Conversations: The Glaze Alchemist

Editor's note: glaze recipes are the most guarded secrets in Jingdezhen. Our guest spoke on the condition that no formula be revealed.

The Alchemist's Workbench

'My workshop looks like a mad herbalist's kitchen. Jars of crushed stone, bags of ash, vials of metal oxides. A visitor once asked if I was making poison. I told her: no, I am making fire in liquid form. Every glaze is a recipe of ingredients that will react at 1300 degrees — and my job is to predict what no one has yet fired.'

On Failure

'The honest number is ninety percent failure. I formulate, I test, I fire. Ninety percent of my tests end in the waste bin — dull color, crawling glaze, pinholes, bubbles. But that remaining ten percent, when it works... when the copper flashes violet or the iron crystallizes into gold spots — that is a feeling I cannot describe. It is why I have spent thirty years in this room.'

On Industrial Glaze

'Factory glaze is chemistry from a catalog. It is predictable — and predictability is the death of art. My ash glazes vary between firings. My mineral recipes shift with the quarry, the season, the rain. That variation is not a defect; it is the signature of nature. A collector who owns my work owns pieces that can never be replicated — because the ingredients themselves have changed.'

On the Future

'Young people ask me for my recipes. I tell them: take my apprenticeship for ten years, and you will have your own. The recipe is not a list of ingredients. It is a relationship with the fire.' Read about wood ash glaze →