COLORING CULTURE
Portuguese ceramics often feature blue-and-white color combinations, says Chinese ceramic artist Bai Ming, who visited Lisbon for an exhibition in July.
It is said that after the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama returned home from his historic voyage (1497-99) that linked Western Europe and Asia via a maritime route, he presented tributes to King Manuel I that included Chinese qinghua porcelain. Since then, cobalt blueand-white ceramics have become part of Portuguese life.
Portuguese love the color combination very much, says Chinese ceramic artist Bai Ming, who visited Lisbon in July for the first time.
The Jiangxi province native grew up in a town not far from China’s “porcelain capital”, Jingdezhen, which produced the porcelain the Portuguese explorer took to his homeland.
He saw many blue-andwhite ceramic elements in Lisbon, from daily-use items to building tiles.
“The patterns and shapes show very little Chinese influence but have a style that reflects Portuguese culture,” says the 52-year-old, who heads the ceramics department of Tsinghua University’s arts and design academy in Beijing.
He was on a mission to link the West and the East like Da Gama. Bai was in Lisbon as a cultural ambassador, holding his first solo exhibition in Portugal, White and Blue / Bai Ming.
The ongoing exhibition showcases nearly 200 ceramic works, including vases, paintings and big bowls.
Some are blue-and-white objects.
Bai displays a contemporary Chinese artist’s ideas while working with an ageold material.
Pedro Gadanho, director of the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, says Bai “expands the tradition of Chinese porcelain as one of the most powerful artistic expressions from a country with a millenary culture”.
The exhibition is being held in a 300-square-meter hall at the MAAT through Sept 4. It’s part of the program of Sino-Portuguese Cooperation and Cultural Exchange under the Belt and Road Initiative.
Rosa Goy, a curator of the MAAT, says the exhibition’s title refers not only to the two colors of qinghua porcelain but also the white limestone buildings and the blue sea that form an ever-changing, dreamlike scene of Lisbon.
Explaining why the exhibition name has “white and blue” though qinghua refers to blue and white, he says this is to show the works are updated versions of an old format.
The artist also says that Bai, his surname, means white in Chinese.
But Bai’s works do not have intricate patterns and auspicious motifs that are commonly seen on antique ware. Instead, he draws simple, smooth lines in cobalt blue, reflecting the natural spirit and elegant beauty of classic Chinese art, says Fan Di’an, the Chinese curator of Bai’s exhibition and head of Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts.
The exhibition also demonstrates Bai’s attempts to diversify. His Between Porcelain and Stone series models porcelain objects after the Taihu rock, a kind of porous limestone used to decorate classic Chinese gardens.
In Zen and Apparatus, the clay is stretched and shaped into small sculptures.
Through this, Bai shows the contradictory nature of ceramics: soft and flexible when molded, and hard but vulnerable after fired in a kiln.
He says this coexistence of opposite characteristics in ceramics best exemplifies the core value of Chinese philosophy.
At the exhibition, he also displays his ink painting series, Cultural Worm Hole.
It is a group of abstract ink-and-water paintings in which he also leaves tea stains and burns small holes in the paper to create a sense of extended space.
The MAAT is also showing four of Bai’s porcelain vases in two glass boxes outside the building. Bai says they face the sea and are close to the port where Da Gama and his fleets returned from their initial expedition.
“The display brings Chinese art and the European passers-by closer. Also, it is a meeting of the past and the present,” he says.
It (the display) is a meeting of the past and the present.” Bai Ming, artist