On the century-old Bund, a classic is renewed.
On September 11, 2026, Taiwanese contemporary porcelain artist and NewChi founder Heinrich Wang presented the art salon Embracing Contemporary Art, Leaving a Mark on Life during The New · The Classic porcelain exhibition at Shanghai’s Peace Hotel.
Guests and speakers at The New · The Classic Art Salon, held at Shanghai’s Peace Hotel.
From his transition from glass art to white porcelain to his ideas about the aesthetics of living, high-temperature firing, the life experiences behind individual works, and contemporary teaware, Wang spoke with nearly thirty guests from the art and business communities. Together, they explored how objects can transform both a space and one’s state of mind—and how Eastern aesthetics can be reinterpreted through a contemporary language.
When a Century-Old Landmark Meets Contemporary Porcelain
At the invitation of Shanghai’s Peace Hotel, Heinrich Wang’s porcelain exhibition The New · The Classic officially opened on September 9, 2026.
As sculptural white porcelain entered the hotel’s nearly century-old Art Deco setting, its pure surfaces, decisive lines, and architectural structures entered into dialogue with the building’s layered history. The encounter opened a conversation about tradition, innovation, and the classics that each generation leaves to the future.
Guests view Heinrich Wang’s white porcelain works at close range during The New · The Classic Art Salon.
For Wang, a classic is not a repetition of the past. It is the value that an age leaves behind through sincere and courageous innovation.
As he said at the opening:
“The new moves an era forward; the classic allows its values to endure.”
The September 11 art salon continued this conversation through the works on view, leading guests into the artist’s life experiences, creative methods, and long-standing reflections on objects and the way we live.
Read the Opening Story of The New · The Classic
Who Is Heinrich Wang? From Glass Art to Contemporary Porcelain
Heinrich Wang is a pioneering figure in modern Chinese glass art and a co-founder of both Liuligongfang and Tittot.
After achieving significant recognition in glass, he began again in a new medium after the age of fifty, devoting himself to white porcelain and founding NewChi in 2003.
Across film, design, glass, and porcelain, Wang has continually explored the relationship among culture, material, and contemporary life. Rather than repeating the rounded, restrained forms associated with traditional porcelain, he introduced architectural structures, sharply defined lines, suspended tension, and the changing presence of light and shadow.
In his work, white porcelain is more than a vessel for holding things. It enters a space like sculpture, carrying an upright, composed, and self-assured contemporary presence.
This approach does not reject tradition. It gives Eastern culture a new formal language through which it can find its place in the present.
Meet the Artist, Heinrich Wang
What Does Heinrich Wang Mean by “the Aesthetics of Living”?
At the beginning of the salon, Wang reflected on the questions of life and meaning raised by post-war existentialism. From there, he introduced his understanding of the aesthetics of living:
Life itself can become an art. Through perception, experience, and creation, each person can bring greater quality and depth to the way they live.
He illustrated the idea through changing drinking customs. In the past, the emphasis might have been on drinking freely and abundantly. Today, even an everyday bottle of wine may invite the careful selection of an appropriate glass, an appreciation of colour and aroma, and the choice to taste slowly.
What has changed is not simply the vessel being used. It is the way people experience time, space, and their own lives.
Objects may appear quiet, yet they subtly influence our gestures, emotions, and habits.
Wang referred to what is sometimes called the “fresh-flower effect.” When a vase of flowers appears on a table, people often begin to tidy the table and the surrounding room. As the environment changes, so does the person within it.
The “fresh-flower effect”: when the environment changes, our own state often changes with it.
A poetic object can similarly encourage us to look at our lives anew. It does not need a grand function. Through proportion, touch, light, shadow, and the rituals of use, it can remind us to approach the present with greater care.
For Wang, a sense of ritual is a way of taking life seriously—a gentle willingness to give a seemingly small matter the attention it deserves.
Heinrich Wang’s contemporary teaware in use during The New · The Classic Art Salon.
Through objects, we explore the possibilities of life; through objects, we also express our passion for living.
Why Was the Move from Glass to Porcelain a Return to the Beginning?
Moving from glass art to white porcelain was not simply a change of material. It required Wang to begin again almost from zero.
Glass can be recovered and remelted, and its making depends on slow, carefully controlled annealing. Porcelain firing, by contrast, is irreversible. At approximately 1300°C, porcelain clay contracts, cracks, softens, and deforms. Once a firing fails, the material cannot be returned to its original state.
Left: porcelain clay contracts by approximately 15% during firing. Right: porcelain softens and deforms under high heat.
This is one reason traditional porcelain forms tend to be rounded and structurally stable. Large flat planes, exact angles, assertive geometry, and suspended structures are extraordinarily difficult to maintain in the kiln.
