New Export China: Translations Across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art
University of California Press, 2023
Why do so many contemporary Chinese artists use porcelain in their work? In New Export China, Alex Burchmore presents a deep dive into a unique genre of ceramic art to describe a framework for a broader art practice. Focusing on the work of four artists from the 1990s through the 2010s—Liu Jianhua, Ai Weiwei, Ah Xian, and Sin-ying Ho—Burchmore 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 the transmission of Chinese art, culture, and ideas.
From its historical pedigree and transcultural relevance to its material allure and anthropomorphic resonance, porcelain offers artists a unique way to move between the global and the intimate, the mass produced and the handmade, and the foreign and the domestic. By dissecting both the legacy of porcelain export and current networks of exchange, Burchmore ultimately demonstrates why this ceramic practice is crucial to understanding the development of Chinese contemporary art.
“In China, from the past to the present, ceramics is not just a material but a language. Alex Burchmore has insightfully translated this language and its variations, or accents, in contemporary Chinese art”
Jiang Jiehong, author of The Art of Contemporary China
“Rather than simply extracting meanings from the artworks, Alex Burchmore tells us broader stories of China’s history, culture, and contemporary social life associated with the making of contemporary ceramic art. These are not aesthetic objects alone; rather, this is a conceptually oriented collective production full of the ambiguity between traditional symbolism and contemporary deconstruction”
Gao Minglu, author of Total Modernity and Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art
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‘New Export China: Translations Across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art‘, interview with Sarah Bramao-Ramos, New Books in East Asian Studies, 2 February 2024, New Books Network.
‘New Export China: Reconciling Surface and Depth in Ah Xian’s Porcelain Busts‘, Art Talks, 26 July 2023, Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture, Western Sydney University.
‘Why do so many Chinese artists use porcelain? Charting the rise of New Export China‘ (conversation with Professor Claire Roberts), Bookworm, 28 July 2023, China Studies Centre, University of Sydney.
‘New Export China: Translations Across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art‘, ACE Magazine, no. 2 (Spring 2023): 14-15.
alexburchmore.com 