Ceramics sculptor Ah Leon teaches CU students about clay, tea and life

Ceramic sculptor and artist-in-residence Ah Leon, left, helps Alina Smirnova, an art student in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, narrow the neck on her vase in the Willard Straight Hall ceramics studio, April 8. Robert Barker/University Photography

By Linda Myers

"There is a saying that if you turn the people of Taiwan upside down, teapots will fall out of their pockets," reports the world-renowned Taiwanese ceramic artist known as Ah Leon.

This semester he is on campus as an artist-in-residence and a visiting lecturer with the Department of Asian Studies, under the sponsorship of the Freeman Foundation. Also supported by the departments of Art and of Art History, he teaches ceramics to about a dozen students in Willard Straight Hall's ceramics studio twice a week.

An agile, broad-shouldered man with a warming smile, graying hair pulled back in a pony tail, Ah Leon begins class, as usual, one Tuesday this April by preparing tea for the students in a perfectly proportioned pot of his own design with whimsical handle resembling a snake.

The artist, whose given name is Ching-Liang Chen, is perhaps best known in ceramic circles for his 66-foot-long trompe l'oeil footbridge made entirely from clay, five tons of it, including the nuts and bolts. The bridge, which was displayed at the Smithsonian Institution's Sackler Gallery and elsewhere in 1997, mimics perfectly the wooden planks of an ancient Chinese footbridge. But long before he made it, or any of the clay sculptures that established his international reputation, Ah Leon was a maker of teapots in Taiwan. Now he turns the ancient practice of preparing and serving tea into a lesson in art and life for his students.

"This is baoxong tea," he tells them. "The old masters always brewed tea for their apprentices when they were going to talk about deep things, to help open their minds to create." The students sit around him at a low table, listening and watching as he pours the tea into a dozen tall, slender ceramic "sniffing" cups and serves them, showing how to grasp the cups, thumb and forefinger on the lip, pinky under the base, and to breathe in the odor from the sniffing cup before drinking, to fully experience the tea.

While the students drink, Ah Leon talks about the history of teapots in China, the difficulty of distinguishing a genuine antique, the importance of "listening to the clay tell you its story" and tricks to keep the clay moist. The sense is that wisdom is being imparted and received along with the hot liquid. Then he rises, exhorting them: "Don't be lazy, come practice." The students move into the adjacent room to work on their own clay pieces while the professor observes, comments and gives a demonstration on the potter's wheel. A good pot, he said, is subtle, with "a beautiful attitude."

Like most of his ceramics students, Erika Gragg, a junior, is an art major in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning. She says of Ah Leon: "He has a unique spirit and energy and he's passionate about what he does. The things he creates are mind-blowing."

Says Alina Smirnova, another art major: "He's always willing to help. It's such a great opportunity to have an artist of his caliber here."

Some of Ah Leon's works are on display at the Johnson Museum through July 6, in an exhibition titled "The Long River Carries the Moon Silently Away: the Ceramic Art of Ah Leon." The following Thursday, at their request, he guides his students through it, beginning first in the gallery where a second, complementary exhibition, "Dark Jewels: Chinese Black and Brown Ceramics from the Shatzman Collection," is on display, with one ceramic piece dating to fourth century China.

Pointing out the different firing techniques and glazes that distinguished the pottery over centuries and the practical considerations that determined them, he tells the students: "Try to look at the details. Not many potters can do a beautiful rim." Of the extraordinary detail in his own work, he says: "Time is a tool. You need to train to be patient."

On April 5 Ah Leon spoke about his work to a packed house in a Johnson Museum gallery. It was a teapot, he said, that initially brought him from Taiwan to this country. A gift to his wife, who was then his fiancé and studying art at SUNY Brockport, the teapot so impressed pottery students at the college that they arranged for him to be a visiting ceramics instructor.

In the United States, he met ceramic artists who used clay as a material to make dramatic-looking sculptures. "I wanted to do something powerful too, but from my own cultural background," he said.

Inspired by rustic Taiwanese wooden furniture, he reproduced different wood grains in clay in a series of playful but functioning teapots that resemble oddly assembled pieces of wood. That led to other pieces -- a clay sculpture of squares of tofu on wooden palettes (the way they're still sold in Taiwan) and the 66-foot-long bridge, which took almost four years to complete and six days for the artist and six assistants to assemble at the Smithsonian.

To make clay look like wood Ah Leon observed the texture of different kinds of wood, sketched them in detail, then used basic tools to carve the various grains in the clay from memory.

"I have no trick, only patience and time," he said. The observer needs those qualities, as well, to pick out such details in the wooden planks of the bridge as the imprint of a truck wheel or an ancient footprint, which Ah Leon added "to tell many stories."

Confessing he still thinks of himself as a "country bumpkin" who feels mildly overwhelmed at the international attention his work has attracted, Ah Leon ended his museum talk by returning to his favorite subject, tea. "If you come to Taiwan," he promised the audience, "I will brew you excellent tea, guaranteed 'to die for.'"

View Ah Leon's work at this Web site: http://www.plasm.com/ceramics/Friends/AhLeon/AhLeon.html.