Alongside the replication and reconstruction of the past, modular and mass-production
are also dominant themes in the history of Jingdezhen and export ceramics, while access
to the factory facilities involved in such production is central to the appeal of medium
and city for many contemporary artists. Most of the works by Ai Weiwei and Liu Jianhua
analysed above were manufactured by teams of specialised artisans whose labour is
central to the meaning of the finished objects as allusions to both the history of export
and contemporary market for antique replicas. Another aspect of this artistic attraction
to Jingdezhen’s inexpensive labour, materials and equipment can be identified in the
creation of large-scale or multi-part works that would be difficult to produce elsewhere,
and for which the idea of abundance and excess are unifying premises. Liu’s Regular-
Fragile (figs. 1, 11, 13) is once again a leading example of this tendency, deriving much
of its potency from the sheer number of components included and the overwhelming
scale of their display. However, while Liu highlights the industrial origins of his replicated
objects by presenting them as vast mounds of interchangeable assembly-line products,
in installations like Discard, Dream and the iteration of Regular-Fragile created for the
Venice Biennale he sublimates this modularity and mass-production into an interpretive
multiplicity. On one hand, the work can be read as an attempt to come to terms with his
early career as a factory ceramicist, and a revaluation of the mass-production techniques
that have been central to Jingdezhen’s industrial ascendancy. On the other hand, such
methods are “elevated” beyond the denigrated realm of industry through Liu’s emphasis
on the concepts underlying his work, creating tension between “artisanal” and “artistic”
uses of ceramics that parallels that between historical fact and fiction discussed above,
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The tension between revival of an illustrious history and critique of its authority can also
be found in a later variation of Liu’s project installed at the 15th-century Oxburgh Hall in
Norfolk, England (figs. 35-40), and an installation of works by Ai at Blenheim Palace in
Woodstock, Oxfordshire (figs. 45-50). These exhibitions invite comparison with massed
displays of porcelain created by European royal and aristocratic collectors during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, intended to signal the extent of their wealth and
global power to visiting relatives and foreign dignitaries. Yet neither installation adhered
uncritically to the narratives of national and cultural ascendancy from which porcelain
rooms derived their symbolic power. In Oxburgh Hall, Liu’s qingbai replicas occupied the
house like an unwanted guest, spilling across the carpeted floors and rendering furniture
unusable to such an extent that other visitors, and even the owners were made to feel
confined and constricted. In such an environment, the tropes of national and cultural
identity on which the authority of the estate and those who call it home have historically
been constructed were forcibly overturned and obscured. At Blenheim Palace, although
less overtly intimidating, Ai Weiwei’s work was no less subversive despite the organisers’
stated desire to employ his reputation as a critic of the CCP to augment the reputation
of the estate as a monument to English democracy. Inconspicuously displayed alongside
pieces from the existing ceramics collection, Ai’s calculated imitation of past styles and
forms exposed the artificiality of such notions of national and cultural identity, perhaps
inspiring viewers to examine their surroundings with a more critical eye.
In addition to their unsettling of historical narratives, these and other works by Liu and
Ai, notably including the latter’s large-scale installation Sunflower seeds (2010; fig. 51),
indicate another defining aspect of New Export China: an uneasy relationship between
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Sunflower seeds frame the Jingdezhen-based artisans commissioned to manufacture the
seeds as little more than anonymous labourers, or gongren (工人). Other contemporary
artists have attempted to surpass such negative categorisations with a more egalitarian,
dynamic model of artist-artisan interaction in which the latter can claim agency as active
subjects, or gongmin (公民). The vase project: Made in China – Landscape in blue (2004-
06; figs. 52-54), an installation of one hundred and one blue-and-white vases painted in
Jingdezhen and led by North American ceramicist Barbara Diduk, in collaboration with
Jingdezhen-born ceramicist and academic Zhao Yu, is one prominent example of such
attempts. Liu Jianhua offers another point of comparison with his more spontaneous
and informal artist-artisan relationships, most of which arose from his former career as
an assembly-line ceramicist in a collective factory. Ai, Diduk and Liu, alongside other
contemporary artists who have worked in Jingdezhen, can be situated on a continuum
of relationships with artisans that shifts between extremes of exploitation on one hand,
and empowerment on the other, again introducing a disruptive ambiguity into what
seems at first to be a straightforward relationship of supply and demand.
