Xu Xiutang
Mastery, Signature Works & Repertoire
Male, Han, born in December 1937 in Yixing City, Jiangsu Province. A national representative bearer of Yixing zisha pottery-making technique, a fourth-batch national intangible cultural heritage project. A master of Chinese arts and crafts. Born into the Shushan pottery family, in 1954 he studied painting and pottery carving under Ren Ganting, a renowned zisha carving master. In 1958 he attended the Chinese Folk Sculpture Research Class and afterwards studied ceramic sculpture under Zhang Jinghu of the Clay Figure Zhang lineage; in 1995 he founded Changle Pottery Village, which has become a practice base for zisha culture for several institutions. Over more than sixty years in the craft he founded his own school of ceramic sculpture, established a distinct lineage of teapots, upheld rigorous principles in pottery carving and brought a deep accumulation in painting and calligraphy to fruition; representative works such as Gong Chun and Penglai have been collected by major museums at home and abroad. He has also written assiduously in order to transmit zisha culture and has published a substantial body of work, among which Zhongguo Zisha (Chinese Zisha) has become a classic textbook on the subject.
Honors & Recognition
He has trained a large number of disciples in zisha ceramic sculpture, pottery carving and teapot making.
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。