GLASS TIGER

This article published in “Glass Quarterly” in 2006, was the first to recognize the emergence of Chinese Studio glass as a distinct cultural phenomenon. It is due to be re-published in an updated form in November 2008. In this version some statistics have been updated to reflect changes since 2006.

It is impossible to work as a curator, artist, designer, or dealer and not be aware of Chinese glass. Whether one marvels at the brilliance of multilayered, cameo-carved pieces from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), or at the handmade decorative vessels that sell for less than the cost of fifteen minutes of hot shop time in the U.S. or Europe, Chinese glass evokes a strong response. China’s legacy of exquisite workmanship coexists with a contemporary reputation for staggeringly low prices (and wages) in China - this makes the studio glass community curious, even a bit nervous, about what is evolving there.

As recently as fifteen years ago, information about modern glass making in China remained sparse. Specialist institutions such as the Corning Museum of Glass relied on scraps of news passed on by itinerant industrial expert Willy Andersson, who periodically sent updates from his visit to glass factories in Asia, Central Europe, and Latin America. An excerpt from Andersson’s 1990 notes reads,

Dalian is one of the larger glass factories [for] handmade manufacturing in China….1,200 glassblowers and 2,700 employees total…144 pots of 300lbs. of glass and a number of very small pots for colours. Glassblowing is in the German upright blocking system…60% of the glassblowers are women and most of the cutters are women. The largest buyer at the moment is a Swedish trading company. Next door to Dalian Glass is a vacuum flask factory….1,600 workers and three continuous tanks…export to Eastern Europe and U.S.S.R.

Today a Google search of “Chinese Glass” offers over 13million web references – mainly citations for commercial producers and agents of industrial materials, inexpensive tableware, and decorative items. An estimated 50 percent of the world’s architectural glazing and most of the tableware marketed by American retailing giants come from China. It is said that the coal-rich Shangxi province northwest of Beijing is the site of approximately 1,000 glass plants, including sixteen enterprises employing more than 10,000 workers.

With such a rich history and rapidly expanding contemporary industry, the persistent question remains: Is there studio glass in China? It is now possible to answer in the affirmative. Although it is in its infancy, glass art is being nurtured by university programs that will transform the scope and quality of Chinese production in the coming years.

At the June 2005 Glass Art Society conference in Australia, artist Sunny Wang presented a detailed overview of Studio Glass in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and most intriguingly, mainland China. I learned more four months later upon travelling to Taiwan and China to give a series of lectures at the invitation of the Tittot Glass Company. Through Tittot I had already been in touch with Professor Wang Jian Zhong, head of the glass program at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and written a brief foreword for his weighty publication The Contemporary Glass Art of the World - the first book on contemporary art in glass published in the People’s Republic of China.

There are two graduate-level Studio Glass programs in China - in the College of Fine Arts at Shanghai University and in the Academy of Arts and Design at Tsinghua University. A third program for undergraduate study only, has recently opened at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. To my surprise, three of the university faculty members, whom I met had studied glass at the School of Art and Design at the University of Wolverhampton in England. Curiosity about that unexpected connection led me to well-known British artist Keith Cummings, who taught all three as graduate students, and then to Andrew Brewerton, former Dean of Art & Design and head of Wolverhampton’s glass program, who initiated the China-United Kingdom link.

In January of 1996 Brewerton and his colleague Ida Wong were charged with exploring potential long-term partnerships between their college and Chinese educational institutions. A meeting with the like-minded Professor Wang Dawei was the catalyst for a studio glass project at Shanghai University, with expertise on setting up the studio and course of study to be provided by Wolverhampton. In 1998, Shanghai staff member Zhuang Xiaowei, a lecturer in painting and design and a technical researcher with an interest in materials science, was sent to England for training. Zhuang graduated with an MA in Glass from the University of Wolverhampton in 2000. Shortly thereafter, he returned to Shanghai University and began recruiting students for the new glass department that he now headed. Seven students are currently enrolled in the Shanghai program; nine others have graduated and are working as teachers and designers.

