Hua Flower Bowl No.23, 2019

Peter Ting grew up in Hong Kong, where he fell in love with the porcelain ornaments he saw in his uncle’s ‘hundred-treasure case’ (the display was rotated seasonally like a museum, with blue-and-white bowls in spring and darker, sang de beouf glazed pieces in autumn and winter)

“.…at the age of 8, I remember being totally fascinated by the fragile looking items sitting on a traditional Chinese Bai Bao Ge display shelf. Only much later did I understand that what I saw so many years ago was a connoisseur curating his collection and displaying it in an installation format.”

This is how Ting recalls his seminal moment after being introduced to his uncle’s porcelain collection. Since then the artist and designer, who was educated in England, has spent his life working with and specialising in ceramics, from ancient China to classical Greece and believes in ‘looking forward with a foot in the past’. Eastern and Western influences are a continuous thread in Ting’s work, from his focus on tea – the leaves may be grown in China but the practice of taking tea has been built in to British afternoons for centuries – to his tableware, which he makes from Chinese porcelain but sells in very English establishments such as Liberty and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. His interest in Blanc-de-Chine led him to visit Dehua in 2004. In 2016, Ting and writer Ying Jian established Ting-Ying Gallery dedicated to presenting unique and limited edition works in Blanc-de-Chine porcelain from Dehua, Fujian Province, China. Since its inception Ting-Ying Gallery has expanded and now represents a wider group of artists whose cultural references and expression of form are increasingly diverse. However all still retain, as a starting point, the shared history and legacy of Blanc-de-Chine porcelain. Ting’s Blanc-de-Chine collection has been exhibited worldwide at various design fairs, including Design Milan and Design Miami/Basel. M+ Museum in Hong Kong has collected Ting’s work retrospectively and it will be a key part of their ceramics collection when the Museum opens in 2020/2021. M+ Museum is the new museum for visual culture in Hong Kong, as part of West Kowloon Cultural District, focusing on 20th and 21st Century art, design, architecture and moving image.

Public collections include: The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The British Museum, London; National Museums Northern Ireland, Belfast; M+ Museum, Hong Kong.

Peter’s work was displayed in The Gallery in the October 2020 exhibition Blanc de Chine.