Porcelain Panel Painting
01 · Historical Records
In the early years of the Republic of China, Liang Duishi of Nanchang opened the Lizexuan porcelain shop in the bustling section of Zhongshan Road, engaging artists to paint portraits and famille-rose porcelain to customers' requirements, and thus pioneered the painting of portraits on porcelain. The origins of Nanchang porcelain-plate painting can be traced back to the qianjiang cai (light crimson-brow colour) wares and portrait painting on porcelain of the late Qing and early Republican period. Although photography had by then been introduced, enlarging photographs was expensive and they were inconvenient to preserve for long; painting likenesses on porcelain, which does not fade, accordingly became a commemorative method eagerly sought by officials, gentry and townspeople alike. After Liang Duishi opened his porcelain shop on Zhongshan Road, a group of painters made their living there and worked in the same room, forming a porcelain-painting community peculiar to Nanchang.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
Porcelain-plate painting is a porcelain-painting art popular in Jiangxi Province, with portraiture as its principal subject; it is concentrated mainly in Nanchang, Jingdezhen and Jiujiang. It is based on traditional Chinese painting, ceramic colour painting and Western photography, and achieves a skilful combination of pictorial art and the porcelain-painting craft. Thereafter porcelain shops such as the Zhonghua Porcelain Shop and the Xiaolu Porcelain Portrait Studio appeared one after another in Nanchang, while a group of outstanding portrait painters on porcelain — Liang Xieting, Wu Yueshan, Yang Houxing, Huang Liuzi and others — came to the fore, and Nanchang thereby became a major centre of porcelain-plate painting. Porcelain-plate painting fuses Chinese and Western techniques into one: its brushwork is meticulous, its characterisations vividly true to life, and it bears distinct national characteristics, so it is deeply loved by the broad masses of the people.
Lize Xuan and the portrait porcelain studios
Liang Duishi's Lize Xuan studio opened on Zhongshan Road in the early Republic, pioneering portrait painting on porcelain in Nanchang.
Low-temperature firing of porcelain portraits
After painting, the slab is fired once or twice at low temperature — too hot dulls the colours, too cool lets them flake.
Glaze that will not take ink
Glaze repels ink, the paint sits on the surface and cannot be reworked, so the painter must pre-judge how the colours will fire.
Liang Xieting, Wu Yueshan, Yang Houxing and Huang Liuzi
The group of portrait painters who made Nanchang the centre of the porcelain-panel art after the Lize Xuan era.
Portrait painting between East and West
The form fuses Chinese painting, ceramic colouring and Western photography into finely drawn, lifelike portraiture.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Porcelain-plate painting is centred on Nanchang, with Jingdezhen and Jiujiang as two other important production bases: Jingdezhen undertook the firing of the white porcelain bodies, while Jiujiang, situated at the strategic point of the Yangtze and Poyang Lake water routes, served as a sales port. The porcelain shops of Nanchang were mostly concentrated in the street frontages of Zhongshan Road and Shengli Road; the painters took work piece by piece, first sketching an ink draft on the porcelain plate, then applying colour layer by layer with famille-rose pigments, and finally firing it in the kiln at low temperature once or twice; once out of the kiln it was mounted in a frame. The works fall into three categories: portraits, opera-costume likenesses and landscapes. Portraits are based on photographs of the actual person; opera-costume likenesses mostly imitate the stage appearance of famous actors; landscapes take local subjects such as Mount Lu and the Tengwang Pavilion. Once framed, they were hung in reception halls as birthday and congratulatory gifts.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
The difficulty of painting likenesses on porcelain lies in the fact that the porcelain surface does not absorb ink, while the degree to which the pigments change colour after firing cannot be fully predicted; the painter must rely on experience to judge the final colour, laying down each stroke with finality so that revision is difficult. Portrait painting on porcelain is therefore regarded as the hardest branch of porcelain painting. The use of chemical pigments for porcelain also led Nanchang porcelain-plate painting in the first half of the 20th century to develop a colour method different both from traditional famille rose and from Western watercolour. The Nanchang Art Academy (the Nanchang Art Museum and the Nanchang Porcelain-Plate Painting Research Centre), as the protecting unit, undertakes the collection of works, the documentation of techniques and the training of talent.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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