Research Process - Visit to Lightbox, The Ceramic Heritage of Zibo exhibition (04 Dec 2011)

I was informed about an exhibition of Chinese Ceramics from Zibo, Shandong at the Lightbox Gallery in Woking, Surrey. I live about five minutes from this gallery so it is good to see a relevant exhibition of cultural art that can provide useful inspiration for my studies.

The use by the curator of the term 'Cultural Crossover' charted intercultural trade between China and the west over 2000 years.

I searched for the term 'Cultural Crossover' and see that is used to apply to artists who take inspiration from other cultures, and merge the influences into their own work. They can take the same objects and motifs and bring their own meaning to them.
Example artist cross cultural works are shown here:
http://tiscoart.blogspot.com/2011/03/arnaud-pages-free-figuration-kid.html

The interesting thing about this poster was that the designer chose to show both pattern and typograhpy together. This is usually kept separate than combined in most graphic design, so although this might appear busy to some, the effects appears to look quite distintive and interesting to view. Some of the letterforms at the top are semi-transparent and this tends to merge the lettering that provide sufficient contrast.



Various organisations were linked with the exhibition - Chinese Embassy London, British Embassy China, Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, The British Museum, The Zibo Ceramics Museum and Woking Chinese Association.



As photography of the actual ceramics was prohibited, I took photos of the text about exhibition, and picked up a free guide for the exhibition.There were background texts to give context to characters and writing. One piece stated that a character could have up to 64 strokes. I am curious as to what a 64-stroke character looks like!

Examples of the ceramics can be seen here.
http://www.chinatravelguide.com/ctgwiki/Chinese_Ceramic_Museum_of_Zibo

For me the most memorable items were pieces of ceramics that were made of 'New materials' such as bubbled ceramics, fired metallic ceramic, and ceramics with writing scriptures on fine porcelain that took the maker one year to make.

Alot of the collection at the Woking Lightbox is part of the Ingram Collection, loaned to the Lightbox by Chris Ingram, a local businessmen, who is regarded as the inventor of the modern media agency and owner of Woking Football club. Chris Ingram has a company called Ingram Enterprise which helps to build small and medium size enterprises.
http://www.ingramenterprise.com/

It was interesting that maybe in reference to Ingram's football connection and the gallery, that there were some ceramic figure scupltures playing a game of ancient 'Cuju', which was claimed to be the forerunner to modern football. Whether the game of 'Football' was formed first of all in Greece or China is actually questionable, or perhaps in both places, but some sources claim that Cuju developed into modern football in Europe around the time of the Tang dynasty, around 700-800 AD.