English-language Yixing books

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mbanu
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Tue Mar 23, 2021 9:39 pm

I noticed that the folks who know about Yixing seem to be getting annoyed in the Yixing thread about people asking for pot identification, so thought maybe a thread on this might help for folks who don't live anywhere where they will see a lot of Yixing pots.

Collecting Yixing isn't really my thing, so I only have a couple, but I figured I'd list them:

* Yixing Pottery: The World of Chinese Tea Culture by Chunfang Pan, 2004. This is a Long River Press translation. I think they produced a lot of these, as they don't have the markups you see on some other Yixing books. I think this might be a good 101 book for Yixing, as it gives a basic history, outlines different shapes you might see (helpful as online only one or two are really popular, sort of giving the impression that any other shapes can't be real), lists a few famous potters and up-and-coming (probably also famous now) potters, color photos of famous pots, etc.

* Selected Works of Contemporary Yixing Potters by the Hong Kong Museum of Art, 1994. This is a good example of what is one of the standard styles of Yixing lookbooks, the exhibition catalog. These are mostly produced by museums at the time of a show and are very affordable when they first come out, but apparently nobody buys them so the prices go up as time goes by. :lol: They usually include intro articles by various Yixing personalities, so they can be good for finding out which authors to look for. This one has an intro by K.S. Lo, for example.

A third stream that I don't have any of but that are a good source are paper auction catalogs from the big auction houses (Sotheby's, Christie's, Bonhams, etc.) as every so often a specialist shop will close or a collector will die and they will have a Yixing-dedicated auction. As the big auction houses make sure to verify what they are selling, the catalogs can be useful even if you don't buy anything. :) Hopefully others will be able to add on here.
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Bok
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Tue Mar 23, 2021 11:04 pm

mbanu wrote:
Tue Mar 23, 2021 9:39 pm
A third stream that I don't have any of but that are a good source are paper auction catalogs from the big auction houses (Sotheby's, Christie's, Bonhams, etc.) as every so often a specialist shop will close or a collector will die and they will have a Yixing-dedicated auction. As the big auction houses make sure to verify what they are selling, the catalogs can be useful even if you don't buy anything. :) Hopefully others will be able to add on here.
Worth noting that auction houses sometimes (more often than they should), have completely no clue when it comes to authenticate Yixing wares... so these are to be consumed with caution.

Same goes for book of someone's collection or private exhibition (quite a few of these around, in Chinese only), which are very often riddled with questionable items, but as it is that person's private collection the necessary scrutiny is not happening. Collectors here normally know which books to consult and which ones have more fakes in them.
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mbanu
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Wed Apr 07, 2021 8:59 am

Maybe some nice cautious consuming would be the Yixing sections of the Woolley & Wallis auction catalogs? A lot of the bigger auction houses will either sell print catalogs or if it is primarily an online auction won't bother with catalogs (It would have been nice for Christie's "Contemporary Clay: Yixing Pottery from the Irving Collection" to have gotten a catalog, I think) but Woolley & Wallis meet in the happy medium of releasing PDF catalogs, which seems helpful when it is just a few Yixing in a larger collection of Asian art, as with their auctions.
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mbanu
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Wed Apr 07, 2021 10:32 am

mbanu wrote:
Tue Mar 23, 2021 9:39 pm
This is a good example of what is one of the standard styles of Yixing lookbooks, the exhibition catalog. These are mostly produced by museums at the time of a show and are very affordable when they first come out, but apparently nobody buys them so the prices go up as time goes by. :lol:
An example of an affordable exhibition catalog might be Tea and Immortality: Contemporary Chinese Yixing Teapots from the James T Bialac Collection by the Phoenix Museum of Art, which can be had for the princely sum of $16.99 from their museum shop.

Lots of art-pieces in this one. :lol: I'm guessing this pot is a play on Xishi-style pots, since every time you'd bring the spout up to drink you'd be kissing a frog. :D
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mbanu
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Thu Apr 08, 2021 7:50 pm

mbanu wrote:
Wed Apr 07, 2021 8:59 am
Maybe some nice cautious consuming would be the Yixing sections of the Woolley & Wallis auction catalogs? A lot of the bigger auction houses will either sell print catalogs or if it is primarily an online auction won't bother with catalogs (It would have been nice for Christie's "Contemporary Clay: Yixing Pottery from the Irving Collection" to have gotten a catalog, I think) but Woolley & Wallis meet in the happy medium of releasing PDF catalogs, which seems helpful when it is just a few Yixing in a larger collection of Asian art, as with their auctions.
One nice thing I've noticed is that their online back-catalogs go back a few years (technically to 2011, but unfortunately those early catalogs are Flash-based). The earliest non-Flash seems to be November 2013, which has an interesting Chairman Mao pot from 1973. :)
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Chadrinkincat
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Fri Apr 09, 2021 8:35 am

Chairman Mao pot from 1973 from Gu Jingzhou?

Did Gu Jingzhou even make a pot like this let alone one during the cultural revolution w/ his personal seals on it? This looks like tourist pot w/ fake patina.
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Fri Apr 09, 2021 9:12 am

Chadrinkincat wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 8:35 am
Chairman Mao pot from 1973 from Gu Jingzhou?

