The Vase Project celebrates the art of copying and the role of the usually anonymous artists in Jingdezhen. Working with 101 blank vases, the curators created a visual chain letter selecting factory workers and painters from independent workshops around the city to copy and hand-paint a blue-and-white contemporary landscape based on their original sketch of the smoke stacks of Jingdezhen. The project took place sequentially over a two year period: the first factory artist received the sketch which he/she copied on a blank vessel which was then fired and passed on to the next artist to copy on a new identical blank vase and so on. This exhibition reveals that even when working by rote or mimetically the anonymous artist’s individual brushstrokes contribute to a singular one-off aesthetic within mass-production.
Curated by Barbara Diduk, Charles A. Dana, Professor of Art at Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in collaboration with Zhao Yu, Assistant Professor at the Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China.
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