Polymer clay can be transformed into a variety of objects, such as birds, animals, plants, and food. Have you ever tried to merge this western craft with Asian culture to explore another type of artistic aesthetics? This book merges Western polymer clay making basics with Asian traditions to create practical, yet beautiful pieces of art for your home. In the chapters, you will find: Unique techniques Creative color combinations Innovative lessons, including stem glassware decoration, coaster, switch cover, and a cellphone stand Detailed instructions Insights into Chinese culture The instructions along with illustrations of the lessons are easy to follow. Through this learning process involving art, you can even come to understand more about yourself—what you like, your strengths, and what you can achieve. This is a way to learn how to work and listen to yourself, and how to deal with your emotions. It's also an opportunity to stimulate your potential artistic power.

The first book to tell the stories of some of the most revered living Japanese ceramists of the century, tracing the evolution of modern and contemporary craft and art in Japan, and the artists’ considerable influence, which far transcends national borders. Listening to Clay: Conversations with Contemporary Japanese Ceramic Artists is the first book to present conversations with some of the most important living Japanese ceramic artists. Tracing the evolution of modern and contemporary craft and art in Japan, this groundbreaking volume highlights sixteen individuals whose unparalleled skill and creative brilliance have lent them an influence that far transcends national borders. Despite forging illustrious careers and earning international recognition for their work, these sixteen artists have been little known in terms of their personal stories. Ranging in age from sixty-three to ninety-three, they embody the diverse experiences of several generations who have been active and successful from the late 1940s to the present day, a period of massive change. Now, sharing their stories for the first time in Listening to Clay, they not only describe their distinctive processes, inspirations, and relationships with clay, but together trace a seismic cultural shift through a field in which centuries-old but exclusionary potting traditions opened to new practitioners and kinds of practices. Listening to Clay includes conversations with artists born into pottery-making families, as well as with some of the first women admitted to the ceramics department of Tokyo University of the Arts, telling a larger story about ingenuity and trailblazing that has shaped contemporary art in Japan and around the world. Each artist is represented by an entry including a brief introduction, a portrait, selected examples of their work, and an intimate interview conducted by the authors over several in-person visits from 2004 to 2019. At the core of each story is the artist’s personal relationship to clay, often described as a collaboration with the material rather than an imposing of intention. The oldest artist interviewed, Hayashi Yasuo, enlisted in the army during WWII at age fifteen and trained as a kamikaze pilot. He was born into a family that had fired ceramics in cooperative kilns for generations, but he rejected traditional modes and went on to be the first artist in Japan to make truly abstract ceramic sculpture. In the late 1960s, another artist, Mishima Kimiyo, developed a technique of silkscreening on clay and began making ceramic newspapers to comment on the proliferation of the media. She became fascinated with trash, recreating it out of clay, and worked in relative obscurity for decades until she had a major exhibition in Tokyo in 2015. Featuring a preface by curator, writer, and historian Glenn Adamson, and a foreword by Monika Bincsik, the Associate Curator for Japanese Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Listening to Clay has been a project more than fifteen years in the making for authors Alice and Halsey North, respected and knowledgeable collectors and patrons of contemporary Japanese ceramics, and Louise Allison Cort, Curator Emerita of Ceramics, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution. The book also includes conversations with five important dealers of contemporary Japanese ceramics who have played and are playing a critical role in introducing the work of these artists to the world, several detailed appendices, and a glossary of terms, relevant people, and relationships. Listening to Clay is a long-overdue and insightful book that, for the first time, spotlights some of Japan’s most celebrated contemporary ceramic artists through personal, idiosyncratic accounts of their day-to-day lives, giving special access to their creative process and artistic development.

Among the most revered and beloved artworks in China are ceramics—sculptures and vessels that have been utilized to embellish tombs, homes, and studies, to drink tea and wine, and to convey social and cultural meanings such as good wishes and religious beliefs. Since the eighth century, Chinese ceramics, particularly porcelain, have played an influential role around the world as trade introduced their beauty and surpassing craft to countless artists in Europe, America, and elsewhere. Spanning five millennia, the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of Chinese ceramics represents a great diversity of materials, shapes, and subjects. The remarkable selections presented in this volume, which include both familiar examples and unusual ones, will acquaint readers with the prodigious accomplishments of Chinese ceramicists from Neolithic times to the modern era. As with previous books in the How to Read series, How to Read Chinese Ceramics elucidates the works to encourage deeper understanding and appreciation of the meaning of individual pieces and the culture in which they were created. From exquisite jars, bowls, bottles, and dishes to the elegantly sculpted Chan Patriarch Bodhidharma and the gorgeous Vase with Flowers of the Four Seasons, How to Read Chinese Ceramics is a captivating introduction to one of the greatest artistic traditions in Asian culture.

This book probes the origins of the practice of nonviolence in early India and traces its path within the Jaina, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions, including its impact on East Asian Cultures. It then turns to a variety of contemporary issues relating to this topic such as: vegetarianism, animal and environmental protection, and the cultivation of religious tolerance.

This volume offers a baseline of information on what is known of earthenware across Southeast Asia and aims to provide new understandings of subjects including the origins of the prehistoric tripod vessels of the Malayan Peninsula and the role of earthenware from a kiln site in southern Thailand.

Southeast Asia is known to many as a region teeming with tourist destinations, economic opportunities and ex-colonies, but a lesser known facet is its colourful and myriad cultures in which ceramics form an integral part of the social fabric. Focusing primarily on the Classical Period (800-1500 CE), this book views ancient Southeast Asian culture through the lens of ceramic production and trade, influenced but not completely overshadowed by its powerful neighbour, China. In this landmark publication, noted archaeologist and scholar John N. Miksic constructs a vivid picture of the development of Southeast Asia's unique ceramics. Along with three contributing authors - Pamela M. Watkins, Dawn F. Rooney and Michael Flecker - he summarizes the fruits of their research over the last forty years, beginning in Singapore with the founding of the Southeast Asian Ceramic Society in 1969. The result is a comprehensive and insightful overview of the technology, aesthetics and organization, both economic and political, of seemingly diverse territories in pre-colonial Southeast Asia. It is essential reading for all those with an interest in the economic history of the region, and also for anyone who seeks a better understanding of the brilliant but too often underestimated material culture of Southeast Asia.