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Wallace Chan’s "unbreakable porcelain"




Jewelry artist Wallace Chan has developed what he says is an unbreakable porcelain that he is using to make high-end jewelry, including rings and bracelets. Anthony DeMarco has some details about how it's made in a Forbes article:

To increase the porcelain’s hardness, he reinforces it with iron, silicon, zirconium and one other ingredient that he isn’t ready to reveal. It’s then heated in a furnace to more than 1,600 degrees Celsius (about 2,900 degrees Fahrenheit), higher than porcelain is usually fired. An important thing Chan had to consider during the firing process is that as the moisture evaporates, the material reduces in size by about 10 to 20 percent. So each piece has to be sized in a way that takes this shrinkage into account.

(It passes the high fire test, but I can still almost imagine the clayart discussions about whether this should even be called porcelain …)

Read the Forbes article here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonydemarco/2018/09/03/high-jewelry-artist-wallace-chan-invents-unbreakable-porcelain/

The New York Times ran an article by Rachel Felder about it earlier this summer:

But this wasn’t just any old porcelain. It was a porcelain seven years in the making, which Mr. Chan invented and which he says is five times harder than steel.

The material — called for the time being, a little unimaginatively, Wallace Chan Porcelain — is made of specially chosen ingredients that Mr. Chan treats like the equivalent of a state secret out of fear of industrial espionage (the jewelry world is, apparently, a paranoid place). But the ingredients are, he said, almost devoid of impurities.

Pieces are fired in one of his two custom-built German kilns, to about 1,650 degrees Celsius (3,000 degrees Fahrenheit), or about 200 degrees Celsius more than in the traditional process. The result is a dense, strong porcelain with an unusual shiny luster.

Read the New York Times article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/fashion/jewelry-porcelain-wallace-chan.html
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