From Blue Willow to Nail Salons: Why Americans Turned Away from “Oriental” Ceramic Patterns After the Vietnam War

Setting the Table After a War

Picture two dinner tables. On one, every plate is a crisp blue-and-white willow scene, pagodas and bridges marching around the rim like a story you have seen a thousand times. On the other, the plates are heavy stoneware in moss and rust, their glazes running, pooling, and crackling, with a hand-carved Vietnamese lotus bowl stealing the spotlight in the center.

In my work styling colorful tabletops, I have watched people instinctively reach past the first and light up at the second. They are not always sure why. They just know the blue pagodas feel a little stiff, a little distant, even a little loaded.

To understand that feeling, especially in the United States after the Vietnam War, you have to pull your chair closer to art history, politics, and design culture. You also have to look honestly at how Americans have used ceramics to fantasize about “the East,” and how artists of Asian descent have pushed back and rewritten that story.

Throughout this article, I will use “Oriental” in quotation marks to describe historical marketing labels and pattern traditions, not as a term for people. It is a dated word, and that is part of the story.

What “Oriental” Ceramic Patterns Actually Are

Before we talk rejection, we need a crisp definition of what is being rejected.

For centuries, European and American consumers were enchanted by Chinese porcelain. Curators at The Henry Ford describe how Western buyers treated Asian porcelain, silk, and tea as mysterious luxuries that justified long-distance trade voyages. Chinese potters had perfected hard-paste porcelain as early as the 7th or 8th century, firing kaolin clay so hot that body and glaze fused into a glass-like, chip-resistant shell. In contrast, Western makers relied on softer earthenware bodies with lead or tin glazes that chipped and revealed darker cores underneath.

Because Europeans could not make true porcelain at first, they did the next best thing: they copied it. Decorators in Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and later England painted Chinese-style landscapes, figures, and pavilions on non-porcelain wares. This hybrid style evolved into Chinoiserie, a European fantasy of Asia that signaled exotic worldliness rather than accurate cultural knowledge.

By the 19th century, patterns like Canton and Blue Willow had become widespread in Europe and its American colonies. According to curators, Chinese makers themselves also produced hybrid forms for Western trade: tea services and bowls with Western shapes but Chinese imagery, sometimes depicting European ports along Chinese rivers. Eventually, European factories decoded porcelain chemistry and began producing their own hard-paste pieces, while China continued to export more affordable wares decorated in blue-and-white landscapes that middle-class families could collect.

In the United States, those blue landscapes were often marketed as “Oriental” designs. In practice, this label lumped together Chinese export porcelain, European Chinoiserie, and American knock-offs into a single, romanticized idea of “the East.” A Blue Willow platter on a dining table in 1950s America carried that whole layered history onto the roast chicken.

A Long Love Affair: Before the Backlash

American ceramists did not only import Asian imagery; they studied and mined Asian techniques. In the period covered by the Metropolitan Museum’s volume “Gifts from the Fire: American Ceramics, 1880–1950,” U.S. makers pulled inspiration from European and Asian precedents, engaging with Arts and Crafts, Art Deco, and early modernist styles. The book’s authors note that American potters experimented with surfaces that moved away from heavy painted ornament toward richly colored glazes and textured surfaces, often in dialogue with Asian ceramics.

At the same time, individual designers such as Hugh Robertson at Dedham Pottery became fascinated by specific Chinese technical achievements. Instead of just painting quasi-Chinese scenes, they tried to replicate particular glazes, like the deep red “oxblood” of Qing-dynasty wares, and applied them to domestic American vessel shapes. This was already a shift from fantasy pictures of the East toward serious technical engagement with Asian materials and processes.

Yet in mass-market tableware, the picture-forward “Oriental” pattern stayed dominant. By the mid-20th century, a Blue Willow plate in an American kitchen was as familiar as a recipe card. It was decorative, nostalgic, and safe.

That safety would not last.

Clay Gets Serious: Studio Ceramics Challenge the Pattern

The ground under the dinner plate started to move well before the Vietnam War ended. Clay, once relegated to domestic “low art,” became a frontline material in the postwar studio craft movement.

