Why do so many Chinese artists use porcelain?

CSC Bookworm Series
This webinar is co-presented by the China Studies Centre and the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney.
With New Export China: Translations across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art, Alex Burchmore traces the emergence of a genre of ceramic art that charts a course for a broader understanding of contemporary artistic practice. Focusing on the work of four artists from the 1990s through to the 2010s - Liu Jianhua, Ai Weiwei, Ah Xian, and Sin-ying Ho - he reveals how the materiality of ceramics has been used to highlight China’s role in global trade and to explore the function of this medium as a vessel for Chinese art, culture, and ideas.
Porcelain offers a unique opportunity to move between the global and the intimate, the mass-produced and the handmade, and the foreign and the domestic. But why do so many Chinese artists in particular choose to incorporate this fragile yet durable medium into their practice? In this talk, Burchmore and Dr Claire Roberts will propose some answers to this question.
About the speakers:
Alex Burchmore is an art historian specialising in the study of Chinese art, past and present, with a broader focus on travel and mobility, trade and exchange, and the intersection of the personal and material. He received his PhD from the Australian National University in 2019 and joined the University of Sydney’s Museum & Heritage Studies department in 2021. His first book, New Export China: Translations Across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art (University of California Press, 2023), traces the many ways in which artists in China have used porcelain from the 1990s to the present to shape their visions of personal and cultural identity.
Claire Roberts is an art historian and curator with an interest in modern and contemporary Chinese art, and the cultural flows between Australia and Asia. She is Professor of Art History in the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Her current research explores the international context of modern and contemporary Chinese art. Claire’s publications include Fairweather and China (2021), Ian Fairweather: A Life in Letters, edited with John Thompson (2019), Photography and China (2013) and Friendship in Art: Fou Lei and Huang Binhong (2010).