A Hong Kong Ceramic Artist Has Run a Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen for 12 Years. The Rules She Tried to Set Barely Work

Twelve years there showed her what in traditional craft deserves reverence — and how much chaos comes with watching a tradition disappear.

In 1998, Caroline Cheng arrived in Jingdezhen for the first time, at 35. The group trip grew out of a question from a Canadian colleague: as a Hong Kong ceramic artist trained entirely in the Western system, why hadn't this thousand-year-old porcelain capital become her "Mecca"? Cheng expected nothing from the place — she assumed it was a town churning out identical imitation-antique porcelain — and set off in a hurry with 60 other foreigners.

She met almost no young people there. Most students at the local ceramics college left the industry soon after graduating. The ten great state-owned porcelain factories, which had once earned the country large amounts of foreign exchange, were being restructured one after another, and the whole city looked run-down — until she stumbled on an enormous wheel-throwing session. In traditional throwing, one person turns the wheel and raises the rough form of a bowl or a jar. What Cheng saw was a "performance" by five masters working together, throwing a single giant vat. Years later she brought those same throwers to London Craft Week, where the crowd around them was packed so tight no one could move. Large ceramics abroad are usually made by machine, and people had never seen hand skill this practiced.

Every year after that, Cheng went back to Jingdezhen, and every time she found something new. "There's no shortage of traditional skills here — things you can't see anywhere else." In 2005, she and the Japanese master ceramicist Takeshi Yasuda set up a branch of Pottery Workshop in the city. They rented space in the Sculpture Porcelain Factory, and their first project was an international artist-in-residence program, inviting ceramic artists from overseas. Cheng told QDaily that the original idea was simple: the skills were here, foreigners wanted to learn them, and Pottery Workshop gave them a decent place to land.

Living Traditional Craft Is Pottery Workshop's Best-Selling Course

"That group of foreigners was the first wave of 'Jingdezhen drifters,'" Cheng says, laughing that she was the first to use the term jing piao — Jingdezhen drifter — in a media interview. According to figures the Jingdezhen Chinese and Foreign Ceramic Art Association released this April, about 30,000 "Jingdezhen drifters" are active in the city, more than 1,200 of them foreign nationals.

The resident artists' studio is plain. Cheng spent little effort redesigning the factory building: white walls, worktables and shelves, a spacious room with no air conditioning. Even so, it is hard to book and always full. By mid-August this year the program had hosted more than 910 artist-visits. Even the two hardest seasons, deep winter and high summer, sell out well in advance. The summer regulars tend to come from India: "In 40-plus-degree heat they still want to do wood firing. I'm already close to heatstroke and they think it's nothing — India is just as hot." In winter, most come from Finland, Norway and Sweden.

Foreign ceramicists come for these living, ancient techniques. Shan Zheqi, once a Pottery Workshop staff member in Jingdezhen, recalls that one of his main jobs back then was designing "courses" — tracking down the old masters behind every step of porcelain-making in the city and making introductions. Shan joined Pottery Workshop after graduating from Jingdezhen Ceramic University, and the job let him get to know the city all over again.

During the planned-economy years Jingdezhen built more than a dozen large porcelain factories, which people habitually call the "ten great porcelain factories." The Sculpture Porcelain Factory, where Pottery Workshop is based, was one of them. These factories were restructured one after another from the late 1990s on, and some of the dismissed workers took over the buildings, machines and kilns and set up small workshops of their own.

Pottery Workshop has brought in experienced famille-rose painters, mold-pressers and kiln workers from the Sculpture Porcelain Factory to demonstrate their techniques. Before 1949, the traditional processes were monopolized and never passed outside the trade; in the late Qing, almost all of Jingdezhen's kiln workers came from Duchang in Jiangxi, the skills handed down within one place, sometimes within one family, generation after generation. Now the old masters teach young outsiders, and more than a few of those are "foreign students."