Liu Jianhua’s early career as an assembly-line ceramicist and his cultivation of material and conceptual modularity in Regular-Fragile (2001-10)
Liu Jianhua’s Regular-Fragile project, in addition to its historical connotations discussed
above, is also one of the earliest and most significant contemporary artistic projects to
meaningfully engage with the modular production of porcelain. Nevertheless, in line
with the defining characteristics of New Export China proposed in this thesis, Liu’s use
of mass-production methods is “elevated” beyond the denigrated realm of the artisanal
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insightful survey of mass-production in China, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass
Production in Chinese Art (2000), art historian Lothar Ledderose identifies modularity as
a central aspect of Chinese culture, tracing its use from the prehistoric to the modern
era in calligraphy, bronze-casting, architecture, print-making, and ceramics. Ledderose
cites seven key traits of modular production: quantity, interchangeability, division of
labour, additive growth, standardisation, proportional scale, and the creation of the new
through adaptation of the old, with the overarching aim being ‘[to] produce objects …
in large quantities and of great variety.’216 Each of these can be clearly noted in the many
iterations of Regular-Fragile, the components of which Liu produced over several years
in collaboration with a team of artisans in Jingdezhen who are heirs to a long tradition
of mass-production in that city in which Liu too has been intimately embedded since his
apprenticeship as an assembly-line ceramicist at the age of ten. His installations can be
interpreted on one hand as an effort to reconnect with and reinterpret this chapter of
his life, which the artist rejected and chose to ignore for many years: a revaluation of
the techniques for ceramic mass-production in which he was trained. On the other hand,
however, the highly conceptual nature of the work in the Venice Biennale, MC1 and
Singapore Biennale installations discussed above obscures the “artisanal” or industrial
aspects of these processes in favour of more “artistic” aims.
A genealogy of mass-production in Jingdezhen and Liu Jianhua’s factory experience
Like historical reproduction and replica-making, modular and mass-production have
long been central to porcelain-making in Jingdezhen, and to other artisanal industries
216 Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 6.
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across China. Ledderose finds evidence for the mass-production of ceramics as early as
the Neolithic era though he traces the elaboration of such methods to the seventeenth
century, when he asserts that it was modularity above all else that enabled Chinese
merchants ‘to flood the entire world with porcelain [in] almost unlimited quantities.’217
During this time, it is recorded in the Jiangxi provincial annals (Jiangxi sheng dazhi 江西
省大志, 1597) that workshops in Jingdezhen were organised into a complex hierarchy
of roles, from the four kiln-supervisors who occupied the highest position and their
thirty-nine assistants, to the sixteen master and eighty-six apprentice throwers, twenty-
three painters, six enamel painters, five inscribers and twenty-seven saggar-makers.218
Archaeological traces also show increasing labour specialisation, indicating that such
workshops would have been divided into four main buildings facing a central courtyard
to enable central supervision, and divided in turn into different areas for each task.219
Yet Ledderose and other historians of mass-production in China have neglected the work
of contemporary artists like Liu, for whom these forms of manufacture remain potent
sources of inspiration, and even contemporary manufacturing in general.
Liu created his porcelain replica commodities during several trips to Jingdezhen from
2001 to 2002, working in the same factory in which he had trained as an assembly-line
ceramicist in the 1970s and 1980s. He began this training at the age of twelve, in 1974,
when his father sent him to the Porcelain Capital from his birthplace in nearby Ji’an to
apprentice with his uncle Liu Yuanchang, a master ceramicist who gave the younger Liu
217 Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things, 85–89.
218 Margaret Medley, “Organisation and Production at Jingdezhen in the Sixteenth Century,” in The
Porcelains of Jingdezhen, by Rosemary E. Scott (London: Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art,
1993), 75–78.
