Text: Xu Feng
Looking at the scenery by the Pearl River, it is best when the morning sun is twilight. Especially standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows on the more than ten floors of the White Swan Hotel, between the pitches, the clouds are rolling and the clouds are comfortable, the weather is thousands, and hundreds of boats compete for the stream, which is a grand view. Diagonally opposite is the White Goose Pond, where the Pearl River "winds" a wide bend. The Baietan-Dawan Art Center complex is at this bend.
The art center has three museums, the Literature Museum, the Art Museum, and the Intangible Cultural Heritage Museum. A few days before the opening of the museum, I was on the scene and witnessed the whole process of the ivory carving work "Bay Area Concentric" by the intangible cultural heritage master Zhang Minhui.
One
When I learned that "Bay Area Concentric" entered the museum today, early in the morning, I took the urban rail and squeezed the subway, just for a sneak peek.
The construction site has long been noisy. A truck was parked there with a large wooden box in its compartment. A large crane was also parked there. After a while, the crane will lift the wooden box upstairs.
I climbed up the fourth floor and looked down. But seeing the crane start, the thick arms leaned out, and it didn't take much effort to reach higher than the fourth floor, and then, the base of the crane came to a 360-degree twist, and the hook swept the wind, hooked people's eyes, swayed gently, and moved to the top of the truck.
Someone below has attached a large wooden box to the hook. The crane made a muffled sound, and the wooden box began to rise smoothly into the air, turning two times in mid-air, and the direction was good, and it fell gently. The spectators looked at the majestic behemoth, their hearts hung in their throats, and finally saw the wooden box fall safely, and applause broke out.
Intangible cultural heritage master Zhang Minhui also put a heart back in his stomach. The wooden box contains his work "Bay Area Concentric".
Because the exhibition hall was still under construction and the dust was floating, he did not open the box immediately, saying that he was afraid that it would be difficult to deal with the dust. I couldn't help but feel a little lost. But chatting with Zhang Minhui, I also know a lot about "Bay Area Concentric".
"Bay Area Concentric" says that it is "ivory carving", but the main thing used is cow bones, and the material is about 13 tons. Here, "ivory carving" refers primarily to the craft, as the "traditional" ivory has been replaced with mammoth ivory and cow bones as elephants are protected.
In the space of 498×108×167 (cm), this work carves 215 buildings, 17 archways, 18 pavilions, 123 boats, and 4 dragon boats; There are 7,170 large, medium and small trees, 820 peonies, roses, chrysanthemums, 760 cranes, 280 seagulls, 117 birds, and 553 clouds. So many flowers, birds, fish and insects, pavilions and pavilions are already a grand spectacle, and it also "hides" 22,385 characters! The most representative natural and cultural landscapes in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area urban agglomeration are presented on it: Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, Baiyun Mountain, and Canton Tower in Guangzhou; Hong Kong's Bauhinia Plaza and Convention and Exhibition Centre; St. Paul's, Lotus Square in Macau; Qianhai International Conference Center in Shenzhen, Statue of Deng Xiaoping in Lianhua Mountain; Zhaoqing's Seven Star Rock Archway, Tropic of Cancer Symbol Tower; Zhuhai's Sun Moon Shell Grand Theater and Zhuhai Fishergirl Stone Statue; Huizhou's West Lake and Sizhou Tower; Dongguan's Opium War Museum and Weiyuan Fort; Foshan's ancestral temple archway, Xiqiao Mountain; Jiangmen's Kaiping diaolou, bird paradise; Sun Wen Memorial Park in Zhongshan, etc.
Zhang Minhui took 20 apprentices to create ideas, sketches, basic clay molds, main body inlays, component carvings, ...... If you cut it, if you learn it, if you grind it, it takes about 3,000 days.
Work "Bay Area Concentric" (file photo)
Zhang Minhui showed me the real photos. I only thought of two words: majestic and exquisite.
High-definition pictures, zoomed in, the knife is exquisite, and the silk is fragrant. People, animals, landscapes, flowers and birds, trees, pavilions, pavilions, modern buildings, etc., are sparse and floating, looking for ecology, real and real. On the knife method, there are round carving, relief carving, hollow carving, inlay.
On the top layer of the work, there is a mammoth ivory ball, with a diameter of 20 centimeters, totaling 31 layers, hollowed out and deeply carved, delicate and complex, and each layer rotates freely. "Bottom support" has the dragon and phoenix are auspicious, the peony is the national color, and the crane sings Jiugao. This ball belongs to "a unique Chinese game". The ivory ball is divided into live layers, the key lies in the "car", experts call it "car eggs", the ball that has just been cared into is thin and slippery, like an eggshell. Layering is the most difficult, and each layer of pattern cannot be carved, broken, or cracked. It is also difficult to carve. First drill through the deep hole, remove the excess material, and then from shallow to deep, from rough to fine. The knives are the same, but due to the different gestures and angles of the carver, the weight of the force is different, the skill is different, and the effect is also different. There are ancient books, as early as the Song Dynasty has appeared three-layer set of balls, when called "ghost work ball", the meaning of the ghost axe is also.
Zhang Minhui said that this ball means that the cities in the Greater Bay Area are like a rising and radiant sunrise.
Two
I originally thought that Zhang Minhui's craftsmanship was a family inheritance. But he said, no.
In 1972, he graduated from high school and joined the Guangzhou Daxin Ivory Craft Factory, a state-owned enterprise. Some of his classmates went to machinery factories, and some went to shipyards and steel mills, and at that time they were fitters and lathes. Zhang Minhui is always embarrassed to say that he is in the ivory factory. When he was apprenticed, he was still "Monchacha", but he was "sober from the beginning to the end" – this is a Cantonese word that describes people who have strong comprehension, cleverness, and rapid progress. The leader saw it in his eyes and spoke: "Zhang Minhui, you go to the character group to report and become Master Li Dingrong's apprentice." The "character group" is the key department with the most comprehensive technical requirements in the whole factory, and Li Dingrong is a veteran of the ivory carving industry in Guangzhou, who can be his apprentice, and the starting point of learning art is naturally high.
