Featured Earthenware pottery bowl/dish with pandas

Hello everyone! Thanks for checking this one out. Seems to be hand thrown and marked on the base, depicting pandas, perhaps chinese, but I don't get an obvious chinese feel from it. I couldn't pass up the cute pandas, and it seemed well made, so... here it is! Any ideas where/when from? Or even better does anyone recognize the sig / mark? I can't really make heads or tails of it.

The bowl/dish part is 4" in diameter, overall, about 6" wide with the pandas. The upright panda is 3" tall.

 

Cute.
I think a lot this type of pottery is from Vietnam. Many are planters sold with bamboo growing in them

 

Sure enough googling "bamboo planter pandas" turns up a ton of them. - None of them quite look like my pandas - but I imagine there are many variations on the theme. Thanks CC!

 

One other observation on mine - the upright panda seems to be holding some bamboo shoots over his left shoulder to keep them away from the other panda, and he looks worried his snack is about to be stolen.

 

I think this is a piece of Chinese Shiwan pottery. Sometimes Shiwan pottery is referred to as mudmen pottery.

Shiwan pottery has been around for a really long time although I suspect your piece is fairly newish.

Here is a pair of 19thc Shiwan foo dogs (lions) I recently acquired:

 

toothy critters !!!
Say....Cheese !

 

LOVE those pandas !!! ... Joy.

 

Now that you mention it, the clay/glaze/style does look very Shiwan. Thanks Blooey!

 

The eyes are wrong though.

 

Wrong for pandas, yes. Pandas should have those black disks around their eyes. As done, they do make them look really cute for some reason though.