Jingdezhen, known as a porcelain capital for thousands of years, has always been an open city for skillful craftsmen, and so it has contributed to some of the most important moments in the ceramic industry. Nowadays, ceramic lovers from Gen Z have followed in the steps of those ancient craftsmen and gathered in Jingdezhen to pursue and innovate in art, adding an infinite amount of vitality and creativity to this city.

Once an old factory, Taoxichuan Ceramic Art Avenue, located in the eastern suburbs of Jingdezhen, was renovated into an urban cultural and creative block of ceramics schools, museums, shops and popular ceramic night fairs. Since it opened, the avenue has become a landmark in Jingdezhen, and also a famous tourist destination; in the summer of 2023 alone, close to a million tourists visited Taoxichuan.

In the evening, young ceramics lovers, entrepreneurs, ceramics students put up stalls to sell their own designs. Their novel and sometimes eclectic pieces are considered a blend of tradition and modernity. Two of the young artists we spoke with told us how they hope to carry on this 1,000-year-old ceramic craft. 

Young ceramic artist Liu Junjie talked to CGTN, describing his efforts in making Tao and Ci, or pottery and porcelain together.

CGTN also talked to Yesen, a young female artist who is both talented in drawing and ceramics making. First, she creates her own characters, draws them, and then makes ceramics out of them.

In other stalls, there is a wide variety of products created from ceramics. Besides for crockery, jewelry, artwork, magnets and more can be found here.

And with the development of new technologies, vendors not only sell their creative products to tourists in Taoxichuan, they also sell them on livestreams.

For hundreds of years, Jingdezhen porcelain traveled by land and sea along the Silk Road to different parts of the world, acting as a medium to facilitate cultural and commercial exchange between the East and the West. Nowadays, the passage of time has enriched the city's cultural heritage, attracting numerous young "Jingdezhen Drifters", who come here to pursue their long-cherished dreams show their ceramics to the world.