Interview with Robert Jacobsen
Curator of Asian Art
1. What are we looking at here?
This is a particularly fine example of Five Dynasties porcelain white ware. It's very high-fired, making it very hard. The design is also particularly lovely in my opinion.
2. The design is subtle. What is it?
It's an impressed floral design that would have been made on a mold, which indicates the mass manufacture capability of the Chinese potters during this period.(1)
3. Did ordinary people have this kind of ware in their homes?
In spite of the fact that they could make many of these with the same design—because it was impressed off a pre-carved mold—it was a ware that was expensive enough to be used primarily by the aristocracy rather than the middle class.
4. Could you describe the technical process in more detail?
Yeah, basically the way this goes—keep in mind if you will a kind of ceramic mound that's been carved; this very floral design has been carved around that. This is hard—it's fired. What the Chinese potters would do is simply take the clay, push it down until it covered the entire mound, and then pare it down on the wheel to the thinness that we see here. They allowed it to dry a bit, and then simply popped it off and would have had this design worked into it.
5. Is it then covered with a white glaze?
Ah, the point about porcelain of course is that you have a white clay to begin with and it's the white of the clay that comes through. The glaze itself is typically clear or nearly that.
6. Is this vessel marked on the bottom to tell us who made it?
This is a period in China, the Five Dynasties and Sung period (10th-12th centuries), that really predates the idea of putting a mark—like an imperial mark or a factory mark even—on the bottom of the vessel. We'll see that begin more in earnest during the 14th and 15th centuries really, but at this time we're still kind of ahead of that thinking and logic. So it's very, very rare that we find marks at all in Five Dynasties or Sung ceramics.(2)