The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
At The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, it is the wind that greets visitors first—a soft, insistent movement of air across the ponds of the Japanese Garden, through the bamboo, and between the carved stones of the Chinese Garden. This invisible presence becomes the perfect overture to Edmund de Waal’s “the eight directions of the wind” (October 18, 2025–October 26, 2026): an exhibition that unfolds like breath—steady, quiet, and full of life.
Across three sites—the Art Gallery, the Chinese Garden, and the Japanese Garden—de Waal has created an installation that reads as both sculpture and poem. Porcelain, text, oak, stone, and shadow combine to form a meditation on movement, memory, and the quiet forces that shape matter and meaning. The project continues his lifelong exploration of porcelain as a medium of remembrance and exchange, while drawing new attention to its ecological and philosophical resonances.
A Journey Across Sites
The exhibition unfolds across space and time. In the Art Gallery, de Waal arranges new vessels beside fragments and shards drawn from global porcelain traditions—Chinese celadon, Korean and Japanese stoneware, German Meissen, English bone china. These pieces form a cartography of exchange: porcelain as a traveler, a witness to centuries of trade, imitation, and reinvention.
In the Chinese Garden, a small pavilion of charred oak and Kilkenny stone invites quiet reflection. Inside, rows of dark porcelain vessels rest on cool ledges, their surfaces absorbing light and air. Through shoji-like screens, the visitor glimpses the garden beyond—a shifting interplay of shadow, wind, and water. In the Japanese Garden, the installations are subtler still: porcelain forms echo the curves of stones and the ripples of ponds, dissolving the boundary between sculpture and landscape.
This geography of display invites slow movement. The exhibition does not progress linearly; it circulates, like the wind itself, carrying the eye through histories of material, trade, and translation.
Material, Body, and Healing
As a medical doctor who has turned to ceramics, I am drawn to de Waal’s work for its understanding of clay as an analogue of the body. Porcelain, like skin, records touch, trauma, and recovery. It hardens through fire yet remains vulnerable to fracture. Each vessel bears the marks of its making—a record of temperature, pressure, and care.
In medicine, we speak of homeostasis, the body’s capacity to maintain balance through change. De Waal’s porcelain performs something similar. It holds stillness and motion simultaneously, appearing fragile yet alive. Within the eight directions of the wind, air circulates as a vital force: through open pavilions, over water, between vessels. The visitor’s breathing becomes part of the artwork’s rhythm. The circulation of air becomes part of the installation’s rhythm, drawing the surrounding environment into the work itself.
Porcelain is an alchemical material—earth refined by fire until it becomes translucent, luminous, enduring. In this transformation, we glimpse the same processes that sustain living matter: adaptation, repair, regeneration. De Waal’s installations remind us that healing, whether in body or clay, is a collaboration between vulnerability and resilience.
De Waal often returns to the idea that porcelain is a language of brokenness. Standing among shards in Jingdezhen, he once described the hillside itself as a “landscape of brokenness”—a recognition that all pots eventually fracture. In that realization lies continuity: every fragment holds the memory of touch and transformation. Fragility, rather than marking failure, becomes a form of endurance.
My own ceramic practice has deepened this understanding. Working with clay after years in medicine has been a quiet apprenticeship in attentiveness: listening not to the body’s pulse, but to the pulse of matter itself. Throwing and firing demand a sensitivity to weight, moisture, temperature, and timing—each decision a form of care. I recognize in de Waal’s vessels the same ethics of observation that guide clinical work: patience, respect for process, and the courage to accept imperfection as part of transformation. Porcelain, in particular, teaches precision without control; it resists haste, requiring trust in material intelligence. Through my own making, I have come to see clay as a partner in healing, not metaphorically but physically, an element that mirrors the body’s own cycles of fragility, endurance, and renewal.
Cultural Transmission and Geography
Porcelain is a global medium: born in China, perfected through trade and imitation, and transformed by the desires of empire. At The Huntington, de Waal’s assemblages make that geography visible. The juxtaposition of shards and vessels evokes centuries of exchange and appropriation, but without didacticism. Instead, the installations breathe with humility and curiosity.
