Ceramics are an ideal case study in the aesthetics of destruction. While a ceramic object can be preserved for centuries, it is always haunted by the chance that it might slip from unsteady hands or fall from an exposed shelf. The conceptual resonance of this fragility has long been esteemed in China—a nation so closely tied with ceramics that country and material are synonymous in the Anglophone imagination—and many Chinese artists have adopted ceramics to reveal the destruction inherent to contemporary society. Ai Weiwei and Liu Jianhua are among the most renowned proponents of this aesthetic. From the 1990s to the present, both have used ceramics to expose acts of violence that far exceed a simple smashing of vases, ranging from planned obsolescence, environmental degradation and ecological cycles of decay and renewal, to the redemptive power of destruction as a crucible for regeneration.

Ai Weiwei’s most iconic ode to destruction is his photographic triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), usually read as a rejection of China’s past and its contemporary co-option by the state but legible also as a call to revitalise that heritage.¹ Destruction is central to this renewal, liberating his appropriated ceramic from the weight of tradition and returning it to a lived existence. By removing the urn from the stasis of a museum case and dropping it to the floor, Ai restores its original identity as an unremarkable wine jar (hu 壶), “the dispensable material culture of [its] time … like mass-produced soda bottles are of

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