lǎo měi chá 老美茶
2023, 純Object, Taipei, Taiwan
lǎo měi chá 老美茶 is an American take on teaware flowing from Dallas to Taipei. The runny surfaces & forms of the teaware reflect the tea flowing within them. The watery blue & white porcelain melts both in the fabrication of clay & in the firing of the ceramic. Symbolizing resilience, resistance, & resourcefulness of intellect in response to the world’s brute forces, the “three friends of winter” (歲寒三友 Suì hán sānyǒu) inspire me to make the blue abstract drawings on the porcelains. The planished or dappled black stoneware traces a fluid path like a petrified riverbed. The polychrome glaze flows over the stiff stoneware core, the most resistant of the three clays. The fluid relationship such as that between tea & tea ware is likewise manifest in the drawings’ figures & colors. Socrates said that each one comes from the other: “Figure is the only thing which always follows color… color is an effluence of form, commensurate with sight, and palpable to sense.”
porcelain with glaze, black stoneware, stoneware with glaze, pencil & pastel on paper