At the salon, Wang recalled spending three years visiting workshops, only to hear the same answer repeatedly:
“A form like this cannot survive the firing.”
He did not stop. Instead, he established his own studio and began testing every part of the process—from clay composition and structural proportion to mould making and firing conditions.
After more than ten tonnes of porcelain clay had been consumed by trials and failed firings, Wang gradually overcame the material’s limitations. Beyond the established conventions of porcelain, he opened a contemporary path defined by pure white form.
His purpose was never innovation for novelty’s sake. He wanted white porcelain to carry the spirit of its time: clear, upright, and rational, yet still alive with cultural warmth.
Giving the Heart a Form: Firing Life Experience into Porcelain
In Heinrich Wang’s practice, an object is never only a matter of form and function. It also reflects the life of the person who created it.
During the salon, he introduced several representative works and shared the experiences from which they emerged.
Fairies by the River: An Upright Presence in Solitude
The inspiration for Fairies by the River came from a black-crowned night heron Wang encountered during an early-morning walk beside the river.
Heinrich Wang’s white porcelain work Fairies by the River.
The flowing river and the motionless bird—one moving, one still—created a powerful tension of life. The solitude of the scene reminded Wang of his early journey to the United States to study glass art, when he faced both the transformation of the industry and the incomprehension of those around him.
International glass art was flourishing, while Taiwan’s glass industry was entering a period of decline. Choosing that moment to commit himself to glass often left him working in isolation.
He translated that state of mind into white porcelain, creating a figure that is independent, quiet, and unbowed.
Fairies by the River depicts more than a bird standing by the water. It is also a portrait of an artist who, even in solitude, chooses to stand, observe, and continue forward.
Horizon: A Sacred Highland Lake Held in Form
Horizon was inspired by the sacred lakes of Tibet.
Heinrich Wang’s white porcelain work Horizon.
Wang translated the purity of a highland lake, far removed from worldly disturbance, and the instant in which water rises into the air, into a form that opens outward in successive layers.
The work resembles both a splash of water and ripples suspended in time. Filled with flowers, fruit, or tea refreshments, it brings an unfamiliar and unexpected beauty to the rituals of use.
For Wang, utility and art are not opposites. Only when an object enters the table and the life of its user does a new relationship truly begin.
Layers of Blessings: Bringing Traditional Culture into Contemporary Life
The gourd is an important auspicious symbol in Chinese culture. Its name, hulu, echoes the sound of fulu—blessings and prosperity—while its connected rounded forms suggest continuity, growth, and blessings passed from one generation to the next.
Heinrich Wang’s white porcelain work Layers of Blessings.
Inspired by the gourd, Wang created a series of interconnected spaces that vary in size and depth and unfold horizontally. The work is both a large-scale porcelain sculpture and a functional fruit bowl, flower vessel, or centrepiece for the table.
During the salon, Wang described how collectors had used it in different ways. One served sashimi upon it; another filled it with glutinous rice balls, allowing the rounded food to settle naturally among the vessels of different sizes. Each interpretation created new visual and practical possibilities around the dining table.
After leaving the artist’s studio and entering different homes, a work continues to acquire meaning through the ways people use it.
This is the aesthetics of living in practice: culture is not only observed—it continues through use.
Discover Heinrich Wang’s Layers of Blessings
Boundless: Practising Release in Everyday Life
Wang also introduced Boundless, his slender interpretation of Maitreya.
Boundless expresses release and emptiness through a slender, weightless image of Maitreya.
Rather than the familiar smiling Buddha with a rounded belly, the figure is lean and light, appearing almost to float in the air.
Before the Song dynasty, Maitreya was frequently depicted with a slender form associated with release and emptiness. Wang wanted the work to move beyond the shrine, where a sacred image might remain respectfully distant, and enter the spaces of life like a teacher whose presence quietly accompanies us.
During the pandemic, one collector spent three minutes each evening simply looking at the work. In that silent exchange, the collector found a sense of release:
“With burdens released, the body feels light and the world opens wide.”
Wang also spoke about his earlier participation in disaster relief and the human concern underlying his Buddhist works.
For him, Buddha-nature does not belong only to the temple. It is realised through action among people. Gratitude, the cherishing of blessings, and the capacity to embrace others are strengths cultivated in lived experience.
Reinventing Teaware for the Contemporary Tea Table
Turning to teaware, Wang began with the different atmospheres created by various tea cultures.
Heinrich Wang’s Beloved tea set features an open, lidless design that allows tenderness and composure to emerge through the movement of tea.
