Friday Fare: Pottery shard museum/restaurant
17 October 2008 1 Comment
This image, taken in Tianjin, caught my eye over at the China Hope Live blog:
The blogger says of the photo,
Me and Liu Wei at a rather eccentric local museum. It doubles as a restaurant and its business card says “eatable museum.” A lot of the stuff on display was damaged during the Cultural Revolution, that means there are lots of headless statues and statue-less heads. The walls are covered in shattered pottery.
It reminded me of an Eddie Dominguez work (titled “Art and Crap” if I recall correctly) where he contrasted art and craft by using shards of pottery and kitsch figurines, although I suppose a lot of different works make use of shards if we really want to catalog the idea.
The owner is a local guy with a personal interest in Chinese history and art. He has a handful of places around town that make extensive use of the shattered ‘china,’ including one whole building that’s completely covered and spelling ‘China’ in huge letters across the top. What’s shown in the photo is just a sliver of what he’s put together — literally millions of pieces of broken ceramics have gone into these places.