Guo Jing is making leather carvings. Photo by Yu Jing
China News Network Yinchuan, January 16 Title: Ningxia Non-Hereditary Inheritors: Slash and slash farming has revitalized the leather carving technique
China News Network reporter Yu Jing
In the hands of the leather carvers, pieces of leather are given different emotions and connotations under repeated percussions. On January 16, a reporter from China News Service walked into the studio of Guo Jing, the non-hereditary heir of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region-level leather carving project, to feel the unique charm of leather carving.
Guo Jing is making leather carvings. Photo by Yu Jing
Walking into Guo Jing's studio, he is burying his head, focusing on carving different shades of lines on a one-meter square hard cowhide, gradually forming a complex tiger pattern. Guo Jing told reporters that leather carving works are not only ornamental, but also have strong practicality, every year when the Spring Festival comes, he will do some zodiac skin carvings, leather carving red envelopes and other works related to the New Year, which is full of rich retro mood and can meet the aesthetics of modern people.
"The leather is highly malleable, the texture of the lines is beautiful, and I can't get tired of seeing it." In Guo Jing's studio, leather sculptures such as key bags, wallets, and belts can be seen everywhere. Piece by piece of cowhide, under the meticulous production of Guo Jing, changed its appearance and glowed with a different look.
Cowhide painting requires pure hand-made and has a complex process flow. When selecting a skin, the skin surface must be both soft and fibrous, and there must be no scratches. The creative process integrates painting, carving, dyeing, polishing, shaping and other technical techniques, roughly speaking, it takes dozens of processes to complete a leather carving painting.
"When making leather carvings, it is necessary to make the pattern on it convex and have a three-dimensional sense, which is more artistic value." Guo Jing said, "If you want to shape the cowhide, the most critical link is to soften it with water. The water is more than the skin out of the water stains, the soft collapse of the lack of three-dimensional sense; less water is not formed, the convex surface can not be shown, especially testing people. ”
Guo Jing told the China News Service that the art of leather carving originated in Europe during the Renaissance and was introduced to China in recent years. Leather carving works are exquisitely carved, the craftsmanship is delicate, the development time in China is still relatively short, it is a niche industry, but the charm of leather sculpture lies in the expression of temperature and emotion. The depth of carving, the use of knife techniques, and the method of tapping will all cause different visual images to the leather, thus bringing different aesthetics and making people have different emotional effects, so they are deeply loved by young people who pursue personalization.
"Leather carving painting has a history of nearly a thousand years, the cultural connotation is very rich, and if it is excavated well, it will definitely have broad prospects for development." Guo Jing said, "It is very beneficial to closely integrate this skill with modern life, take cultural creativity as the guide, and explore the development of industrialization." ”
Therefore, Guo Jing learned from Western leather carving techniques and integrated Chinese leather carving elements, not only inheriting Chinese leather carving, but also innovating on the basis of inheriting traditional culture. He used a knife as a pen, leather as paper, a knife and a hammer, a needle and a thread... Each leather art work bears witness to the artist's ingenuity.
The positioning of leather carving was originally a high-end luxury, but Guo Jing did not want to only do high-end customization, he wanted to mass-produce leather carving, add Ningxia elements, and make leather carving a new business card of Ningxia tourism cultural creation.
Talking about the future, Guo Jing said that inheriting intangible cultural heritage is not to rigidly retain the old crafts and patterns, but to innovate in combination with the lives of modern people in order to bring new life to intangible cultural heritage. He not only wants to inherit the art of leather carving and painting, but also to make it a living, so that it has new value and vitality in modern society. (End)