Author: Marvin Sweet

Hardcover: 206 pages

Publisher: Foreign Languages Press (2006)

Language: English

 

Contents: Many artists-- and lovers of the arts -- believe that artistic perfection can be founded in any time period and within any culture. American ceramic artists are particularly adventurous, continually exploring the vast heritage of ceramic art. With this insightful and beautiful book, The Yixing Effect: Echoes of the Chinese Scholar, Marvin Sweet reveals how the Yixing teapot has captured the imagination of contemporary ceramic artists and why it has becomes a compelling source of inspiration.

From the moment Yixing ware arrived in Europe over three hundred and fifty years ago, the teapot, which was invented in Yixing, has been used as a model by Western ceramists. The Yixing Effect: Echoes of the Chinese Scholar offers a brief history of Yixing ware, addressing the collaboration between the Yixing potters and Chinese scholars, including their philosophic and aesthetic influences. The text also offers an overview of the author's collection of historic Yixing ware and culminates with a deeply knowledgeable discussion of the influence Yixing ware has had on contemporary American ceramic art. William Sargent, curator of Asian export art at the Peabody Essex Museum, contributes a chapter on the influence of Yixing wares on seventeenth-and eighteenth-century European ceramics.

The Yixing Effect: Echoes of the Chinese Scholar is richly illustrated with photos of historic Yixing ware, scholar art and works by fifty-nine outstanding contemporary American ceramists. These contemporary artists conclude the book with brief discussions of how Yixing ware has influenced their own work. Their comments reveal divergent personal perspectives and sensibilities -- and the richly individual ways in which their encounters with the wares of Yixing have helped expand the teapot tradition.

(China.org.cn October 24, 2006)