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Art and adventure in China

I want to take you to Xi’an, the home of the Chinese warriors. The now famous story about  the discovery of the Chinese warriors by Mr Yang in 1974, while drilling for water, is still fascinating to listen to. What Yang’s initial discovery will lead to, as excavations continue, is immense. It is likely that there are some 8,000 soldiers, around 700 horses and more than 100 chariots. These are objects that have resonated around the world as demonstrated by the huge success of the British Museum’s The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army exhibition.

I was in Xi’an to attend a conference organised by the IAC (Geneva) of which I am a member. These conferences are run about every two years somewhere in the world, the 2010 conference is being held in Paris and our film about GWYN HANSSEN PIGOTT, a potters film, will be shown at the Ceramics Centre of La Borne during the conference period.

It is the scale of art events in Asia that I find fascinating.  Around six million visitors attended the exhibitions during the 4th World Ceramic Biennale 2007 at the Icheon World Ceramic Centre in South Korea in which I exhibited a work called Family with egg, which is now in the museum’s permanent collection.

I have exhibited my work in Europe, USA and the Asia Pacific for more than quarter of a century. There is one particular occasion that I want to tell you about, which, to say the least, was extraordinary. We have always had close friendships with Chinese people around the world because much of our business lives have been linked to Chinese people in some way. But during a visit to China in 2008, they took my breath away.

Members of the IAC are asked to make work for an exhibition which is opened during the IAC conference. At the time of the IAC conference in Xi’an I took part in two exhibitions. I want to tell you about the second exhibition which was held at Fule International Ceramic Art Museums, China’s collection of contemporary ceramic art museums at Fuping. I am not going to tell you about the exhibition itself, other than to say my work was called New warriors (now in the museum’s permanent collection), but what happened to us on the day of the opening.

On the day of the exhibition opening we were picked up from the hotel and whisked off to Fuping. We had an escort and police held back the traffic as we sped through numerous intersections. When we arrived at Fule we were whisked down a red carpet to the applause of many hundreds of Chinese people, more the scale of a sports crowd than one for an art exhibition opening. There was a large stage with a welcome banner, then there was music and dancing to tell us about the local culture.

There were police and army present at the event because of the scale of the audience and the need to organise the huge and very well behaved crowd that had gathered. There were speeches by important people from Shaanxi Province.

There was lunch and dinner with great dishes from Xi’an, a firework display and lots of Chinese hospitality and friendship. The museums at Fuping have an international collection of nearly 3,000 works so there was a lot to look at.

We headed back to the hotel that night taking with us memories that will last a lifetime. I left China thinking about the extraordinary skills of the Chinese potters, centuries of knowledge and artistic skills are there for us all to see. Long may these skills be nurtured.

ANDREA HYLANDS is the grand prize winner, Vallauris, France 1992 and gold medal winner, Faenza, Italy 2007.