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Her full
name is Li-Jung Chen. Li was born and grew up in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
She majored in aquaculture in Pingdong Agriculture College. After
graduation, she joined a research team in water quality control in aquaculture
environment at the Tungkang Marine Laboratory, a branch of the Taiwan Fisheries
Research Institute. Eventually though, the laboratory director
discovered that Li was a prize winning photographer and assigned her to the
post of institutional photograpoher.
Li married Lloyd and came to the US in 1990. In the
following year the two together enrolled in a ceramic class taught by Pamela
Kozminska at the Leisure Connection at San Diego State University and began
a long process of converting themselves from aquaculturists to potters.
Li's ceramic activities were interrupted two years later because of
the birth of their son and it wasn't until 2000 that Li resumed potting.
Since 2000, Li has taken numerous ceramic courses at the San Diego Mesa College,
under teachers including: Cara Moczygemba, John Conrad, Lana Wilson, Patty
Yockey, and Brian Gillis.
Li's pots often are thrown and altered, with added on appendages
and/or handcarving. She likes to enrich surface texture using
rolled on or stamped pattern, carving, or forcing a wet leather hard pot
from the inside outward to create cracking. She also experiments
with glazes. Li does raku, sagar firing but the majority of her
pots are fired to cone 10 in gas or electric kilns.
Li enjoys exploring new techniques and creating new surface pattern
and forms. She would repeatedly making pots of certain
type only for perfecting the technique of producing that surface and/or
form. Whenever she believe that she has mastered the technique,
she would drift into the venture of another form/surface. Her
pots are truly unique, one of a kind things.
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