"More than a Year in a Row"
"Huang Zhong"
"Zhong Kui"
"Riding the Black Tiger Rabbit Grandpa"
◎ Xin Yousheng
Gold armor pounding medicine pestle, mountain-shaped eyebrow three-flapped mouth, behind a back flag", this is said to be a folk plaything in Beijing - rabbit grandfather. Legend has it that one year there was a plague in Beijing, and the jade rabbit in the Moon Palace took medicine during the Mid-Autumn Festival, and this medicine was the moon cake. Since the jade rabbit saved Beijing, the people have to eat mooncakes every year during the Mid-Autumn Festival, and every household has to invite a rabbit grandfather to go back to worship and thank the merits of the jade rabbit.
There is a detailed description of the image of the rabbit grandfather in "Four Generations Together". Before the Mid-Autumn Festival, the old man celebrated his birthday and walked around the street to buy a rabbit for his grandson, "The little rabbit is indeed meticulous... There was no rouge on the face, but only a thin line was drawn on the small three-petal mouth, red and oiled; two slender white ears were faintly painted with a little light red; in this way, the face of the little rabbit brought out a handsome look, as if it were the yellow tianba among the rabbits. Its upper body is dressed in a vermilion robe, and from below the waist, the emerald green leaves and pink flowers, each leaf fold and petal are carefully dyed with a distinct and uniform color, making the green leaves and red flowers sparkle. As Lao She wrote, in the past, rabbits were sold before the August Festival, and vendors stacked rabbits on top of each other and called them "Rabbit Mountain". The children bought the rabbit grandpa and broke it after playing with it for a few days. If you are lucky enough to stay, it will become the beijing post-break, "the next year's rabbit - old Chen ren". Speaking of old Chen people, the Palace Museum still has several rabbit grandfathers from the late Qing Dynasty.
Now the rabbit is really a bit of "chaotic roads", not only the Mid-Autumn Festival, but all catch up with folk activities, Spring Festival temple fairs, it is indispensable, and tourist souvenir shops throughout Beijing are also indispensable varieties, and they have also been made into posters, pictures, and cartoons with it as the theme. Rabbit Erye stood out among the many folk gadgets and became a symbolic existence of Beijing folklore.
Like many other folk customs and folk crafts, rabbits disappeared at a special historical stage and gradually recovered after the reform and opening up. Recently, the master of arts and crafts who focused on clay sculpture production, Shuang Qixiang, died at the age of 90, which is the basic image that he restored and created the current rabbit.
In 1931, Shuang Qixiang was born in the flower market under the headlines of a Manchu family of craftsmen. His parents worked on artificial flower making. In the early years, there were four festivals per month on Huashi Street, and the Pantao Palace Temple Fair near the Flower Market was one of the most famous temple fairs in Beijing. From an early age, he was exposed to various mud toys in the market and developed a strong interest. At the age of 14, he began to learn the art with his second uncle who made clay people. Shuang Qixiang's second uncle was an apprentice of the Bai family in the "Deshunxiang" toy store in Dong'an Market, and was also called the "Clay Man Holy Hand" by the "Shiyan Bao" at that time. This holy hand is good at innovation, and sometimes he is a clay man with a half-brick pillow and a messy hair, and some people in the family who smoke big smoke like to buy one to go back to play a role in exhortation. At that time, the industry was very competitive, and if someone resimilated with your work, you had to hurry up and come up with a new one.
Shuang Qixiang learned art with his second uncle and also followed him to set up a stall. The second uncle is a clay man, and he is a mud bird. After leaving the school, Shuang Qixiang set up a stall and was recommended by the second uncle to work in Deshunxiang. In Deshunxiang for 3 years as a sand table, mountains, pavilions, trees, people, motorcycles, tanks do everything, this experience has exercised the ability to make small objects in double flight. In 1952, Shuang Qixiang began to make facebooks alone, supplying them to shops in the Dong'an Market, and later his facial works were sold to the Beijing Arts and Crafts Service Department, and he also began to become famous in the industry.
Working in a paint mill in the early 1960s was a peak period for shuangqixiang art. Clay sculpture has two kinds of kung fu, one is painting and the other is plastic. Like rabbit grandpa, mud dolls, etc. are first made of molds, and then the mud is filled into the mold to knock out the shape, also known as "bumping mud", and then drawn on the mud dumplings. The focus of this work is on painting, which is the craft that Shuangqixiang excelled when he learned art. There are also clay people who can't use molds and rely purely on hand pinching, such as the "knife and horse people" in the Beijing clay people, who have to pinch the shape of the horse with their hands and pinch out the image of the riding figure. Then the delicate ones such as the painted sculptures of Tianjin "Clay Man Zhang". Legend has it that Zhang Mingshan, the founder of "Clay Man Zhang", can pinch the clay man with his hand in his sleeve, and the image of Bi Xiao requires superb sculptural skills. According to the opinion of the second uncle of Shuang Qixiang, plastic is more test of kung fu than painting, and Shuang Qixiang, who urgently needs to earn money, is not in place on plastic. Fortunately, during his work in the painted plastic factory, Shuang Qixiang met Zheng Yuhe, a disciple of Zhang Jinghu, the third generation of the "clay man Zhang" who was sent to the factory, and improved his plastic skills in the exchange.