Art historian Martha Drexler Lynn’s book “American Studio Ceramics, Innovation and Identity, 1940 to 1979,” published by Yale University Press, frames this era as the first comprehensive national survey of American studio ceramics. She does not present studio ceramics as a single movement but as a heterogeneous field defined by tensions: functional pottery versus sculpture, handmade craft versus design for industry, regional traditions versus avant-garde experiment.

She and other scholars point to several structural forces that raised ceramics’ profile. Depression-era programs like the Works Progress Administration put craftsmen on a more equal footing with painters and sculptors. After World War II, the GI Bill funded art school education, expanding university ceramics programs. Institutions such as America House, Craft Horizons magazine, the American Craft Council, and later the Museum of Contemporary Craft built a national infrastructure where clay was no longer just something you ate soup from; it was something you debated in catalog essays.

At Alfred University, long a center of ceramic education, figures like Charles Fergus Binns encouraged technically refined yet utilitarian forms that drew on Arts and Crafts ideals. Later, teachers such as Daniel Rhodes and Ted Randall brought in Abstract Expressionist energy and pushed students toward more experimental shapes, while still grounding them in clay chemistry and glaze science. The exhibition “History: A Legacy in Motion – Alfred Ceramic Art 1900–2025” positions Alfred’s faculty as central to the story of American ceramics, moving from functional vessels toward boundary-pushing sculptural work over the 20th century.

By the 1950s, a generation of artists no longer accepted the idea that ceramics had to “serve” by holding food or flowers. They wanted clay to shout, drip, fracture, and stretch. In that climate, a carefully printed “Oriental” border could start to look suspiciously tame.

Peter Voulkos and the Revolution Against Decor

No one symbolized the revolt against polite decoration more than Peter Voulkos. In a widely discussed essay, critic Charles Kessler describes how Voulkos, working in California in the 1950s, broke away from wheel-thrown, functional pots by sawing, slamming, and assembling their parts into large, abstract sculptures. He collaborated with student John Mason and a ceramics engineer to build industrial-scale kilns, firing works up to about six feet tall.

The surfaces of these pieces were rough, gouged, heavily textured—what contemporary makers now proudly call “sloppy craft.” Instead of glossy, intricate ornament, Voulkos favored direct evidence of touch, smashing, and improvisation. His sculptures resonated with the energy of Abstract Expressionist painting; he was part of that circle socially and aesthetically.

Even when Voulkos used glaze and occasional color, the effect was miles away from the controlled cobalt drawings on a willow-pattern tea set. His work, and that of students such as Ken Price and Ron Nagle, declared that clay could be as intense and conceptually ambitious as any bronze sculpture or oil painting.

At the same time, many of these artists continued to make functional pottery. The point was not to abolish utility, but to break the assumption that ceramics could only be valued when it stayed politely useful. Once clay moved onto the pedestal, the social meaning of the patterned dinner plate changed; it became, in comparison, the symbol of a narrower, domestic past.

Crafting Modernism, Living the “Clay Lifestyle”

The postwar craft historian who may have captured this shift most vividly is Aileen Osborn Webb, founder of institutions such as the American Craft Council and the Museum for Contemporary Crafts. An article on postwar craft often cited in this context, “Crafting Modernism,” describes how, between about 1945 and 1969, crafts moved from marginal decoration to an assertive, fine-art–level practice.

Webb’s School for American Craftsmen encouraged students to fuse technical skill with contemporary theory, often under the guidance of émigré modernists like Anni and Josef Albers. Ceramists soaked up ideas from Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, and Pop. Peter Voulkos translated action painting into massive stoneware; Robert Arneson’s “California Funk” pottery made satirical, political statements; other makers used clay to comment on Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, and other upheavals of the 1960s.

Lynn describes a “clay lifestyle” emerging in these years. Some potters lived communally, selling handmade wares at fairs and rejecting mass-produced housewares as symbols of corporate conformity. Others took teaching positions, anchoring ceramics programs at universities across the country. Either way, functional pottery became a way to live differently. A hand-thrown mug on your breakfast table said something about your values.

