A Practice-based Study of " Kwon-glazed Porcelain ": How Creative Writing Help Flourish the Intangible Cultural Heritages

In 2003, UNESCO passed Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. The conservation of intangible cultural heritage has played significant role in the protection of regional traditional culture, cultural identity and social cohesion.

In 2008, Kwon-glazed porcelain was selected into “the list of China's national intangible cultural heritage”. As the representative of traditional handicraft in southern China, it has gone through a hundred years of evolution and is regarded as the important cultural carrier that witnessed the historical evolution of folk art in Guangdong and Hong Kong. However, the complete and scientific framework of research has not been established in the conservation of Kwon-glazed porcelain, much less the independent and systematic academic works. The decline of the industry has negatively affected the inheritance and development of the artistic form, and hindered its expansion of influence world-widely.

As a culture researcher and creative writer, the PI has been committed to studying Kwon-glazed porcelain for years and aims to raise the social concern to the intangible cultural heritage with the framework of creative writing that is of more universality and dissemination. Therefore the project will be focusing on the practice of creative writing and related research. Firstly, in terms of textual practice, the PI will take the fictional text as the basic narrative framework. With the meta-narrative method, the narrator will be participating in the text as the researcher, presenting the creation process, and demonstrating the research achievements and fieldwork to analyze its value in Anthropology, folklore and sociology of Kwon-glazed porcelain. Secondly, the PI will break through the boundary between fictional and non-fictional texts so that the research output such as the inheritors' oral history will be embedded in the fictional text framework to fully enhance the evolution, historical origin and inheritor's experience of the Kwon-glazed porcelain. Thirdly, the ideology of New Historicism will be introduced in the creative writing output in which the grand narrative of Chinese modern history is introspected and rewritten from the perspective of personal history so as to reveal the critical role of Kwon-glazed porcelain in the cultural interaction between China and the West.

The project output will be a full-length novel of 200,000 words (to be published in a national publishing house) and three academic papers on tier 1 journals in the research fields of Kwon-glazed porcelain culture, the interpretation of novel creation ideas and methods, and the practice and theories of the combination of fictional and non-fictional creation respectively. As creative writing projects in the field of intangible cultural heritage are scanty either at home or abroad, it is a pioneering and practically significant project to interweave creative writing and cultural studies of Kwon-glazed porcelain. The project will contribute significantly to the preservation and development of intangible cultural heritage.