Every year, the Academy Awards ceremony captures the attention of film-lovers around the world. With all the biggest stars coming together on the same stage, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences creates a luxurious atmosphere for the proceedings. The red carpet is rolled out for the bigwigs, renowned chefs prepare great feasts, and guests clad in designer clothing and precious jewelry fill the hall. Even small gifts for attending VIPs are carefully thought out.

Every year, the Academy sends out 12 "gift seekers" to find appropriate items. The gifts should have value as works of art and as mementos, and should also be original, handmade creations. Though ritzy jewelers and gift merchants offer up their wares every year, the Academy looks for original, non-commercial gifts. Finding the right item is a difficult task.

This copper matte vase, with its mysterious interplay of rose, violet, and green glazes, was fired in a reducing atmosphere at a temperature of 1300°C. (height 35 cm)

Sunset to mist

At the 75th Academy Awards ceremony in 2003, each of the 125 nominees received from the Academy a peacock-blue glazed plate 7.5 inches in diameter which mixed the traditional elegance of Eastern styles with the fluid lines of modern Western ones. The only color used is a brilliant blue, but the artist has artfully made it into stripes of various shades radiating from the center. It gives a sense of imponderable depth, and one only needs to gaze at it for a while to enter a relaxing, Zen-like mindset. Recipients wanting to learn the name of the artist flipped it over only to see a line of Chinese characters reading "Liu Feng-hsiung"--a ceramic artist from Taiwan.

A poet once described Frank Liou's use of purple, blue, and green glaze over a copper bowl as "the setting sun's jades and purples suddenly turning to mist." From the white bottom of a bowl comes a lattice of purple, green, and blue, and toward the rim it takes on the spirit of an ink-wash landscape painting.

Liou's works are all elegant and flowing in form, but no matter whether they're vases, plates, pots, or saucers, they all have layer upon layer of dazzling colored glaze. There are designs made with brilliant red, deep orange, bright yellow and shimmering gold glazes and multiple pastel colors that pull the viewer into another world. It takes a year or two to create each masterwork.

Frank F.S. Liou has been creating ceramic works for over 30 years. He once briefly returned to Taiwan to teach, but never exhibited his works in Taiwan until last year. His works are well regarded in America, Japan, Europe, and China. Two years ago he was invited to display his works for sale at the Mitsukoshi department store in Chiba, Japan--a rare honor for a Taiwanese. He has also received the National Prize for Progress in Science and Technology from China's Ministry of Light Industry. A three-color glaze bowl of his was selected by the Chinese Community Center in USA as one of three gifts to be given to Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Soong Mei-ling, on the occasion of her 105th birthday. In September of this year, he will take up a lecturer position at the National Taiwan University of Arts' industrial design department, and then he plans to head to Europe to put on a touring exhibition of his works.

After being discovered by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Liou spent four months creating the 125 peacock-blue plates. Though he received no payment for them, he has no regrets.

"This is an honor which can't be measured by or replaced with money." To him, putting traditional Asian ceramic art on the world stage is more important than making a buck.

This Brown-tinged Yellow Bowl has a rare soft orange color. Its semi-lustrous iron glaze, which contains bone ash, glitters subtly. It was fired in an oxidizing atmosphere at 1260°C. (29 x 11 cm)

Art from earth and fire

Liou was born in Taichung in 1942, and raised there. He was admitted to his first-choice college, National Taipei Institute of Technology, where he studied civil engineering. At that time he did not realize that he had artistic potential. After graduating, he decided to study abroad. He passed a Japanese language proficiency test and headed for to Japan, but upon his arrival he discovered that the cost of living in Japan was higher than he had expected. He took a job in a glass factory to cover his expenses while deciding on a school.

While learning to make glass, Liou discovered his artistic talent and also met his greatest benefactor--a Mr. Okubo Minoru, the owner of the glass factory. Mr. Okubo taught him all about the process of glassmaking, and passed on his own special techniques. He even put up the money for Liou to go to Kyoto Institute of Technology to study. Liou was unable to find a course on glassmaking so he took up a different medium--ceramics.

"When I began to get involved with ceramics, I discovered it's a completely different world from glassmaking. Making ceramics pieces takes more time and labor, but it's more of a challenge," says Liou.

