Yingge has more than two hundred years of history in producing ceramics and is the ceramics capital of Taiwan. In 2000, New Taipei City government selected Yingge for Taiwan’s first ceramics-themed museum, with goals to develop local tourism, drive the transformation of the ceramics industry in Yingge, and provide a platform for showcasing and exchanging achievements in Taiwan’s ceramic art. As a specialized ceramics museum, Yingge Ceramics Museum has assumed the responsibilities of preserving knowledge in ceramics, reviving the ceramics industry, and promoting ceramic art. With full dedication, we engage in ceramics research, curation, and education while continuing international exchange, coordinating local industries, promoting cultural diversity and equal rights, and enriching lifestyles with the aesthetics of ceramics, thus elevating Taiwan’s ceramics industry and ceramic art to the global arena.

- Hsiu-Tzu Wu, Director of New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum (Refer to the website of Yingge Ceramics Museum)

The Digital Museum of Taiwan Ceramics allowed many people to appreciate artwork during the pandemic. Under what circumstances did the museum come up with this idea? Now that the pandemic is slowing down, are there any further plans and activities planned to attract more people to visit?

According to statistics, 800 (or even more) museums in the world have been closed due to the COVID pandemic, and those private-operating museums are affected the most, including our Yingge Museum which has been closed for a total of 113 days. However, before the pandemic, we already started the project — The Digital Museum of Taiwan Ceramics. Through this platform, everyone can know more about pottery art at home themselves. Nevertheless, we have also found that this digital museum is actually not that convenient: if you are looking for a specific work, it is actually not so easy to find. If you want to make pottery works at home, the results may not be perfect, since the process to making perfect pottery needs to be checked by professionals. Other than these problems, it also has some advantages. For example, everyone can watch pre-recorded videos about pottery easily since it is accessible to anyone who is interested in this type of art. At the museum, only 20 people at a time are allowed to watch since we don't have enough seats for everyone. Since there is no quota on a digital device, the number of viewers would increase. Now, our goal is to produce more documentaries, exhibitions, or promotional activities, and then gather all activities on the same digital platform that is convenient for the public to use. After that, we will also improve the digital museum system from the perspective of the audience so that we can ensure everyone can use it more conveniently, and thus learn about pottery directly.

Now, although the pandemic seems to show a sign of easing, we are constantly thinking of ways to attract "new audiences" to the on-site museum. Before the museum closed, the staff of our museum made an "experimental candy wall"; each "candy" was written with everyone's expectations, wishes, and blessings, such as ending the pandemic as soon as possible so that we could get our normal life back. There are about 20,000 "candies" in this public art, which successfully attracted many newer visitors to the museum. In addition to this, we also have a famous landmark called "The Faraway Toilet". Customers often go to the counter directly to ask about the location of this toilet. Just like its name, this toilet is at the end of our 4.2-hectare park, isolated from the rest of our attractions. If visitors don't know much about this museum, they usually don't go to that particular toilet, because of how far it is. What a pity! However, I must say, the decoration inside is very exquisite. It was remodeled by 9 young artists, who use their imagination to express art vividly and beautifully.

Yingge Ceramics Museum takes the responsibilities of inheriting ceramic knowledge, revitalizing the ceramic industry, and promoting ceramic art. Over the years, which aspect has shown to be the most effective? Did you face any difficulties, and how did you overcome them?

Basically, there are two aspects in which we improved on during recent years. Firstly, we internationalized our projects. Actually, our museum has been opened for over twenty years, and one of the goals of the first curator that listed out in the first place was to internationalize the museum. Local wise, people have been creating pottery in Yingge as early as 200 years ago. However, if we only localize the artworks and projects, the world cannot identify Taiwanese unique culture and method of creating pottery. To achieve internationalization, the first curator, Mr. Wu(吳進風), plotted the International Ceramics Biennale in Taiwan. The winner of this competition would win a large amount of money, therefore many pottery and ceramics masters joined the contest, which helped the museum gain its fame. In 2018, Taiwan hosted the International Ceramics Biennale, and the right to host this competition was fought over for by many countries. Because we have been trying very hard to achieve this goal for many years, we successfully completed this activity. We believe that we must interact with pottery masters and museums around the world in order to maintain an international status. In addition, every year, about a hundred pottery masters submit their works to the Yingge Museum, and we choose nine contestants to visit Taiwan and interact with each other, which also allows the pottery masters from Taiwan to learn about the pottery from other countries. They can share novel tools, ideas, and methods with more people in Taiwan, even with the pottery students at Yingge High. Secondly, our museum improved our friendliness toward citizens. Museum has always been a center of knowledge, but modern museums focus more on the visitors than the artifacts. In other words, it matters less whether there are a lot of artifacts, but how to attract more visitors to the museum. This also means that we made our museum friendlier for handicapped people or people with dementia. In fact, last year, we got an award of being a senior-friendly museum. In addition, we established an active museum where we took our programs to rural areas to get in touch with more people. The people also enjoyed producing their own pottery artwork, such as cups, plates, and other containers. By improving on both hardware and software, we make it easier for more citizens to visit our museum.

