UK exhibition highlights Chinese contemporary studio crafts

Walking alongside the vitrines, one can catch the differences when seeing a jar made by Sun Chao, who experimented with a special glaze called crystalline glaze that can be fired to a shell-like luster. The decoration evokes a misty scene from Guilin, in South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, in an abstract way, instead of intricately picturing the splendor by using typical blue or green glazes.

Another piece inspired by Guilin is more fancy in which artist Huang Jing made a loop with many spherical components. The white, blue, or green parts, each referencing the sky, rivers, and rocks, eventually form a miniaturized Chinese mountain scene, where it looks as if the clouds come from the mountain and the waters cascade through the interiors.

"Apart from being ingenious, these artworks do not lose their Chinese roots," says Li. "For example, for Huang's Loop #3, the colors interweaving with each other remind us of Jun wares from Song Dynasty (960-1279). In this exhibition, I would like to include pieces that are contemporary but also Chinese."

Yet in Chinese culture, mountains are not a mere natural landscape that reveals the grandeur of the Earth, but also a vehicle of philosophy reflecting the viewers' mental world.

Mountains can be as grand as the writings of one of China's greatest poets, Du Fu (712-770), who wrote of how the crest dwarfs all peaks under one's feet. And they can be the focus of feelings of loneliness, as another acclaimed poet, Li Bai (701-762), described in writings that talked of a single cloud between deep and serene mountains fading away.