A Crystal Clear Revival
More than just its founders’ personal passion, glassmaker Liuligongfang is on a greater mission to restore and preserve a Chinese heritage
For the longest time before the end of the 20th century, liuli merely existed in the imagination of many Chinese people. Though several ancient poems and religious manuscripts have spoken of its translucence and beauty, the disappearance of the essentially Chinese art form following the Opium Wars had rendered the glasswork almost fictitious. That is until three decades ago when an artist took it upon herself to revive it. When Loretta H Yang first learned pâte de verre— an age-old glass-working technique—in France, she did not immediately associate the French name with its oriental origins. To begin with, it is quite different from glass blowing. While the latter involves inflating a balloon of molten glass by pushing air into it through a tube, pâte de verre is a form of casting. Finely crushed glass is worked into a paste with a binding material and, sometimes, colourants, before it is arranged into a mould and fired to sinter the glass particles together. It is seemingly less dramatic, but the kiln method is a meticulous and time-consuming one. Yang can attest to that. After all, it has taken her seven years to perfect her craft. It was a steep learning curve, with a remarkable degree of trial and error. But her passion had kept her going and was only intensified when she discovered that the Chinese have long mastered the pâte de verre to produce liuli, back in the Han Dynasty about 2,000 years ago. It remains a mystery how the skill was lost in the subsequent years but Yang knew she needed to restore it. That strong urge within her that became her calling marked the beginning of Liuligongfang—the first glass art studio in Asia.