Canadian artist Joanne Tod’s Salt Plate slyly recreates a historical Chinese precedent, a small plate with scenes of salt mining produced in Jingdezhen for the Japanese market. Todd playfully distorts perspective to highlight the instability of the object’s meaning. Mass consumption, global trade, the fashion for blue-and-white, and cultural appropriation all enter as themes inherent to the medium.

Before cobalt was widely used, classical qingbai-style porcelain used shallow carving and an icy blue-green glaze to ornament the surface. Contemporary Canadian potter Harlan House looks to this early technique in works such as his Nasturtium Vase. The carving, form, and colour all evoke historical Chinese precedents, while the nasturtium, a plant House grows in his own garden, connects the work to the artist’s daily life.

Forms like the double gourd vase became popular in the West in the 18th century and carried shifting connotations of class, refinement, and taste. Initially evoking the ‘exotic’, such Chinese shapes soon became central to the language of European decorative art. Leopold Foulem’s Silhouette 2951 adopts the double gourd as an icon, using the shape to stand in for the idea of a vase. This conceptual sculpture relies on the legibility of Chinese ceramics to ask questions about idea versus thing.

From the early 2000s, many Western artists traveled to China to work in the newly privatized workshops of Jingdezhen. Academic exchanges and residency programs flourished, with artists drawing from historical models as well as the pool of highly skilled labour. Canadian artist Ann Roberts sculpted Penelope’s Suitors in Jingdezhen, using imagery drawn from Greek mythology. Paul Mathieu designed Peaches and Bats and commissioned its fabrication, recreating Qing dynasty ornaments to comment on the complex interplay of image, object, and desire.

Canadian artists of Chinese descent draw from histories of porcelain to investigate their own identities today. Brendan Tang recreates a Chinese blue and white vase but distorts the form with ripples and a robotic base to reference the interplay of ancient and modern. Sin-ying Ho combines Chinese and Western imagery to question standards of beauty in both objects and the female form. Together, we see how both artists navigate present and ancestral aspects of their identities.