Ceramic artist
Simin
思敏Ceramic Artist
Currently based in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi, China
Born in 1992 in Leping, Jiangxi Province
Graduated in 2013 from Jingdezhen Ceramic University, majoring in Ceramic Design
Has been creating tea wares since 2013
Selected Solo Exhibitions
- “Plants as Glaze”, Youlian Studio, Shanghai
- “Returning Light into the Deep Forest”, Youlian Studio, Shanghai
- “Letting Arrival Happen”, Banleng, Xixi, Hangzhou
- “Green in Subtle Variations”, Tea Road, Shanghai
The practice
Time & attention
Simin is a ceramic artist whose practice is grounded in time, attention, and lived experience. Working primarily with plant ash glazes, she has spent more than a decade engaging with one of the most demanding and unstable glaze traditions in Chinese ceramics. Rather than pursuing control or repetition, she works within narrow firing margins where material, atmosphere, and human judgment meet.
For Simin, glaze is not a surface treatment but a record of relationship between ash and mineral, heat and duration, intention and chance. Her vessels are never fixed results. Each firing is singular, shaped by patience, failure, and sustained observation.
The practice
Harmony & use
Over the years, her work has shifted from an early impulse to directly express what she observed in nature toward a deeper understanding of harmony and fit. Initial experiments were driven by visible change such as foliage, light, growth, and decay, yet often remained partial.
Through long-term experimentation and reflection, her focus moved toward how form, glaze, and use function as a whole. This evolution reflects a broader life view that favors allowing meaning to emerge through repetition, restraint, and long engagement rather than forcing expression.
The practice
Thinking & making
At the core of her practice is an inseparable relationship between thinking and making. Simin does not treat experience as authority in itself and continuously questions what she knows, aware that perception can mislead without direct verification.
Concepts of good and bad are never absolute in her work but relational, dependent on moment, material, and use. This outlook gives her vessels a strong internal coherence, resolved without rigidity and open without uncertainty, grounded in attention rather than assertion.
The practice
Holding time
Her recent works draw from historical kiln traditions such as Jun and Yaozhou while reinterpreting them through contemporary experimentation. Glazes unfold in layered greys, blue greens, purples, and subtle opalescence, with colors that drift, separate, and rejoin like light moving through foliage or reflections on water at dusk.
These vessels carry an ancient sensibility without nostalgia, reopening the past as a living continuation. For Simin, making is inseparable from living, a sustained act of attention that connects memory and future, material and perception, offering objects that hold time rather than decorate it.
Inside the studio
Material & fire
By Simin
