Shanghai Qingu Art Museum
The Shanghai Qingu Art Museum is in the Jiangshangqiao Cultural Park at 2888 Cao'an Highway, Jiading District. The main building is a classical Huizhou-style courtyard complex. It was built from traditional materials, including century-old wall bricks, reclaimed timber and old grey bricks. The new building opened in 2019, and since then the museum has made ceramics its specialty. It also shows calligraphy and painting, holds a porcelain collection, and runs classes in traditional Chinese culture and the arts.
The current exhibition is Kiln Fire and World Heritage, Porcelain Painting and the Spirit of the East: Celebrating Jingdezhen's Inscription on the World Heritage List. It brings together ceramic paintings by well-known Shanghai artists. I was surprised by how much is on display, both porcelain pieces and paintings on porcelain. The vases and jars in the cases don't have the quiet, timeless elegance of antique porcelain. Still, the sheer variety of painting on porcelain was a real eye-opener.
A porcelain plaque painting is a flat ceramic artwork. The design is hand-painted onto a plain porcelain slab with special pigments, then glazed and fired at a high temperature. The craft has a long history that can be traced back to the Qin and Han dynasties, but porcelain plaques in the true sense didn't appear until the mid-Ming. By the mid-Qing, porcelain-making was advancing rapidly, and painters set out to bring Chinese painting from paper and silk onto porcelain. The plaques caught on, became an important commercial ware, and grew steadily more popular.
You often see richly decorative plaques set into porcelain-inlaid screens, whether folding screens, table screens or hanging screens. The styles are endless: blue-and-white, blue-and-white with underglaze red, wucai, su sancai, doucai, famille rose, ink-colour (mocai), qianjiang and more. The subjects range just as widely, from figures, landscapes and flowers to insects, birds, fish among water plants, and auspicious motifs. Almost nothing is off limits. In Jingdezhen, plaque painting dates back to the Ming and Qing dynasties, and ordinary households set the plaques into screens, cabinet doors and bed frames as decoration. In the mid-Qing, folk artists began copying and creating works with the qianjiang technique borrowed from Chinese painting, and this laid the foundation for porcelain plaque painting as we know it.
Unfortunately, the labels give only the title, the artist's name and a short bio. They say nothing about the technique behind each piece, and I was curious whether the plaques were painted over or under the glaze. If it's Jingdezhen qianjiang, it's classic overglaze work. Apart from blue-and-white, I'd guess most porcelain plaques are overglaze. Some artists have cleverly worked pinholes or cracks left by firing flaws into the painting, turning them into the texture of Taihu rocks or mountain ridges, which I thought was really inventive. When I last interviewed Ms. Luo, she told me about her time painting porcelain in a factory in Jingdezhen. Many of the pieces that were painted and then fired ended up as rejects, which shows how unforgiving this craft is.
Overall, most of the plaques here take their subjects from traditional Chinese painting, though a handful deal with contemporary themes. Oddly enough, I found those contemporary pieces more attractive and more harmonious. After thinking it over, I suspect the reason is that the restrained, understated brushwork and spirit of Chinese painting don't sit well on smooth, glossy, translucent white porcelain. If anything, the porcelain takes away some of the painting's depth. That's just my personal take, of course, so have a look at the photos I took and judge for yourself.
Admission to the Qingu Art Museum is free. You just need to register your contact details. Allow about an hour for your visit.
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