Grace spent the final three years of her IBM career in Hong Kong, where she experienced firsthand the full Chinese culture and watched the "tremendous changes" happening on China's mainland. It was there that she decided to open her own "porcelain kingdom."
"I was interested in art, especially ceramics. Then in Hong Kong, I started picking up pottery and learning myself, spending a lot of time going to the studio and working on my own ceramics," she said.
"That's when I started to be serious about things, going into a kind of self-discovery period."
During our interview in her retail shop at Shanghai 1933, a new commercial hub for creative industries in Hongkou District, I referred to all the porcelain as "china," and Grace carefully clarified it.
"Terminology actually gets complicated in our business," she said.
"Ceramics is just a general term which is translated as 'taoci' in Chinese. It includes everything from 'diwen (low-fire) taoci' to 'gaowen (high-fire) taoci.' The term 'pottery' generally refers to low-fired ceramic ware, translated as 'taoqi.'
"When you say china, the general term for it is porcelain, "ci" in Chinese. The definition is sometimes blurry," she explained.
Grace's company, Asianera, has been established for 14 years and entered the Chinese mainland market seven years ago, mainly focussing on bone china.
"Bone china was a material invented by the British in the 18th century. And that was because the British loved the 'china' from China so much, they called it 'white gold'," Grace explained.
"As the 'china' items were so precious, foreign countries in the 18th century wanted to make porcelain in the Chinese way.
"But the main ingredient in Chinese porcelain is kaolin which is a special kind of clay you can only find in certain parts of the world, and it is not prevalent in the United Kingdom.
"The British then tried to figure out what could be substituted for kaolin to make a hard enough porcelain piece and they finally settled on the bone ash of cows which gives porcelain a superior transparency and durability."
The products from this style are called bone china. The term porcelain basically means high-fired ceramics that become vitrified, Grace said. "At least 40 percent of the clay formula for a good bone china body should contain bone ash. Our products contain 40-45 percent," she added.
"My goal is to preserve the craft of hand-painted china. It could be porcelain, it could be bone china, it could go either way, but I am happy that I choose bone china in the end because it really has such a fine, high-end, very elegant look.
"My other goal is to produce a very high-quality product."
