Text / Xu Feng
Follow the instructions of the teacher and make a pot of eggplant.
As far as the type of instrument is concerned, it is a simple kind of optical device. A few years ago, the Palace Museum published a copy of "Yixing Purple Sand", which was a purple sand vessel collected by the palace during the Ming and Qing dynasties. From the middle and late Ming Dynasty onwards, the aesthetics of the literati paid attention to the ancient times, the simplicity and the simplicity, and the simplicity. Embodied in the purple sand pot, it is a return to the basics, not carved. Among the hundreds of purple clay pots that entered the palace, there were no eggplant pots. Similar pot shape, look around, only a melon pear pot.
Undoubtedly, Gu Jingzhou likes such a pot type. In the early years, when making a batch of purple sand pots for shanghai's "Iron Painting Xuan", he specially recommended it to the owner of "Iron Painting Xuan". However, at that time, he did not call it an eggplant pot. Careful observation, the batch of pots with "Zi Yixuan" as the pot at that time, compared with the "eggplant pot" he made later, the style was closer, but the details were still large. What's the biggest difference?
Ge Tao believes that the melon pear pot is still the concept of melon fruit. Evolved to the pot, its shoulders and neck are plump, the pot body is plump, transitioning to the bottom of the pot, but slowly sinking. This sinking is sinking, it is sinking, and it is also a little thick and depressed. At that time, Gu Jingzhou wanted to support his family. Although he himself was not married, his parents and brothers had no income except to rent a little land from others.
It is the height of summer to make this batch of pots, and the countryside is sweltering and unbearable. Shanghai is urging goods, and it can't wait for a day. According to Gu Jingzhou's personality, hot rice is not cooked. However, people pay a deposit, and you have no way to do anything about it. It was night, the lonely countryside was like a stew pot, mosquitoes were flying, Gu Jingzhou was waiting under the dim oil lamp, sweating like rain. You can only put your feet into a clay urn filled with cool water, which not only cools down, but also makes mosquitoes bite. Put a wet towel on your shoulder to absorb sweat.
In specific scenarios, people's moods inevitably do not stay on the pot. Although, from the surface of the pot, you can not see the mark of half-heartedness, but the slightly sinking bottom, but conveys such a message: when people are low, any high and elegant can only be recalled in the thought. Not discouraged, not sinking, is the integrity of the superb.
When Gu Jingzhou made this pot again, the melon and pear faded, and the eggplant duan calmly appeared. The eggplant pot, like a tuan eggplant standing there, emits a simple and rounded atmosphere emitted by the whole instrument; compared with the melon and pear pot, it increases the strength and high temperament.
yes. Stand tall and tall. At that time, Gu Jingzhou was no longer the village pot maker of the "Zi Yixuan" period. The eggplant pot maintains the simplicity and thickness, heaviness and solemnity of the melon and pear pot, and the bottom is raised, so that the pot body is full of strong strength, and the high in the temperament is to have connotation support. In his later years, Gu Shi had already reached the point of ascending to the heights and looking far away and saying nine words.
From the earliest melon shape to eggplant segment, it connects the knots of the hearts of artists of past generations. Master did not say why the earliest melon, and the later melon, when it came into his hands, became an eggplant. The ancients and their descendants could not look at the prime minister. However, they can find the spiritual vein of their ancestors and the mental state when making the pot on the surviving pot. The lines that stretch out, interlock, and retract freely. What is demonstrated is the endless rhythm of life, one life two, two birth three, three life all things.
Now, it is up to Ge Taozhong to make the eggplant pot.
He chose the old purple mud of Huanglong Mountain that had been stored for many years. Old purple mud, there is also a combination of raw and mature. The concept of raw mud is that it is a strange friend, but it is not a stranger who has just entered the house. It is like cooked mud, and its hometown is in Huanglong Mountain. In the earliest days, it was as hard as iron and fell asleep in the belly of the mountain. A day is like ten thousand years, and ten thousand years is like a day. At some point, one day, it was awakened in a state of ignorance, and then left its dim home. If it had eyes, then, when its body first appeared on the ground, it would be excited to the point of shock in a sudden glare.
