Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Competition: 香蘭社 有田焼 古伊万里蘭菊

In the last blog, we mentioned that the competition from China hitted the Japanese porcedain trade very badly. Instead of becoming a dying trade, the Japanese took the opportunity to start a produce their own porcelain design.

While the Japanese design become popular, but due to Eurporean infliences and demands, the Japanese porcelain designs export quantity was very small, but it didn't completely stopped.
At the initial stage, different procelain workshop work independently to innovate itself. Around 1640, there is Kyp Yaki cereamic of Kyoto which conatined blue and green enamels, and later there is the Shoki Imari style, which consisted of underglaze blue, with opaque blue/green/dull red enamel.
Wanli Kraak Style, which uses a colour scheme of blue, bluish green, yellow and red enamels without underglaze blue and outlined in black, and many others styles which were retired.
In no time, the Japanese started to working together to start a main stream design, and classifying them in different major group. The aka-e machi is one of the early examples in Arita where several enamelling shops worked close together (1662).

While the production of porcelain and enamelling was most of the time done at different places today. We can still recognise several styles. Here are the major groups found in literature : Blue and white Arita; Arita without underglaze blue; Imari; Kakiemon; Ko Kutani and revived Kutani; Nabeshima; Hirado; Kameyama (19th century)

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