23Aug

People who seek the "beauty" of pottery

PNO - From a busy woman with many things, Thuy Mai became a wife who sticks by her husband's side all year round, passionately telling him the same story - about pottery.

The long rows of pottery items are lined up on the shelves with bottles, bowls, plates, trays, lamps. The familiar shapes of household items in each rustic yet sophisticated line evoke the warmth of the dining rooms, tea tables, and kitchens of ancient aristocratic families.

There are no strange designs, no leaning towards a particular mark of Eastern or Western culture, among the modern pottery, we can only see the unique yet unified style of the creator, along with the artisanal flavor that has almost disappeared in the era of industrial goods.

However, the breath of simple shapes, of the subtle innovations in the mouth of the cup, the body of the bottle, all seem to be humbly silent. Only the glaze color "speaks". The glaze is shiny. Each item has a different “face”, a different color path...

Love

Entering the pottery profession, tirelessly searching for the optimal, exclusive way to make glaze, and determined to make handmade pottery until developing the world-famous Dong Gia pottery brand, all the stories of fate of this woman seem to be told from innocence and enthusiasm.

Phan Thi Thuy Mai was not born in a pottery village, nor did she study fine arts. She graduated from Ho Chi Minh City University of Foreign Trade, became an editor of cultural books on graduation day, then took another step into art from the day she cooperated with a Japanese friend, opening an art gallery. In her eager twenties, she both made books and organized art exhibitions, interacting with artists. At that time, as an outsider, Mai gradually integrated into the art life of Saigon, quietly visiting every art exhibition in the city.

Once by chance, she stopped by the Raku ceramic exhibition at the Ho Chi Minh City History Museum and was “held back” by the small lines of writing and short notes for each ceramic statue. The paintings were signed by a French artist and written in French. Seeing this way of doing things for the first time, and having just learned French, Mai stopped and translated each sentence. The short sharing written in that strange language startled her because of the familiar feeling. She quickly took her business card, and a few days later, called François Jarlov - that artist, and started a conversation by inviting him to exhibit at her gallery.

After that first “art conversation”, François returned to France. The day François returned to Vietnam, Mai’s gallery had closed due to the turmoil in the American artist-customer community after the 9/11 event. The plan to cooperate in an exhibition failed, and when he learned that Mai was making a book, he shared it and invited her to cooperate in making a book about Vietnamese ceramics.

Enthusiasm for culture in Jarlov attracted Mai, she accepted. Then, by entering the serious and sublime world of Western artists, she first "proposed" to the world of ceramics. François wrote the content and created the images for the book. As if drawn into that world, when he and Thuy Mai meticulously edited each page of the book, Thuy Mai gradually became "soulmates".

Two years after starting their friendship, on a backpacking trip along the Mekong River, holding Thuy Mai's hand to climb to the top of Phom Bakheng temple to watch the sunset, Jarlov looked into his Vietnamese friend's eyes and confided: "This is the first time I've held Mai's hand, but I don't want to let go anymore".

Mai loved. On the day she married Jarlov, she decided to leave all her unfinished work in Vietnam behind, follow her husband to France, where the quiet countryside where he had been working for more than 30 years, helping her husband with housework and work in the workshop. He taught his wife the basic and difficult knowledge of the profession. She first knew the wonderful feeling of opening the kilns, looking at the new glaze color like a picture created from the blend of minerals. Joining him in every exhibition, traveling through the regions of France, meeting many other artisans, helped her broaden her vision of the country of creativity.

The husband created, found new glaze colors, the wife watched, chatted with the craftsmen and helped with some technical steps. On weekends, she followed him to exhibitions. On weeks when there were no exhibitions scheduled, Jarlov took his wife to visit picturesque villages, or wandered around Paris eating ice cream, drinking coffee, enjoying cakes, and... listening to cải lương along the way.

From a busy woman with many things, Thuy Mai became a wife who clung to her husband all year round, passionately telling the same story as him - about ceramics. At ceramic art exhibitions, Jarlov attended and criticized like an expert, while Thuy Mai talked to her husband like a knowledgeable connoisseur.

Immersing herself in the life of pottery in a foreign land, while admiring the amazing creations on that ancient material, Thuy Mai suddenly startled and turned to her husband and asked: "Why doesn't Vietnamese pottery develop?". Knowing the history of Vietnamese pottery, Jarlov understood that the answer Thuy Mai needed was not just knowledge. Because, it was not just a question. It was an "invitation" to commit.