In this context, the “Oriental” dinner service that had once signaled sophistication started to look like a mass-market, inherited script—one that did not speak to war protests, feminism, or environmental activism.

1970s Design: Earth Tones and Environmental Calm

While ceramists were reinventing vessels, graphic designers and product designers were pulsing with the same cultural currents. A design history of 1970s graphics notes how jazz, funk, and disco, along with new typesetting technologies, encouraged experimentation beyond the crisp minimalism of the 1950s and 1960s.

One of the clearest shifts was color. Designers embraced warm, nature-inspired palettes: mustard yellow, burnt orange, avocado green, and harvest gold. These hues were explicitly associated with peace and environmental awareness in the first Earth Day era, beginning in April 1970. The rainbow flag, introduced in 1978 by Gilbert Baker for the LGBTQ community, contributed another vivid, activist palette.

Even when 1970s graphics went psychedelic and busy, they pulled from swirling organic patterns rather than neat chinoiserie scrolls. At the same time, a minimalist strain led by designers like Saul Bass and Deborah Sussman used flat planes of bold color and geometric shapes to convey complex ideas with deceptive simplicity.

Ceramic glazes and forms are not documented in that design essay, but early studio stoneware from the same period shows similar earth-tone, tactile sensibilities. In tabletop styling today, vintage 1970s American stoneware in these colors is a perennial favorite precisely because it feels grounded and post-war calm. Against that mood, a porcelain plate covered in stylized “Oriental” figures can feel like a relic of a different emotional weather system.

War, Race, and the Uneasy Gaze on Asian Aesthetics

Taste never changes in a vacuum. The Vietnam War brought Americans face to face with Asia in a way that was not romantic, and not set in cobalt on a teacup. That trauma, and the racism that accompanied it, shaped how Asian imagery was seen in public space—and who was allowed to wield it.

Maya Lin and Who Gets to Design Memory

The clearest example comes not from the dinner table but from the National Mall. In the early 1980s, a 21-year-old architecture student named Maya Lin won the competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Her concept was radically simple: two black granite walls, set below grade, bearing the names of the war dead.

In an interview with the Academy of Achievement, Lin recalls how her design was subjected to an unusually stringent federal review, passing through five agencies, each reviewing it twice. Despite this, political figures including President Ronald Reagan, Interior Secretary James Watt, and H. Ross Perot publicly opposed the project. The controversies swirled around its black color, perceived “emptiness,” and below-ground siting, which critics called a “gash” or “hole,” as well as Lin’s identity: young, female, Asian American, and too young to have served.

Some critics argued, explicitly or implicitly, that only veterans—implicitly white, male ones—could adequately shape the nation’s memory of Vietnam. Lin remembers feeling isolated at Senate hearings, with few public defenders beyond her lawyers, a handful of arts organizations, and one particularly supportive writer. At the memorial’s dedication, her name was not even mentioned.

What does this have to do with porcelain patterns? Lin’s experience reveals how fraught Asian presence had become in American visual culture linked to the war. The problem was not just the subject of Vietnam, but who was allowed to represent it, and in what visual language. A young Chinese American woman proposing a radically minimal monument triggered anxieties about foreignness at the very heart of American mourning.

If a designer like Lin was perceived as too “other” to shape a national memorial, it is hardly surprising that some American consumers looked at “Oriental” décor with fresh unease. The old fantasy of a distant, decorative East had collided with images of napalm, protests, and POW bracelets. That does not mean people consciously boycotted willow patterns, but it changed the emotional temperature in the room.

Vietnamese American Artists Refuse the War-Only Story

While much of mainstream culture continued to flatten Vietnamese identity into “the war,” Vietnamese American artists were already reframing ceramics as a site of living culture, not just trauma.

Ceramic artist Christian Dinh, featured in a profile from the George Ohr museum and in PBS reporting, embodies this shift. A Vietnamese American from Florida, Dinh creates porcelain works that embed family recipes, domestic rituals, and the everyday feel of Vietnamese American life. One series turns the plastic “longevity” rice bowls found in countless immigrant kitchens into larger, more permanent ceramic sculptures. Another, called “Nail Salon,” transforms display hands from Vietnamese-run salons into porcelain forms inscribed with words and symbols about community and success.

Dinh explicitly rejects the idea that Vietnamese American identity should be understood only through the lens of war. He insists that his work is American art as much as it is Vietnamese or Asian, and he uses familiar objects—rice bowls, manicured hands—to center family, food, and small acts of care, rather than bomb craters.

In New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, composers like Dylan Tran mix Vietnamese court music with Western string quartets, while communities like Village de L’Est rebuild after Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, creating farming cooperatives when shrimping collapses. Their stories, documented in public broadcasting coverage, are full of adaptation, resilience, and cultural hybridity.

In Manhattan, writers on design and urban craft describe Vietnamese pottery as a “hidden art treasure.” Galleries and small studios in Lower Manhattan present Bát Tràng celadon, Chu Đậu floral engraving, and Phu Lang rustic clay alongside contemporary, minimalist reinterpretations. Workshops teach techniques using imported Vietnamese red clay; collectors are encouraged to ask about village-of-origin, artist biographies, and the difference between handmade and mass-produced work.

Taken together, these narratives show a post–Vietnam War desire to move beyond Orientalist clichés. Rather than a generic “Oriental” pattern, we see specific Vietnamese villages, diaspora experiences, and individual artists. The war is present as a backdrop of displacement, but the art refuses to freeze there.

From Exotic Pattern to Problematic Cliché

Given all of this, why did “Oriental” ceramic patterns lose their easy place at the American table after the Vietnam War? The research points to several overlapping reasons, more like layers of glaze than a single stroke of paint.

First, the hierarchy between “high” art and “low” craft was being actively challenged. At the American Museum of Ceramic Art, writers have used the example of the Chicano collective Asco to question how categories like high art (painting, sculpture) and low art (ceramics, murals, street performance) shape what gets written into history. Ceramics, like Asco’s radical actions, had often been dismissed because they were considered craft or community art. By the 2000s, exhibitions such as “The Ceramic Presence in Modern Art” at Yale University Art Gallery were explicitly arguing that clay belonged on equal footing with painting and sculpture, showing works by John Mason, Ken Price, and Peter Voulkos alongside Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler.

Once clay is seen as a medium that can bear complex, modern ideas, mass-market “Oriental” patterns, which emerged from centuries of decorative trade, start to feel conceptually thin. They might be technically beautiful, but they do not obviously wrestle with nuclear anxiety, civil rights, or war guilt in the way that, say, Richard Notkin’s Yixing-inspired “Nuclear Nuts Teapot” series does. Notkin uses the small teapot form—rooted in traditional Chinese purple-sand pottery—to comment on the Holocaust, atomic bombings, and environmental collapse. He deliberately keeps a distinct Western identity in his forms while honoring the Chinese techniques, making explicit how cross-cultural influence can be ethically complicated and politically sharp.

Second, there is a growing suspicion of superficial exoticism. The Henry Ford essay shows that Chinoiserie and Canton wares historically allowed Western buyers to bask in the glamour of “the East” without engaging deeply with Asian cultures. Later designers like Hugh Robertson and institutions like Alfred University shifted focus toward technical understanding and genuine material dialogue. In our own time, Manhattan’s Vietnamese potters encourage collectors to look for “artist’s fingerprints,” ask about the village, and verify provenance. This is the opposite of buying a plate precisely because it is generically “Oriental.”

Third, the mood of the era demanded seriousness. Robert C. Turner, an influential Alfred-trained ceramist and educator, provides a telling case. In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, he served as a juror for the Ceramic National Exhibition. He and his fellow jurors made the astonishing decision to reject every single entry, declaring that the submitted work lacked the strong conviction needed to match the depth of contemporary despair. Turner believed art needed to minister to people’s moral and spiritual needs, not just decorate their shelves.

If you take Turner at his word, then a delicate, imported plate covered in imaginary Chinese bridges would have had a hard time justifying itself as adequate response to napalm and draft lotteries. It is not that those plates disappeared overnight, but that they no longer represented the emotional cutting edge.

