SHIWAN POTTERY EXPLORED
FREDRIKKE SKINSNES SCOLLARD*
In April of 1977 I had the opportunity to visit the pottery-producing town of Shiwan for the first time with the Oriental Ceramic Society tour. At that time for foreigners, group travel to China from Hong Kong still involved months of waiting for approval, and the individual trip needed for my own research of Shiwan pottery was an impossibility. The day spent in Shiwan however, was sufficient to establish a few acquaintances and to discover that fundamental archaeological research was in progress.
In May of the same year I gave a talk to the Oriental Ceramic Society titled "Shiwan Reverberatory". The reason for the choice of that title was that in ten years' experience studying Shiwan pottery, I have met with a great deal of resistance to the study of these wares. Art historians feel they are a coarse and unimportant local product with little esthetic merit, and even most non-specialists more often than not react with "I just don't like it." In a first lecture on Shiwan pottery, I therefore did not expect to gain immediate converts to this art with a very different and unfamiliar esthetic. Rather, the choice of the title indicated that I felt the subject was worthy of much more attention, and that I hoped, over the next few years, my audience would have repeated opportunity to see and study Shiwan pottery, thereby slowly gaining familiarity with its esthetic.
Indeed, over the last two years, more attention has been paid to these wares. In October of 1977, the Hong Kong Museum of Art in cooperation with the Leal Senado of Macau, staged an exhibition of 139 pieces and published a full colour catalogue. Mr. Lawrence Tam delivered an excellent talk to this Society on the subject, and Mr. Nigel Cameron critiqued the exhibition with his "Second Thoughts on Shekwan" in the South China Morning Post.1 At present, the Fung Ping Shan Museum of the University of Hong Kong, in cooperation with Guangzhou museums, is preparing a joint exhibition on Shiwan pottery for the fall of 1979.
* Ms. Scollard holds Masters' degrees in the History of Art (Hawaii) and Chinese Literature (Chicago). She is Associate-in-Research, Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong.