In most Asian cultures, things go from large to small, as in the following:

The world, Asia, People’s Republic of China, Jiangxi Province, the porcelain capital Jingdezhen, master artist and teacher Shi Yuren (1928-1996).

Fifty years ago, Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute was founded, the first university with a curriculum in ceramics, and Shi Yuren was one of the artists sent from Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he had studied, to establish the ceramics program. Born in Yuyao, Zhejiang Province, Shi Yuren converted to Roman Catholicism by Jesuit missionaries at an early age. A gifted painter, he studied first at the Hangzhou Academy of Art, then to Beijing, and eventually to Jingdezhen where he taught and lived until his untimely death in a bicycle accident on March 3, 1996. During the People’s Republic political campaigns under Mao Zedong, Shi Yuren endured nearly 22 years of persecution and isolation, but he survived to shepherd 12 MA students through their studies and to revitalize Jingdezhen’s porcelain tradition with his aesthetic innovations. In particular, he rethought the symmetry of the vessel, rearranged design motifs, and breathed new life into a very ancient art form.

In the western paradigm, the individual artist, Shi Yuren, brought about new ways of seeing and making in ceramic art that has spun concentric circles to a much wider geography all around China . . . and beyond.