[Movers & Shakers] He Thought He'd Stay 4 Weeks. The Porcelain City Kept Him

Kaspar Ludwig went to Jingdezhen with a plan: one month, 20 pieces, then on to Beijing and Yunnan. The month he'd budgeted came and went, and he just kept working. Ten weeks later, he left having made 54 ceramic works. The rest of the itinerary went unused.

The Swiss sculptor grew up in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland before spending several formative years in Carrara, the Tuscan city where marble has been quarried since antiquity and where, as he puts it, every second doorway is a craftsman's workshop.

Jingdezhen has been pulling artisans in for over a thousand years – the city that once supplied imperial courts with fine ceramics, and gave the world the word "china" in the first place. It had the same workshop culture as Carrara, just built from clay instead of stone. Kaspar first came across the city while researching ceramic residencies online. The name kept appearing until he applied for one.

CNS caught up with him recently in Shanghai – decompressing, still slightly studio-dazed, and already counting down to when he can go back.

CNS: What drew you to Jingdezhen?

Kaspar: China had been this huge missing chapter for me in Asia – it's almost like a totally different entity, and I was really interested in going. About a year and a half ago I started doing research, watching stuff about ceramics, and the name Jingdezhen just kept popping out so many times. I was like, what is this, where is this? So I found this town and this ancient tradition and I got really, really fascinated by the history.

What really convinced me to go was hearing from artists that a lot of people who were living in Beijing or Shanghai – creative people, designers – during the pandemic, a lot of them moved there. You can have a huge studio for not so much money; materials are cheap; there's a huge knowledge of handcrafts. And so in a way, like, at least if you have to shut yourself in somewhere, you're in a place where your creativity can go big. I got really fascinated by this idea.

CNS: You mean, you arrived there without knowing anyone? What was that like?

Kaspar: Yeah, and the place that hosted me, Huaqianwu Ceramic Art Studio, they didn't even have a website! I could not even look them up to see what they were doing. I couldn't find them anywhere. But I trusted the residency people (who connected me with them).

And then I arrived, and it was incredible – better than every expectation I had. Beautiful studio, beautiful people. The two who run it are Si Feng and Fang Fang – Si Feng is a Jingdezhen local, and Fang Fang moved there to study and stayed. They're younger than people probably picture when they imagine a Jingdezhen master. We had some communication problems at the beginning. Fang Fang speaks English really well – Si Feng, not so much when I arrived. But because we really liked each other from the beginning, the work attitude, too – that didn't matter.

CNS: Were you expecting it to feel like the old-master, single-craftsman image people tend to have of Jingdezhen?

Kaspar: I came kind of with an open heart and free of expectations. But I have to say, I had no idea the tradition was this alive, this massive. I was thinking, okay, there are some factories for sure, some smaller studios; I know younger artists and designers are working there. I did not know how much the 1,000-year tradition is still alive, how full this place is of old shifus still doing their thing and keeping the traditional techniques going.

It actually reminded me of Carrara, where I did my bachelor's and lived for eight years – it's a similar thing, where every second door is actually a workshop of a shifu doing something, and every tiny corner has its own mysteries going on. Jingdezhen had that same texture. Just bigger. So much bigger.

CNS: What did a typical day look like once you got into it?

Kaspar: Waking up, going to the studio, staying in the studio until midnight or sometimes later, going back home, sleeping, and back to the studio. I explored a little at the beginning – went to Taoxichuan, which has become this really fancy area in the center of Jingdezhen, old factories all converted, galleries, a street market, really beautiful actually, but also not anymore what it once was. So, I explored a bit at the start and then I ended up in the studio.

I wanted to do around 20 pieces. I did 54. I had an institutional show in Switzerland booked for October, so I came with a quite strong focus. I knew what I wanted to do, and then I just kept going. Overproducing, basically. I knew it, and I kept doing it anyway.

CNS: What was the community like there?

Kaspar: Really great – and that was one of the two main reasons I ended up staying as long as I did. It's a whole area full of other studios and other artists, a nice circulation of people going around and coming through. And Si Feng, the boss of the studio – he was really my master there; I learned so much from him in these two months – he's someone with such a huge knowledge that a lot of people come to him to resolve things.

Even people who are like double our age, who should almost be retired, come to ask him how to deal with technical problems. He's a full-on ceramic nerd in the best sense. And it's a beautiful community around that. I actually met another artist there who turned out to be living in Zurich. I'm often in Zurich, and we have friends in common – and it's just absurd that we meet for the first time in Jingdezhen.

And the local people, they are so nice. Very warm. But you know, many people, especially older men, they kept giving me cigarettes, and I was all the time smoking because they offered them to you and you can't say no.

CNS: Were you working in traditional styles, or putting your own spin on things?

Kaspar: Both, all the time – I'm always a bit playing around with this in my practice. I come from handcrafts, from stone, so I have a huge respect for a tradition like this. But at the same time I'm always playing a bit. So what I did was keep the traditional forms of the pots, but instead of handles I made ears.

There's this Singaporean guy who has been living there for around 15 years, has his own ceramics school – and he's just an incredible potter. He was throwing the base shapes for me and I was taking what he made and modifying them, glazing them.

CNS: What's something you learned in Jingdezhen that you couldn't have learned anywhere else?

Kaspar: For me, this was quite crazy in a really simple, simplistic way. In Europe, glazing is like, super specific – you are at a temperature like exactly 1,265 degrees and you have to fire it to this exact temperature. In Jingdezhen, there's high temp and low temp, and that's it. And at the beginning I was a bit like, what? I kept asking Si Feng, what are we actually doing here?

