A Chinese Funeral

I was eating lunch in a small village outside of Jingezhen when I heard the faint popping sound of fireworks in the distance.

I looked down at my cup of tea and noticed some ripples on the surface starting to occur every couple of seconds. In the distance I heard the sharp explosions of fireworks getting louder and louder. Seconds slowly ticked by and the volume quickly grew of the sharp cracking sounds of hundreds of little red explosives going off to scare away the demons.  It was now accompanied by deep booms of much larger fireworks and the beat of drums. The large windows began to shudder with each wave of noise crashing against it.

Then the beginning of the parade emerged. A few of us ran out onto the street and watched five or six dozen people walk by, some with instruments, several strands fireworks hung on their body, and many holding up bright colorful banners. It even included a marching band very much dressed like a western marching band. At the height of the march was a casket hung from two pieces of bamboo, it was carried by the four largest men, this was a funeral.

Feel free to click these images for a larger viewing as there is a lot happening in each one.

The Coffin Brought into the Cloud

They were marching along with the coffin on a course for the longest possible path through the town, which is in the chinese tradition of a funeral. Every so often they would stop, put down a box of fireworks the size of an oven, and set them off launching bright colorful explosions into the sky matching the color of the banners they carried. The group would kneel each time the largest fireworks were set off for respect and avoiding to get hit by burning phosphorous.

I felt like I was in a movie, but I also felt much more connected than just sitting in a theater. Documenting religious ceremony is always tricky in terms of ethics, but clearly this parade wanted to be seen and celebrated. This funeral was joyous and also recognizing loss, I would like mine to be like this, but I prefer the spread of my cremated ashes or sky burial instead of tomb at the end.

The Fireworks Set Off

Kneeling

The Parade Continues

They marched up our side of the river and then back down the other where I was able to get some clear photos of the whole thing. a massive mound of clothing and blankets belonging to the dead rest on the bank of the river. The friends of the man poured fuel on the pile and lit them on fire. This stark celebration life and death really surprised me. It was loud, it was happy, it was very much marking the ending of something and the beginning of another.

Burning the Clothes

The Band

The group began to theorize who this person was, we thought possibly it was an important official of the town. We began talking to two elderly men hanging out on the river with us and they explained this man was not a local official but a beloved person who influenced the town for the best, and his children wanted to see him off well.

Making Porcelain

The group headed over to Sanbao village to explore the historic and still used method of making porcelain. We visited the mine featured in the film Never Sorry and also one the sources for the porcelain  for Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds project. After a long and bumpy drive we arrived at the mine.

Below is the mine cart. They actually mine into the mountain upwards. The blast a little then push the rock around and it falls right into the cart -pretty smart in my opinion. When they exhaust the porcelain above they will start digging below, which is a bit more difficult. Apparently the guy who works at this mine is super nice, but he wasn't around the day we visited.

The porcelain is wheeled out and dumped in this massive pile.

It's then taken to a water hammer and pounded into a fine dust.

The water hammer had some really interesting details. First it's powered by water, some are now powered by gas or electricity, but this one is traditional. Second, in the second image it is clearer to see that there are bamboo shoots directing water onto the  axel to lubricated it. The wheel turns spinning an axel with small fingers that push down the back of the hammer, the hammer then drops and pounds the porcelain rock with it's own weight. These hammers shake the ground.

You can see it in action, click here.

The dust is washed, put through a series of settling pools, then scooped out, dried, and formed into these bricks for sale. You may wonder why they use this process in a day of technology and desire for efficiency but the chinese prefer this method to keep consistent clay for antique replicas, but also keeping the clay up to it's historic quality (good or bad.)

This is us walking around on the dusty roads...

Peaking into the Kitchen

This is just one of my favorite photos that I took two weeks ago. I peaked in through the door and got a bunch of photos of this kitchen. The cooks never noticed me because they were so busy. The Chinese method of cooking food is very different from America or most other places. Food is cooked in a wok for maybe a minute at extremely high heat and then the dish is ready. When you order food in a restaurant here it comes out in under five minutes. It's such a drag when I get back to the states and wait the standard amount of time there.

