Studio: Steal the Plane 偷飞机去 Series: “Occupation”

Material: Porcelain, underglaze Qinghua cobalt, lead-free overglaze transfer

Dimensions: Height 20cm, top 2.2cm, base 17cm This is the most sculptural object in the Long-Life Design collection. Where other pieces in the series preserve the silhouette of the original factory vessel, this one has been deliberately deformed. The ceramic wine bottle has been compressed, folded, pushed past its intended shape into something organic and unfamiliar. It no longer looks like a bottle. It looks like a fruit splitting open, or a stone worn by water, or something living caught mid-transformation.

A thick red glaze cascades down from the shoulders, engulfing the body in a colour so saturated it feels almost edible. Beneath it, the original white glaze surface breaks through at the neck and in irregular patches across the upper body, as though the vessel is shedding one skin to reveal another. Occupation marks in green and black scatter across both surfaces without distinction, indifferent to the boundary between red and white.

The God of Fortune, Caishen, whose image once decorated this bottle in its factory life, is no longer visible. He has been buried under glaze, under colour, under the artist's hand. What remains is not a symbol of prosperity but something more honest: an object that was discarded, reclaimed, reshaped, and made extraordinary.

It fits in two hands. The second photograph shows this. For all its visual intensity, it is an intimate object, meant to be held and turned, its irregular surfaces explored by touch as much as by sight.