Though he had no previous experience with ceramics, he discovered quickly that he had the knack for it. It wasn't that he was particularly clever, but that his previous training in civil engineering had given him a feel for the nature of the clay and the fire which gave him keen insight into what went wrong with his failed attempts.

For example, when pieces in the kiln heat or dry too quickly, they will crack due to internal temperature differences. If the kiln is too hot or the piece is not well designed, the piece risks collapsing. If a piece becomes misshaped during firing, it is likely due to the clay being too dry or the temperature being uneven. Such key points of creating ceramics are the basics of civil engineering.

This Iridescent Copper Bowl was reduction fired in a copper kiln at 1300°C. It has a subtle beauty like "the setting sun's jades and purples suddenly turning to mist." (22 x 8 cm)

A blend of art and science

After studying in Japan for a while, he began to discover the world of traditional pottery. Though he had the basic technical knowledge and the manual skill, he found it difficult to enter the closed, conservative world of traditional Japanese ceramic arts.

"If you want to be accepted by the Japanese ceramics world, you've got to first master the styles of the greats, and then create your own style. It's a hard path to follow." Looking to bring ceramics to the next level, Liou entered a graduate-level course in industrial ceramics in the University of Illinois. He hoped the technical knowledge would allow him to make a breakthrough in the traditional craft.

"A successful ceramicist must be able not only to command the clay and the fire, but also to put his own emotion and spirit into the work." Liou says that just to come up with a unique shape, one would have to consult hundreds of books on ceramics, and developing a glaze is even more difficult. He estimates it would take an inexperienced person 20 years to come up with one, as their formulas are highly complex and the slightest impurity will make the color change. A ceramicist must repeatedly experiment with formulas, temperatures, and creating "variation glazes" and "crystal glazes" before the desired effect can be achieved.

Liou's specialty is using a technique called "reduction firing," in which oxidized iron is added to the glaze and during firing ferric iron is "reduced" to ferrous iron. This method is challenging, as it creates a lack of oxygen in the kiln that has unpredictable effects, but it took Liou little more than a single year to create a new glaze.

As a visiting lecturer at Taiwan National University of the Arts in Panchiao, Liu Feng-hsiung will be beginning a new chapter of his life in the land of his birth.

Ceramics 101

In lectures and classes, Liou often begins with a crash course in the basics of ceramics. "Do you know how to differentiate between earthenware and porcelain? Is all porcelain white?" Most in the audience don't know how to answer. Actually, porcelain represents the "evolution" of earthenware. Most earthenware pieces are minimalistic and basic in form. They can be glazed or unglazed. Porcelain pieces are more graceful and delicate in form, and always glazed. A main difference between the two is their ability to absorb water: A kilogram of earthenware placed in water for one minute will increase in weight by 10-20%, while porcelain will barely absorb any water at all and only gain 0.005% of its weight.

Definitions of porcelains vary by country, however. To Europeans, only white and translucent materials can be referred to as porcelain. In China, however, a variety of types and colors may be called porcelain, on the condition that they do not absorb water.

"Many people don't realize it, but only ceramics fired at high temperatures will have muted colors. If it's got vibrant colors, it was fired at a low temperature." But loud colors attract the eye, and many people buy brightly hued plates for serving food. They don't know that ceramics fired at low temperatures are unstable and will release toxins when exposed to heat. Whether with ceramics students, new friends, or lecture audiences, Liou never tires of sharing his knowledge of his art as he believes that to appreciate ceramics one must first learn about the materials.

This Rustic Marigold Large Bowl is an example of traditional Chinese high-temperature (1260°C), glazed porcelain. The surface seems to be covered with countless golden crystals. (23.5 x 7.5 cm)

Arita inspiration

While studying and working in the US, Liou found that though modern ceramic works were plentiful there, they could only be described as artworks which use ceramics as a medium of expression rather than ceramic art. Also, individual creativity is emphasized over the carrying on of tradition. In Japan, however, he could see how marketing and innovation were changing traditional ceramic arts and reviving them.

