Heroes and villains reimagined as traditional Chinese crockery - CNET

Enlarge Image

In order to revive the fading art of hand-painted qīng-huā, or blue-and-white underglaze ceramics, Mona Tang and Chris Ng have tued to an unlikely saviour: heroes and villains of pop culture.

The pair is crowdfunding a series of five bone china plates on Kickstarter, each with a different hero or villain from pop culture, in a series called "Blue and White Porcelain -- Vice and Virtue". But, because the world is rarely as simply divided as good and evil, the five characters are, arguably, morally ambiguous.

"The way we see things in the world are not always clearly black or white. For example you may see 'good' people do bad things and 'bad' people do good things," they wrote.

"We thought this was an interesting concept and chose to use it as inspiration for our idea which we ended up naming 'Vice and Virtue'. Through this idea we selected 5 different pop culture characters which we felt matched this analogy."

The characters themselves are rendered in traditional style, and are lovely to look at. They are also rather charmingly renamed. Dragon Ball's Goku becomes Prince Ape, Super Mario's Bowser becomes Black Tortoise King, Godzilla becomes Pacific Dragon, Pokemon's Charizard becomes Arrogant Fire Dragon and Darth Vader becomes Dark Samurai.