Enamel art exhibition highlights Sino-French craftsmanship exchange

Artworks made with cloisonné enameling at the Beijing show are mostly by artists Wang Yuan, Su Jia and Chen Wen. The installation Mom Is Not Home II jointly made by Wang, Su, Wei and Nie Jinghui, features cloisonné enameling and strikes a chord with many viewers. Within an album frame are four 3D printed TV sets, and on their screens are cartoon figures such as Nezha, Monkey King and Little Eggshell, which are from the artists’ favorite childhood cartoons.

Visitors to the exhibit can also spot works made with champlevé, another major enameling technique. To make a champlevé piece, artists usually etch or engrave a metal surface to create desired images, which are recess on the surface. Enamel is placed into the recess and then fired.

A Moving Train, collectively made by six artists, is an example of such a technique. Six train-window-shaped copperplates are placed next to each other, depicting scenes including cottages, trees at dawn and snow-capped mountains that their creators have cherished.

Plique-à-jour is another enameling technique that is spotlighted at the show, represented by the hairpin made by contemporary jewelry artists Jean-Marc Waszack and Wang Xiaojia, co-founders of L’Atelier Studio in Beijing.

Made of titanium, the hairpin features a multi-layered transparent enamel decoration that strikes viewers as miniature stained glass, which is the desired effect of plique-à-jour, where enamel is applied in the cells pierced out of a sheet of metal. It is similar to cloisonné, but without backing in the final product so that light can shine through transparent or translucent enamel.

Hence this technique is considered technically demanding — both time-consuming and prone to failure, according to the curators.