Professor Zhuang is also the force behind Chinese Art Glass, published under the auspices of the China Architectural and Industrial Glass Association. The first (and, so far, only) issue of the magazine seems to have been inspired by the German periodical Neues Glas. Another of Shanghai University’s projects is the translation into Chinese of various glass-related texts such as Charles Bray’s Dictionary of Glass and one of Keith Cumming’s books on kiln-forming. There are important ties between Shanghai University / and the Chinese commercial glass industry, which contributes economic support, materials, and access to facilities for blowing and batch melting for casting cullet. In exchange, Professor Zhuang acts as a consultant for seven companies.

The founder of the glass program at Tsinghua University is Wang Jian Zhong, a prominent ceramist who began researching the possibilities of glass in 1998. In 2000, again with the help of the University of Wolverhampton, Tsinghua organised both four-year undergraduate and three-year graduate programs in glass, and dedicated a small building in central Beijing to various forms of kiln-working. The department’s other two staff members, studio-head Guan Donghai and Liyu Liu, both graduated in 2003 with advanced degrees in glass from the University of Wolverhampton.

For a number of reasons, not the least being a shortage of electricity in China, all three of the existing programs focus on kiln-work instead of energy-intensive glassblowing. There are no known studio hot shops in China, however, that situation is about to change. Tsinghua University, with an expansive and lush landscape reminiscent of an Ivy League campus, has just opened an impressive state of the art facility for its Academy of Arts and Design. A new studio for glassblowing as well as casting and kiln-work is being designed for the building; it will include a furnace, three benches, three glory holes, two annealing ovens, pipe warmers, thirteen kilns and coldworking equipment. Until the new blowing facility is up and running in 2009, students will continue to practice glassblowing during periodic field trips with Professor Guan to factories in the city of Dalian.

New Chinese glass is not developing in isolation. The exhibition “New Glass Economy, Contemporary British Glass from the University of Wolverhampton” and a series of related lectures were presented in a gallery of the new Shanghai Public Library in 1999. Over 18,000 visitors were attracted to the venue during the ten day run and a major sculpture commission by Wolverhampton alumnus Colin Reid was gifted to the library. In 2001 the American gallery Habatat, in collaboration with the Liuli Gongfang Company, presented “International Glass” at the Shanghai Fine Arts Museum and the Millennium Museum in Beijing. One of the exhibiting artists, Irene Frolic from Toronto, met Tsinghua staff member Dai Shu Feng and began a relationship with the school that continued after Dai’s departure from the faculty. Frolic has since lectured in Beijing and presented, with fellow Canadian Lou Lynn, a two day kiln-casting workshop. Frolic and Lynn also provided assistance to Professor Wang in the preparation of his book.

Other contacts with foreign artists since 2000 include visits by Sunny Wang of Taiwan and Michael Rogers from the United States. The aforementioned British artist Colin Reid and Steve Weinberg from Providence, Rhode Island, have given workshops, and there are plans for William Carlson, Steve Klein, Catharine Newell, and David Reekie to instruct in 2006. The artistic directors of two important pâte de verre production companies, Hsia Chun (Heinrich) Wang of Tittot and Hui Shan (Loretta) Yang of Liuli Gongfang, have each taught at Tsinghua and Shanghai. Both of their Taiwan-based firms operate factories in the Shanghai area.

What does the new Chinese work look like? Hands-on-glassblowing skills are still at a basic level in the universities and the expertise of professional artisans is often necessary to execute furnace work. With brilliant traditions in bronze and clay and their related moldmaking technologies, it is not surprising that cast glass (often made in cire perdue molds) is a preferred technique.

Some Chinese artists voice ideas about glass that sound (to Western ears) romantic and unduly fascinated with the perceived metaphysical qualities of the material. Andrew Brewerton has astutely observed, however, that analogies with Taoist aesthetics may be found in the transparency of glass as the embodiment of “nothingness” and as the presence of a coexistent solid and void. Keith Cummings encouraged his Chinese students to draw from their rich heritage ; nevertheless, a degree of foreign influence is evident and no doubt unavoidable in even the most sophisticated Chinese work. Cumming’s former student, Guan Donghai, manages to successfully balance the shifting realms; his sandcast sculptures based on massive city gates impart a Chinese feeling without yielding to cliché.

