May Chee - An Overview of Ceramic Works
The Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center
October 7, 2005 - January 24, 2006

The swelling, robust ceramic vessels of May C. Chee are distinctive expressions of her interests, influences, and technical/design abilities. This exhibition presents a selection of her works from the early 1970s to the late 1990s.

Born in Honolulu in 1921, May Chee has been active in the contemporary arts scene here for over 40 years. She first studied ceramics with Isami Enomoto at Ceramics Hawaii and later with Claude Horan and Harue McVay at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She taught adult ceramics classes at the Honolulu Academy of Arts' Art Center and at the Crossroads Ceramic Center, as well as participated in the Department of Education's Artists in the Schools Program. She was also one of the founding members of the Hawaii Potters Guild. Her works are in the collections of The Contemporary Museum, The Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, and many private collections.

Chee has stated about her work: "All my pots are made from stoneware clay, hand-built using coil and pinch techniques and decorated with wax-resist and glazes made from the ashes of island trees, principally mango, kiawe and shower trees." Her works from the 1970s are large closed forms, at times smoothly rounded, sometimes with tiny nipple-like openings at the top. Using glazes, Chee painted narrative scenes incorporating landscape elements and animals on her surfaces, or sometimes a dense assemblage of abstract symbols which evoke teeming jungle or undersea life. Chee also perfected at this time the wax-resist technique in which she would paint the designs on her works with melted wax and then apply a glaze. Where the wax covered the piece, the glaze would not hold, so that in firing the wax would melt and leave uncovered areas of the clay body which stood out in contrast to the glazed areas.

Early in her career Chee also made burnished vessels for which the clay surface is rubbed with a hard material such as a stone or stick that makes it very smooth. These were pit-fired, giving them glossy, smoky surfaces in a range of pinks, oranges, grays and blacks.

The jar forms with bold decorations from the 1980s and 1990s for which Chee is best known take their inspiration in part from Neolithic pottery vessels of ancient China. Chee visited China several times beginning in 1979, seeing museums and the important archaeological site of Xian. In her own work, Chee employed the dark/light contrast of the abstract geometric patterns of the Chinese prototypes but made her own versions by incorporating elements of her Hawaiian environment-stylized fish, birds, and the rounded arc shapes of rainbows. Chee also adapted the wide mouths, low necks and lug handles of ancient Chinese pots into her work.

May Chee's works are a wonderful blending of elements of her Chinese heritage with materials and decorative impulses drawn from her Hawaii environment.