皮影雕刻艺术的魅力 - 2016年12月16日

EDITOR’S Note：

THE marketplace at the popular Yuyuan Garden tourism area in Shanghai is a potpourri of traditional Chinese folk arts. Shanghai Daily is running a series on the craftsmen who are carrying ancient culture into the modern age.

PHOTOS on paper will eventually fade, but mementos carved in granite never will. The ancient Chinese art of shadow carving may remind some of the more modern “pointillism” school of art, exemplified by the French painter Seurat.

Only instead of thousands of points of paint forming a picture, shadow carving involves chiseling small dots on a dark stone, with the layers underneath making the dots appear white.

Ma Xianguan, 29, is one of the contemporary artisans keeping shadow carving alive. He plies his art at Shanghai’s Yuyuan Garden.

A native of Fujian Province, Ma is the newest generation in the lineage of some of the most famous stone-carving masters in Chinese history.

Li Zhou is considered the father of shadow carving. It began in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), when the art form was known as zhen hei bai, or literally “black-and-white painting with a needle.”

New life was breathed into shadow carving in the 1970s, when local artisans started to carve portraits on stone.

Ma says he was fascinated as he watched the work of his elder brother, who was an apprentice in the art form in their hometown Fuding.

“The chiseling seemed messy and purposeless at the beginning,” Ma says, “but in the end, you find yourself looking at a wonderful portrait or some landscape.”

When Ma turned 18, he decided to try his hand at the art, but it proved more daunting than he first imagined.

He holds a 15-centimeter-long diamond-head pointed chisel that weighs 1.5 kilograms with the three fingers of his right hand, holding it up with the forefinger of his left hand.

“You have to chisel with the strength of your wrist and your arm,” he says. “You don’t hammer in the dots. You need just the right amount of strength to make a dot.”

His forefinger has a thick callus where the chisel rubs against his skin as he controls the direction of the tool.

Ma says he thought about giving up the whole idea two months after taking up shadow carving. But as he started to make progress, he became more encouraged. He first learned how to create straight lines and graceful curves, and dots in different sizes.

“When the chisel feels like an extended part of your arm instead of a tool in your hand, you have achieved perfect control,” he says.

In carving a picture, the artisan prints out a picture on paper and then draws outlines with the paper laid on stone. He then carves the outlines and the most contrasting parts before working on shades.

“We look for the brighter parts and the ‘focal point,’ which we carve with dense dots in circles,” Ma explains. “The darker parts with fewer dots necessary are left to last.”

Under the instruction of his brother, Ma started out by carving flowers and leaves. His first serious challenge in learning the art was carving a Buddha, a popular motif for shadow carving in Fujian, where Buddhism is prevalent.

The hardest part of transferring a two-dimensional Buddha figure to stone is getting the halo around the head right.

“In the beginning, it was hard to carve a perfect halo, with neat lines and natural transitions of dots of different densities,” Ma says.

After 10 attempts at Buddhas sized at about 30 by 40 centimeters, he finally created something that his brother declared was “all right but only halfway there.” Ma still smiles when recalling the faint praise.

As with all fine works of art, there are no shortcuts to mastery. It takes a lot of practice and dedication, and careful observation of human faces.

To this day, when Ma is having trouble getting the shades right, he just rests for a while or tinkers around on another stone.

“The transition of light and shadow has to be both natural and well-defined, without a trace of hesitation,” he says. “My brother could tell instantly if I had been absent-minded when carving a picture.”

The works of shadow carvers are identifiable by the hand that created them.

“Some carvers chisel harder than others, and that starts from the first dots,” says Ma. “Top masterpieces are those carved with dots as minor as possible but nonetheless in clear lines.”

Machines exist that can create shadow carving pictures, but they are mostly used in the production of large pictures, such as those one-by-two meters in size.

“It has been suggested that I save some labor by using a machine,” Ma says. “But machines are troublesome to operate, and since it usually takes me only two hours to finish a smaller picture, working by hand is much more convenient.”

The stone pictures can be colored with acrylics, but that takes longer and the “naked” pictures usually look much better.

At Ma’s stand in Yuyuan Garden, tourists can find dot stone pictures of world-renowned celebrities, including Chinese kung fu star Jackie Chan, American basketball legend Michael Jordan and English footballer David Beckham.

Stone art is beloved in China because stone is a symbol of good luck and eternal love. For that reason, Ma gets many requests from couples who want their pictures carved in stone.

“I often advise the ladies to provide pictures of themselves with no makeup so that the reproductions on stone have a genuine look,” he says.

Customers are asked to provide photos of high resolution. Ma says it once took him two days to carve a human figure only five centimeters high because he was working from a photo where the facial features were hard to discern.

“Generally speaking, the eyes are always the hardest part to carve and carve well,” he says. “If I’m not sure that a picture actually resembles a person, I’ll ask him to have a look at the part that I am most uncertain about.”

Ma’s brother retired from shadow carving because of chronic back problems. Ma, a former welder on construction sites, says his current job is much less physically demanding but it does take a toll on his health.

“I often feel pain in the muscles of my left back after working long hours holding the chisel with my left hand,” he says. “But it won’t stop me from doing shadow carving — at least for now.”