A Japanese tea gathering often leans towards quietness and restraint. A Chinese tea gathering may become more open and animated. After several cups, what began as a silent tasting can grow into a lively exchange of ideas.
This led Wang to ask: within contemporary urban life, could another way of drinking tea be created—one that allows intimate conversation and a sense of ceremony to coexist?
From this question came the elevated teapot.
Its raised body and narrowed base create the stable tension of an inverted triangle. As the pot is lifted, poured, and returned to the tea table, every movement naturally acquires an upright and deliberate rhythm.
The Mountain and Water Line teapot takes a different approach, condensing a landscape onto the table. The line of a mountain, the movement of water, and the function of the pot become inseparable within a single object.
As Wang writes in The Will of the Teapot:
“The mountain is tea’s homeland; water is tea’s kindred spirit; the teapot brings the two together.”
In The Will of the Teapot, Heinrich Wang explores how vessels introduce ceremony and awareness into life.
A traditional Yixing teapot carries the leisurely atmosphere of a courtyard or scholar’s studio. NewChi’s contemporary teaware responds instead to the modern city, expressing a desire for order, proportion, and strength.
As the lines of the vessel move from gentle curves towards greater clarity, new possibilities for drinking tea begin to emerge.
Explore NewChi Contemporary White Porcelain
Where Does an Artist Find Inspiration?
During the conversation, a guest asked:
“Where does an artist’s inspiration come from?”
Wang replied that inspiration is not mysterious. What we see around us, what we experience in life, and what moves us inwardly can all become material for creation.
The true difficulty lies in the long process that follows: refining the idea and overcoming the limitations of material and craft.
Heinrich Wang’s design notes.
He compared the process to writing. Through sustained practice, a writer may learn to produce work of consistent quality. Yet a piece that truly moves its reader often requires years of experience and repeated revision.
The same is true of art.
Inspiration is only the beginning. For an object to reach its final form, it must pass through a long process of refinement.
A compelling thought must still undergo sketching, structural development, mould making, material testing, and high-temperature firing before it can become a complete work.
The kiln does not become more forgiving simply because an artist’s idea is moving. Every failure demands that the problem be understood again—and that the process begin anew.
Collecting Gives a Work Another Life
During the discussion, guests asked questions and shared stories of their own encounters with NewChi works.
A glass artist spoke of his admiration for Wang’s decades-long pursuit of the limits of craft. A long-time collector reflected on more than ten years of collecting and recalled the emotion of first encountering Wang’s white porcelain.
For collectors, a work does not belong only in an exhibition setting. It accompanies family life, friendship, and important moments. When given to a close friend, it carries more than a blessing; it also expresses the giver’s own relationship to culture and beauty.
Some guests asked about the differences between historical porcelain and contemporary white porcelain, while others wanted to understand the contrasting material qualities of glass and porcelain. Wang responded through firing methods, cultural symbolism, and aesthetic expression, revealing the technology, thought, and human experience held beneath white porcelain’s pure appearance.
Towards the end of the salon, host Li Yuexin recalled the arrival of the exhibition works at the Peace Hotel. As each piece was removed from its crate, members of the hotel team could not help but pause in admiration.
Now in his seventies, Wang continues to work with abundant creative energy. With a smile, he said:
“It is because of my family’s unconditional love and support that I have dared to keep creating without fearing the limits.”
Every Object Is a Mark Left by Life
Every classic was once a daring act of innovation.
Every object is a vivid mark left by life.
Within the century-old light and shadow of Shanghai’s Peace Hotel, the white porcelain works stand quietly.
The New · The Classic porcelain exhibition at Shanghai’s Peace Hotel.
Without clamour or excess, they create concise yet powerful presences through pure white surfaces, line, and structure. They carry Eastern thought while recording how contemporary people experience life and the world around them.
The New · The Classic reveals not only how Heinrich Wang has challenged the material limitations of white porcelain. It also shows how art can leave the distant position of observation, enter the spaces in which we live, and become part of our lives.
Even for those unable to visit Shanghai, the exhibition photographs and stories offer a way to understand how Wang transforms life experience, Eastern culture, and high-temperature porcelain craft into a contemporary language of form.
Links
Exhibition Information
Exhibition
The New · The Classic: Porcelain Art by Heinrich Wang
Dates
September 9–October 8, 2026
Opening Hours
Daily, 12:00–20:00
Venue
Lobby and Cin Cin Bar, 2/F, Shanghai Peace Hotel
The exhibition in the Peace Hotel lobby is open to the public. Admission to the Cin Cin Bar exhibition area on the second floor requires advance registration and an admission pass. Please refer to on-site announcements for current opening hours and admission arrangements.
