Butterfly Wing

Hand-Carved White Clay Earrings with Splashed Color Glaze and Liquid Gold Detailing

A butterfly pauses mid-flight — wings spread, veins traced in gold, color pooled like minerals inside a cave.

Butterfly Wing begins with white clay, hand-carved into a pair of wings that carry the faint irregularity of something alive. The surface tells the real story: spots of blue, green, and brown glaze applied one by one in the splashed-color technique — a method born in the Tang Dynasty at Changsha Kiln, where artisans first discovered that dropping different color glazes onto the same surface and firing them together would produce something no brushstroke could ever paint. The glazes melt, bleed, and fuse in the kiln's heat, forming a mottled, mineral-like texture that is different every single time. No two butterflies share the same pattern of stone.

Over this, liquid gold traces the wing veins and edges — a fine network of lines that gives the piece its structure, its precision, its weight. The gold is hand-applied and low-temperature baked, the same overglaze gilding tradition used for centuries in Jingdezhen. Beneath the gold, the splashed colors shift between blue and green and brown like the surface of a river stone, polished by a thousand years of water.

Key Features

• Hand-carved butterfly wings — Each wing sculpted and incised by hand from white clay; natural irregularities make every pair unique
• Splashed color glaze (点彩) — Blue, green, and brown glazes hand-spotted onto the surface in the Tang Dynasty Changsha Kiln tradition; kiln-firing produces unpredictable mottled textures
• Liquid gold detailing — Wing veins and edges hand-traced with liquid gold, low-temperature baked (700–850°C); traditional overglaze gilding
• Rooted in a 1,300-year tradition — The splashed-color technique originated at Changsha Kiln in the Tang Dynasty (8th–9th century), one of China's earliest polychrome ceramic innovations
• One of a kind — Kiln chemistry ensures no two splashed-color surfaces are ever alike

Materials & Specifications

Technique Heritage

• Splashed Color Glaze  — A decorative technique with its deepest roots in Changsha Kiln, one of the most innovative ceramic centers of the Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD). Artisans applied spots of different color glazes — typically copper-green and iron-brown — onto the clay surface before firing. In the kiln's intense heat, these glaze spots melt and flow into one another, creating mottled, mineral-like textures that no brush could reproduce. The result is always unexpected, always unrepeatable. Changsha Kiln was among the first in the world to master multi-color high-fire ceramics, and its splashed-color wares traveled along the Maritime Silk Road as far as the Persian Gulf and East Africa.
• Hand Carving  — The butterfly form is not molded but carved. The artisan shapes each wing from a flat or roughly formed clay piece, incising and scraping to create the wing's contours and surface texture. This process preserves the slight unevenness that gives hand-carved ceramic its sense of life — the gentle imperfection of something made by human hands, not machines.
• Liquid Gold Detailing  — Liquid gold is hand-painted onto the already-fired glaze surface and baked at 700–850°C. During baking, the organic resin in the gold liquid burns away, leaving a thin metallic film bonded to the glaze — the same finishing technique found on Meissen, Hermès tableware, and Royal Copenhagen.

Care

• Avoid direct contact with perfume, lotion, or chemicals
• Store separately to prevent scratching
• Remove before swimming or bathing
• Clean gently with a soft dry cloth

Part of the TaoTianXia collection — entirely handcrafted in Jingdezhen, each piece one of a kind. Our ceramic artistry has been chosen for diplomatic gifting, trusted by over 70 Fortune Global 500 companies, and featured at New York's Grand Central Terminal.