台灣現代陶藝體制源起

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the origin and development of the field of modem pottery in Taiwan, and to find out the social drive shaping that field. Taking pottery as a kind of cultural production, our fundamental presupposition is that the practice of pottery based upon both social policy and the evaluating mechanism, which forms the judgment of its significance. It is all of them to make pottery work effectively, and to get the social legitimacy.

In his theory of social change, Julian H. Steward (1902 - 1972), the American anthropologist, claims that in any region the development and changes of culture are the result of plural evolution. Accordingly we believe that modem pottery as a kind of social practice, its evolution should not be monistic. Therefore we regard that the reason why the pottery evaluation in Taiwan so distinctive from other regions (especially America, the origin of modem pottery), is caused of its unique tradition and context. In Taiwan, at the beginning pottery is not the genre of pure arts but a branch of courtly pottery; and latter it transformed into Aesthetic pottery. Therefore Aesthetic pottery became the primary concept of “pottery” in Taiwan; it is the late 1970s at the time.

The real pottery, which means its creative idea instructed by Modernism, was first introduced into Taiwan during the early 1980s by the aboard students backing from U.S. and Japan. Not merely new techniques, they brought back also new aesthetic attitude toward pottery. From then on, the whole mechanism of pottery production began to separate from the original system of craft; and furthermore, coming with the change of the authorities’ viewpoint, the autonomic production system of modem pottery had been constructed since the mid 1990s.