I started classes at Tsinghua in September of 2010. Because I didn't have a proper work visa the year prior, I had to leave the country every 3 months, and soon after I received acceptance at Tsinghua, I had to leave again, deciding to be indulgent and taking the Trans-Siberian to Mongolia for a month. This, combined with the previous trips I had been forced to take for visa reasons had completely drained my savings and I spent the rest of the summer teaching English, living on less than $5 US a day.
When I was able to change to a study visa and move into the rent-free dorms, a lot of my stressors cleared up. But it wasn't very long after classes started that I realized that the Tsinghua Program wasn't what I was expecting from a university. "University" is a Western concept - indeed, Tsinghua was founded by Americans - which is all fine and dandy for sciences, but what does the modern university system offer to a country and culture that has a 10,000+ year history of ceramic manufacturing? Although the Ceramic Department had awesome space and facilities at school, it was reserved for undergrads only - of which there were about 50; us graduate students were expected to go out to the countryside and do our work in factories of the traditional ceramic manufacturing towns.
Although it was weird and unusual, the department allowed me to use the pottery wheels during my first year, when I was taking required classes and unable to take time to go to the countryside. Not that I knew what that would mean anyways at that point. For the most part, I was left alone, until one day when then-president Hu Jintao, a Tsinghua graduate, was on campus. Suddenly, the department clerk was yelling at everyone in the studio to clean up immediately on the off chance that he decided to come tour the facility. When I didn't start cleaning up immediately, she reiterated that I needed to start, I told her that I needed to finish the piece on the wheel and then I would start - a level of back talk and insubordinance that had to be shut down immediately and she laid into me in front of everyone. Gossip about the incident spread like wild fire around the department and everyone teased me mercilessly about it when they saw me for the next week. President Hu never showed up.
I took my first trip to Jingdezhen in the summer of 2011, accompanying a classmate of mine. It was my first up close experience with the volume of industry that ceramics has in China. We toured all the major tourist points and factories of her contacts as well. Jingdezhen is the Porcelain Capitol of China, the largest and most diverse area of ceramic manufacturing in the world, with a university only devoted to ceramic learning. All around its campus we toured studio after studio of its students, many times the town resembled a war zone to me, with building debris and clay in the roads, because of the rate of buildings going up -construction was everywhere.
I returned from the trip with greater understanding and excitement about what the rest of my grad program would be - I could go anywhere, not just Jingdezhen, but anywhere my advisor had connections and learn directly from the potters practicing in the tradition I was interested in. For the remainder of my schooling, I travelled to 5 different traditional ceramic production towns - Jingdezhen, Yixing, Longquan, Dehua and Yuzhou. Each town had it's own speciality type of ceramics that was its historical industry for hundreds of years:
Jingdezhen: the Porcelain Capitol and home to Qinghuaci and Qingbaiyou. Jingdezhen is located in Jiangxi Province in the south. The terrain is mountainous and climate humid in the summertime. Evidence of the first ceramic production in Jingdezhen area dates to the late Han dynasty, but it really rose to prominence in the Ming and Qing Dynasties.
Yixing: is a small town in Jiangsu Province, not far from Shanghai. By the early Tang, the region was already well-known for tea production, with tea ware being produced since at least the middle Northern Song, until it truly flourish in the 16th century. The clay at Yixing is called zisha, literally purple sand. Its most famous ware is the teapot, called zishahu. Yixing continues in popularity today. Custom teapots created by Yixing masters are a status symbol among Chinese middle and upper classes.
Longquan: located in the mountainous region of Zhejiang province’s southwest, just to the north of Fujian, the Longquan area in covered more than 300 square kilometers with more than 400 specific sites excavated to date. With a location naturally abundant in raw materials, manufacturing began in the 3rd century, serving the demands of local markets until the 10th century.
Dehua: located in the mountains of Fujian province, has had continuous production since the 10th century, but because of its naturally isolated location and lack of waterways for trade, it never reached the heights of popularity that Jingdezhen enjoyed. Indeed, the Ming and Qing emperors never seemed particularly enchanted by Dehua porcelain. Early Dehua porcelain from the Song, is classified as a type of qingbai ware. At the end of the Ming, qinghua manufacturing in Dehua probably started, but its most well-known product was its baici, white porcelain, the main production at Dehua until the Mid-Qing.
Yuzhou: the birthplace of Jun Pottery is where I did the majority of my MFA grad work and where I spent the most time. Also spelled Chun, Jun production was located in on the central plain of Henan, one of the more developed complexes of the northern kilns. Jun started in the Tang era, with pale white-blue glaze dripped or splashed on top of black glaze ware, By the Song dynasty, the application of a black base glaze was eliminated and the oxidization firings were replaced with reduction firings of copper and iron glazes that produced brilliant reds, purples and blues, a breakthrough of technology of the Song era.
I would work for on average about a month at a time, sometimes more, sometimes less. Some places I only visited once, some places more. Most of the time I'd travel alone, having to navigate the trains and long-distance buses myself.
Every place I went was a factory, as is the traditional structure in China, as opposed to the lone individual potter structure we are used to here in America. I would live and work alongside the workers. Because they were factories, they had production schedules, and I had to work around them, given space as they had it, having my work fired as they could fit it in. It went without saying that I wouldn't ask certain questions - glaze recipes, firing schedules etc. cause these were all trade secrets. But I was allowed to watch, which forced me to train my eye to an unimaginable degree.
Yuzhou, where I did my MFA work was my favorite. The owner's daughter and her husband were classmates of mine. She was a 9th generation potter and her father was a National Living Treasure, he had discovered how to fire a traditional Song Era kiln successfully and had a small (by China's standards) factory and kiln museum, where he had built recreations of the iterations of the Jun kilns throughout history, from the Tang Dynasty to modern day.
It was because of my extensive travels I was able the see the cultures that developed and evolved around the different types of ceramics. By the end of my three year MFA program I had spent significant time in each of these areas. It was a great experience, but I was still lacking in the more pragmatic aspects of being a potter - namely having my own aesthetic style and being able to experiment with materials and tools. I started to look towards Japan.