• 4 1/4" x 2 1/2"

About the Designer

Middle Kingdom celebrates the traditions of Chinese porcelain and creates new objects both subtle and elegant.

Bo and Alison Jia founded the company in 1998, however, their interest in Chinese art began much earlier.  As a child, Bo spent time in the Chinese countryside, appreciating the rhythms of farming life and the lines of traditional architecture and landscapes.  At the China Academy of Fine Art in Hangzou he received rigorous training in Chinese and Western painting traditions.  It was there he developed an eye for Chinese decorative arts.  Before arriving in the United States in 1989 he worked as a painter and exhibition designer at the National Museum of China on Tiananmen Square in Beijing.  Alison studied modern and classical Chinese language and history at the College of William and Mary and Harvard University.  Her interest in China was piqued in childhood visits to the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC.

Middle Kingdom strives to revive the luxurious connotations of "made in China" for a modern audience.  In 1004 AD the Song emperor Jing De established the imperial porcelain kilns at Jingdezhen.  Porcelain for China's imperial court was manufactured there until the fall of the Qing Dynasty 900 years later.  Bo and Alison traveled to Jingdezhen, in southeastern China, in early 1996 to create a porcelain studio.  The imperial system may have ended but the distinguished crafts tradition at the kilns remain to this day, and Middle Kingdom is recreating and exceeding the standard fashioned by a millennium of imperial connoisseurship.