Tuesday, October 1, 2013

The Pottery Workshop

Through the WVU program we are working at The Pottery Workshop's amazing studios, and have their resources available at our finger tips. It's a really great pairing of two programs and resources. We're being housed in a hostel but we have the nicest rooms so it's really more like staying in a hotel. When I wake up in the morning and look out the window sometimes I see this:

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It's great, we're really spoiled rotten: consistent electricity and hot water, clean simple rooms, a western toilet (I'm a big fan of the squat toilets though,) AC, and somewhat comfortable beds. The hostel has a very cool lobby filled with ceramics, a pool table, an over priced cafe/bar, and couches. They even have a cat that just had kittens:

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This is my roommate Kaleb (of Canada) and our good friend and fellow artist Huang Fei who is famous for his blue and white painting on porcelain:

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We're in the east end of Jingdezhen and our whole situation (hostel, studio, and all,) is wedged between two large roads -kind of like highways- that are 4-6 lanes wide and going at 30mph. We kind of take over four city blocks and have a narrow road that runs through the middle. Our hostel is on one side of this road with a big stone gate (known as the front gate,) and the restaurant where we eat two meals a day is at the other end (known as the back gate.) It takes about 5-8 minutes to walk across the block. 

A thirty second walk from the Hostel down this narrow road that cuts through the block is where we have art history, which is in a nice classroom on the second floor above a the Pottery Workshop Gallery in the building on the left below.

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Also, next to this building is other galleries and a cafe with excellent coffee and cheap beer at 6 yuan or 98 cents for a liter. It's also 3% in alcohol, and it's damn refreshing. It's a great place to hang out and meet other ceramic artist from all over the planet. 

If you walk five minutes further down the road you reach our amazing studio:

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