Fourth, the sheer look of modern ceramics shifted. Collectors like Philip E. Aarons championed mid-century American studio ceramics as equal in brilliance to better-known designers, assembling works by Glen Lukens, Maija Grotell, Gertrud and Otto Natzler, Mary and Edwin Scheier, and Leza McVey. Many of these artists favored biomorphic forms, shimmering single-color glazes, or abstract surface designs that owed more to modern painting and the landscape than to Asian figuration. McVey, for example, abandoned the wheel for hand-built, asymmetrical vessels with matte earth glazes and elaborate stoppers, designed to assert themselves as sculpture rather than containers.

Decorative painting did not disappear, but it no longer needed to quote pagodas or dragons to feel worldly. In fact, continuing to do so risked looking derivative and nostalgic.

Here is a concise way to see the transition:

The pattern was not rejected everywhere, all at once. You will still find Blue Willow plates in diners and family cupboards across the country. But within the worlds of art, design, and increasingly lifestyle-conscious home consumers, the old “Oriental” image lost its unquestioned authority.

Styling East Asian–Inspired Ceramics Today (Without the Baggage)

So where does that leave your grandmother’s Chinese export platter or the stack of Canton bowls you just scored at a thrift shop? Are they doomed to the attic because they whisper of outdated fantasies?

Not at all. The key, as I see it from a tabletop stylist’s vantage point, is to use them with awareness and in conversation with contemporary work.

First, be precise in your language. When I talk to clients, I describe a plate as “Blue Willow–style,” “Canton pattern,” or “Chinoiserie,” rather than simply “Oriental.” For contemporary Vietnamese pieces, I say “Bát Tràng celadon cup” or “Phu Lang stoneware jar.” This mirrors the way curators and writers in our sources differentiate specific villages, factories, and artists, and it quietly teaches guests that Asia is not one monolithic aesthetic.

Second, mix pattern with presence. Instead of laying an entire table in matching willow, I might use one ornate platter as a centerpiece, then surround it with hand-thrown stoneware in earth tones. The rough surfaces and irregular rims of the studio pieces undermine any hint of precious stiffness, and the older pattern becomes a story object rather than a default.

Third, support living Asian and Asian American makers. When you place a Christian Dinh–inspired nail-salon hand on a bar cart, or a Vietnamese Manhattan lotus-motif lamp on a bedside table, you are literally setting the stage for contemporary narratives. Remember that many of these artists, as Dinh says, refuse to let the war be the only story. Their work sits in the same rooms as your inherited porcelain and changes how all of it reads.

Fourth, borrow the technical lessons, not the clichés. If you love the crispness of cobalt on white, look for contemporary ceramists, including those in American studio traditions, who use that palette with modern motifs. If you are drawn to the depth of an oxblood glaze, explore pieces from potters who, like Hugh Robertson in the early 20th century, study Chinese glazes but apply them to new forms. That way, your table honors the material brilliance of Asian ceramics without rehashing simplified pagoda scenes.

Finally, let function be playful. The Manhattan guide to Vietnamese pottery suggests using traditional water jars as sculptural umbrella stands in entryways, small hand-thrown bowls for spices or fruit, lotus-motif lamps for calming bedroom light, and glazed planters on balconies that echo Vietnamese garden aesthetics. Translating those ideas into your home means letting pieces travel: a Canton serving bowl might become a key catcher by the door; a lone willow teacup could hold flowers on a desk. When objects slip their inherited roles, it becomes easier to see them as part of a living, mixed culture rather than props from a frozen fantasy.

Pros and Cons of Holding On to “Oriental” Patterns

Keeping “Oriental” ceramic patterns in play has real advantages. They embody remarkable craft histories: centuries of Chinese kiln innovation, European attempts to reverse engineer porcelain, and the industrial ingenuity of American potteries mimicking far-off aesthetics. The narrative scenes on many pieces are miniature graphic novels, spiraling around rims and telling stories of lovers, scholars, and landscapes. On a table full of minimalist stoneware, one willow-pattern platter can provide a satisfying jolt of visual complexity.

