Crafting a future for traditional arts

Guo paints on pottery. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Guo values the traditional crafts as genuine art treasures, and he is eager to innovate and add to modern advances to its development.

"Our country needs people who inherit just as much as who innovate," Guo then speaks for himself, "I want sancai works of my own creation to be displayed in museums a hundred years from now, and not just some copies of Tang sancai I once produced."

He believes that innovation that ignores the art form's history and singularity in favor of purely Western interpretation will not have an any lasting value－like a tree with roots.

Guo applies modern artistic expression to porcelain production based on the traditional craft.

During his studies at university, he learned about traditional Chinese painting, oil painting and watercolors, which he says are elements still reflected in his sancai works.

He has been bold enough to try 500 new types of bright and semitransparent colors on glaze, while the traditional sancai always remains loyal to white, yellow and green. He jumps out of tradition that ties the ceramist to the three-dimensional figures including horses and camels, and has expanded the subjects of his creations using sancai glaze painting techniques.