The ceramic installations of Edmund de Waal are rooted in poetry and reflect the artist’s profound awareness of how Occident and Orient intermingle.
InSight No. 190
Edmund de Waal, jade steps grievance, 2018
In 1988, the Japanese financial services company Daiwa Securities endowed a charity to promote relations between its home nation and Britain. The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation offers a nineteen-month scholarship programme to a few successful applicants, and in 1990 one of the earliest recipients of the scholarship was Edmund de Waal (b. 1964). He first spent a year studying Japanese at university in Sheffield, then he went to live in Japan where he worked at the Mejiro Ceramics Studio in Tokyo and conducted archival research into the studio potter Bernard Leach. His return to London in 1993 marked the beginning of his maturity as a potter and an artist. The scholarship provided de Waal with an opportunity to immerse himself in Far Eastern culture and, since then, he has made personally distinctive porcelain vessels imbued with an awareness of the relationship between East and West.
Another artist enamoured by the Far East, but much less sensitive to its distinctive cultures, was the American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972). Equipped with the notes of certain scholars, whose names were credited on the title page of his book Cathay, published in 1915, Pound used a free verse technique to make a new kind of poetry from poems by others. One of his classical Chinese sources was the Tang dynasty poet ‘Rihaku’, as Pound erroneously called him, or as he is variously known today by English speakers, Li Po, Li Bo, Li Bai and Li Taibai (c. 701–762).
De Waal’s ceramic installation jade steps grievance takes its title from a sophisticated courtly poem by Li Po. A longstanding admirer and critic of Modernism, in which Pound’s poetry collection Cathay is a significant literary landmark, de Waal did not use Pound’s translation but rather a more sympathetic one. Wai-Lim Yip’s anthology of Chinese poetry, published in 1997, includes a particularly literal translation of Li Po’s poem in which the stairs are said to be ‘jade’. Pound’s version in Cathay is called ‘The Jewel Stairs’s Grievance’, and it extrapolates and broadens the sense of the original Chinese word for jade. Another translator of the poem, Arthur Cooper, chose the word ‘marble’ instead of jade. Writing in 1973, he explained that the sense of ‘jade’ in the original text equated to the (Western) notion of ‘marble’—a hard, beautiful, often translucent stone.
Wai-Lim Yip’s translation catches the impactful restraint of the original:
Upon the jade steps white dews grow.
It is late. Gauze stockings are dabbled.
She lets down the crystal blind
To watch, glass-clear, the autumn moon.
The explanatory notes included with ‘The Jewel Stairs’s Grievance’ in Cathay are almost as terse and compelling as the poem itself. They shed light on the scenario evoked by Li Po: ‘Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather. Also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.’
Edmund de Waal gives poetic titles to his ceramic installations in an act of evocation, and this practice suggests the strong sense of poetry he invests into his work. In 2015 or so, he began to introduce beside hand-turned porcelain vessels a variety of materials. To date, his installations have incorporated plaster blocks, silver, gold, graphite, Cor-Ten steel, lead, tin boxes, and so on. jade steps grievance includes two slender pieces of alabaster, which stand upright directly behind two porcelain vessels. The installation registers the ambivalence of the Chinese word for ‘jade’. The slender square and oblong of stone included in jade steps grievance are sufficiently dense and translucent to suggest ‘jade’ (or ‘jewelled’, or ‘marble’). This narrow material connection opens onto a wider field of semantic and literary activity, and whichever translation de Waal may thoughtfully adopt, his work is loaded with both poetry and cultural exchanges at the frontier between East and West.
Images:
Logo for the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, 1914, marble, height 90.5cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The title page of Cathay by Ezra Pound (1915, Elkin Mathews
Traditionally attributed to Zhou Fang, Palace Ladies Playing Double Sixes, late C12–mid C13, ink and colour on silk, 30.5 x 69.1 cm, National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C. (detail)
Edmund de Waal, jade steps grievance (detail)
