Tian Wei works in Jingdezhen, the city that has been making porcelain for over a thousand years. His studio operates under two names. ANTENNA is the broader practice. Steal the Plane is the design brand that has emerged from it, carrying the spirit of conceptual art into objects made for daily life.
The name Steal the Plane comes from a true event. In 2018, a ground crew member at Seattle-Tacoma Airport took off in a commercial aircraft without authorisation or training. He flew for seventy-five minutes, speaking calmly to air traffic control, then brought the plane down on a small island. It was an act that should have been impossible within the systems designed to prevent it. That impossibility, and the quiet freedom it represented, became the founding impulse of the brand.
Tian Wei's central project is the Occupation series: a body of work that takes inherited ceramic forms and interrupts them with a single, angular mark. The mark is applied across Qinghua patterns from the factory era, across dragon-and-phoenix motifs from the imperial tradition, across the surfaces of industrial wine bottles rescued from factory waste streams. Each piece preserves the original form while refusing to leave it untouched.
The work is serious without being solemn. There is humour in putting the Occupation mark across a God of Fortune. There is environmental intent in the Long-Life Design collection, which transforms factory rejects into signed objects. And there is, beneath everything, a sustained inquiry into what it means to inherit a tradition and choose to do something unexpected with it.
The Occupation series draws on several distinct production methods. The Qinghua Wutong pieces use traditional underglaze cobalt fired in a high-temperature reduction kiln, with overglaze lead-free transfer applied in a secondary firing. The ice bucket and daily wares are hand-thrown porcelain with applied Qinghua decoration. The Long-Life Design collection begins with industrial ceramic wine bottles sourced from Jingdezhen's Xintianyi factory, selected for their forms and surfaces, then reworked by hand.
What unifies the work is not technique but intent. Every piece in the Occupation series carries the same gesture: a mark that asserts the presence of a living artist inside a tradition that could otherwise feel fixed in the past.