*Shiwan Pottery Sculpture Craft

90.*Shiwan Pottery Sculpture Craft

Nominating Unit: City of Foshan

Shiwan lies in the central area of Chancheng District, City of Foshan, Guangdong Province. Shiwan Pottery Sculpture Craft is mainly distributed in the streets of Shiwan Town and its surrounding areas. The abundant natural resources, and the geographical position that nears mountains and rivers combining unimpeded waterways make Shiwan an important base of pottery industry in Lingnan.

The humanistic, localized and nationalized Shiwan Pottery Sculpture Craft has a unique artistic style. Depending on the practical form, “Shiwan Doll” can be divided into five types: People Pottery Sculpture, Animal Pottery Sculpture, Vessel, Micro Sculpture, and Ridge Pottery Sculpture. With the shape of people as its representative, “Shiwan Doll” implicates both the form and the spirit of a man. Absorbing all kinds of cultural and artistic essence, integrating a high degree of objectivity with moderate exaggeration and combining the interests of life and artistic taste, “Shiwan Doll” formed a distinct local style. The processing skills include conceiving, refining the material, molding, decorating, glazing and calcining in dragon kiln. The duration of calcining all depends on the handicraftsman’s experience. In order to calcine flexibly different parts of the material, high, moderate and low heats in the upper, middle, lower positions of the dragon kiln are used respectively, which can only be handled by skillful handicraftsmen.

Shiwan Pottery Sculpture Craft is developed on the basis of the pottery for daily use, of which the early artistic form can be seen from the pottery unearthed in the Shiwan Eastern Han Tomb. The development of Shiwan Pottery Sculpture Craft can be divided into four stages: initiative period (from the Tang Dynasty to the Ming Dynasty), golden age (in the Ming and the Qing Dynasties), trough period (in the Republic of China) and fl ourishing period (since the founding of the People’s Republic of China and especially since the reform and opening up. The representatives of contemporary famous Shiwan pottery sculpture artists include Liujia, Zhuangjia, Liu Zemian and Liao Xiongbiao, etc.(https://www.daowen.com)

At present the craft is facing the difficulty of passing on. Because of the limited market space and realistic living environment, young people hardly consider the Craft as a lifelong career. Under such circumstances, extensive foreign elements have been poured in Shiwan Pottery Sculpture Craft, which makes it hard to reserve this traditional Craft, so it is in urgent need of protection.

In 2006, Shiwan Pottery Sculpture Craft was listed into the list of the first batch of state-level intangible cultural heritage.