Tucked in a parking lot behind a beauty salon, Spin is as spare as its wares. The Shanghai shop is a cavernous room with a concrete floor, an unfinished ceiling and wafting classical music. Track lights beam on simple, artful ceramics with unexpected, often Japanese-style touches , handmade in Jingdezhen, China’s porcelain capital since the Song Dynasty (960-1279). A rust-brown square platter has one side curled like ocean surf; celadon mugs sport wavy brims and a sizzle of blue or vermilion glaze. A vase’s long neck dips like a crane’s. Sauce bottles have stones or wood balls as stoppers.
Spin was spun out of the restaurant business. In Shanghai and Taipei, Jeremy Kuo, a software engineer, opened several Japanese restaurants outfitted with dinner sets imported from Japan. But the dishware was expensive and unremarkable. Mr. Kuo’s solution was to have his own dishes made in China.
Besides gracing the tables at Mr. Kuo’s Shintori and People chains in Taiwan, Shanghai and Beijing, the dishes are sold at Spin, which he opened in Shanghai in 2004. A second Spin opened in Beijing last year.
Chopstick rests and tiny bowls shaped like conical bamboo hats are among the lowest-priced pieces, at 20 to 30 yuan ($2.58 to $3.88, at 7.73 yuan to $1); among the highest are platters large enough to hold a turkey, at 1,500 yuan, or about $194. A 220-yuan tea set looks like an ensemble of Cubist sculptures, part sleek celadon, part sandpapery white. The hottest seller is a set of seven different celadon vessels, resembling lumpy, mini pears (300 yuan).
New items or styles — sink basins, bone-china teapots or brick-red bowls, for example — are introduced every three months. Quantities are limited since the china is hand-crafted, says Anita Xu, the sales director.
The ceramic ware, which Spin’s art director Gary Wang describes as “back to the basics,” is made in several Jingdezhen workshops, about 400 miles southwest of Shanghai. But Jingdezhen otherwise mainly manufactures replicas of imperial-era pottery and the ostentatious patterns favored by many Chinese nouveaux riches. There’s “too much embellishment, too complicated forms, too much auspicious symbolism, too complicated techniques,” says Mr. Wang, who is based in Connecticut and travels to Shanghai twice a year to work with two local designers. In enlisting Jingdezhen craftsmen to produce Spin designs, Mr. Wang and Mr. Kuo hope to spark modern creativity and aesthetics in the ancient city and in Chinese ceramic art.
Spin, 758 Julu Lu, Building 3; (86-21) 6279-2545; e-mail spinceramics@126.com.
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