"Apprenticeship isn't possible anymore. The people still studying ceramics in the West are rich; they don't have to worry about a living. In China, the younger generation finishes university and rarely wants to go learn a craft from ordinary folk. To eat off ceramics takes at least seven years before the skill is ripe. Now everyone wants quick money — it's the same everywhere," Cheng says with a sigh. Without apprentices, she says, many traditional techniques are slipping away.

In 2016, Pottery Workshop mounted an exhibition about the Sculpture Porcelain Factory's old masters, "Invitational Exhibition of Craftsmen from the Jingdezhen Sculpture Porcelain Factory." It gathered the tools and the stories of more than 100 masters — sixty years of this state-owned factory's memory.

A 20-year-old kiln nicknamed the "Mao Kiln," for the number of Mao Zedong statuettes fired in it, was once one of Pottery Workshop's research subjects. After the Sculpture Porcelain Factory was restructured, the kiln worker Li Huaizhong did not sit idle at home. He took two kilns off the factory's hands and later rebuilt them into three fired by piped gas — the hottest-firing kilns in the entire Sculpture Porcelain Factory. Master Li took in a steady stream of firing orders, from factory workers and from "Jingdezhen drifters" alike. Pottery Workshop photographed his "address book": a whole cement wall, the names and phone numbers of porcelain workers written across it in colored chalk.

That is also why Jingdezhen draws young people. There is a seasoned craftsman for every step of the process, and even if you don't know the full sequence, "you can buy every kind of ready-made material here. As long as you understand design, it's easy to find an old kiln master for the firing at the end."

The Imagination of 30,000-Plus Jingdezhen Drifters

Cheng once hailed a taxi in Jingdezhen and the driver recognized her at once: "Aren't you the boss of Pottery Workshop? I've been to your Friday talks." Every Friday evening from mid-March to mid-December, Pottery Workshop invites someone to speak — an artist, a local craftsperson, Chinese or foreign, with interpretation.

"It's not like Beijing or Shanghai. Jingdezhen really is closed off, there's nowhere to go, and everyone is a bit like the frog at the bottom of the well." The Friday audience is mixed too: "Not only people who make ceramics. Taxi drivers. Old men who come to listen and then say they want to learn pottery from us."

This July, Pottery Workshop's Shanghai branch put on an unusual show: the work of a retired man known as Fa Ge. Twelve years ago the work unit that employed Fa Ge collapsed. He didn't want to retire early, and decided out of nowhere that he wanted to learn clay sculpture. Once he had made his pieces, he searched Shanghai for somewhere to fire them and ended up at Pottery Workshop. Cheng charged him no course fee and gave him free use of the studio; in exchange, Fa Ge watched the door and cleaned up.

"It isn't only young people who feel bored," she says. Pottery Workshop's creative market in Jingdezhen has more than once taken registrations from elderly vendors using their children's ID cards.

The free Friday talks fill up, one or two hundred people on average. Cheng has invited the Japanese ceramicist Hideaki Suzuki to talk about overglaze decorative patterns, and Nelson Reyes to introduce Fusion 360, a free modeling program. Even in Jingdezhen, where handwork is the point, Reyes argued, technology still has a use: modeling software and 3D printing are tools, and what matters is the work you end up making.

"One week we didn't feel like talking about ceramics, so we found a dancer to teach everyone tango. We've done craft beer and home baking too, all with young people based in Jingdezhen."

Brandon Schnur, an American resident artist, is also the technical manager of the ceramics studio at West Virginia University. He noticed that most ceramics workers in Jingdezhen never wear masks, gloves or any other protection, and often work in sealed rooms with no ventilation. So he built a full paid course, going one-on-one into "Jingdezhen drifters'" studios to teach people how to run a ceramics studio, how to use materials correctly, how to stay safe.

"I've seen with my own eyes someone run out on fire. A lot of kiln workers stand right beside a gas kiln with a cigarette in their mouth — the smallest leak and it explodes. The gas canisters in Jingdezhen are all substandard; you can smell them from far off. There's no management here to speak of."

A Nine-Year-Old Creative Market and Its "Rules of the Game"

Even now, Cheng can't get used to Jingdezhen: "Nobody here respects intellectual property, only fists." "Every time I get back to Shanghai I want to shout inside, Ah, Civilization!"