Did Gu Jingzhou even make a pot like this let alone one during the cultural revolution w/ his personal seals on it? This looks like tourist pot w/ fake patina.
Certainly doesn’t look like Gu could have made this pot, unless he’s had a lapse and forgot all about fine proportions and balance he was famous for...
.m.
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Fri Apr 09, 2021 10:15 am

Conceptually it's brilliant: a tourist pot with fake patina bearing the words "Don't forget the class struggle" being sold to a rich collector for like 2000GBP. I hope Gu Jingzhou made that up.
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Fri Apr 09, 2021 10:24 am

I can’t count how many times I’ve seen ZGYX seals on pot listed as early 1900’s or older from these auction houses. This is exactly why these western auction catalogs are pretty useless.
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mbanu
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Fri Apr 09, 2021 10:40 am

This is one reason I like that they give a provenance as a starting point. :) Because now we can ask, "OK, who are/were Peter and Susan Wain?" Peter Wain was a ceramics dealer from Staffordshire who died in 2015. A 2018 article in The Chronicle (a UK newspaper) on an auction of some of his other things described him this way:
Peter was born and raised in the Staffordshire Potteries and the last three generations of his family were managers at the Royal Doulton factory in Bursalem. He even worked there himself from the age of 15 during his holidays from school and university. After leaving university, he taught for a while before joining the British Army as an officer in 1965, serving from 1969 to 1972, as a captain of the Hong Kong garrison headquarters in Kowloon.

The Cultural Revolution in Mainland China was in full swing when he arrived and riots had just taken place in Hong Kong.

Among his duties was monitoring the social changes taking place and he realised one of the best ways was through the arts and crafts coming out of China via Chinese-owned arts and crafts friendship stores.

There were three in Hong Kong -- one in Victoria and two in Kowloon -- all owned by the Chinese government and known to be bases for the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong.

Dressed as a tourist, Peter would wander innocently around the stores as Mao-suited shop assistants followed him waving the "Little Red Book" and chanting "Chairman Mao is great, Chairman Mao is good".

Peter invariably headed to the fourth floor to the arts and crafts department where he purchased many fine pieces at a modest cost, kick-starting a lifetime of interest in 20th-century Chinese ceramics.

Peter also toured the antique stores of Hong Kong looking for the best of China's recent productions, including any works relating to the post 1948 "New China". By the end of his tour of duty in 1972, he had amassed a large collection. On leaving the army in 1980, he was sponsored by Royal Doulton to attend a one-year West Dean conservation course and naturally, he concentrated on Oriental porcelain. He and his wife, Susan, subsequently opened a shop in Tetbury, Gloucestershire, where they specialised in antique ceramics. The couple closed the shop in 1990 and moved to Anglesey in 2001.
So if we had to guess a provenance, it would be that this was picked up from a friendship store in Hong Kong, as I doubt the antique stores would have been interested in blatantly Maoist works. So then the question becomes, "Were original works sold at friendship stores, or copies of original works?" Would anyone happen to know? How long did these friendship stores remain open in Hong Kong?

I seem to remember K.S. Lo mentioning that works weren't signed in his experience, before he started requesting them in the 1980s, but I don't know if that was correct or not.

If making a Mao pot seems unlike something that potter would normally do, we can then ask if Yixing potters were acting differently during the Cultural Revolution. I seem to remember reading in an essay on this time that there were a couple senior potters who were deemed not sufficiently dedicated and were downgraded to cleaning the factory as punishment, but I can't remember where I read this, so I will have to go digging for the source to see if I am misremembering or not. :)
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mbanu
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Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:23 am

mbanu wrote:
Fri Apr 09, 2021 10:40 am
If making a Mao pot seems unlike something that potter would normally do, we can then ask if Yixing potters were acting differently during the Cultural Revolution. I seem to remember reading in an essay on this time that there were a couple senior potters who were deemed not sufficiently dedicated and were downgraded to cleaning the factory as punishment, but I can't remember where I read this, so I will have to go digging for the source to see if I am misremembering or not. :)
It was not from an essay, but from a Master's thesis:
In the state-owned Yixing Purple Clay Factory, Yixing potter Jiang Rong (1919-2008) was accused of working in the “Youth Corps” led by the Kuomintang (KMT) government during the Republic of China (1912-1949). As a consequence, Jiang Rong was no longer allowed to make pottery as the communist party viewed as the “four olds” (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits) as representative of the ideologies of the exploiting classes. Jiang Rong was humiliatingly punished to hard labors, such as cleaning washrooms and clearing roadside weeds in the Yixing Purple Clay Factory for ten years from 1966 to 1975. But Jiang Rong was not the only persecuted potter. Among the senior master potters, Gu Jingzhou (1915-1996) was charged with the historical title of “pseudo security chief” in the Chinese civil wars; Zhu Kexin (1904-1986) was placed under house arrest; and Wu Yungen (1892-1969) committed suicide after being public disgraced. (http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/ ... %20MRP.pdf)


This in turn was sourced from Hua Fei Hua: the Biography of Purple Clay Artist Jiang Rong by Xu Feng.

So maybe Gu Jingzhou made Mao pots to smooth the "pseudo security chief" thing over? Then the question would be still, did he make a set of originals that were then copied to sell at friendship stores, was he demoted to mass-production as a form of punishment similar to Jiang Rong pulling weeds, or something else? There is also the timing. Why would a Mao pot carry his name rather than "Yixing, China"? Was this the equivalent of writing on the blackboard however many times, "I will not forget the class struggle"?
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LeoFox
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Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:57 am

The other possibility they are fakes from the 80s and 90s
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LeoFox
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Fri Apr 09, 2021 12:10 pm


Great find!
Chadrinkincat
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Fri Apr 09, 2021 12:22 pm

1800’s? https://www.woolleyandwallis.co.uk/depa ... w-lot/250/

This claim is easily debunked by looking through the official F1 catalogs from 70-80’s or by having the most basic level of knowledge about seals.

Many of their antique yixing are very clearly Chazhou clay. If you can’t identify two entirely different clays + construction methods.....


No reason to even consider the possibility of that Gu Jingzhou pot being authentic at this point.
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