The title, the eight directions of the wind, refers to cosmological systems in East Asia and the Islamic world, mapping the earth through elemental flow rather than fixed borders. In this light, the exhibition becomes a meditation on interconnectedness: how air, clay, and human gesture move through cultural space.
The phrase also echoes a line by the Chinese poet Bei Dao, for whom the wind represents the ceaseless movement of diaspora and migration. De Waal transforms this into a sculptural metaphor: porcelain as a material of passage, carrying stories across continents. Like the poet’s wind, his vessels speak of return and belonging—of home as a place that is both found and remade.
De Waal situates this project within The Huntington’s own complex history—a site shaped by Western collecting and colonial ambition. By placing delicate, hand-thrown porcelain in these imperial galleries, he reopens questions about value, heritage, and the ethics of display. Yet his tone is neither accusatory nor nostalgic; it is one of reparation through beauty, conversation, and shared breath.
The Language of Silence and Text
De Waal’s installations are as literary as they are material. Texts, fragments, and quotations appear like whispers throughout the exhibition—from classical Chinese poetry to Rilke, Celan, and Bashō. Some are inscribed on porcelain slips; others appear as etched shadows or reflected light.
This interleaving of word and object produces a rhythm of presence and absence. Words are read, then lost; meaning flickers between what is seen and what is felt. The result is a choreography of silence.
De Waal conceives porcelain itself as a language—a material of translation. His vessels often act as poems in space, composed through repetition, pause, and breath. The writing he incises onto porcelain is deliberately partial, layered like a palimpsest: traces of meaning written over one another, inviting touch and patience rather than immediate comprehension.
For those of us who work with clay, this silence is deeply familiar: the waiting for a kiln to cool, the held breath before a vessel is touched, the quiet moment of release after firing. In de Waal’s world, silence is not absence but potential—the charged stillness where transformation begins.
Architecture, Garden, and the Living Environment
Few exhibitions integrate architecture and landscape as seamlessly as the eight directions of the wind. The Chinese and Japanese Gardens become extensions of the work itself—living architectures that change with season and weather.
Rain darkens the charred oak; sunlight softens the glaze; fallen leaves collect among the vessels. These shifts are not accidents but essential to de Waal’s concept of time as material. The installation resists the fixed temporality of the gallery; it invites entropy, decay, and renewal.
De Waal has described these installations as spaces for pause— places where one might sit, breathe, and allow time to settle. The marble benches inscribed with poetry provide such a caesura, a rhythm of stillness within movement. This slowing of attention mirrors the ecology of the work itself: a recognition that art, like environment, thrives in intervals of quiet exchange.
In this sense, the work is ecological. It acknowledges air, moisture, and temperature as collaborators. Porcelain, far from inert, participates in the life of its surroundings. The exhibition becomes a quiet manifesto for an ethic of interdependence— between art and environment, human and nonhuman, object and atmosphere.
Ecology, Ethics, and the Contemporary Field
For contemporary ceramic discourse, de Waal’s project is significant. It reasserts ceramics as a language of thought—not only about form and glaze but about time, ecology, and care.
At a moment of environmental crisis and cultural displacement, clay offers a model of slowness and repair. De Waal’s attention to material process—his insistence on listening, waiting, returning— mirrors ecological mindfulness. His vessels ask us to consider what it means to make responsibly: to understand where our materials come from, what histories they hold, and what energies they require.
As a practitioner, I recognize in this approach an ethics of making akin to medicine. Both demand observation, humility, and respect for transformation. The exhibition thus bridges two forms of practice: healing and craft.
Healing, Transformation, and the Body of Clay
Within the pavilion, de Waal’s vessels resemble anatomical forms— lungs, bones, cells—structures that breathe, support, and contain. Each one holds the imprint of touch and heat; together, they form a collective anatomy of care.
