The ceramic artist talks toDominique Corlettabout Meissen, friendly gestures, and the benefits of distance when considering your heritage
HEIRLOOMS OF THE FUTURE
One of the projects that sticks in Gerald Mak’s mind from his ceramics and glass MA at the Royal College of Art, from which he graduated in 2020, was having to choose a piece from the V&A’s collection to reinterpret in a work of his own. Gerald picked a porcelain lemon basket, made around 1737 by Meissen, the finest porcelain factory in Europe and the first to rival the quality of the porcelain made in Asia.
Lozenge-shaped in white, the basket is modelled in elaborate Chinoiserie style, with an outstretched eagle forming a handle at each end, and two of the four feet depicted as lions’ paws. Each side features a cavorting couple in Chinese dress and hats, with the woman holding a parasol, surrounded by cornucopias, swags and flowers. Having grown up in Hong Kong, Gerald was fascinated by the piece, finding it both familiar and alien: ‘It was clearly a representation of Asian culture, but seen through Western eyes, and I became really obsessed with that. I was seeing my heritage, but seeing it through different eyes.’
The work that came out of the exercise was Hats!, a collection of ornamental hats rendered in porcelain, inspired by those worn by East Asian characters in Western musicals and operas, as well as the hats worn by the figures on the basket. It was a formative step on his artistic journey to creating the work he makes today: ceramics inspired by traditional Chinese wares, but interpreted through his unique lens of growing up in Hong Kong, and moving to London at the age of 18 to study.
From smooth, egg-form porcelain vessels, covered in his almost pop-art motif of gesturing hands, to flat terracotta table screens inspired by traditional Chinese furniture, Gerald’s work is influenced by both Eastern and Western cultures. Increasingly, he also divides his time between the two, working mainly from a studio in a shared space in Haggerston, East London, and visiting China’s porcelain capital, Jingdezhen, for extended periods of time.
Jingdezhen, a mountain town in Jiangxi province, southern China, has been a major centre for porcelain production since the 11th century thanks to the quality of its porcelain deposits, and has dominated the market since the 14th century. Gerald first visited on a summer residency in 2018, a couple of