He cites the example of Kyushu's Arita ware, also called Imari ware, which has a history stretching back 400 years to the age of Toyotomi Hide-yoshi. Though the exacting traditional method is currently in its 14th generation of disciples, it is still followed rigorously.

The graceful and resonant Arita ware only uses four basic colors--red, yellow, green, and dark blue--but each generation develops a style of its own. The first generation painted landscapes, the second generation took up painting birds and flowers, later generations moved on to making painted human forms, and the current generation has developed complex patterns. Tradition does not have to mean stagnancy.

"Though Chinese ceramics are known throughout the world, unfortunately most artists today are stuck imitating old styles and recreating antiques," Liou laments. Spots such as Jingdezhen and Longquan are world famous for their ceramics traditions, but their works are just not modern enough in form or delicate enough in their colors, and they have lost their prestige. Now works from these places are thought of as mere "local specialties" or souvenirs for tourists.

Liou says that after China's Cultural Revolution ended in 1978, artists began to try to develop ways to revive traditions. In recent years, "ceramics towns" and university ceramics departments have been set up. Now the Chinese are investigating international trends, such as how the Japanese set up ceramics laboratories and how the Europeans market their pottery.

The delicate color and pattern of this Yellow Crackle Bowl lend it a sumptuous beauty. It was fired at 1100°C in an oxidizing atmosphere, using a "soft" (low-temperature) frit glaze. (21 x 8 cm)

Where are the young masters?

In comparison, Taiwan is not doing very well, Liou says. "We can only find a way through tradition and the mix of Eastern and Western cultures, but as our roots are not deep enough it's hard to develop a unique style." He recalls that Taiwanese ceramics thrived for a time in the 1970s, but that was only due to the remaining influence of the Japanese from the colonial period.

Later, ceramic arts were supplanted by the commercial production of household goods for export such as tableware, reproduction antiques, Western-style figurines, and tiles. In the late 1990s, a regional economy developed, and the Taiwanese ceramics industry found itself unable to compete. Many companies invested in factories in Southeast Asia and China, and focused on the production of gift items for export. It seems that a Taiwanese ceramics renaissance is not yet in the cards.

"There are one or two artists in Yingko who are pretty good, but their works don't sell at a high enough price so they don't have the motivation to compete internationally." Liou has observed that modern ceramics has entered a new stage of mixing art and science, but Taiwanese ceramicists haven't caught on yet. Lacking the scientific knowledge, they merely follow the techniques and formulas taught by their teachers, and though those techniques may be the results of thousands of experiments they are not necessarily the best. Students still need to experience the entire process of creating.

"Taiwanese ceramicists are creative, but they lack the practical experience so it's hard for them to make breakthroughs." Liou feels that Taiwan's art schools imitate modern American ceramics, but due to historical and cultural factors America has yet to develop a ceramics tradition. American artists merely experiment with forms and use the same glazes over and over. It's hard for them to stand up to a long, rich tradition such as Japan's.

"There are no young masters around here." Liou says that ceramics is a long, difficult road to follow, because an artist must not only learn the basic science of the craft and become familiar with the techniques of the greats, but then on top of that create an individual style. But the most important factor is persistence, because it takes a lot of experimentation and hard work to create a new style, and you never know what the final outcome will be.

"If I could live to 100, I would surely be able to leave behind more dazzling and lasting works." Though Liou has already created more than ten of his own glazes, he still resembles a determined runner on his own path, determined to make it to the artistic finish line.

In this Raindrop Bowl, the glaze contains copper particles that form raindrop-shaped purple crystals in the surface of the glaze. It was fired in a reducing atmosphere at 1300°C. (18 x 11 cm)

Though only five centimeters tall, this copper blue-glaze plate has extraordinary presence. It is one of the Peacock Blue Plates that delighted VIPs attending the Academy Award in 2003. (19 x 5 cm)

Ceramic artist Liu Feng-hsiung, a long-time US resident, is this year returning to teach in Taiwan, to share with his compatriots the unique knowledge of colored glazes that he has gained through many years' research.

This Pine Cone Vase gets its effect from the layering of two different types of iron-rich glazes. This is the same technique as Japanese Namako glaze. It was reduction fired at 1260°C. (height 28 cm)