And he was just like, "yeah, it's low temp, don't worry about it." And low temp has a range of like a hundred degrees – you are melting glass at these temperatures, it changes a lot. But they have figured it out, and they make it much more stable, much easier than how we do it back home. I think there are less rules, but in a way it's more intuitive, because people have a much, much bigger knowledge.

Like, a person that has spent three or five years in Jingdezhen and still considers themselves a beginner already knows more than a lot of ceramicists in Europe. I'd always been a purist before this – I almost never glazed anything. I liked keeping the raw material. Here it just started to feel natural.

CNS: What was the hardest thing to unlearn?

Kaspar: Again, for me, it goes back to simplifying. Like when I decided in the middle of the process that I was going to glaze my work, I had to really learn to accept that it's actually much simpler than how we are doing it in Europe. And also, I made two real mistakes at the beginning where Si Feng told me from the start to do it in a certain way, and I was like, ah, no, but I want to do it like this.

I modeled the ears for the big jars connected together as one single object, because I liked them that way – they're two ears side by side, and they look a bit like a butterfly. He told me, "Don't do that, make two separate things." And I was, "No, no, it's beautiful, I'm going to use it."

And then when we made the lip cast, I realized, oh, this was a terrible, terrible choice. Huge, huge problems. I told him, from now on, when you tell me something about ceramics, I will not even ask what your thinking is behind it. I will just shut up and listen to you. That took about two weeks to learn.

CNS: Looking back, what surprised you most about Jingdezhen?

Kaspar: Watching the big-scale throwing – this is something that nobody does in Europe; it just doesn't exist. Four shifus throwing together on one piece, with a master behind them coordinating everything. It's like four people playing one violin – the pressure, the movements, everything has to be super in sync, because otherwise it falls apart. (Editor's Note: "Big-scale throwing" refers to shaping large ceramic forms on a potter's wheel – a technically demanding process because the weight of the wet clay can cause it to slump or collapse.)

And you're talking about 200 to 250 kilos of clay spinning. If something goes really wrong and you make a huge mistake, you don't just lose the piece – you can break your hands.

I was also struck by how clay is treated differently in Chinese sculpture compared to what I come from. In Italy, in Europe, clay is almost never considered a finished product – it's a step toward something else. In China, clay sculpture stands completely on its own, at huge scale. I saw a Buddha figure two and a half meters tall, entirely in clay, treated as a complete artwork. We just don't have this.

And there was a material I touched there that I had never experienced in my life – a black mud that collects on the bark of certain trees, mostly after storms. The tree releases chemicals, the mud collects on the bark, and they go and take it off by hand. It takes ages to collect, and it's one of the softest, finest things I have ever touched. They use it mostly for modeling, then cast it in plaster – and then you take the clay back and keep using it, refreshing the same bucket over years. Si Feng has had his batch for more than ten years.

CNS: I imagine there's a lot of physicality in the work – how'd you manage the physical exertion?

Kaspar: Acupuncture! Twice or three times a week. I never did it before in my life. I have had sleeping issues since always, and acupuncture was incredible for this. He put a needle in my belly button and in like 15 seconds I was falling asleep – sleeping for one hour there in the studio, snoring. I had no idea it could do that. The acupuncturist was the father of Fang Fang, my studio owner, and he was on my walk to the studio in the mornings.

And just yesterday I had the cupping and the massage. I got tortured for one hour by my incredible guy doing these Chinese massages that are a bit torturous but really work.

CNS: You ended up spending most of your China trip in Jingdezhen. What does Shanghai feel like after that?

Kaspar: Well, I grew up in a village in Switzerland – 300 souls, last village on top of the mountain. I've lived in cities since; I was a lot in Milan as a teenager, I did a residency in Tokyo three years ago. Shanghai is just so dynamic, so beautiful, so huge.

Here I'm really impressed by the architecture – because it's all these mixtures and influences and things that make it quite incredible. Also, every district, every second neighborhood has its own thing going on, its own identity.

CNS: Do you think people outside China still get things wrong about Chinese ceramics?

Kaspar: There is in Europe this thing where everybody is speaking about Japan all the time – everybody needs to go, it's mind-blowing, and so on. I was there, and I really liked my time; it's beautiful. And there seems to be a conviction in Europe that Japan in handicrafts is in a way better than China. And this is something that they have to cancel from their minds because it's quite different. What is in Japan, it just exists at a much smaller scale there than what it is in China.

Japan is really minimal in its aesthetic, and in this moment that is really trendy – it's so clean, so perfect. And China is seen as much more dense, like you put infinite patterns on a jar with dragons, phoenixes, flowers, this or that. Which is real, that exists. But in the same moment, it also exists here a lot of ceramics and a lot of periods where it's super minimalistic – whole dynasties where ceramics are as simple as it can get, maybe one tiny pattern, or just one glaze color, and nothing more.

CNS: So what's happening to the 54 pieces you produced in Jingdezhen?

Kaspar: They are being shipped to Europe for my show in Switzerland this October. And then I collaborated with Si Feng on three pieces, and I leave two of those there in the studio because it's our collaboration, and for me, it's important to leave a tiny, tiny gesture there.

Kaspar Ludwig's work from his residency at Huaqianwu Ceramic Art Studio will be exhibited in Switzerland this October. Follow his work on Instagram: