Chen San-huo: Handing Broken Vases to Fate, Keeping the Temple Roof's Jian-nian Alive

30-Second Overview: Chen San-huo was originally an apprentice in Jian-nian (ceramic mosaic), following his brother to temples and sleeping on construction sites. In 2002, while restoring Fengyuan Ciji Temple after the 921 Earthquake, he picked up a discarded broken vase and accidentally created a statue of Bodhidharma. He later turned "shattering first, then finding the shape" into his signature method. This turning point resembles a craft paradox: to preserve Jian-nian, one cannot simply copy the past intact; sometimes, it must first lose its original form.

In 2002, Fengyuan Ciji Temple in Taichung was still undergoing restoration following the 921 Earthquake. Chen San-huo, from Madou, Tainan, picked up a discarded broken vase on the construction site and assembled a statue of Bodhidharma. This work was not created by pre-drawing a contour and then finding ceramic shards to fill it; rather, it began with the fragments left after breaking. This accident later became his most recognizable creative method. ¹

He later called this approach "using smashing instead of cutting" (yi gang dai jian): first smashing old vases, wine bottles, or ceramic jars, and then following the curves and textures of the shards to find the shapes of figures, clothing folds, or animals. Jian-nian thus transformed from a decoration on temple roofs into a three-dimensional art form that preserves the material's damage. ² This is not pretending waste is new material, but letting cracks become part of the composition.

📝 Curator's Note: The most common misunderstanding about traditional crafts is the belief that "preservation" equals "not changing." Chen San-huo's answer is exactly the opposite: some skills must first change the way materials are used to have the chance to continue being seen.

From Glass-Cutting Apprentice

Chen San-huo was born in 1949 in Madou, Tainan. His father, Chen Tian-ao, worked in paint and mural decoration and originally intended for him to learn woodcarving. However, during a summer vacation when he went to Madou to find his father, he saw his eldest brother Li Shi-yi's master cutting glass, and was attracted by the craft that turned hard materials into the curves of roof ridges. After graduating from junior high, he studied temple Jian-nian under Li Shi-yi. ³

Li Shi-yi was a successor in the lineage of Hong Kun-fu. Chen San-huo's apprenticeship life was not like a craft classroom: he followed his brother to temples across Taiwan, slept on the ground, and had to get up early to cook. The artist archive preserved by the National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Center (NTCRDC) even records an incident where he mistook the bright moonlight for dawn and got up to cook in the middle of the night. ³

This lifestyle broke down technique into many unromantic details: recognizing the thickness of different ceramic shards, knowing whether the plaster modeling skeleton could bear weight, distinguishing the direction of wide robes on figures, and facing sun, rain, and long hours of squatting on the roof. Jian-nian does not end with pasting beautiful shards. It first requires a frame, plaster, and shaping; ceramic shards are merely the final clothes put on. ⁴

Data from the Tainan City Cultural Assets Management Bureau indicates that Chen San-huo excels in ceramic stacking and拼接 (piecing together). His works have appeared in Tainan's Zhengziliao Fu'an Temple, Xinying Zhenwu Temple, Fengyuan Ciji Temple, Dajia Zhenlan Temple, and Beigang Chaotian Temple. These names strung together allow readers to see the scale of his work: he did not imagine temples in a studio but left his craft on actual temple roofs. ⁴

Slow Work on the Rooftop, Nearly Losing the Next Generation

Jian-nian is a craft that bends iron wire into frames, uses plaster to build rough molds, and then pastes ceramic shards or glass. Traditional methods require a clear form first, then use tools to cut colored ceramics into the required components. Figures, deities, birds, beasts, and historical figures are thus fixed on the roof ridges and walls of temples. ⁵

Its crisis did not happen suddenly. Records from the Tainan Cultural Assets Management Bureau show that starting in the 1960s, the lower-cost and faster mold-casting "glazing" (lin tang) method rose, causing the slow, detailed traditional Jian-nian to decline. International media reports also indicate that while Jian-nian has a history of hundreds of years in Taiwan, its fine techniques require long-term training; when demand drops, the master-apprentice system becomes thinner. ^{5 6}

In the 1980s, rising wages and changes in temple engineering made the time-intensive production method even harder to maintain. After Li Shi-yi passed away in 2003, Chen San-huo again felt that the life of this craft was short. He asked himself: if the history of Jian-nian might be lost, what could he leave behind first? This question pushed his work from "completing a temple" to "finding the next field for the skill." ³

📝 Curator's Note: The disappearance of a craft is usually not a sudden break one day, but everyone learning a little less, waiting a little less, and paying a little less time. True innovation sometimes lies in this narrowing time gap, creating something worth waiting for again.

"Following Conditions, Not Myself" Is Not Giving Up Control

Chen San-huo's creative shift is often simplified as "turning broken vases into art." But fragmentation itself is not his entire method. The National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Center points out that naturally broken ceramic shards still require judgment: the force of the strike, the landing point, the thickness and curve of the shards will all change whether the final work can stand. ³

This is why "chance" cannot be understood as randomness. Traditional Jian-nian decides the form first, then cuts the materials into parts that obey the shape. Chen San-huo lets the shards happen first, then identifies possible forms from the shards. Both methods require technique, but the power between the creator and the material has been redistributed. ⁷

At the 2021 National Award for Traditional Craft Achievement ceremony, the NTCDC honored Chen San-huo with a plaque reading "Following Conditions to Shape Hands" (sui yuan bo shou). Reports recorded Chen San-huo's creative philosophy of "Following Conditions, Not Myself" (sui yuan bu sui wo). This phrase does not tell people to stop judging; rather, it acknowledges that a broken vase will not completely follow the author's expectations. ⁸

At Tainan's Zhengziliao Fu'an Temple, an English report in Taiwan Panorama saw the concrete effects of this method: the robes of the Heavenly Emperor use fragments of black wine jars, the shell of the clam spirit in the Nezha story comes from everyday white plates, and one can even see commercial characters on tableware. Originally inconspicuous objects were not stripped of their identity; instead, they brought local life into the deities' clothes. ⁷

From Temple Components to Exhibition Works

Chen San-huo did not become an artist only after leaving the temple. He learned how materials withstand wind and rain, and how figures are seen from a distance, during temple restoration. There, he also encountered the bodily vocabulary of the Eight Generals, divine generals, and local beliefs. Craft Center data describes how he used facial masks from the Madou area as a basis to create the Eight Generals series, using hard ceramic shards to express the wrinkles, flow, and gradients of clothing. ³

This shift also changed the viewing distance of the works. Rooftop Jian-nian is for the entire neighborhood to see, requiring vivid colors and exaggerated contours to resist distance. Works in exhibition halls allow viewers to get close, seeing the patterns on broken ceramic shards, the arcs of wine bottles, and the traces left by hand modeling. Chen San-huo placed the same technique into two scales, without erasing the temple experience. ⁷

In 2024, when the Ministry of Culture introduced Chen San-huo's solo exhibition, the exhibition consisted of 32 works and tools/materials across four zones, presenting his creative starting point, technical turning points, exploration of sustainable materials, and imagination of craft innovation. The importance of this exhibition was not moving the rooftop into a "white cube," but allowing viewers to see that before a work exists, there is a pile of discarded plates, vases, jars, and smashing tools. ⁹

Reports in Taiwanese news placed his career in another angle: he had restored or created over 100 temple projects, later using recycled ceramics, vases, and glass bottles as main materials, and was selected from 21 senior craft artists for the 2021 National Award for Traditional Craft Achievement. ¹⁰ Numbers show the scale; broken vases remind us what the turning point happened on.

Image: Dragon and phoenix Jian-nian and ridge decorations on the roof of a temple in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Author: The Nature Box; License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Original file page: Wikimedia Commons. Image embedded via hotlink, not downloaded or rehosted.

This photo is not Chen San-huo's work, nor his work site. Its purpose is more restrained: first, to let readers see the public scale of Jian-nian on Taiwan's temple roofs. Dragons, phoenixes, roof ridges, and upward-curving contours explain that this craft was never an isolated ceramic technique, but a surface formed by architecture, faith, and distant viewing. Understanding this scale, then looking back at how Chen San-huo brought broken vases into the exhibition, prevents misunderstanding his innovation as a personal style detached from temples. ¹¹

The Preserver Is Not the End Point

In 2020, the Ministry of Culture designated Chen San-huo as a preserver of the National Important Traditional Craft "Jian-nian Craft," making him the first preserver of this craft to be called a "Living Human Treasure." In 2021, he received the National Award for Traditional Craft Achievement. ^{4 8} These recognitions provided public resources and a name for the skill, but also posed a harder question: after a craft is listed, who will still spend years learning it?

Chen San-huo's approach was to pull inheritance out of the master's personal body. He established the "Jian-nian Family" to teach apprentices and participated in campus craft transmission. Since 2021, the Cultural Assets Bureau has conducted the Important Traditional Craft Jian-nian Apprenticeship Program, providing guidance to selected apprentices. ⁴ Central News Agency also reported that upon receiving the award, he understood the honor as a reminder to himself to let more people understand Jian-nian and pass it on. ⁸

This path remains unstable. The demand for temple engineering, whether apprentices can make a living from it, and whether traditional subjects will be fixed into an unchangeable style are not problems a single award can solve. Chen San-huo's own archive is also honest: temple Jian-nian work has decreased, and he still needs to grow vegetables to sustain his life. ³

So his innovation is not a pretty success story. It contains the pressure of the labor market, the loss of his senior brother, the reuse of waste, and a craftsman's stubbornness unwilling to let materials remain only as "materials." The future of Jian-nian is not only on the roof ridge, but also on whether the next apprentice can understand: the shape of a broken ceramic shard is not a mistake; it may be where the work begins.

📝 Curator's Note: What Chen San-huo truly preserved may not just be the method of Jian-nian, but the right of the craft artist to still negotiate with materials. When a vase breaks, the creator does not rush to repair it to its original state. He first listens to what the shards say they can still become.

Jian-nian has never been simple decoration. It stacks the temple's faith, local aesthetics, master-apprentice time, and the roof's weather on the same surface. Chen San-huo added a crack to this surface, allowing people to see both sides: one side is the technique that needs to be preserved; the other side is that if the technique no longer takes risks, it will only remain a specimen.

What he picked up in Fengyuan was not just a usable vase, but the beginning of a working method. First letting the ceramic shards lose their original appearance, then finding figures, clothing folds, and fate in the fragments. This "Following Conditions, Not Myself" craft ultimately still requires a pair of hands that know exactly what they are doing.

Further Reading

• National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Center: Chen San-huo Artist Archive
• Tainan City Cultural Assets Management Bureau: Giant Heart and Crafty Art — 'Jian-nian' Preserver Chen San-huo
• Taiwan Panorama: Reconfiguring Tradition: Chen San-huo’s Art of Jiannian

References