another teapot

Last time on the "most hated teapots", Emmett of Cha & Kung Fu said, "is there an opposite version (to the breast teapot)?" And I recalled seeing a teapot with "combination of male and female spirit." Last night, when sorting out my book shelf, I randomly glanced through some books and saw this picture again. So here you go, Emmett :-D

It's called Fu Xi. Fu Xi (male) and Nv Wa (female) were the parents of all humans in ancient Chinese myths. So they were supposed to be "source of life" :-D This teapot was made by Lv Yaochen, one of the few living gurus of yixing arts. It's included on many yixing picture books. This picture is from a book called Palace Museum Collection: The 200 Pieces of Yixing Works that You Should Know of (《故宫收藏•你应该知道的200件宜兴紫砂》), and this Fu Xi teapot was collected by Palace Museum (although the main purpose of the museum is to curate antiques from the Ming and Qing emperors living in the Forbidden City, it also collects small amount of contemporary arts). 

I think this this Fu Xi teapot is more bearable than the very much "naturalism" "life of source" teapot that I hated. But I can't help wondering if it was only made in one copy, and whether anybody tries to brew tea with it ;-)

The above-mentioned book, by the way, is a pretty good one. It's mainly composed of pictures of yixing arts, so there won't be much of language barrier for anybody. Compared with numerous other yixing picture, this book is unique in a way that all the pieces presented are from the royal palace, so the overall styles are quite different from private collections that dominate most yixing picture books.

This book was published in 2007, by Forbidden City Publishing House, which specializes in Palace Museum pictures and literature. This publisher is one of those that have the highest publication quality in China, in terms of paper, printing, photography and literature of antiques. Even now, this book is sold at amazon.cn for ￥60. That is so cheap!