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employment at the Sculpture Factory (Diaosu Cichang 雕塑瓷厂, abbreviated from now
on as SF).220 Liu Yuanchang became an employee at this factory in 1964, eight years after
its founding by the central government as one of many collective enterprises established
in the city during the 1950s. He remained there for his entire career, eventually securing
the esteemed position of director and, in 1996, the state-administered title of “national-
level master artisan” (guojiaji gongyi meishu dashi 国家级工艺美术大师).221 Liu Jianhua
too received several awards while employed at the SF, though he has since described
his employment there as deeply unfulfilling, especially when he came to realise that he
would remain on the assembly-line for the rest of his life if he continued to follow the
conventional career path, and so, unlike his uncle, he resigned in 1985 to study at the
JCI. Here, he turned away from ceramics in favour of sculpture in bronze and plaster,
which he considered to be a more “genuine” form of art, and found inspiration in the
work of European modernist sculptors Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), Antoine Bourdelle
(1861-1929), Aristide Maillol (1861-1944) and Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), rather
than the Chinese ceramic traditions in which he had been trained.222 By 1998, however,
he had once again taken up porcelain for reasons explained below, and returned to the
SF to make use of the professional connections he had established as a young adult.
Regular-Fragile can therefore be positioned as the first work in which Liu revisited and
sought to reassess the assembly-line processes of ceramic production through which he
first became acquainted with the medium, and these processes are in turn central to the
meaning of the work across its various incarnations. As noted in the first chapter, Liu
220 Jin, «刘建华: 给艺术做减去» [Liu Jianhua: An Art of Subtraction], 89.
221 Gillette, China’s Porcelain Capital: The Rise, Fall and Reinvention of Ceramics in Jingdezhen, 102. 222 Liu Jianhua and Zhu Qi, «如果迷茫的话，我会不知所措 - 对刘建华的访谈» [If You’re Confused, Then I Have No Idea - an Interview with Liu Jianhua], Shanghart, March 23, 2001, n.p., http://www. shanghart.com/texts/LJH-interview-c.htm.
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used the technique of slip-casting to produce his replica consumables, which allows for
rapid mass-production of identical forms that echoes their original creation as functional
commodities. He was assisted in this process by former co-workers as well as newly-
hired artisans, effectively recreating the conditions of collective manufacture with which
he had once been so familiar, though with the aim of producing a work of contemporary
art rather than the archaic and Socialist Realist sculptures produced in the factory.223
For Eugene Tan, Director of the National Gallery of Singapore, this site of manufacture
and the formal reduction of consumables to their most basic outline once again recalls
Duchamp’s use of a mass-produced urinal for Fountain. Echoing the above-mentioned
comparison drawn by Garth Clark between Duchamp’s ready-made and Ai Weiwei’s
Dropping a Han-dynasty urn, Tan asserts that the French artist’s removal of the urinal
from a utilitarian to an aesthetic context is mirrored in Liu’s re-packaging of functional
consumables as “useless” objects for aesthetic appreciation.224 Like Duchamp, Liu was
partially motivated by a desire to remove “sculptural concepts” from his work, replacing
personal taste with standardised forms in a manner that presages his “no meaning, no
content” approach.225 Yet this is where the similarities between Fountain and Regular-
Fragile end. While Duchamp deliberately removed his urinal from the conditions of its
manufacture, Liu draws attention to the industrial origins of his chosen objects, not only
by presenting them as identical, interchangeable (i.e. modular) artefacts of assembly-
line production, but also by participating in this production rather than adopting the
isolated role of artist-curator. The significance of Duchamp’s work consists entirely in its
223 Gillette, China’s Porcelain Capital: The Rise, Fall and Reinvention of Ceramics in Jingdezhen, 55, 72. Liu Jianhua, email communication, 16 January 2018.
224 Eugene Tan, “Transformation of the Everyday,” in Liu Jianhua: Regular-Fragile, ed. Dan Dang (New York: Arario, 2008), n.p.
225 Yan and Liu, «嬗变中的刘建华: 艺术转变的内在逻辑 - 阎玉婷对话刘建华» [The Evolution of Liu Jianhua: Internal Logic for Art Transformation – Yan Yuting in Dialogue with Liu Jianhua], 42.
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re-contextualisation – the “original” urinal was so unimportant that the artist didn’t
even seek to reclaim it after its display in 1917 – while, conversely, it is precisely through
their materiality and manufacture that Liu’s objects gain meaning. As doubly reproduced
commodities, the components of his Regular-Fragile installations are directly connected
to his employment as an assembly-line ceramicist and the industrial processes of mass-
production in which he was trained.
