Author: Marvin Sweet
Hardcover:?206 pages
Publisher: Foreign Languages Press
(2006)
Language: English
Contents: Many artists-- and lovers of the arts
-- believe that artistic perfection can be founded in any time
period and within any culture. American ceramic artists are
particularly adventurous, continually exploring the vast heritage
of ceramic art. With this insightful and beautiful book, The
Yixing Effect: Echoes of the Chinese Scholar, Marvin Sweet
reveals how the Yixing teapot has captured the imagination of
contemporary ceramic artists and why it has becomes a compelling
source of inspiration.
From the moment Yixing ware arrived in Europe over three hundred
and fifty years ago, the teapot, which was invented in Yixing, has
been used as a model by Western ceramists. The Yixing Effect:
Echoes of the Chinese Scholar offers a brief history of Yixing
ware, addressing the collaboration between the Yixing potters and
Chinese scholars, including their philosophic and aesthetic
influences. The text also offers an overview of the author's
collection of historic Yixing ware and culminates with a deeply
knowledgeable discussion of the influence Yixing ware has had on
contemporary American ceramic art. William Sargent, curator of
Asian export art at the Peabody Essex Museum, contributes a chapter
on the influence of Yixing wares on seventeenth-and
eighteenth-century European ceramics.
The Yixing Effect: Echoes of the Chinese Scholar is
richly illustrated with photos of historic Yixing ware, scholar art
and works by fifty-nine outstanding contemporary American
ceramists. These contemporary artists conclude the book with brief
discussions of how Yixing ware has influenced their own work. Their
comments reveal divergent personal perspectives and sensibilities
-- and the richly individual ways in which their encounters with
the wares of Yixing have helped expand the teapot tradition.
(China.org.cn October 24, 2006)
