Ju Ci: The Art of Repairing Porcelain
110 points by lawrenceyan 4 days ago | 13 comments

nickcw 22 hours ago
Wow - beautiful.

I've mended a lot of porcelain and earthenware but I use the modern art of epoxy resin. The tricky bit is letting it set just enough so you can cut the excess off cleanly without smearing but not too much so you can't cut it all the while keeping it under enough tension.

I like the string tensioning in the video - think I'll try that on my next mend. I normally use a set of small clamps but it is difficult to get them very tight.

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numlocked 22 hours ago
I watched the video at the expecting one thing and finding something completely different. Remarkable — [0] watch the video in its entirety. Not what I thought when I read “staples to repair porcelain”.

[0] intentional human use of an em-dash

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interroboink 22 hours ago
For others interested, perhaps a more straightforward example is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGHkigtPcIA

The one in the article is the same essential technique (structurally speaking), but with a lot more decorative flourish.

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flyrain 22 hours ago
"intentional human use of an em-dash" LOL
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johnea 28 minutes ago
I still don't like them, human or pretend intelligence generated.

Please use the correct punctuation for subclauses, the comma!

However, I will give the comment author credit for _correctly_ surrounding the dash with spaces.

This is my biggest bitch about the punctuation, it's used without spaces, making it indistinguishable from hyphenation.

Written english is a space delimited language! The exception of the hyphen is to explicitly create one word by connecting two.

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x13pixels 21 hours ago
Somewhat related is Kintsugi

> Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with urushi lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi

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silisili 21 hours ago
The article mentions it -

>> But Ju ci is more than a technique; like its close cousin, Kintsugi (the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics using lacquer and gold), Ju ci embraces a profound philosophy: that of celebrating “beauty of the imperfect.”

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IAmBroom 8 hours ago
And that philosophy is called "wabi-sabi" (which is a hella fun word to say):

"Japanese aesthetic philosophy finding beauty in imperfection, transience, and incompleteness. Rooted in Zen Buddhism, it appreciates the natural cycle of growth and decay, valuing authenticity, rustic simplicity, and the patina of age over modern perfection. It encourages accepting flaws, such as cracks in pottery or weathered surfaces, as part of an object’s unique story.

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dumb1224 12 hours ago
It used to be a lot of them roaming in the residential area, out of necessity since household items were precious. Related is also the profession of a tinker to mend woks and pots and the scissor sharpener https://donwagner.dk/tinkers/tinkers-Zhongwen.html

Used to hear their shout in the street but largely disappeared in the 90s.

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johnea 34 minutes ago
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blacksmith_tb 19 hours ago
Beautiful work, but the cup can't hold water (or tea, or wine) now I assume? So a partial restoration. It does make me wonder if you could do a mechanical repair like that and then reglaze and refire it (but I suppose that'd melt most metalwork soft enough to hammer onto a delicate cup...)
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prodigycorp 17 hours ago
Youtube video posted in a comment above shows that it does hold liquids! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGHkigtPcIA
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fedeb95 12 hours ago
This practice also describes coding in legacy applications, but instead of a silver leaf you have // TODO: fix
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