The act of firing mirrors the body’s metabolism: clay is tested by fire just as tissue is tested by time. Both emerge changed, stronger yet marked by their passage. De Waal’s work reveals that fragility is not failure; it is the condition that allows transformation.
In that quiet space, the porcelain seems to hum with its own pulse, alive with its own breath and resonance—of air shaping matter as surely as the hand. The exhibition becomes a meditation on the unseen forces that sustain life.
A Circle Completed
Within de Waal’s wider practice—from The White Road to Letters to Camondo—this project feels like a culmination. It gathers decades of reflection on porcelain, diaspora, and the archive into a living installation that exists in constant dialogue with its environment.
The experience of the exhibition is contemplative but also profoundly physical. Across the three gardens, temperature shifts, light variations, and subtle changes in air pressure make the artwork a sensory field—art experienced through the environment itself.
In this, de Waal redefines ceramics as a time-based art. His vessels are not static; they are events—moments of concentration that extend into breath, into weather, into the lives of those who encounter them.
The Wind That Remembers
In the end, the eight directions of the wind is not merely about porcelain or East–West exchange. It is about movement, attention, and the continuity of transformation. De Waal invites us to see wind—invisible yet palpable—as the element that connects all things: body, clay, language, and world.
Porcelain, shaped by fire and air, remembers every gesture of its making. De Waal’s vessels embody storytelling and care: things that hold memory. In their brokenness, they remind us that repair is not the opposite of loss, but its companion—that mended things, like mended lives, can become more luminous for having endured fracture.
To encounter this work is to learn to listen: not to the noise of the world, but to its quiet respiration. In that attentive silence, art and healing become one practice—the practice of noticing, tending, and allowing the wind to move through us.
the author Anisio Veloso is a Brazilian-born British medical doctor and practicing NHS GP who, over the past two years, has developed a self-taught ceramics practice. His work explores clay through the lenses of anatomy, ecology, and transformation, investigating themes of fragility, repair, embodiment, and physical intelligence while drawing parallels between bodily healing and the regenerative processes of earth and fire.
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
At The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, it is the wind that greets visitors first—a soft, insistent movement of air across the ponds of the Japanese Garden, through the bamboo, and between the carved stones of the Chinese Garden. This invisible presence becomes the perfect overture to Edmund de Waal’s “the eight directions of the wind” (October 18, 2025–October 26, 2026): an exhibition that unfolds like breath—steady, quiet, and full of life.
Across three sites—the Art Gallery, the Chinese Garden, and the Japanese Garden—de Waal has created an installation that reads as both sculpture and poem. Porcelain, text, oak, stone, and shadow combine to form a meditation on movement, memory, and the quiet forces that shape matter and meaning. The project continues his lifelong exploration of porcelain as a medium of remembrance and exchange, while drawing new attention to its ecological and philosophical resonances.
A Journey Across Sites
The exhibition unfolds across space and time. In the Art Gallery, de Waal arranges new vessels beside fragments and shards drawn from global porcelain traditions—Chinese celadon, Korean and Japanese stoneware, German Meissen, English bone china. These pieces form a cartography of exchange: porcelain as a traveler, a witness to centuries of trade, imitation, and reinvention.
In the Chinese Garden, a small pavilion of charred oak and Kilkenny stone invites quiet reflection. Inside, rows of dark porcelain vessels rest on cool ledges, their surfaces absorbing light and air. Through shoji-like screens, the visitor glimpses the garden beyond—a shifting interplay of shadow, wind, and water. In the Japanese Garden, the installations are subtler still: porcelain forms echo the curves of stones and the ripples of ponds, dissolving the boundary between sculpture and landscape.
This geography of display invites slow movement. The exhibition does not progress linearly; it circulates, like the wind itself, carrying the eye through histories of material, trade, and translation.
Material, Body, and Healing
As a medical doctor who has turned to ceramics, I am drawn to de Waal’s work for its understanding of clay as an analogue of the body. Porcelain, like skin, records touch, trauma, and recovery. It hardens through fire yet remains vulnerable to fracture. Each vessel bears the marks of its making—a record of temperature, pressure, and care.