This year is the tenth for Pottery Workshop's creative market in Jingdezhen. It is not cute and pretty — "that kind of work doesn't get into my market; you won't see Doraemon or Snoopy here" — but what matters more is that Cheng spent ten years working out a set of "rules of the game." "Plenty of people want into this market, want to play this game, and none of them want to play by the rules. All I can say is, fine, then we won't play."

In the summer of 2008, a few young people came to Cheng wanting to set up stalls in front of Pottery Workshop's café. The city, as they saw it, was either famous "masters" or porcelain workers, with no way through for the young, so they wanted to lay out their work and see whether anyone would buy it. Cheng agreed, on one condition: they couldn't pack up after two weeks, they had to do eight before taking stock.

The market was first called the "Saturday Street Stalls." Seventeen people came the first week and made 1,000 yuan; 25 came the second week and took a dismal 30 yuan. By the eighth week, ceramics enthusiasts from other cities were joining in.

"I'd reckoned it would take five years for this market to amount to anything. It took less than two." In the early days anyone could set up — a stall cost 5 yuan — and people fought constantly over the good spots; some slept on a stall the night before to hold it.

"It went from ten or twenty people to nearly 350 stallholders overnight, everyone copying everyone else's work. That's when we started screening. People submit applications every month and we pick 80 to 120 of them."

A market anyone could once join now had a threshold, and the vendors who were cut were unhappy. The friction never stopped. At one point Pottery Workshop hired a security guard from the Sculpture Porcelain Factory to keep order. "Better if we hadn't. The guard started letting his friends in on the sly — a pack of cigarettes was enough to buy him." In 2011 it turned violent: a vendor beat the guard until his head was bleeding, and the creative market shut down for a period of reorganization.

Vendors still submit work every month to apply for a stall. Cheng is the sole judge, and each month she posts the list of who got in and which zone they're in on Weibo and WeChat. In the early years people stayed up all night to hold a spot; now the process is settled. "The market has four zones, A to D. Zone A vendors are the ones whose work is consistently strong — 200 yuan a week — but they still have to improve. If I catch someone applying with similar work several months running, I'll ask them to leave too. Zone B vendors are the ones I'm watching, whose work is sometimes good and sometimes not — 100 yuan a week. Zone C is for the traditional blue-and-white and famille-rose masters, or their aunts and uncles and whoever else — I leave room for them too, 200 yuan a week. Zone D is food and drink, 100 yuan."

Cheng told QDaily that she once tried handing the screening to her staff, and the result was "terrible." "The work they picked wasn't good enough. I've seen so much of it that I can tell at a glance which pieces are copies. Applicants have to submit photographs of their work, and some of them pasted in an image straight off Pinterest. Absurd, isn't it!" Cheng has posted on Weibo about a Guangxi Academy of Fine Arts student's graduation piece that copied the work of a Pottery Workshop employee, and she has said more than once that anyone caught copying goes on the market's blacklist. Recently someone found that Pottery Workshop's logo had been lifted and used without permission; the Hong Konger took the chance to teach her WeChat Moments followers a line of Cantonese — gou dou nei lat fu, "I'll sue you till your pants fall off."

"One time five big men burst into my office, banged on my desk and shouted at me, asking why I wouldn't let his son into the market. I said it straight: what your son submitted wasn't made by him, you can tell at a glance a factory master made it. You want to bang on my desk? Fine, I'll stop doing this altogether."

Someone once quietly brought his own table and set it up beside the market, posing as a stallholder. "How could I not spot that, when I picked the list myself? I sent him away and told him to make the work first and then apply. Others smuggle goods in: they get approved, then bring pieces that were never in the application. That's not allowed either."

The number of applicants each month is fairly steady now, over 200, with 60 to 80 vendors finally chosen. "At the peak there were more than 300 applicants. A lot of people have given up, knowing they'll never get in, and turned to other markets instead." Since Pottery Workshop's, several similar creative markets have appeared in Jingdezhen.

