Career shift smooth as glass
Print Edition
LORETTA Yang and Chang Yi made a dramatic career change after making their names in Taiwan, where Yang was an awarded-winning actress and Chang was a new-wave movie director.
Now in their 60s, the married duo have forged a new career in contemporary colored glass art, operating a workshop in Qibao Town.
The couple has been engaged with glass art for more than three decades. Their Liuli Gongfang brand is widely known in China and across the world.
Liuli was established in 1987 in Taiwan and now operates 70 galleries around the world. The company has a presence in Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, San Francisco and New York, among other places. “I think the art of colored glazing has a beginning but doesn’t have an ending,” said Yang.
The range of their artistic glass works spans jewelry, animal and flowers, mythical creatures, vases and other designs. They are often breathtaking to behold.
Young people may not be aware of their cinema backgrounds, but many seniors and mid-aged people still remember the tender performances Yang gave on the big screen. Of the 124 movies she made in a career spanning 12 years, she won the Golden Horse Award in Taiwan twice. Chang, meanwhile, is best remembered for his “Woman Trilogy” in the 1980s.
It was the first movie of the trilogy, “Yu Qin Sao” (1984), that brought the pair together for the first time. Three years later, they married and decided to quit movie-making. After several years exploring what to do next, the couple chose glass art, specializing in a form called liuli, which originated in the Western Han Dynasty in the third century BC.
In the process, the couple drew on technique called “lost wax casting.” It’s a process by which a duplicate metal sculpture is used to make a cast from an original sculpture.
A new career door opened.
“I feel that movies and colored glass are both performances, but of different types,” said Yang. “My experience in movies helped me a lot in making the art of colored glazing.”
Yang learned the art from scratch. She explored lost-wax casting technique, which had been out of use for about 2,000 years, and used the technique in her creations.
In 1993, she held a personal exhibition at the Palace Museum in Beijing to widespread praise.
“I received a letter from a visitor who said the exhibition showed how beautiful Chinese colored glass could be,” she said. “I was determined to do this for the rest of my life.”
Several years later, Yang and Chang arrived in Qibao. They opened up a workshop and gradually expanded the brand Liuli Gongfang. Their headquarters in Qibao is located on Huazhong Road. Amid all the hustle and bustle of factories there, their workshop is like a quiet museum.
“When we opened up the workshop here, we believed it should be much more than just a workshop,” said Yang.
She said she loves the transparency of colored glaze, which, in her opinion, outshines common sculptures. The transparency affords opportunities for new ideas and creations.
A Buddhism believer, Yang said ancient scriptures described colored glass art. She cites one: “You need to be like colored glass — clean and clear both inside and out.”
Yang’s ultimate dream is to make a five-meter colored glass sculpture of the Buddha. It’s a hard goal to fulfill, but that doesn’t daunt her.
“It is a very big goal, I know,” she said. “But we need to make big goals to push ourselves forward. There should be no limit in artistic creation.”
While Yang is the main creator of the glass works, Chang is the manager of their business. But looks may be deceiving. Chang is an artist in his own right and has his own philosophy about glass art.
When he was a director, he always pursued the question: “What is the biggest change men can make within their very limited powers?”
He found his answer in glass works that evoke human emotions. Compared with Yang, Chang’s dream is perhaps more abstract and more ambitious. He would like to make colored glass art a cultural icon of China. More than 30 of their works have been collected by museums all over the world.
The couple thinks of itself neither as business people nor artists. Yang said she believes her mission in life is to create colored glass art.
“I think the more I grow older, the more I enter a purer state,” she said.
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