In medicine, we speak of homeostasis, the body’s capacity to maintain balance through change. De Waal’s porcelain performs something similar. It holds stillness and motion simultaneously, appearing fragile yet alive. Within the eight directions of the wind, air circulates as a vital force: through open pavilions, over water, between vessels. The visitor’s breathing becomes part of the artwork’s rhythm. The circulation of air becomes part of the installation’s rhythm, drawing the surrounding environment into the work itself.
Porcelain is an alchemical material—earth refined by fire until it becomes translucent, luminous, enduring. In this transformation, we glimpse the same processes that sustain living matter: adaptation, repair, regeneration. De Waal’s installations remind us that healing, whether in body or clay, is a collaboration between vulnerability and resilience.
De Waal often returns to the idea that porcelain is a language of brokenness. Standing among shards in Jingdezhen, he once described the hillside itself as a “landscape of brokenness”—a recognition that all pots eventually fracture. In that realization lies continuity: every fragment holds the memory of touch and transformation. Fragility, rather than marking failure, becomes a form of endurance.
My own ceramic practice has deepened this understanding. Working with clay after years in medicine has been a quiet apprenticeship in attentiveness: listening not to the body’s pulse, but to the pulse of matter itself. Throwing and firing demand a sensitivity to weight, moisture, temperature, and timing—each decision a form of care. I recognize in de Waal’s vessels the same ethics of observation that guide clinical work: patience, respect for process, and the courage to accept imperfection as part of transformation. Porcelain, in particular, teaches precision without control; it resists haste, requiring trust in material intelligence. Through my own making, I have come to see clay as a partner in healing, not metaphorically but physically, an element that mirrors the body’s own cycles of fragility, endurance, and renewal.
Cultural Transmission and Geography
Porcelain is a global medium: born in China, perfected through trade and imitation, and transformed by the desires of empire. At The Huntington, de Waal’s assemblages make that geography visible. The juxtaposition of shards and vessels evokes centuries of exchange and appropriation, but without didacticism. Instead, the installations breathe with humility and curiosity.
The title, the eight directions of the wind, refers to cosmological systems in East Asia and the Islamic world, mapping the earth through elemental flow rather than fixed borders. In this light, the exhibition becomes a meditation on interconnectedness: how air, clay, and human gesture move through cultural space.
The phrase also echoes a line by the Chinese poet Bei Dao, for whom the wind represents the ceaseless movement of diaspora and migration. De Waal transforms this into a sculptural metaphor: porcelain as a material of passage, carrying stories across continents. Like the poet’s wind, his vessels speak of return and belonging—of home as a place that is both found and remade.
De Waal situates this project within The Huntington’s own complex history—a site shaped by Western collecting and colonial ambition. By placing delicate, hand-thrown porcelain in these imperial galleries, he reopens questions about value, heritage, and the ethics of display. Yet his tone is neither accusatory nor nostalgic; it is one of reparation through beauty, conversation, and shared breath.
The Language of Silence and Text
De Waal’s installations are as literary as they are material. Texts, fragments, and quotations appear like whispers throughout the exhibition—from classical Chinese poetry to Rilke, Celan, and Bashō. Some are inscribed on porcelain slips; others appear as etched shadows or reflected light.
This interleaving of word and object produces a rhythm of presence and absence. Words are read, then lost; meaning flickers between what is seen and what is felt. The result is a choreography of silence.
De Waal conceives porcelain itself as a language—a material of translation. His vessels often act as poems in space, composed through repetition, pause, and breath. The writing he incises onto porcelain is deliberately partial, layered like a palimpsest: traces of meaning written over one another, inviting touch and patience rather than immediate comprehension.
For those of us who work with clay, this silence is deeply familiar: the waiting for a kiln to cool, the held breath before a vessel is touched, the quiet moment of release after firing. In de Waal’s world, silence is not absence but potential—the charged stillness where transformation begins.
Architecture, Garden, and the Living Environment
Few exhibitions integrate architecture and landscape as seamlessly as the eight directions of the wind. The Chinese and Japanese Gardens become extensions of the work itself—living architectures that change with season and weather.
