A summer event at the Guimet Museum, the exhibition "At the Heart of Color" traces the long history of porcelain and grand feu colors in China between the 8th and 18th centuries . Coming from the extraordinary Zhuyuetang collection of Richard Kan (Hong Kong) and that of the Guimet Museum, 250 masterpieces illustrate the Chinese taste for formal simplicity and purity of colors, resulting from centuries of perfection. The incessant quest for purity, until finding the perfect shape and color, has given rise to unique pieces of great aesthetic finesse, presented in the exhibition.
If porcelain is famous throughout the world today, it is because of the purity of the kaolin body which, once fired at high temperature, turns out to be perfectly white. Its manufacture remained the exclusive domain of China until the 18th century and its mystery continued to fascinate European courts.
Coated in a single color, so-called monochrome porcelain is the highest expression of the technical perfection of Chinese workshops: it requires both purity of materials and absolute mastery of technical firing techniques. Despite the reduced number of pigments that could withstand firing at very high temperatures, Chinese potters never stopped trying to develop new colors in order to satisfy emperors and scholars, and meet the demand for perfection. linked to the use of porcelain in rituals.
In a magnificent scenography organized into nine sections divided by colors (white, celadon, green and turquoise, blue, black and purple, red, yellow, brown, imitation of the colors of nature and the rainbow), this exceptional exhibition evokes the cultural and symbolic connotations linked to colors and the techniques which allowed their manufacture. The visitor is guided through this journey by a selection of poems illustrating the deep emotion that the Chinese can feel in the face of the perfection of these creations.
In addition to these ceramic masterpieces, a rare illustrated album dating from the 18th century , 7 meters long, on exceptional loan from the Rennes Museum of Fine Arts, traces the process of porcelain production in the Jingdezhen workshops. , the main porcelain-making city of China.
Multimedia animations will allow visitors to discover Chinese porcelain seen from the infinitely small. They will offer the possibility of “entering” the material, with the glass particles. An introduction to the essential action of fire in the formation of colors, their mutation before and after cooking, depending on an infinite number of parameters: temperatures, atmosphere, cooling speed, plants used as fuel.