Yixing Effect: Echoes of the Chinese Scholar

by Marvin Sweet

Hardcover: 206 pages
Publisher: Foreign Language Press (2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 7-119-04277-7
Dimensions: 11.5" x 8.1" x 0.8"
Shipping Weight: 2.59 lbs.

"Through the second half of the twentieth century, as American ceramics developed its own voice—truly eclectic and wildly diverse, drawing from all world ceramic traditions—one of the traditions that American artists found particularly congenial was that of Yixing, China. Yixing is one of three principal Chinese pottery centers who artisans have, for hundreds of years, produced tea ware of surpassing beauty, ingenuity, and grace. The very first teapot, in fact, was designed in Yixing."

"As is their custom, contemporary American artists have not so much imitated or copied the Yixing pots, but rather have drawn inspiration from them, finding in these diminutive works a kindred concern for the natural world, refined craftsmanship, and objects that are both utilitarian and—as Richard Notkin puts it—'powerful works of art.'

Like the impact of twentieth-century translations of Chinese and Japanese poems by Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough, and Arthur Waley on modern American poetic practice, Asian ceramics in general have had a profound effect on artists in the West. But as Marvin Sweet (together with essayist William Sargent, an authority on Asian export art) clearly demonstrate in this marvelous book, Yixing are has had a special resonance for Western ceramists.

"With The Yixing Effect: Echoes of the Chinese Scholar, the authors have produced an exemplary work of scholarship, one that will surely serve as the definitive source on its subject for many years to come."—Rick Newby