Essays & Media
Essays
評論選輯-
2020
From Medium to Material: Lin Chen-Long's Ceramic Story
This essay divides Lin's career cleanly in two. From 1989 to 1999 he belonged to Taiwan's avant-garde ceramics movement, using clay as a medium for social commentary; The Potter, the Many-Spouted Teapot and the Mute Teapot are each read in turn. After 2000, with the Tsu Yang Kiln wound down, he returned to the material itself along three lines: form (Space · Structure), texture (Earth) and glaze (Space · Glaze). The closing section explains the shift through the idea of studio pottery: living on the mountain, building his own kilns and testing glazes year-round changed the work.
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2019
Blending the Ancient into the Present: The Ceramic Art of Lin Chen-Long
Written for the 2019 solo exhibition at the China Ceramics Museum in Jingdezhen, this essay reads the Earth, Space · Glaze and Space · Structure series together. Pan traces the Earth series back to the cracked mud of a reservoir in the dry season, finds Yuan, Ming and Song glaze traditions side by side on a single flat bottle, and walks through the technical hurdles of the Space · Structure works, whose scaffolding he compares to I. M. Pei's Bank of China tower.
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2018
From the Tsu Yang Kiln to the Jingshan Studio: Lin Chen-Long's Modern Ceramic Sculpture
Bai traces Lin's path from the Han Tang factory at eighteen, through the founding of the Tsu Yang Kiln and his collaborations with over two hundred artists, to his turn after 2000 toward his own work. The essay centres on the Space and Glaze series begun in 2009, built from point, line and plane, and on his "clay-laying" technique that brings celadon, white and copper-red glazes onto modern forms. It closes with his new fascination with kiln-fired stones, the seed of the Stone Texture series.
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2014
Humble as a Valley, Vessels of Delight: Lin Chen-Long
A short piece written for the 2014 exhibition Vessels. Chen follows the mountain road up to the studio, considers the balance of near and far, large and small in Lin's work, and explains how the slender struts of the Space and Glaze pieces are made: a polystyrene core, bamboo twigs for the lines, layer upon layer of grogged slip, and a firing that burns the armature away. She also notes the river stones he had begun firing in the kiln, the beginnings of the Stone Texture series.
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2014
Traces of Clay, Rhythms of Porcelain: Landscapes in a Teapot
Chiang sets Lin's teapots against the rise of tea culture and tea-ware collecting in Taiwan since the 1980s. For someone raised in the tea country of Lugu, a teapot has to pour properly; beauty and use cannot be separated. The essay moves from the politically tinged Mute and Many-Spouted teapots of the early Sounds Beyond the Teapot series to the recent Traces of Clay pots and trays, where rough stone-like clay meets the blue-and-white painting of his wife Huang Yen-Hsueh.
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2013
Drawing on a Hundred Schools, Learning from Nature: On the Ceramic Art of Lin Chen-Long
Liou reads Lin's work in three phases: early figurative modelling that reflected on society, a middle period of cut and torn clay slabs responding to land and environment, and recent work in which blocks and lines explore space and composition. He also recounts the history of the Tsu Yang Kiln as a shared studio for painters and Lin's years with the Apartment No. 2 artists' group. The essay ends with the line quoted on this site's home page.
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2012
Finding Life and Art in the Clay
A newspaper profile that begins on the winding road up the Tucheng hills and ends at the kiln where the family has lived for twenty years. Juan writes about the invitation from the National Museum of History in 2011, a daughter's wedding, the quiet years after 2000 when fewer painters came to the kiln, and how Lin mixes his celadon glaze from stones gathered in the valley, letting their trace iron give the soft green.
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2012
Lin Chen-Long: A Ceramic Career and Its Styles
Writing from a museum researcher's perspective, Sung groups Lin's work into the Rebirth figures, the cracked Earth vessels and the Space and Glaze teapots, and sets each beside Western modern sculpture: Henry Moore, Constructivism, modern architecture. He stresses that Lin works only in pure clay, yet his silk-like celadon surfaces still carry the influence of his teacher Lin Pao-Chia.