Under the embrace and dismemberment of air, sunshine, rain and dew, wind and snow, it slowly became countless stones of different shapes, and then it was ground into powder, added water, and then repeatedly reconciled by a pair of rough hands to form mud blocks. Then it went into a pot maker with the surname Ge. At this time, it did not know its own luck, the same piece of mud, the pot maker can make it into a small amount of money, and the "country billet" (the artist's collective name for all the pots, their birthplace, mostly in the remote countryside, hence the name) hands, but can waste a piece of the same quality of mud to nothing.
Previous experience showed that although it was still a recruit, it no longer had to suffer like eating dried radish rice at a training camp. However, its expectations of itself were still a little high, and it heard the muttering of the pot maker, and it finally understood that even if it was already a square piece of mud at the moment, with a gentleman's tone and style, it could not be used immediately to make a pot, and it would also receive a second ambush on the balcony or yard of the pot maker.
The mud that is retrieved is routinely ambushed.
Volta. To put it bluntly, it is to leave the mineral soil or mud on the side, usually a cool place that is ventilated and not exposed to the sun, and not to take care of it for a year or two. The ambush here is not an ambush before the siege and plunder, nor is it a lurking with suspicion, but an honest prostration. You just lie there, don't make any movement for a year or two, don't let people feel your presence, you have cultivated merit.
If a piece of sand is given spirituality, it will know that this is an inevitable lesson before it becomes a great thing, and it can afford to wait. Time dilutes and differentiates the stubbornness of its remaining spleen, and also indicates its great plastic future in the future. Another advantage of the ambush is that as a piece of mud, only after sufficient ambush can it withstand repeated pounding.
The so-called cooked mud is the scrap material that has been made before the pot, and it is quite familiar with the owner of the pot; like playing, it has been a substitute player at least once or more, full of vitality, but it is not the turn to play. If you don't put it in the pot, it's just a piece of mud. Now, the opportunity has finally come, and it has once again entered the room, with the expectation of being repurposed.
On that day, the whole mud block was also a tight work.
I remember that when the master and disciples made pots, they were particularly particular about mud. According to Ge Tao, raw mud is divided into two categories, raw mud powder and raw mud blocks. The former is made of stone grinding after the ore differentiation; raw mud blocks are mixed with water and made into brick shapes. Cooked mud is a mud chip mud scrap that is cut when the pot is handmade. Raw mud is like a stunned young man under the age of 18, walking rampage; cooked mud, has been beaten and hung, the original fiery breath, in the repeated beating and yin dry alternating, the character has tended to be warm, to say ugly, but also the old rivers and lakes.
And the tenacity that the mud material should have, but it is still high. At this time, they are combined with the raw mud that has just joined the army, reflecting a consideration of the owner of the pot, raw and cooked, just like just and soft, black and white, which are themselves an even number. Mature in life, ripe with raw, rigid and soft, fang shows authenticity. The best clay is nothing more than this: it is malleable, has a rich texture, and has a suitable dry humidity.
And all of this must be done jointly by cooked mud and raw mud. How to fuse raw and cooked mud? It's not that just stirring them together is enough.
Ge Tao had a water tank in his possession. Inside is a half-tank of clear water. One morning, he put raw mud powder and broken pieces of cooked mud into the water tank little by little, and suddenly a string of bubbles appeared on the surface of the water. The sound is reminiscent of what it was like when a fierce man plunged into the water as a child. Are they turning heads and ears, perhaps, they imagine that the jianghu is much larger than this water tank. I don't know if this tank is their final destination. If it comes, let it be safe. It's not easy to get out of the mix, who knows where we will be tomorrow?
Finally, use a thin layer of plastic film to tie the cylinder mouth tightly. Why? Will they run away? No, it's to make them better fermented, expanded, blended. Two days and two nights passed, and I believed that they were really brothers in distress. When the film covering the water tank was uncovered, there was no difference between raw mud and cooked mud. It should not be very accurate to say that they are "mixed and matched", but the actual situation is that they have penetrated and perfected each other in the past two days and two nights, and it is really impossible to distinguish between you and me.