At first, the master only gave the apprentice some ivory scraps and asked him to carve them himself. He filed and scraped all day long, which made his fingers hurt. It is worn out, and the master said that pinching a handful of tooth bran and tooth silk can stop the bleeding. But in the dead of night, he always felt his heart beat and his fingers beat in pain.
Gradually, the "characters" that the master had done well, such as fishermen, Fulu birthday stars, ladies, etc., began to let him practice, still starting from "scraping" to scrape the surface smoothly. He also has to learn to make tools. The iron sheet is made into curved, round, flat and other shapes, and then quenched and annealed; He lit an alcohol lamp and blew on a copper pipe with inconsistent thickness at both ends. When it blows, the flame is red, and when it is ventilated, the flame weakens again, making me dizzy, but the temperature never goes up. The master teaches the secret, and the mouth is pressed and the breath cannot be stopped. He tried a few times and finally learned.
The more Zhang Minhui learned, the more he felt that art was as high as a mountain and art as deep as the sea, and there was not enough time at all. Together with his young co-workers, he returned to the workshop after dinner, practiced sculpture in plaster and sketched on white paper...... He didn't leave until 10 p.m. before the factory locked its doors.
Zhang Minhui also participated in several "trainings". In 1975, Guangzhou Arts and Crafts Industry Company opened a workers' university, and he was selected as a technical backbone to be sent to semi-full-time study in the first batch; In 1980, the factory sent him to participate in the sculpture art inspection class sponsored by the Guangdong Provincial Institute of Arts and Crafts, and in three months, he went to the Shaanxi Provincial Museum and the Dazu Grottoes in Sichuan. He felt the profoundness, grandeur and heaviness of the traditional culture of the Chinese nation, and kept copying and sketching; In 1984, he was selected to study at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts for another year.
"I slowly felt that this work was good, unlike an assembly line, which kept producing the same thing every day. Ivory carving, there is a creative meaning in it, even if you make the same specification of products, each piece is different, there is a sense of accomplishment after completion, so I feel that this is my lifelong career. In the 90s of the 20th century, when the ivory factory was almost out of production due to the lack of ivory carving, the technical backbone changed careers, so Zhang Minhui and several like-minded workers set up a craft factory in a simple peasant house in Fangcun on the outskirts of Guangzhou, and began to explore the arduous entrepreneurial road of inheriting ivory carving skills through material innovation.
Zhang Minhui and his works (file photo)
Three
In 2007, Zhang Minhui and his team designed and created a large bone carving work "Fu Ru Donghai", which caused a strong response in the national arts and crafts circles. Li Yanzu, a professor at the Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University, sighed after watching the work: "Zhang Minhui's innovation has opened up a second spring for the ivory carving technique that has been inherited for more than 3,000 years and is currently the most dangerous and lacking inheritance in the inheritance of traditional Chinese crafts. ”
This year, Zhang Minhui was rated as a national model worker in the light industry.
At this time, he pointed to the 20-centimeter-diameter mammoth ivory ball on the top of "Bay Area Concentric" and said, "There are two materials in this work: cow bones and mammoth ivory. Now ivory carving practitioners are using mammoth ivory, cow bones, etc. to continue to inherit the thousand-year-old skills of ivory carving. ”
"Isn't this work all handmade?" I asked him.
"If it's mass production, it's now possible to digitally model and digitally engrave. But this work is the only one, and it is impossible to use these methods. But I'll use tools. When I was an apprentice, I already had power tools, but with power tools, what the master made and what I made are fundamentally different. It's like a writer used to write with a pen, but now he writes with a computer, the tools are different, but you can't say it's machine writing. We all laughed. He continued, "Now, the old tools are less used. ”
He said that the work "Bay Area Concentric" is the crystallization of collective wisdom and embodies the efforts of too many people.
First of all, it is necessary to make a base draft, white drawing, composition, make a clay mold, and then turn the mold, and paste FRP; The skeleton is erected and then inlaid with cow bones. Cow bones only use cow thigh bones, thigh bones are also very small, and hollow, the two heads of osteoporosis can not be used, to cut off, only twelve or thirteen centimeters can be used.
Cut the beef bones into sections, pieces, the surface is flat, longer for carving clouds, ship's side, etc., cylindrical hollow, suitable for pavilions; A big tree should be inlaid one by one, can not see where the "joint" is, to use drilling, nailing, tenon and other traditional methods, the various parts of the clever combination, and the use of the details and parts of the scene, between the part and the whole lining, blocking, interlacing, interspersed relationship, hundreds of pieces of aggregate organic inlay, and strive to leave no traces and flaws, so that seamless.
looked at the 71-year-old Zhang Minhui in front of him again, with an introverted personality and a pleasant face.
As the representative inheritor of the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage ivory carving projects, he is an expert who enjoys special government allowances from the State Council and a senior arts and crafts artist, but he feels that for intangible cultural heritage, family inheritance is important, but horizontal master-apprentice inheritance or college inheritance is more important. Some memories need to be passed on by word of mouth; There are some crafts that someone must learn and do.
"Children may not have talent, and they may not like this career. But I can take a lot of apprentices and teach a lot of students, and I can produce 1 out of 10 and 1 out of 100, and that's amazing. That's how I came out. When the old man said this, I saw that his eyes were firm and full of hope.
This article was originally published in the A6 edition of Yangcheng Evening News on October 13, 2024
Editor: Yi Zina