At this stage, the main achievement of double qixiang is in Facebook production. He did not make the face sheet completely copied the image on the opera stage. For example, the representative work Zhong Kui's face is derived from the stage image of Hou Yushan in the Northern Kun Theater, but hou Yushan's helmet is changed into a Tang scarf, and the complicated face is reduced to simple red. On stage, the actors' faces and facial movements present rich expressions, such as simply copying onto static clay faces, which are trivial and crowded because of the size limitations of the work itself. Another of his face representatives, Lu Zhishen, has a widened cheek and a shape almost "convex" in shape, highlighting the image of Lu Zhishen's fat and big quill. In addition, the eyes of his character works basically do not adopt the simple treatment of looking straight ahead, but let the eyes focus on a point, as if looking at someone, increasing the character's aura.
After the "Cultural Revolution", Shuang Qixiang heard some old people say that Grandpa Rabbit had not been seen for many years, and he created Grandpa Rabbit in the style of Shuangshi based on his early impressions and his own understanding. The rabbit grandfather seen by the old man in the "Four Worlds together" quoted above is "no rouge on the face", and the rabbit grandfather made by Shuang Qixiang is lightly painted with a little carmine on his cheeks, which is more lively, such as compared with several rabbit grandfathers hidden in the Forbidden City. But this liveliness is not cartoonish, he particularly emphasizes the crispness of the rabbit's flame eyebrows and the strength of the pen, combined with the eyes and the slender and unbloated face shape, showing a vigorous and heroic feeling. Based on this basic shape, The Rabbit's mount varies in various ways, which can be tiger, elephant, deer, gourd, peony flower or Rabbit's Cave Ofofu Jinguang Cave.
During this period, Shuangqixiang also produced many other types of clay man works. Once, when he went to Xi'an, he saw a child wearing a tiger hat and a tiger suit, and came back to make a "tiger baby" according to this image, which became his masterpiece. In the past, clay people used to make a blank, brush the base color first, and then draw. Shuang Qixiang found that the true color of the retained mud was drawn directly on it, which was more quaint.
In 2003, the National Art Museum of China collected 772 works by Shuang Qixiang; in 2006, Shuang Qixiang was recognized as the "Master of Chinese Arts and Crafts"; in 2014, Beijing Rabbit Erye became the fourth batch of national intangible cultural heritage, and Shuang Yan, the son of Shuang Qixiang, was the representative inheritor.
Now as a Symbol of Beijing, Rabbit Grandpa has become an industry, there are special brands to make Rabbit Grandpa on a large scale, and clay sculpture artists in Shaanxi are processing Beijing Rabbit Grandpa. The clay sculpture production areas in Tianjin and Hebei also have their own rabbit works.
This seemingly prosperous situation is not the overall prosperity of Beijing's clay sculptures represented by Grandpa Rabbit. There are more than a hundred kinds of works produced by Mr. Shuangqixiang in his lifetime, and only some of them can be seen now or passed on by future generations and disciples. What about the inheritance of the works of other old artists? The National Art Museum of China has also collected a large number of works by Han Zengqi, another old clay sculpture artist in Beijing, who has produced hundreds of complete sets of Three Kingdoms Sword and Horse Men. His son once told this writer that the old man was still studying the innovative appearance before he left, so he left something more. But Han Zengqi's descendants now basically only make rabbits, go to schools to teach intangible cultural heritage classes, and sometimes rush to rush to temple fairs.
This state is present in many non-genetic people. It is not that they did not want to move closer to the market, Han Zengqi's descendants opened shops and did not make money; Shuang Qixiang also made stores himself, and later mainly customers came to buy at home. Guozijian Street once had a Sheng Tang Xuan, a shop opened by Tang Shi, a descendant of Beijing flannel toys, which was once a good place to shop for old Beijing gadgets, and then it was gone.
Mr. Shuang Qixiang is gone, and it is not like the death of many other old artists that have formed a big wave, and no one has come out to say that this is the end of an era. But we should also remember Mr. Shuang Qixiang and thank him for giving us the opportunity to see such a cute gadget as Grandpa Rabbit again.
Image source/ "China Association of Nationalities Public Platform" WeChat public account