Find and spread

Thuy Mai returned to Vietnam. The homeland of many long-standing Vietnamese pottery villages now only makes pottery to order. Many once-famous pottery workshops have closed. Vietnamese pottery is becoming more and more monotonous and lifeless due to the loss of the market. With the sources of pottery soil, people exploit them to make bricks, or sell the resources cheaply by exporting raw soil. The price of raw materials is high, and there are no conditions to test and renew glaze designs to meet the increasingly demanding market; potters gradually leave the profession. Most of those who still follow the profession only do processing work, not branding.

Thuy Mai is determined to create a handmade pottery brand from the soil and skillful hands of Vietnamese artisans. However, to do "something truly different", she has to go upstream, starting over from scratch the profession that she thought had been practiced for generations in her country.

Choosing her mother's hometown in Go Cong Tay, Tien Giang as her future pottery workshop, she began to search for raw materials, "gathering" them all there to experiment. She went down to the pottery-making areas of Tien Giang, then to Binh Duong, to each merchant, to talk to buy the right materials according to her husband's criteria. While craftsmen in Vietnam all use the same type of premixed glaze for firing, Thuy Mai insisted that she had to find her own glaze recipe.

However, holding the list of ingredients written in chemical names analyzed down to the atomic composition, going to the stores selling the ingredients, Mai was lost among the "randomly transcribed" names, and there was no information about the chemical composition of each item. Calling the ingredients by their chemical names, the sellers either shook their heads "nothing", or flusteredly brought out a random type "that seemed to fit that name".

Sometimes when she brought the "mist powder" home, Jarlov tested it and was shocked to find out that it was... gypsum. Unable to find enough ingredients to mix the glaze herself, she decided to try using ready-made Chinese wet glaze for analysis, and then... was shocked to see her hometown people measuring the glaze in baskets, while her foreign colleagues had to weigh it with an electronic scale, meticulously distinguishing each gram.

Unable to control the color when using ready-made glaze, Thuy Mai's criteria for handmade ceramics required maximum color efficiency when combining glaze and temperature; she went to Dong Nai, Binh Duong, and Hanoi, collecting a few ingredients from each place. She had to think of every way to describe and buy each type of ingredient with the clearest possible information from the source.

Back home, she and her husband tested continuously, then took notes. Any item that could be used was kept, and any item that did not meet the standards or could not be analyzed for content was discarded. For items that could not be found in Vietnam, she ordered from professional suppliers abroad.

The glaze making stage became a familiar and adventurous game for François Jarlov. Determined to make fire-changing glaze - a type of glaze that does not use industrial colors, the color of the finished glaze is the result of the interaction between temperature, iron oxide, and titanium; he and his wife "standardized" all pottery making tools. The Vietnamese enamel kilns were not suitable for making fire-changing glaze, so Jarlov built his own kiln. He brought back from abroad white, porous, light, heat-resistant bricks, along with a ceramic support plate in the kiln; completing a six-block kiln.

For each ceramic or porcelain item, the potter must wipe off the dust, dip it in the pre-mixed glaze, then place it in the kiln and bake it at 1,300 degrees. In the kiln, it is a game of fire. At this temperature, each item will soften again. The clay begins to... breathe, twist together tightly, pushing all the air bubbles out, creating small holes on the surface. The glaze is not pre-colored, only the content is reduced in the raw materials, then, depending on the position, contact area, the sophisticated light/dark angles, it is refined into different shades of a design.

After two years of research, in 2008 they launched a unique Vietnamese ceramic line on the market. Search on Google, you will see that the concept of "fire-changing glaze" is accompanied by the name of the couple François - Thuy Mai. More than eight years of launching in the world ceramic market, so that Jarlov can "always be him" - an artist belonging to the gallery and the new forms of glaze in the fire-changing glaze workshop; Thuy Mai herself registered, attended exhibitions both domestically and internationally, bringing Dong Gia ceramics into the space of famous names in the international ceramic village. From the aesthetic impression, experts and customers were gradually attracted to her ceramic products.

The 38-year-old woman - CEO of a famous ceramic brand with a ceramic workshop in Bat Trang, showrooms in Ho Chi Minh City with many large partners in the world - still enthusiastically tells about the ongoing "path finding", like telling an adventure story. There, ceramics are still ceramics, glazes are still glazes, artists are always artists. As for her, as a lover, she has fallen in love with everything, and is eager to reveal it, then spread it...