| In English, “China” means both the country and porcelain. In this way, the famed Chinese export is inherently connected with the transforming country and its culture. Thus, porcelain is so significant a substance that it connects the past history and the present moment of this great country. The material is not a widely used medium in contemporary art, but its unique character as shown in the art works of Ma Jun and Huang Min makes one believe that porcelain improves the variety of contemporary art greatly. The art form has been a symbol of Chinese art for more than 1000 years. | 
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In English, “China” means both the country and porcelain. In this way, the famed Chinese export is inherently connected with the transforming country and its culture. Thus, porcelain is so significant a substance that it connects the past history and the present moment of this great country.
The material is not a widely used medium in contemporary art, but its unique character as shown in the art works of Ma Jun and Huang Min makes one believe that porcelain improves the variety of contemporary art greatly. The art form has been a symbol of Chinese art for more than 1000 years. On one hand, artists find porcelain a very important medium because it carries a sense of history; on the other hand, it is a burden because of its past. So, in spite of the influential nature of porcelain, the material may play the weaker role in modern art because of its own, colorful baggage.
Ma Jun and Huang Min transformed the traditional conventions of porcelain art in their recent works. Here, the medium is not only the form, but also the content—form and function combined. Similarly, when contemporary artists play with such ideas of Chinese traditional culture as well as with imagery of the present day, past and present are, likewise, connected.
In Ma Jun’s works, porcelain is used to express the everyday. He creates a porcelain TV set, a porcelain recorder and even a porcelain Cola tin. The medium, as symbol of traditional Chinese aesthetics, here returns to the functional and mundane. In Ma Jun’s works, porcelain is not treated as treasure any more, but is instead associated with utility alone.
Lately, tradition has become an obstacle of modern development. Consumers need no longer concern themselves with observing conventions as modernization has greatly changed the face of Chinese culture. Today in fact, consumerism takes the place of traditional art. It is this shift that Ma Jun describes in his series “Porcelain Equipments” so vividly. In these works, one could find both the artist’s memory of the classic and his incorporation of consumerism itself, which are the two prevalent aspects of modern urban life in this country. The TV set, the Cola tin and the cars, are all representatives of the inevitability of modernization. Instant consumerism is part of Chinese society, and it often takes the place of traditional aesthetics. It is for this reason that the artist made the “equipment” in porcelain, pairing these traditional aesthetics with modern consumerism in an attempt to combine the concepts of form and function.
At the same time, the artist does not expose any strong emotions in the art works. This may be because Ma Jun desires total proactivity in creating this series; he may want to visualize the reality objectively—to put tradition and modernization side by side without comment. It is the audience’s turn to decide if the artist caused the two to harmonize in the art works. Ma Jun does not concentrate on the visualization of the modern commodity, but instead plays with the form itself so that the audience is led to certain thoughts via an image. The works is a metaphor therefore, and the meaning is moved to a higher level.
Unlike Ma Jun, Huang Min concentrates on the human figure in her porcelain artwork. She addresses the fact that ordinary people, specifically those in a railway station and/or peasant workers at large, are often dumbfounded by the rapid modernization taking place all around them. This weak societal group indicates the imbalance of China when it comes to urbanization. Huang Min visualizes this situation and fosters an identification with the public. Here too, porcelain is the subject of Huang Min’s Chinese style of painting.
In these depictions, the bulk of porcelain takes the place of the people’s environment. In this way, they are isolated from their surroundings and this emphasizes strong feelings of segregation in Chinese society today. This illustration of such isolation may well lead to feelings of social responsibility for the art viewing audience.
Some of Huang Min’s other paintings are of especially wide dimensionality; a painting form that comes into modern artistic practice from traditional, scholarly painting. In Huang Min’s wide dimensioned paintings, modern people occupy the entire space, additionally highlighting the Chinese conventional composition at hand. The traditional Chinese landscape serves as the background for the modern people at front thus keeping the whole image far from reality. Huang Min’s interest in history accordingly leads to the great variety of her painting. Here, she combines the traditional Chinese convention with objective, contemporary images.
Ma Jun and Huang Min express different tastes within the same media. This not only leads to a new trend of aesthetics, but also gives the audience a chance to reflect on themselves and the transforming society in which they live.