Yet there are clear downsides. The very word “Oriental,” when used for people, is recognized in American English today as offensive; attached to objects, it can still carry a whiff of that flattening gaze. The patterns themselves often repeat a narrow set of tropes: quaint pavilions, obedient figures, picturesque bridges. After the Vietnam War and broader civil rights movements, many Americans grew more attuned to how such imagery can anonymize real cultures.

There is also an emotional mismatch. A table covered entirely in delicate, idealized Asian scenes can feel disconnected from the lived histories of war, migration, and diaspora that Vietnamese American artists like Christian Dinh deal with. In a world where clay is used to address nuclear disaster, genocide, and structural racism—as in Richard Notkin’s work or the politically charged installations documented by contemporary ceramists—the old patterns risk feeling like prettified denial.

Practically, they can be hard to integrate with current interiors dominated by warm woods, matte finishes, and plants. It takes more styling effort to make them feel intentional rather than simply old. That does not mean they should be discarded; it means they benefit from being curated, remixed, and paired with pieces that speak in a different visual vocabulary.

FAQ: Using “Oriental” Patterns in a Post–Vietnam War World

Is it disrespectful to use old Oriental-pattern plates today?

Intent and context matter. Using inherited pieces thoughtfully, with awareness of their history, is different from buying new items that trade lazily on exotic stereotypes. Pairing vintage Chinoiserie with contemporary works by Asian and Asian American artists can actually open conversations about history, trade, and representation at the table.

How can I tell if a piece is a thoughtful cross-cultural work or just a cliché?

Look for specificity and story. The Vietnamese pottery guides recommend asking where a piece was made, who made it, whether it is hand-thrown or mass-produced, and whether there is an artist biography or certificate. Pieces rooted in particular villages or individual practices tend to carry deeper cultural content than anonymous, factory-printed “Oriental” patterns on bargain-store plates.

Can I mix Blue Willow with 1970s stoneware and still have it look cohesive?

Absolutely, and that mix is one of my favorite visual conversations. Think in layers: use earth-tone stoneware as chargers or dinner plates, then drop a smaller willow salad plate on top, so the pattern pops without overwhelming the table. Echo the cobalt with a single blue glass, a napkin edge, or a tiny bud vase. The result feels less like nostalgia and more like a dialogue between eras and aesthetics.

Closing: Setting a Table That Sees Clearly

In the wake of the Vietnam War, Americans did not simply flip a switch and “reject” Oriental ceramic patterns. Instead, clay itself changed status; Asian and Asian American artists claimed their own visual voices; curators rewrote craft history; and broader design cultures turned toward earth, process, and authenticity.

When you set your table today, you have the luxury of that whole story. You can keep the blue pagodas, but you no longer have to pretend they are neutral. You can sit them beside a Vietnamese diaspora bowl, a West Coast “sloppy craft” sculpture, or a quietly serious stoneware cup and let them all talk. That, to me as a colorful tabletop joy curator, is the most satisfying kind of rejection: not erasing the old pattern, but refusing to let it be the only one.

References

1. https://ceramicsmuseum.alfred.edu/exhibitions/history-a-legacy-in-motion/index.html
2. https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstreams/5e7a5fc0-413a-483b-825a-57a5644c2288/download
3. https://news.yale.edu/2015/08/28/exhibition-explores-often-overlooked-role-ceramics-20th-century-art
4. https://georgeohr.org/christian-dinh/
5. https://www.metmuseum.org/met-publications/gifts-from-the-fire-american-ceramics-1880-1950
6. https://achievement.org/achiever/maya-lin/
7. https://www.amoca.org/blogs/asco-and-hierarchies-of-art/
8. https://ceramicartsnetwork.org/ceramics-monthly/ceramics-monthly-article/the-small-tight-and-precious-world-of-richard-notkin
9. https://journalpanorama.org/article/american-studio-ceramics-innovation-and-identity-1940-to-1979/
10. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/vietnamese-american-artists-on-gulf-coast-honor-their-communitys-success-and-struggles