China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Connoisseur strives to reconstruct rare porcelain pieces
Luo Guoxin has worn thick eyeglasses since primary school, but that has not stopped him becoming one of the best china connoisseurs in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province.
The 49-year-old is the son of a porcelain-making couple, and he can easily tell the type and age of china from just ceramic chips.
He calls himself a “scavenger” and sees shards of ceramics buried underneath construction sites as great treasures. Luo is a regular at an antique market where he recently found fragments of a rare jar with a blue-and-white qinghua floral pattern.
Luo has collected 50 metric tons of broken ceramics over the past decade. Tsinghua University sent students from Beijing to catalog his collection and published a book in May.
To store the chips and restore them to their original splendor, Luo set up a workshop with his brother. Whenever he finds a piece of broken china at the market, he opens his iPad and searches for a match. “The fragments are just like brothers, separated from each other for years,” he said. “I want them to be reunited.”
Collecting ceramics costs a lot. Luo is 6 million yuan ($950,500) in debt, yet he is not willing to sell his collection. In fact, he wants to build a bigger museum that will be open 24 hours a day.
The city government has agreed to provide him with a 2,000-square-meter space in Sanbao village, home to a concentration of ceramic artists and studios. “I will not sell the collection, nor will I pass it on to my daughter,” Luo said, adding that he intends to keep his collection in China’s “porcelain capital”.
Luo has always earned his living from porcelain. He learned to make ceramics from his father at the age of 15 and went on to marry the daughter of a porcelain workshop owner. He began looking for foreign buyers as early as 1986, and opened a shop at the Shenzhen International Trade Center in 1992.
He opened a shop in Malaysia in the late 1990s and an auction house in Beijing in 2005. But three years later, while business was still booming, he chose to return to Jingdezhen.
He recently agreed to loan a qinghua jar that took him about three months to reconstruct to the Jingdezhen Ceramic Museum for exhibition. He had only one requirement: “Don’t put it in a glass case, let everyone touch it,” he said.