"I've asked our vendors — more than half come from elsewhere: students from the Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua, from CAFA, from the China Academy of Art, from Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts. They've probably seen more, so they know what good design is; the local students, by comparison, fall short." The market has become a rare platform where buyers can meet the people who made the work: look around in the morning, arrange in the afternoon to visit a maker's studio and place an order.

Pottery Workshop once put out a map marking 30 studios, so people could follow it around on open-studio days.

At Beijing Design Week in 2016, Cheng picked 20 young people out of this market to exhibit, and they went on to London Craft Week afterwards. Last May she gave a talk at the British Museum called Young Craftsmen of Jingdezhen, Porcelain Capital of China, introducing the new blood coming into this thousand-year-old porcelain capital.

Drifting, or Leaving?

"I'm an artist, really — who wants to do operations and management?" Cheng says, mocking herself. Besides running Pottery Workshop, she once made a hanfu robe out of 35,000 ceramic butterflies the size of a fingernail, fired in Jingdezhen and shipped back to Shanghai to be sewn together. The porcelain garment is on long-term display in the British Museum's China gallery.

But the traditional Jingdezhen has been disappearing faster than she expected.

In the early years it cost a "Jingdezhen drifter" very little to live there: prices across the city were low, rents were low. But Jingdezhen won't stay cheap. As the outside population has grown, rents have risen, and streets of workshops that formed on their own have been torn down and replaced by new cultural-creative parks. Wannengda was once Jingdezhen's busiest wholesale market, with more than 90 workshops large and small, where you could buy every kind of unglazed body imaginable. It has been demolished, and the old masters there were given nowhere to go.

Cheng belongs to two WeChat groups of local veteran porcelain workers, and lately what she keeps hearing in them is: "Tear it down. Tear it all down and we'll stop doing this too — go home and play mahjong."

Some people are still in Jingdezhen; some are on their way; some have already left. Shan Zheqi, the former Pottery Workshop employee mentioned earlier, ended his life as a "Jingdezhen drifter" back in 2012 and went home to Xiuyan, in Liaoning, where he built a studio on the edge of town. He built his own wood-fired kiln, using construction methods he learned from a Japanese master. The most basic raw material Jingdezhen has isn't here, but by then he had learned the whole sequence in Jingdezhen: quarrying the clay, kneading it, forming the body, trimming it, glazing, firing.

"There probably aren't the (traditional) 72 steps anymore, but the big ones are much the same." The first part of the work is finding local stone. Taking his studio as the center, he checked abandoned mining pits one by one within a radius of 200 kilometers. "There are a lot of deposits like this in the northeast; the stone is actually quite rich." There he found an unusual soil — peat formed by a meteorite strike — which he processes into material. He calls the series "Meteorite Porcelain."

"My original idea was to spend ten years in Jingdezhen. Everyone learns the skills they want to learn, and after ten years, once you have it, you can go on to the next stop. Now they're killing the hen to get the eggs. Once the old masters have been driven home and stopped working, I don't know what's left for us to learn here, or what the foreigners are supposed to come and see."

Cheng feels a certain helplessness about Jingdezhen. "You say jing piao, Jingdezhen drifter. Sometimes I think it's really jing piao in the other sense, the one that means buying sex. You come to Jingdezhen, use their masters, pay a little, make something — how is that not soliciting? Nothing given back to the masters here, nothing given back to the ceramics industry. Who's going to stay?"

Shan Zheqi went home. Cheng's next stop is Dali, where Pottery Workshop has opened a branch in the Dali Bedsheet Factory. She is full of hope for the new beginning all over again: "It isn't a developer's project and it isn't a government move. A group of photographers took it on."

But do artists make good managers? Cheng mentions one photographer who has spent three years running the Bedsheet Factory and is now "about to go mad." "He wants to farm. I scold him about it all day — every Weibo post he puts up has nothing to do with the Bedsheet Factory, it's all about the carrots coming up in his field."

Unless otherwise credited, all images in this article are courtesy of Pottery Workshop. Long-format cover image: Stocksnap.