Ah Xian Porcelain Life Castings











Member

Ah Xian

China Series
1997-1999
Porcelain body-cast, with hand painted underglaze and overglaze decoration

Head 1 (from 'China. China' series) 1997
Porcelain body-cast, with hand painted underglaze blue and overglaze decoration in yellow, orange and green

Xian, Ah For the best part of the Australian Winter The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, has been displaying the fabulous porcelain lifecasting of Ah Xian. These works are disarmingly casual, yet also full of pathos, sentiment and nostalgia. His 40 porcelain busts decorated in traditional Chinese style manages to cleverly emphasize somberness and decoration simultaneously and this is exactly why Xian is one of the most interesting artists to emerge from post-cultural revolution China.

The forty porcelain busts and a sprinkling of pairs of legs are the fruits of Xian’s recent to China. After a decade of self-exposed exile following the Tianamen Square uprising, Xian’s journey back to his homeland has produced incredibly understated and beautiful work, full of quiet complexity and intricate detail. The exhibition includes a selection of proto-type porcelain busts made from body casts created by Xian at the Sydney College of the Arts ceramic studio in 1998.

Spending nine months in China’s historical center of fine porcelain production, Jing De Zhen, Jiangxi Provence, brought Xian in contact with a number of local artisans, all of whom worked collaboratively to produce the works on display. The porcelain body casts were meticulously hand-painted under Xian’s direction: traditional Chinese and Buddhist motifes were drawn to follow the contours of each individual body. Each artisan specialized in a particular skill.

China China,
1999
Porcelain with under glaze blue and overglaze enamel

Xian believes that Asian faces, with their features generally less pronounced than those of Europeans, are more sympathetic to porcelain and more relative to the material, which originated in China during the T'ang dynasty.

Most of the casts were, notably, fired in the kilns of Jingdezhen, the Chinese capital of fine porcelain, with the collaboration of initially incredulous, though technically proficient, local artisans. There are also a few early works from Ah Xian's days at the Sydney College of the Arts ceramic studio. His objects now can sell for as much as $40,000.

Although the Jingdezhen-fired busts are imbued with an added authenticity, Ah Xian says it was the distance provided by his adopted homeland that fired the memories of China essential to making the objects a reality. As a struggling artist in Australia, he has worked as a house painter and kitchenhand, roles that provided him with the time to recall China and its distinct aesthetic.

"If I had not come to Australia I would not have had the idea," he says. "It was only after a few years in Australia that I had a better perspective on China."

Ah Xian says his next challenge is to create full-length, free-standing figures. Porcelain warriors, rather than the terracotta variety, perhaps.

A bust from the China, China series which includes a group of vibrantly colored porcelain busts, and a few pairs of legs, conceived and cast by Ah Xian, that were made in kilns at Jingdezhen and hand-painted under his direction by local artisans.