As everyone from glassmakers to film producers is painfully aware, intellectual property rights and copyright laws are widely disregarded in China, as they are in many other countries. The practice is not confined to expropriating the ideas of foreigners; native innovators are equally victimized. A lenient attitude toward replication is a particular cause for alarm when it comes to education. Students everywhere are inclined, and sometimes encouraged, to emulate other work as a tool in finding their own ways, nevertheless, copying is a teaching exercise that is meant to be short-lived.

Also muddying the waters of originality and creativity is the temptation to simply translate mythological and religious iconography or the historic forms of bronze and porcelain into glass. This is a long established and respected practice in the decorative arts of more than a few cultures; nevertheless, it becomes an issue in the arena of contemporary sculpture. When looking through the catalogue of “Still Rainbow”, presented in 2003 as “the first Chinese glass art exhibition”, the reader is confronted by objects of genuine personal expression interspersed within greater numbers “inspired” by glassmakers Dale Chihuly and Dominick Labino, to name a few, as well as duplicators of the Art Nouveau panels Alphonse Mucha and even Kitschy Italian clowns. Chinese educators are keenly aware of the problem and attempt to counteract it by teaching students to take pride in carving out their own identities.

When speaking with the members of China’s glass community one feels a degree of excitement and enthusiasm that is waning in other studio glass locales. There is also a sense of urgency - to catch up and to grow - not only technically, but also philosophically. Familiar topics are already debated: Should pedagogical focus be in commercial success or artistic technique, and what is the difference between them? Is it necessary for the same person who designs a work to also fabricate it? Should the new glass association under construction by the three schools view itself as part of the official academy and the “culture and leisure industry” or should it be completely independent and driven only by the wishes of an artist-centred membership?

While many aspects of the Chinese developments have Western parallels, artists and educators - like all citizens of the People’s Republic of China - like an environment changing at a faster rate than anywhere else on the planet, where the tenets of Mao Zedong somehow coincide with galloping capitalism on a mammoth scale. Explosive growth is the mode everywhere, and this applies to studio glass. Six more Chinese universities are interested in establishing platforms for glass and the city of Shanghai will open a new glass museum when it hosts the 2010 World Expo. Artists and educators are hungry for publications, technical information, and opportunities. Graduates of Shanghai and Tsinghua Universities continue to engage the Post Graduate MA and research based PhD programmes headed by Stuart Garfoot at the School of Art & Design, University of Wolverhampton. And there are hopes that future exchanges and scholarships will open pathways to more foreign educational venues, including the Pilchuck Glass School.

With the university glass programs still in their infancy, the impact of Chinese studio glass is still years from making an international impact. Whether it will offer worthwhile approaches to the field remains to be seen, but one thing is for certain: the enthusiastic embrace of studio glass by artists and universities, along with the rapid pace of change in the most populous of countries, is sure to bring new energy, new ideas, and, indeed many new collectors to the field in years to come.


Susanne K.Frantz is the former curator of Twentieth-Century Glass, the Corning Museum of Glass.

Glass Tiger pdf

FOREWORD
Professor Tim Collins: Foreword

ESSAYS
Professor Andrew Brewerton: Glass Routes
Professor Keith Cummings: Continuity and Change in Glass History
Stuart Garfoot: The Glass Baton, A Personal Overview
Susanne Frantz: Glass Tiger
Associate Professor Xiaowei Zhuang: The Development of Studio Glass at Shanghai University
Associate Professor Guan Donghai: Creating With Glass
Dr Kristina Niedderer: Developing Glass Practice Through Creative Research
Xue Lu (Shelly): Growing With the Soil of China

Stuart Garfoot: Introduction to Creative Pathway
David Reekie: Creative Pathway 1
Katy Holford: Creative Pathway 2