Day 5 of Being Sick

I open this with the statement that I am not seriously sick. However, I am exhausted, and being sick in Asia is a who new level difficulty than at home. There has been quite the cold that has been whipping through the group since Shanghai four weeks ago. Approximate 8 out of 11 students have had it and some of the staff is getting it. It's a really intense fever and aches the first day or two, then a persistent runny nose, cough, and exhaustion for many days after.

Today I went to the Chinese hospital, which was a complete adventure. I was feeling simply exhausted and seeing as it was about day 5 or so of this nonsense I figured it would be best to go to the hospital and try to figure out what this is. I was in and then out in about 25 minutes, and the total cost of seeing a doctor and blood work was $6.04USD. Eric (deputy director of The Pottery Workshop?) was kind enough to drive me.

We walked in the large concrete fecal smelling building and registered at the front desk, then walked immediately to the doctors office. As we entered the room the doctor finished his cigarette, blew the smoke out the window, and sat down at his desk. I joined him sitting on a little white wobbly stool, and he had me put an old fashion glass thermometer in my armpit for 5 minutes. Eric and the doctor chatted in Chinese about my symptoms and other members of the group that had/have this illness. After a few minutes my temperature was 36.9C, which is totally fine, a fever is 38C or so. I said I wanted blood work done anyways to try to identify this.

We went to another room full of nurses and chairs with fixtures to hold IV's, this is really popular way of administering medicine in China, usually it's just saline solution. I sat at the reception counter layed my arm across the table had blood taken out immediately. Then we went to what looked like a counter at a pharmacy, handed my vile of blood to a guy wearing a graphic t-shirt, cargo shorts, and flip flops and was handed back this paper 30 seconds later with results:

It was explained to me that the first number listed as WBC (white blood cell count?) was normal so it was probably a virus, if higher than normal probably an infection. He said I could have chinese medicine that taste awful or equally effective: go home and rest. I didn't hang out to ask question because the people in line behind me held a baby with a bloody face and x-rays of his head waiting to be read. The baby seemed in good spirits though. 

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:

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:

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:

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.

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:

The Moon Festival

One year, long ago, ten suns rose in the sky causing great heat and destruction on the Earth. Hou Yi, a human of immense strength shot down nine of the suns and left one up for light. An immortal admiring Hou Yi gifted him an elixir with the power to give Hou Yi the strength to live forever. However, he did not drink it because he was deeply in love with Chang'e, and did not wish to live without her.

For the Mid-Autumn Festival, or the Moon Festival, our group decided to go out onto a lake on the outskirts of town late at night to admire the moonlight. After dinner we rented a bus for the group and drove twenty minutes to the locations. It was a park with a man made lake, hundreds of people were there lighting off small fire crackers and sparklers, eating food, drinking beer, and chatting while they watched their friends on the boats out in the lake. The Americans made their presence known by bringing some major fireworks that set off all the car alarms.

Hou Yi strength greatly inspired many people, he quickly accumulated apprentices, one of which was (super evil) Feng Meng who knew his secret of the elixir. One day, when Hou Yi was hunting, Feng Meng broke into his house to steal the elixir. Chang'e was home and knew that he could easily overpower her for the elixir so she drank the elixir.

The lake was far more pleasant at night. On the murky water I could see dead fish and trash floating on the surface, and transmission towers ran through the middle of the lake. But the buildings were beautifully lit and after about twenty minutes the smell of the water did not really bother you. The boats were a step up from paddle boats both in size and power. They had small electric engines that when running smelt like a burning toaster. Nine of us crammed into one boat, then me and two others into another boat. Our boats collided several times almost tipping but the large amount of alcohol consumed numbed the terror of falling into such disgusting water.

High above the full moon shone brightly, with wisdom and clarity, undisturbed by our rowdiness.

Great power flowed through Chang'e as she became immortal. She flew into the sky away from her husband. Still deeply in love with her husband so she went to the closest place immortals can reside to humans -the moon. When Hou Yi came back hunting he learned what happened and became deeply saddened. He began offering cakes to the moon where his wife lives every year on the day that she became immortal. The villagers learned of Hou Yi tragic story and became sympathetic, over the years they too began to participate and make offerings on the same day.

