For many Americans, the delicately patterned porcelain of Chinese ceramic dinnerware has been a familiar sight, either placed on a mantel as decorative art or to serve meals on special occasions.

The great majority of those imports originated in the northeastern city of Jingdezhen, the "porcelain capital" of China and arguably the world, where a huge ceramics industry has flourished for over 1,000 years as a result of the city's access to kaolin clay.

During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), an imperial magistrate named Wang Shimao wrote of Jingdezhen: "I was kept awake all night with the thundering of tens of thousands of pestles pounding the ground and the glare from the kiln fires lighting the sky in this so-called Town of Year-Round Thunder and Lightning."

A new exhibition at New York's China Institute, "New China: Porcelain Art from Jingdezhen, 1910-2012," presents a range of modern and contemporary ceramic artists whose work in that city demonstrates a thriving porcelain art market that has extended beyond the material's functional roots.

"Conceptually, porcelain has the added significance of being a cultural touchstone when people think about China," said co-curator Nancy Selvage, former director of the ceramics program at Harvard University.

"It's very much embedded in Chinese culture, so using that material has cultural significance. But Americans traditionally associate porcelain with very finely decorated vessels, so the idea of this exhibition is to show how this material is being used by contemporary artists in very different ways.

"We wanted work that represented a breadth of approaches using this material, in a place that has an incredibly long history of expertise and manufacturing and cultural exchange - and how that is continuing to happen today," Selvage said. "In the past it happened through the exchange of objects, but now it's a cultural exchange of global impact that is happening through art1ists who are themselves global."

The collection features work by 24 renowned Chinese ceramic artists including Wang Bu, Zhu Dequn, Zhu Legeng and Zhao Meng, along with American artist Wayne Higby, whose time in Jingdezhen has shaped his career, he told China Daily.

"The real history of ceramic art is Chinese," he said. "Everyone in the world who deals with ceramics appreciates the fact that high-fire ceramics (porcelain) are Chinese, so to have a more thorough awareness of China today, and the other contemporary art forms, it seems overdue that we would look again at that ceramic history."

Among the pieces are work by "The Eight Friends of Zhushan," an art society whose members met once a month under the full moon. Their art is characterized by a blending of traditional painting with modern ceramics. The most modern pieces are by Zhu Lugeng, whose "Lotus Figures" (2011) presents five standing figures in Buddhist garb.

Work created in Jingdezhen will be of particular interest to Americans, said Lili Fang, co-curator of the exhibition and director of the Art Anthropology Research Center of the Chinese National Academy of Arts in Beijing.

"Jingdezhen, the capital of traditional ceramics, has become an 'incubator' where the inspirations and dreams of ceramists from all over the world are aroused and realized," she said.

Higby believes the Chinese ceramic-art industry will continue to gain traction internationally.

"Chinese audiences are interested and excited about their own culture, and more Americans are becoming aware of that," he said. "The arts are the best of what human beings do, and for people to see the beauty and intelligence of this work, helps to bridge gaps. That's really important to how we communicate globally. You don't have to speak Chinese to appreciate this work, and that's a wonderful thing."

kdawson@chinadailyusa.com