In the tomb of King Mingqiyang in Nanjing, the Shinto stone carvings are solemn and solemn, and the trees are lined up. There is an inconspicuous small building in the corner of the cemetery, which is the Nanjing Institute of Cultural Heritage Protection. Here we met the post-90s cultural relics conservator Wu Xiao, a white, quiet boy. Here we also listened to a story about the fate between a new generation of people and old objects.
"Reunion" on paper is more than just repair
And the office stripped of the relics restoration room seems a bit empty. The restoration of paper artifacts has environmental requirements, which determines the seasonal change of demand. There is relatively little work in winter, and Wu Xiao's task today is not complicated: repairing broken albums.
Wu Xiao adjusted the paste to the appropriate concentration and spread the broken album pages flat on the mounting table. The water pipe pen lightly and quickly brought the paste to the splicing place, and he carefully spliced the two albums.
Wu Xiao said that ancient calligraphy and painting mounting generally has four layers of rice paper superimposed, one layer of painting heart, one layer of life paper, and two layers of back paper. From cleaning to live, uncovering the back and making up the grade, full-color receiving the pen, to "re-mounting the finished product on the wall", the fault tolerance rate is very low, because "one step is missed, and then it takes a lot of effort to save, and even the effort you pay is not necessarily effective." It is common to take one step and think about three or four steps later, and "stability" is something that must be done.
Wu Xiao has been in the industry for 12 years. In the past 12 years, he has gone from a young man who has just left school to an older "old man" in the team. In the past 12 years, not only the practitioners have changed, but also the development of the industry. With the development of cultural exhibitions and the convergence of the world, the concept of cultural relics restoration is constantly updated.
Originally, cultural relics restoration adhered to the concept of "repairing the old as old", but how old is the old concept? Any cultural relic, its state at a new time, in fact, is what we call the "old state", and the material used in the restoration and the original body material are definitely different, if the state of the restoration is the same as the original state, after 10 years, 20 years, the traces of later repair will be obvious, so you can not only consider the current restoration effect.
"We're fixing now with the next step in mind, taking into account what's going on decades from now."
Therefore, the original intention is kept in the paper pile
Wu Xiao has always been considered suitable for this profession: interested, personality is also suitable. When I was a child, I watched costume dramas, and I liked to use cardboard to make some accessories in the play, and the seal characters and engraved seals were also done out of interest. When I was in school, I always liked history. In the year of the college entrance examination, he and his mother read a report together, and finally "took the major to find a school" and chose the cultural relics restoration major of Nanjing University of the Arts.
After graduation, Wu Xiao was admitted to the Nanjing Institute of Cultural Heritage Protection and became a paper cultural relics conservator. In the whole class, less than 10% of the students are engaged in the corresponding occupations of the major. When he first entered the institute, he did artifact restoration, and later converted to paper cultural relics restoration. Calligraphy and painting restoration is not the same as artifact restoration, the requirements for color grasp are more acute, and the restoration process is also higher. In calligraphy and painting works, freehand calligraphy and painting works and calligraphy works are also more difficult to repair, because the law is more difficult to grasp.
Wu Xiao's treatment method is to first check the author's historical works and find the same type of works as a reference. Consulting the works is a process of looking at luck, good luck, the information appears early, and the first level is counted.
More troublesome is later, and the repair process is longer. Calligraphy and painting works generally have 4 layers: the heart, the paper, and two layers of back paper. When repairing, it is necessary to first unframe, that is, to remove the painting center from the paper. Since the adhesive paste cannot be completely dissolved, the process of mounting is usually very long, and a painting may have to be unveiled for a week or two, and the process should be as error-free as possible. Overtime is also a common thing: the intermediate steps of repair cannot be stopped, and it is very good to leave ten minutes in the middle to eat.
This kind of work requires meticulousness, patience, concentration, and the ability to sit on the cold bench. What is rare is that after so many years in the industry, he feels that his personality has not changed significantly, which is also due to the nourishment of the working environment.
In recent years, with the rise of a series of cultural documentaries, the smaller profession of cultural relics restoration and protection has entered the field of vision of more people, and the number of practitioners has also increased. We asked Wu Xiao, do you think your line is "rolled"?
He thought for a while and said that our collection is too rich, it is almost impossible to restore it, and for cultural relics conservators, "quality" is always more important than "quantity". Fixing itself is a time-consuming task, and the technology is constantly being updated, and they are constantly communicating with other peers about better and updated ways of dealing with it. If they roll up this line, it may be that they will make things thinner and better for everyone.
The average age of Wu Xiao's team is getting younger and younger, with a teacher retired last year, and now the youngest member is 97 years old. The meeting between new people and old things is itself a meeting of gentlemen's friendship: the love of using people to go forward and succeed Changing things is eternal from generation to generation, and in the circulation of the world, there are always some constant changes, and some are unchanged for a long time.
Jiangsu News Broadcast
Reporter Gu Qianying Jin Jing
Grandma Gu Ailing is from Nanjing! She loves to eat dumplings made by her grandmother
Just now, make history!