On our way back I looked out the window of the bus. First there was a police car. Then a scooter on it's side and a crowd of on lookers. Then there was a shoe. Another fifty feat down was a body of a middle age woman lying on her back in the highway. Her body seemed undisturbed, but her shirt was open from the use of a defibrillator, she was clearly dead.

Off to China (yet again.)

Sorry for the delay, I had troubles with my VPN, which inhibited my ability to blog.

So let's start!

I managed to pack the night before without sleeping at all and leaving my room a bit of a mess. Dad dropped me off at PMW and my adventure begun.

After a the second leg of fourteen hours the plane began to tilt down as it descended into the metropolis of Shanghai. The panels, seats, and people shuddered and shook with the plane as it barreled against the wind outside. The ocean went from blue, to chocolate-milk-brown, and then gave way to the partial land of shrimp and fish farming ponds. The runway passed underneath and we were suddenly back on earth.

The smell of the air in China slowly found it’s way to my nose. It is the smell of stale cigarette smoke, oil, food, and rot –similar to an old bowling alley. The unpleasant yet comforting smell welcomed me back for my third venture on the other side of the globe.

I quickly found Shoji, our group leader/professor, waiting for me on the other side of customs. We waited and collected about 80% of our group -the last few were on a much later flight. Our group consist of 11 students and four professors, some of which switch out during the semester.

We boarded the maglev, which would bring us quickly into town. We sat down as a group in a completely empty train car and waited for the ride to begin. You could feel the train jump up an inch or so when the magnets were activated and the train began to float off the ground. The train sped up to about 250mph, which seemed excessively fast and definitely a flash of Shanghai wealth. I looked out the window as things simply blew by and was surprised when the train slowed down just a few minutes from reaching top speed.

We found our hotel which is located near People’s Square, checked in, rested for 15 minutes, then went to a Beijing style hotpot restaurant (basically coal fired hot pots with volcano cones in the center which hold the coals inside a large bowl full of broth. It was an excellent first dinner and as I got to know my group more my confidence in having a good trip began to grow. It seems most people in our group –if not all- have really common sense/courtesy and no interest in dominating the group.

My roommate, Kaleb, who is from Alberta Canada, is an excellent match. There are 5 boys, and 6 girls (one boy dropped out last minute,) Kaleb and I drink similar amounts, and sleep similar hours of the night.

Shoji has been a fantastic tour guide. In addition to the normal Shanghai touristy stuff he took us to the black market where I got Light Room 5 for $8USD. There was also a movie store where you could get any movie (even just released,) for around $2USD.

We visited The Pottery Workshop location in Shanghai (which is the group we are partnering with,) who have a small studio in one of the art districts. It was enjoyable to walk around and look at what the locals were up to:

Home, Maine.

Returning home from school this summer I was instantly greeted by the familiar broken landscape of Maine. I had just managed to figure out my first summer job (later I picked up another,) and had a few weeks to rest after a somewhat stressful spring semester.

One of the things I have been dealing with the most recently, and will have to continue to deal with, is my stomach. It's been somewhat of an obsession, but constant mild pain in my stomach is really hard to divert my attention from. After trying out a series of different drugs for my stomach I have settled on one, but I also have to manage my stress to feel relatively normal. It has been a big part of my life for the last 8 months or so, and it finally seems to be getting out of the way of daily function --kind of. Without talking about it too much, my stomach is definitely bad partially to blame from being sick in Asia so much, and partially it's where my body decides to direct stress, it has been an interesting way of getting in touch with myself.

But back to summer, I unpacked:

It's good to be back.

I think I'm recovering.

Seeing, pace of life. 

Wood Firing Spring 2013

The incredibly active ceramics department and I went over from Hartwick College to Corning Community College where they have two amazing wood fired kilns. They have both a traditional anagama and what we refer to as a train kiln, which is a long box shape with a smoke stack coming out the top at one end making it look like a steam engine. The interesting thing about the train kiln is that as far as I know, it's one of two wood fired kilns in the world specially designed for blowing glass out of the side at peak temperature. The other, which is identical, is in France. Fred, the teacher at CCC with the help of the engineers of Corning Glass developed the design which is relatively simple but works very well. Fred's thing is wood firing, and building kilns, he also built the other glass/ceramic kiln in France.

