Liu Lizhong
Lineage & School of Heritage
Liu Lizhong was born into a family of ceramic makers and is the fourth-generation inheritor of the family.
Mastery, Signature Works & Repertoire
Liu Lizhong, a male of Han ethnicity, was born in 1944 in Handan, Hebei. He is a national representative bearer of Cizhou Yao Firing Craftsmanship, a first-batch national intangible cultural heritage project, a Master of Chinese Arts and Crafts, and the director of the Cizhou Kiln Site Museum. In order to improve his skill, he drew widely on the strengths of others and also became a disciple of Wei Hongbin, a renowned Cizhou kiln craftsman. For more than forty years of artistic practice, he has devoted himself to the rescue and research of traditional techniques. Through his collation and excavation work, all 72 working procedures of traditional Cizhou kiln firing have been completely preserved and continued, and more than twenty decorative techniques that had been lost were restored, such as colored-slip incised decoration, pearl-ground decoration and the red-green polychrome process. Over the years he has discovered nine ancient Cizhou kiln sites and collected more than ten thousand physical specimens and several thousand plates of ancient pottery designs. Every stage of Cizhou kiln firing, from the selection of raw materials and the preparation of clay through the forming of bodies, the decoration and the firing, is marked by a rich and distinctive local character, with many special processing methods that depend on transmission from master to apprentice by hand and mouth; Liu Lizhong has accordingly devoted constant effort to taking on apprentices and passing on his art. His representative works include the Fish-and-Algae Tea Bowl, the Cizhou Kiln Song Imitation Series and the White-Slip Black-Painted Meiping Vase.
References & Archival Sources
Representative Items of This Bearer
Profile
This static English edition is rendered at the edge for search engines, AI crawlers and readers without JavaScript. Compiled from official national representative bearer archival records, organized by topic and translated into English. 阅读中文版。