
The catalyst for her to move from "a dancer on canvas" to a creative ceramist was, in fact, a romantic ideal: the movie "Ghost," in which actress Demi Moore plays a potter.
"At that time, I thought that was pretty cool. It was just to my liking," she says of the profession she has worked at for over a decade.
Inspired by a months' stay with French contemporary ceramics artist Claude Champy, she decided to set up her own studio.
"It's said that there are two ultimate thrills: killing people and setting fire. Since we can't kill people, we set fire to the kiln," she quips, big black eyes twinkling with her good humor and ready wit.
Today, contemporary ceramics in China has grown beyond its status as a branch of industrial arts and design to become an independent art form.
To be a contemporary ceramic artist, Hai Chen opines that one must have three things: personal conception, a signature and a studio.
China still lags behind its international counterparts in terms of the variety of materials used, she says, as well as the range of different types of expression.
This is in part because the number of ceramic artists is relatively limited. Hai Chen is one of only two in her Ceramics Department class that still be working in ceramics.
Another factor is that many artists have not progressed beyond the stage of expressing themselves intuitively.
As we spoke, Hai Chen was repairing "Reality & Unreality" - two rectangular ceramic columns that were on display last month at the Shanghai Jin Wen Art Center in Pudong. Apparently one column was broken by a cat prowling in her backyard.
"It will take me quite some time to restore it," she says, without any trace of a grudge in her eyes.
After all, once the column is glued and sealed, it will more perfectly represent its undercurrent theme of "Reality" - broken, but still existing.
(Eastday.com February 21, 2002)
