Porcelain painting - Art or Craft?

[peterp]

Some people like to think of Chinese porcelain as 'art', but with the mass production methods used, especially in the later periods, one can hardly speak of 'art'. In China, porcelain painting as an 'art' did probably not exist before the 19th century, when the first Qianjiang paintings came into being.

Normally production was a collective effort. While production was done by hand, many painters would potentially work on a single decoration, each doing only part of it. Some porcelain painters would be painting only the landscape, others only the trees, the people, boats, the buildings, etc.
When painting with colors some may have painted only features of specific colors, etc.

Sounds familiar when we think of modern factory processes? This was old China: mass production, not much of art, just craftsmen and women working on the same items to get huge numbers ready for shipping.

The above is mainly valid for private kilns. The imperial kiln was a different matter. There only a limited number of items was created for the court, the best were then selected, and often the rest was then smashed.