Elevating material modularity to conceptual multiplicity
The familiarity of Liu’s replica porcelain commodities and their various configurations in
different contexts of display, however, opens Regular-Fragile to a range of affective and
conceptual associations beyond this absolute materiality, generating what could be
described as a modular form of interpretation. Curator and art dealer Pi Li, a co-founder
of Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing, like Eugene Tan, has noted the erasure of obvious meaning
in Liu’s abstraction of his chosen objects as a defining aspect of their artistic significance.
Approaching the work through a semiotic framework, he compares the commodities to
words removed from syntactical structure, cast adrift in arbitrary combinations in which
the logic of the sentence dissolves into a series of fragments, each legible in isolation
but lacking mutual coherence. Rather than denying communication, however, Pi asserts
that this fracturing ‘[allows] viewers from different cultural backgrounds [to] create their
own … interpretations according to their different life and cultural experience.’226 Like
Duchamp’s urinal, the replica commodities in Regular-Fragile have been removed from
their intended context and the functionality that once gave them meaning. Liu has even
226 Pi Li, “Presence of Matter and Absence of Personality,” in Regular-Fragile - Liu Jianhua, trans. Karen Smith (Shanghai: ShanghART, 2003), n.p.
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further extended this dislocation by remaking his appropriated objects in a material that
renders them completely unusable, in contrast to the eminent suitability of the thick-
bodied porcelain of the urinal for its intended purpose, and the possibility that it could
therefore be restored to function. As Pi Li observes, however, Liu’s replica commodities
retain some traces of their former meaning: just as the word “fragile” in the title carries
affective associations, so a discarded child’s toy or single shoe evoke for most viewers a
feeling of abjection and impermanence that reinforces the presentation of the work in
the Venice Biennale, MC1 and the Singapore Biennale as a meditation on transience and
disorienting catastrophe. Liu has also noted this potential for multiple responses to his
work, writing in 2014 that
… the different configurations of the work, in different contexts and display
spaces, [were intended to inspire] a wide range of viewer experiences, [to]
create completely different affective sensations – [from] joy, pain, excitement,
fantasy [and] secrecy, [to] fear.227
These objects, then, like words released from syntax, are not rendered meaningless by
their abstraction and isolation but are opened to new associations that might not have
emerged within a defined context. Their material modularity is reflected by a conceptual
multiplicity as parts of a more complex whole that can be arranged and rearranged to
create an almost infinite number of narratives.
This proliferation of meaning in Liu’s work reinforces the transexperiential aspects of its
artistic significance, while knowledge of the process of its manufacture adds a further
temporal dimension to this interpretation. Australian art-historian Francis Maravillas
227 Liu, «思维的连贯性: 关于我这些年的作品» [Collected Thoughts: About My Work over the Years], 77.
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has provided a useful means to understand this new layer of meaning in his concept of
“haunted cosmopolitanisms”, or the palimpsest of experiences accrued over time by
those whose lives are marked by movement between contexts. Although writing about
Chinese artists in Australia, Maravillas’ concept can be readily applied here not to Liu
himself but to the objects he has replicated, all of which have journeyed from their place
of manufacture (in many cases, China) to points of sale and use around the world, then,
following their “translation” into another material, to a comparably global range of
exhibition venues as works of art rather than functional commodities. A parallel could
also be drawn with Liu, who returned to his adolescent place of employment to create
these pieces and travelled between Jingdezhen and his new home in Kunming during
the years of their making. Maravillas argues that the work of artists who move between
contexts in this manner should be regarded not only as a product of their immediate
surroundings but also of the ‘transnational forms of imagining and living’ that they have
experienced.228
Maravillas privileges the concept of Chineseness, externally imposed or self-defined, as
central to this framework, describing it as an implicit influence or ‘spectral entity that
both haunts, and is haunted by, the work and [the artists’] identity,’ where memory and
translation converge.229 Extending this interpretive model to Regular-Fragile, it is not the
spectre of Chineseness that opens Liu’s project to the associative currents of memory
and translation – though his use of porcelain definitely lends a “Chinese” inflection – but