In terms of texture, they are no longer mud blocks, but mud. If you grasp them with your hands, they will emerge from the cracks of your fingers and trickle into the water tank. Then you stir hard with a wooden stick in the water tank (this should be called a mud tank), and the mud will follow your gestures and inertia, and a rotating turbine will appear with the stick. Agitation with arcs. Ge Taozhong said that this kind of stirring is to fully integrate the cooked mud and raw mud. Cooked and alive, raw and mature, is a state of "just right".
Then, let it dry. Direct sunlight is required at this time. The muds are in a posture of fours and eight forks, receiving a comfortable bath in the sun. Under the sunlight, they take on their original style. Unfortunately, before it is molded and fired, it is difficult for people to share with the naked eye. In the Ming Dynasty, a man named Wu Meiding wrote a "Yang Envy Famous Tao Fu", which has a passage of text, which is about purple sand and mud color, translated into vernacular:
Speaking of the change in the color of the purple sand mud, some are gloomy and some are bright; some are like grape cyanosis; some are yellow like orange grapefruit; some are like new tongs pulling out tender green, some are like gemstones dripping green; some are like sunflowers with dew, floating with the dark fragrance of jade millet; some are like sprinkling gold chips on the mud sand, like delicious pears that make people salivate; some fetal bones are blue and solid, like the black pulp emitting a bright light, how can the strange kiln change be named after the hue? As if it were iron, as if it were stone, was it jade? Or gold? Looking at it from a distance, it is as calm as a bell in the temple, and it is tasted close to it, and it is as splendid as a strange jade floating with crystals. How beautiful that is! All the treasures of the world cannot match it.
Judging from the tone, this is an exclamation of an ancient literati playing with a pot to a state of "infatuation". He is opening up and depicting an unknown world for everyone.
There is no doubt that at this time, Sunshine is a full of divine shaper. He was evaporating the waters of the world, refining the dry goods that he thought were valuable to him. Implemented on the purple sand mud, that is, the excess water vapor is removed, leaving the fullest of various elements, making the necessary preparations for a pot-making feast.
At this time, if you have the ability to separate the mud from the pulp, you will find that what is left is some angular powder, until finally they still maintain their original posture, so that we can confirm that the pulp is its flesh and the sand is its bones. This is the essence of purple sand.
Where does the principle of blending raw and cooked mud come from? Here again, I want to talk about mr. Song Yingxing in the Ming Dynasty, who talked about the textile of silk in the book "Heavenly Works and Open Things". The great silk fabric, after weaving, is still raw silk, and it can only become cooked silk after cooking. When cooking, boil with straw ash and water, and soak it in pig pancreatic fat overnight, and then put it in water to wash it, so that the silk color can be very bright. Then, the silk of the early silkworm is used as the warp thread, and the silk of the late silkworm is used as the weft thread, and after cooking, it will be reduced by three or two every twelve. If the warp and weft lines are made of fine early silk, then twelve are lightened by two or two. After cooking, it should be washed off with hot water and tightened to dry, and then the silk fabric should be thoroughly scraped with the smooth shell of the large mussel, so that it showed the luster of the silk.
This principle, the person who made the purple sand pot borrowed it and used it. Everything in the world is about karma. One thing drops one thing, one thing supplements one thing; one thing grams one thing, one thing matches one thing. It's all fate.
Raw mud and cooked mud, just like this, became a family.
This article is selected from Xu Feng's "Making Pots", authorized by Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House)
Selected Chinese books
"Making a Pot"
Xu Feng
Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House
April 2022
"Making Pots" is an ingenious text recorded, investigated and created by Mr. Xu Feng, a famous writer, Jiangnan cultural scholar and researcher of purple sand culture, which has been recorded, investigated and created for several years, and vividly restored his pot-making skills by Mr. Ge Taozhong, a disciple of Mr. Gu Jingzhou.
Using the ancient method to make a pot and interpreting it with vivid and beautiful literature, the work comprehensively shows the technique and mental method, spirit and connotation of the Ancient Chinese Purple Sand Jug, and highlights the beauty of literature and the beauty of purple sand. This book is a book with both literary aesthetic value, cultural historical value, craft academic value and skill transmission guidance value, this book is a review and restoration of the extraordinary skills of the purple sand masters, but also a complete display of the history, culture, spirit and the most advanced craft of the purple sand.
Good books in Chinese
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