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And then, the article switches suddenly to stating: "...one of the finest techniques of glass art was lost in the midst of all this." I would be very reluctant to speak of the revival of ‘glass art’in the same breath as world-changing events like the Opium war or the Cultural Revolution in China. But I became intrigued, and decided to follow the story of glass art in China. The Czech or Italian, even Finnish, glasswork I knew something about, but this? As it turned out, it is quite a story that begins with two highly acclaimed Taiwanese film persons — award winners, both: Loretta Yang Hui-shan, an actress, and Chang Yi, a director, and later Loretta’s husband — suddenly leaving their career in films at the height of their fame, and deciding to get into making sculptures in glass. Their reasons for this dramatic career move were somewhat different: Loretta, as she says, found her 11 years career in cinema to be "filled with unrest", and she was looking for "a more in-depth medium of expression"; Chang, on the other hand, having finished his film, This Kind of Love, was, as he puts it, "searching for imagery that would capture his theme of the magnificent yet fragile state of modern love and marriage".
Both of them became exposed in the process to crystal glass — initially European, but later native Chinese, that went back to more than a century before the Common Era began — and decided to immerse themselves in the world of glass. Liu Li, as they came to know, was the ancient, somewhat archaic, Chinese word for glass artwork. And they preferred to adopt it over the common Chinese word for glass — boli — which suggests only bottles and glasses. But making artistic glass was a long way off yet. They decided to learn the technique, for in that resided, as they say, ‘the soul of Chinese culture’. Loretta has an insatiable, irrepressible ‘need to sculpt', as she says. But would she succeed in this career? When asked about this, she said recently in an interview: "What you don’t know, you learn". As simple as that. But the technique is complex. In its essence, the method is very close to cire-perdue, that is ‘lost wax’, which our own great sculptors of Chola bronzes knew well and used for centuries. ‘Pate de Verre’ is another name for it, and, as applied to glass work, it can be summarised ‘as using a mix crushed glass with enamels or paint to form a paste that was carefully placed in a mold and then fired’. The crux of the technique lies, of course, in making the mould, which demands the hands and the eyes of a sculptor. These clearly Loretta had. When the husband and wife team founded, with great difficulties, their art-glass workshop in 1987 — Liu Li Gongfang it was named — they had only vague ideas about the direction in which they might head. But slowly they found their m`E9tier. Dipping back into the Buddhist roots of Chinese culture — much of which had been mauled by the Cultural Revolution — Loretta turned for inspiration to the Buddha himself. In 1990, she turned out a sculpture that is now identified with her name: "The Healing Hand". It represents, or at least interprets, the hand of the Master who set the Wheel of Law into motion: fingers delicately articulated, the hasta suggestive on the one hand of ‘granting a boon’ and on the other of ‘meditation’: Peace, Compassion, Quietude. Loretta tells, briefly, a story about this sculpture. She had been working on it, she says, and in the midst of it, she needed to take a short break. Placing the unfinished sculpture — in clay form yet — on a windowsill, she left. When she returned, the sun was shining brightly and through the window, it cast a shadow of the hand upon the ground. Suddenly, she thought, she experienced a revelation. "Was this not the shadow of a tree?", she found herself asking the question. "Did the Buddha not attain enlightenment under a tree?" Something stirred within her. She did other, decorative work too, but Loretta was bent upon exploring her Buddhist heritage further and further. It naturally took her to sites like the famous Dunhuang caves, and one of the great images she saw was the Bodhisattva of "A Thousand Arms and a Thousand Eyes". Slowly, from her fingers and her mind emerged that most impressive glass work: "Thousand Arms, Thousand Eyes: Possessing the Knowledge of Sorrow". It stands 100 cm tall. Not far removed from it, she turned out another, but still larger, terracotta version of the same Bodhisattva: five metres in height. It now stands in the Buddha Memorial Centre in Taiwan. The Liu Li work that Loretta does has brought peace to her own self, and clarity. She remains at peace with herself, as Mythili Mamadanna reports, even after having discovered, suddenly one morning in 2010, that she had lost all hearing in her left ear. This was a disorder that was not going to go away, she told herself, and — as someone who prefers to work in silence — "she accepted this new state of being as the latest proposition life had to offer". The Liu Li Gongfang industry is flourishing today — there are 70 outlets of its products the world over — but somewhere, it seems, there is in Loretta’s work down there some reference to a Buddhist prayer: "May the moment come when I attain enlightenment, the body, even the soul, become as Liu Li. Pure, transparent, flawless."
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A
Cursory
World of Van Gogh
Eros restored
Step up
Painting recovered