- Flowers
- Zen Branches
- Sitting Still
- Moon Tides
- The Blue Archive of Clay
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2026
The Blue Archive of Clay explores the cultural significance of Yixing handmade teapots through typological photography and the nineteenth-century cyanotype process. The project brings together eighty-four teapots made by different artists across different periods, materials, and forms. By presenting them in an archive-like structure, I attempt to remove the hierarchy created by authorship, market value, and collectability, allowing each object to be encountered through its form, proportion, and traces of craftsmanship.
Yixing teapots have been part of Chinese material culture for nearly a thousand years. Today, however, the tradition exists within an increasingly commercialised environment, where handmade craftsmanship is gradually overshadowed by industrial production and the symbolic value attached to famous makers. Rather than documenting a disappearing tradition, this project questions how cultural value is constructed, circulated, and perceived in contemporary society.
I employ cyanotype—a photographic process originating in nineteenth-century Europe—as a means of translating an Eastern craft through a Western historical medium. The monochromatic blue removes the natural colour of the clay, directing attention to the silhouette, texture, and physical presence of each vessel. The slow, manual process of producing cyanotypes also echoes the rhythm and labour of handmade teapot making, creating a dialogue between two distinct craft traditions.
Through large-scale cyanotypes, individual prints, and a wordless accordion photobook, The Blue Archive of Clay invites viewers to reconsider these objects beyond their cultural symbolism and commercial identity, asking how their value might be understood through materiality, process, and form alone.