When maintaining a museum, facing challenges is inevitable. Human labor and funding are both examples of challenges we face. We have begun to realize that some of our hardware are wearing down over the twenty-one years since the museum opened. For example, large windows suddenly shatter and the malfunction of the air-conditioning systems. When the museum asked professionals to give a quote about how much money we needed to fix the museum hardware at once, we realized that we needed over 200,000,000 NTD, and there was no way the government could fund us. As a result, we decided to split the maintaining and repairing project over a span of seven years, and prioritize the more important hardware, such as the equipment for fire safety. Apart from funding, we also might encounter the problem of lacking in human labor. We need to find more people who are interested in this culture in order to sustain our labor. These are the major problems we face as we run our museum. However, when encountering a problem, we must find a general solution, instead of fixing a small error one at a time, unless the fix is absolutely necessary.

In your opinion, what pottery or project represents the museum the most and why?

We’ve considered this question for many years, and we thought about choosing one pottery work that represents Yingge Museum. Yet after multiple discussions, most of us disagrees towards this idea, because each pottery work has its own meaning and story behind it. Choosing one art that to represent the museum has its own difficulty. However, there are some recommended pottery work. The first one is Master Qiu Huantang’s “Julibee Gate”. Master Liu Zhenzhou’s “Caiyun Chengxiang” is another recommended pottery work to visit at the museum. Besides these two pottery work, it is also recommended to visit the aboriginal pottery when you come to the museum, because the aboriginal people are a very precious culture in Taiwan, and many aboriginal pottery works are full of stories.

For a curator, except for displays and a wide variety of activities associated with potteries, are there any other ways to promote the culture of potteries?

We often say that museums have four major functions: research, collection, display, and education. However, for the sake of the economy, museums are no longer just doing exhibitions like before. Some museums even focus more on tourism and the economy, and their purpose is to let the people get closer to these artworks and promote the culture. Our ceramic culture is an art that urgently needs the people to understand and promote because the culture is silently disappearing. For example, it's predictable that Master Zhan Guoxiang’s kick-wheel technique is no longer available in Taiwan. Therefore, instead of passively waiting for the people to discover the beauty of pottery, it is better to launch cultural, creative, and artistic products, so that in addition to watching, the people can take the pottery home show them to their family. At the point, the culture will naturally and surely spread further and let more people understand it. Furthermore, lively education and experiential activities can also enable the public to understand more about the culture of pottery, so that there is no distance between ceramics and the people.

What do you think of the future of Taiwanese ceramic arts?

There are many aspects in which the culture of pottery can develop in the future. Our museum’s main goal is to use the local pottery to introduce our culture to the entire world. We also want to be a professional museum since we are determined to produce handmade pottery, and we must have the professional knowledge, spread, and collection to maintain our expertise. As for innovation, we keep learning new ways of promoting our culture through social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram, and Podcast. We can even learn new knowledge of how different pottery masters develop their methods in creating their artwork. In addition, we have been internationalizing even in times of the coronavirus. Recently, we promoted our pottery to Japanese museums and established an exhibit in a Japanese city. We hope to continue our achievements in the future. Moreover, we cooperate with other fields to make our museum friendlier to our citizens. For example, because we have to produce service for people with dementia, we must educate our workers on the disease and how to help them. Occupational therapists and physical therapists are all people with professional knowledge concerning this topic, and we must cooperate them to create a more comfortable environment for every visitor.

As a curator, what do you want to achieve the most?

There is a project called the Sany Cultural and Creative Integration Project, which is the cooperation of dozens of places in New Taipei City to promote Yingge's project. The plan's main goal is to improve the traffic situation in order to attract more citizens. Mainly, most people come to Yingge by train and then through Wenhua Road to the Ceramic Museum, but because this road is unpaved meaning it is pretty inconvenient to travel through, cars and motorcycle rushes out of the streets time to time making it unsafe. To improve the current situation, MRT will be constructed which is expected to be completed in 2023, and hopefully, the newly build Sanying Bridge will improve the traffic from the san-xia to Yingge. In addition, the road from the railway station to the museum should also be improved, the distance walking straight from the train station to the Ceramic Museum is less than 100 meters, but because there is a special association in the middle, the road becomes tortuous and require a lot of time to walk through, so we wish to make an aisle through the association for the people to use. In addition, we wish to add a variety of public artworks displayed on both sides of the 600-meter distance between the new art museum and our ceramic museum, so you can enjoy art during this journey. We also hope to improve the Fenghua Trail from Yingge Museum to Old Street. In the future, when these trails are created, they can connect to the art museum, the Ceramic Museum, and Old Street which will definitely make Yingge more modernized and attract more people.