Li Hongwei: Master of Innovation

March 19, 2024 by Stewart Ikeda

On Sunday, March 24, 10:00am - 4:00pm, The Umbrella Ceramics Studio is proud to present a special full-day workshop with internationally renowned ceramic artist Li Hongwei, in association with Pucker Gallery at 240 Newbury Street in Boston, which will host the exhiibtion Li Hongwei: Master of Innovation from March 23-May 5, 2024. The following passages are excerpted with permission from the exhibition's beautifully illustrated catalogue essay by Robert D. Mowry, Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Chinese Art Emeritus, Harvard Art Museums, and Senior Consultant, Christie’s.

A ceramicist of the highest caliber and a sculptor of unsurpassed ability, Li Hongwei is internationally renowned for his porcelains, which are prized for their highly innovative glazes, as well as for his sculptures, which combine glazed porcelain and polished stainless steel. His ceramic glazes are acclaimed both for the new colors that he has pioneered and for the localized areas of crystallization that he induces within the glaze matrix to create decoration in a contrasting color. Mr. Li has achieved success not only in determining the quantity and size of the crystalline formations but in defining their shapes, which typically recall leaves and blossoms. And his unique sculptures offer a new direction in contemporary sculpture.

I first encountered Li Hongwei’s work at a New York art fair fifteen or twenty years ago. The yellow-glazed vase embellished with royal blue, ginkgo-leafshaped designs featured in that display immediately captured my attention. Wholly apart from its beauty, the vase opened my eyes to the world of contemporary Chinese ceramics, sparking an interest that continues to this day.

Egg-shaped sculpture blending chrome and brown and turquoise ceramic tiles

Before I saw that yellow vase with blue designs some years ago, I was convinced that most contemporary Chinese ceramics were lodged in the past, so to speak, recreating Song monochromes and replicating Ming blue-and-white wares or Qing enameled porcelains but not technically advancing the potter’s art. The moment I saw Li Hongwei’s yellow-glazed vase, however, I knew that my previous belief was wrong: Li Hongwei can compete in the same arena as the finest, most innovative traditional Chinese potters.

As I learned from that yellow-glazed vase, Mr. Li’s ceramics are not focused on recreating the traditional Chinese ceramics of bygone eras; rather, they are of an entirely different order. Highly innovative and stunningly beautiful, they are technically sophisticated, advancing the potter’s art through the introduction of new techniques of decoration.

Chinese potters were the first in the world to produce stoneware, which they did as early as 1500BCE, evincing China’s early technological prowess. With their invention of white porcelain in the eighth or ninth century, during the Tang dynasty (618–907), they established the foundation of the later ceramic tradition not just for China but for the world. With mastery of high-fired ceramic bodies firmly in place, whether stoneware or porcelain, potters faced the challenge of creating beautiful glazes and of introducing appropriate techniques of decoration to embellish their pots.