Paul Kyle Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Wayne Ngan: The Mark of a Master, a celebration one of Canada’s most important ceramic artists. Drawn from over one hundred works in the gallery’s holdings and Paul Kyle’s personal collection, the exhibition offers an opportunity to look at the breadth of Ngan’s practice: his extraordinary language of form and glaze, and the evolution of his vessels.

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Born in Guangdong, China, in 1937, Ngan immigrated to Canada in 1952. Ngan’s practice developed over more than six decades and is inseparable from his life on Hornby Island, where he built his home, studio and kilns. Here, he investigated how a vessel could acquire its final character; the kiln’s design and fuelcould become as consequential as the shape. His island life provided the space for that work, while his teaching and travels kept it connected to a much wider world.

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Ngan received the Saidye Bronfman Award for Masters of the Crafts in 1983 and the BC Creative Achievement Award of Distinction in 2013. His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in major collections including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Gardiner Museum, and National Gallery of Canada, affirming his place within both regional ceramic history and international contemporary art conversation. Following Ngan’s death in 2020, his daughters Goya and Gailan undertook the care of his estate; they continue to show tremendous dedication to preserving and advancing their father’s legacy.

 

Fusing Chinese, Korean and Japanese ceramic traditions with an experimental approach characterised Ngan’s practice. The irregular surfaces of his salt-glazed and raku works record volatile firing conditions and artistic intervention. His use of oil spot glaze pursued historic effect; his Yukon Black works were strengthened in form and proportion. His fluency in Hakeme tied together brushwork and corporeal rhythm. Ngan worked with colour, gesture, and volume simultaneously. The bodily familiarity and contour of his vessels give them each a distinct presence, carrying the possibility of shaping how we encounter them. Through these relationships, Ngan made pottery a means of thinking about how things acquire individuality, how traditions remain available to change, and how an artist inhabits the world through sustained making.

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Ngan gives us a demanding example of artistic independence: learning from inherited methods, testing them against materials at-hand, and accepting the labour required to make them his own. His surviving work rewards curiosity at every level, inviting us to consider the discipline beyond its apparent ease and to take pleasure in the afterlives of his ceramic assemblages. With this understanding, we are brought closer to Ngan’s achievement as an artist, and to the particular pleasure of living with his works.