Me, by the anagama.

This time we used the train kiln. It can hold roughly 200 plus pots while the anagama, which is relatively small compared to the traditional ones which are often over a hundred feet long, can hold around 500 pots. Additionally the train kiln takes a day to load, two days to fire, two to three days to cool, and an afternoon to unload, while the anagama takes two days to load, five to seven days to fire, another week to cool, and then a day or two to unload. We only had a weekend to fire, additionally we wanted to blow glass out of the kiln.

Below is the train kiln. Fred is in the kiln, which is roughly three feet wide and four feet tall. It's moderately uncomfortable to load, so if you build a kiln either make it taller, or have a removable roof. We're all standing around handing pots to Fred. We don't load because Fred has years of practice laying the pots in certain ways so the wood ash, flames, and glaze draws interesting patters on the pots.

We organized the pots by size, height, and how much they were glazed (because some parts of the kiln are hotter causing the glaze to run more,) then brought them over a few at a time for Fred to load.

This is what loading the inside looks like as we neared the end of loading.

About two thirds of the way down the kiln on each side there are two ports with two doors that slide open and closed. This is where we glass blow and one of the things that makes this kiln so unique. On one side of the port is a crucible full of glass and on the other is what we refer to as the "glory hole" (great name right?) which is where you stick your work in when you need to heat it back up to make the glass malleable again. 

Inside we had three crucibles of glass. The largest held roughly 40lbs. of clear glass. On the other side we had blue and green colored glass to mix with the glass pieces we were made. In the middle you can see our cone system to measure work heat versus the pyrometer which just measures air temperature inside the kiln. Each cone melts at a specific point  

We bricked up the entrance of the kiln and then went to main street Corning to find something for dinner.

The next morning at 10am we lit a small fire in the entrance and began to slowly heat the kiln up. Within the first few hours steam and water seeped out between the bricks as the last of the water left the work. We created shifts to watch the kiln and CCC had the afternoon, which allowed us to leave and go over to corning and blow some glass.

In the evening when we returned we began the process of feeding the hungry kiln ever ten minutes or so to achieve a steady temperature climb.

We also split two to three cords of wood with a hydraulic wedge. I think we burned around four cords. 

Elliot, Erica, Berky, and I had a shift from 6pm to 10pm. Most of the time we spent eating an excessive amount of food and throwing wood in. Steadily it grew hotter and hotter. First the pots glowed a dark red, then a bright cherry red, and then yellow.

You may recognize the photo from earlier. This was in the evening and we were riding around 2,000F with another 400 to go. As you can see some of the cones in the back have tipped over and the glass has turned to liquid. Interestingly, the higher you climb in temperature the more energy you need to keep climbing. So during the first twelve hours we climbed around 1800-2000F while in the second twelve hours we only climbed 400-500F.

I returned at 6:30 the next morning grateful that I did not have to do the midnight to 6am shift. Opening the kiln without gloves is uncomfortable, in the image below I burnt the hair off my hands. There is also flames coming out of the 20ft chimney and it's unbearable to stand close to the kiln for more than a few minutes. Good thing it's outside.

You can make out the rims of the colored glass crucibles. 

Then the glass students from Hartwick showed up, set up shop, and blew glass for two hours. Below is Erik Halvorson our glass instructor trying out the glass. The glass is a bit softer than usual since it normally comes out of the furnace at 2100F or so and this glass is around 2400F. 

We were also a bit cramped for space but things managed to work out fine. Elliot in the white t-shirt is stoking the annealer which runs on a separate wood fire to keep a box around 900F so our glass doesn't break.

Elliot blowing glass.

So what did all this fire make? Below is the blue glass crucible. It's actually a waste product of the firing since sadly, it's not reusable or safe to eat food out of it, but it is beautiful. We cannot remove all the glass from all the vessels, but we do our best to use as much of it as possible.  

Here's one of my mugs. Where it is redish is called flashing, or where it got blasted by flame. Where it is crusty, singed, dark, or glossy is where wood ash collected and melted in (mostly the other side of the cup.) I put glaze on the insides of all my cups to have a glossy texture inside (which also makes it food safe and easy to clean.)

Teabowl