パワーハウスミュージアムさんのインスタグラム写真 - (パワーハウスミュージアムInstagram)「‘It would be hard to find a more beautiful example of the fragile threshold between failure and success than the pair of blanc de Chine wine cups in the museum’s collection (1723-35). Small enough to cradle in one’s palm, these impossibly serene objects were made in the Qing dynasty, from Dehua porcelain, which is the most prized of all porcelains, its creamy-white turned faint pink by transmitted light. English potter Edmund de Waal in The White Road (2015), the story of his “pilgrimage” in search of the thousand-year history of porcelain, describes standing on a hillside in the ancient porcelain centre of Jingdezhen, China, and realising that its face is made entirely of shards thrown over makers’ shoulders from the kiln mouth. This is because, in making porcelain, “things go so wrong, so often”. Perfect porcelain — smooth and translucent — is captivating. It seems to hover eerily between earthly matter and the immortal. Each Dehua cup is beautiful but also haunted, like all porcelain, by the others that did not make it through the firing process. While we do not know the history of the museum’s blanc de Chine cups, it is likely that they would have been used for ritual devotions. I like to imagine that no mortal has drunk from these tranquil objects. Like small envoys from the moon, each seems to emit an other-worldly glow, having persisted for 300 years now between the fallible human realm and the godly.’ — Delia Falconer in today’s @review_australian from the @powerhousemuseum publication Success and Failure. Image: Blanc de Chine porcelain wine cups (Qing dynasty, 1723-1735).」5月30日 16時39分