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2010
The Qi Baishi of Taiwanese Ceramics: Lin Chen-Long
The fullest biographical account of the set. Hong begins with the banana farm in Lugu, follows Lin into the ceramics factory, where he improved the firing by borrowing the logic of cooking rice, through his glaze studies with Lin Pao-Chia, the founding of the Tsu Yang Kiln and the series that followed. He compares Lin to Qi Baishi: both began as apprentices and both fused the rough with the refined, "in Qi Baishi fine brush and free brush side by side, in Lin Chen-Long stoneware and porcelain in one body."
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2010
Ink Rhythms in Blue and White: Lin Chen-Long's Cobalt Painting
A short study of Lin's use of cobalt blue. Lin Wan-Ju sketches the history of blue-and-white from the Yuan dynasty onward, then shows how Lin treats cobalt as ink, controlling depth with water and borrowing from Zhang Daqian's splashed-ink manner in works such as Pure Land Book and High Mountains, Flowing Water. He also folds the blue into his geometric compositions, as in the Ink Rhythm series and the Earth flat bottle.
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2005
Shaping Teapots, Contemplating Life
An essay devoted to the teapot. Starting from the 1984 teapot exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and the 1992 solo show Sounds Beyond the Teapot, Lin Wan-Ju reads the pots alongside the doggerel verses Lin inscribes on them, from "to make a pot, learn from Yixing, not to imitate but to reflect" to the Many-Spouted Teapot's "how could it not speak out". Each series of pots is tied to the mood of its moment and to his longing for the tea gardens of Lugu.
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2000
Legend in the Mountains: The Tsu Yang Kiln and Its Artists
A magazine feature about the kiln rather than Lin's own work. Tsai describes how he found a firing for every painter who came, a year of trials before Chen Ching-Jung's sombre charcoal manner could be matched in underglaze, high-temperature smoke firing for Hu Ling-Yu's unglazed figures. She also records the cashless profit-sharing arrangements, the rotating credit clubs that kept the kiln going, and the two hundred artists, from Huang Chun-Pi to Hsi Muren, whose painted porcelain fills the storerooms.
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1997
A Ceramist Who Reads Life through the Nature of Clay
Written in 1997, this remains the best key to Lin's work of the 1990s. Shih notes that although Lin made his name through glaze technology, he uses glaze sparingly and prefers to keep the raw character of the clay. More importantly, Lin treats clay as a metaphor: from Firing Clay, Firing Heart to the Rebirth series he reads society through the nature of earth, in a tone of patient persuasion rather than sharp critique. The essay is also the first to set him beside Qi Baishi and Feng Zikai.
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1990
A Witness to People and Land: On Lin Chen-Long's Firing
A short review by the poet Xiang Yang of Lin's first solo exhibition at the end of 1989. Quoting Lin's own verses, "I am a seed of grass, waking from the mud", he reads the human figures on the vessels, standing on their heads, bowed, gazing out, and the recurring trees and forests as a record of the bond between people and land.
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1989
A Ceramist Who Carves the Language of the Mind
The preface to Lin's first solo exhibition in 1989. Sung begins with Lin's standing among Taiwan's painters and calligraphers, for whom the Tsu Yang Kiln was a familiar place, then turns to the poems in Lin's small book Firing Clay, Firing Heart and to The Potter, with its inscription "with no skill but shaping clay, I am ashamed when my clay cracks". He also records the broken Ming-Qing bowls Lin picked up from a roadworks site in Jingdezhen in 1988, which became a small figure gazing up at ancient porcelain.
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Video
影音報導2021Blending the Ancient into the Present: The Ceramic Life of Lin Chen-Long
2018The Art Profile: Interview with Lin Chen-Long