Rain darkens the charred oak; sunlight softens the glaze; fallen leaves collect among the vessels. These shifts are not accidents but essential to de Waal’s concept of time as material. The installation resists the fixed temporality of the gallery; it invites entropy, decay, and renewal.
De Waal has described these installations as spaces for pause— places where one might sit, breathe, and allow time to settle. The marble benches inscribed with poetry provide such a caesura, a rhythm of stillness within movement. This slowing of attention mirrors the ecology of the work itself: a recognition that art, like environment, thrives in intervals of quiet exchange.
In this sense, the work is ecological. It acknowledges air, moisture, and temperature as collaborators. Porcelain, far from inert, participates in the life of its surroundings. The exhibition becomes a quiet manifesto for an ethic of interdependence— between art and environment, human and nonhuman, object and atmosphere.
Ecology, Ethics, and the Contemporary Field
For contemporary ceramic discourse, de Waal’s project is significant. It reasserts ceramics as a language of thought—not only about form and glaze but about time, ecology, and care.
At a moment of environmental crisis and cultural displacement, clay offers a model of slowness and repair. De Waal’s attention to material process—his insistence on listening, waiting, returning— mirrors ecological mindfulness. His vessels ask us to consider what it means to make responsibly: to understand where our materials come from, what histories they hold, and what energies they require.
As a practitioner, I recognize in this approach an ethics of making akin to medicine. Both demand observation, humility, and respect for transformation. The exhibition thus bridges two forms of practice: healing and craft.
Healing, Transformation, and the Body of Clay
Within the pavilion, de Waal’s vessels resemble anatomical forms— lungs, bones, cells—structures that breathe, support, and contain. Each one holds the imprint of touch and heat; together, they form a collective anatomy of care.
The act of firing mirrors the body’s metabolism: clay is tested by fire just as tissue is tested by time. Both emerge changed, stronger yet marked by their passage. De Waal’s work reveals that fragility is not failure; it is the condition that allows transformation.
In that quiet space, the porcelain seems to hum with its own pulse, alive with its own breath and resonance—of air shaping matter as surely as the hand. The exhibition becomes a meditation on the unseen forces that sustain life.
A Circle Completed
Within de Waal’s wider practice—from The White Road to Letters to Camondo—this project feels like a culmination. It gathers decades of reflection on porcelain, diaspora, and the archive into a living installation that exists in constant dialogue with its environment.
The experience of the exhibition is contemplative but also profoundly physical. Across the three gardens, temperature shifts, light variations, and subtle changes in air pressure make the artwork a sensory field—art experienced through the environment itself.
In this, de Waal redefines ceramics as a time-based art. His vessels are not static; they are events—moments of concentration that extend into breath, into weather, into the lives of those who encounter them.
The Wind That Remembers
In the end, the eight directions of the wind is not merely about porcelain or East–West exchange. It is about movement, attention, and the continuity of transformation. De Waal invites us to see wind—invisible yet palpable—as the element that connects all things: body, clay, language, and world.
Porcelain, shaped by fire and air, remembers every gesture of its making. De Waal’s vessels embody storytelling and care: things that hold memory. In their brokenness, they remind us that repair is not the opposite of loss, but its companion—that mended things, like mended lives, can become more luminous for having endured fracture.
To encounter this work is to learn to listen: not to the noise of the world, but to its quiet respiration. In that attentive silence, art and healing become one practice—the practice of noticing, tending, and allowing the wind to move through us.
To learn more about Edmund de Waal and his work, visit edmunddewaal.com or follow on Instagram @edmunddewaal.
the author Anisio Veloso is a Brazilian-born British medical doctor and practicing NHS GP who, over the past two years, has developed a self-taught ceramics practice. His work explores clay through the lenses of anatomy, ecology, and transformation, investigating themes of fragility, repair, embodiment, and physical intelligence while drawing parallels between bodily healing and the regenerative processes of earth and fire.
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