Paper, a handicraft that originated in the early Western Han Dynasty in China, is a carrier of words, pictures, and knowledge, as well as a tool that often accompanies human life. In the course of history, the art of papermaking has undergone numerous improvements and has passed into the hands of contemporary artists – the ever-changing forms of paper have forged the core of their spiritual expression.
Tang Guo now lives and works in Nanjing, with his studio tucked away in a large building in the heart of the city, surrounded by the hustle and bustle of every city center, and his work itinerary starts with a cup of tea at 8 or 9 a.m. and leaves at 4 p.m. every day. "I still grasp the rhythm of life step by step and enrich my knowledge. In addition to the just-concluded multi-year study tour to the Mediterranean, he also hopes to go to Persia, the "Two River Basins", to make his plant fibers more pure and white, and make more pure works. Tang Guo's creative experience and transition are quite unique, he started his work with painting in his early years, and after a long period of ink practice, he was once one of the representatives of "New Literati Painting", and then in the 80s of the 20th century, he turned his exploratory eyes to the creation of rice paper materials. In the world of "paper", Tang Guo has experienced traditional handmade fibers and directly used them in his creations, and the return to pure paper materials makes him feel suddenly enlightened, "Fiber gives me enough freedom, so I choose to return to fiber", he said to us, freedom and casualness have always wrapped him.
In the early 1980s, in order to find the most suitable paper for creating ink, Tang Guo went to Jing County, Anhui Province, and spent two full years learning the ancient papermaking process. In the ancient workshop, more than 50 processes of the ancient method are strictly followed, without adding any chemical auxiliary materials, natural material preparation, material selection, cooking, drying, and papermaking. Ancient Chinese papermaking was not only a technical restoration and archaeology, but also a method to trace the geology and natural texture of water sources.
At that time, under the wave of reform and opening up in the early 90s of the 20th century, contemporary art also flourished during this period. The artist can't control his inner restlessness, let alone stay out of it, and Tang Guo is also looking for a new expression of art. "There are thousands of different types of paper, and there aren't many that suit me. When I was looking for 'paper with natural fibers', I was also asking about 'the reality of paper' (in 1991, Tang Guo held an art exhibition entitled "The Reality of Paper" at the Shanghai Library). At that time, he returned to the real workshop site in ancient times, in order to find the process of steaming, washing, tempering, drying and reprocessing green sandalwood bark. This kind of immersive study made him talk about paper craftsmanship like a treasure, no matter what field he was in, Tang Guo would study it thoroughly.
Tang Guo, Tofu, 2021, Plant Fibers
"My job is to find plants and fibers," says Tang about his current role. "The composition of rice paper is only green sandalwood bark and sand field straw, and the paper made of other fibers can not be called rice paper, perhaps it can only be called calligraphy and painting paper", Tang Guo introduced to us, because there is no clear industry standard in the handmade paper industry, it is inevitable that there is a mixture of fish and dragons, high quality and inferior quality exist at the same time, "paper is just paper, the important thing is art", he quipped: "No matter what, how can chemical paper products be 'paper longevity for a thousand years'?" Let it flow naturally, control the rhythm, discover the accident, wait for the paper material to change itself, gather and gather, splash and disperse...... In his works, paper fibers are condensed into "images", and sandalwood bark, constituent bark, bark, mulberry bark or grass "concrete" are all commonly used fiber materials.
The raw materials of "concreted paper" come from the discarded debris that is not reluctant to be discarded in daily life, which may be used books, discarded newspapers, periodicals, pictorials, magazines, or more extensive ready-made materials such as tattered linen cloth and wrapping paper, which Tangguo calls "concreted paper". In the early days, he used ancient books, inscriptions, rubbings, remnant paintings, folk New Year paintings and other combinations to enrich the picture, and later simply crushed and mixed them, and the materials were also part of the "cultural mix".
Tang Guo, Temple of Heaven and Earth, 2020, linen surface, plant fibers
Tang Guo's recent work "The Spirit of the Avatar" is a special type, in which white plant fibers "explode" against a black background, and the disturbing flocculents float out in the shape of a "head", and the paper fibers are faintly visible. In order to make the fibers flow more slowly, Tang Guo wrapped the linen cloth in layers of pulp fibers, waited for the last time to dry, and then started again. "The 'thoughts' floating out of black and white may be the scene of brainstorming, or the moment of 'freedom' when people are thinking, or the ......confusion of being at a loss," Tang Guo analyzes the painting for us.
The blue screen-like "The Bottom of the Lake" is covered with traces of fibers flowing on the paper, because the paper is not controlled, so when making it, it can only slowly superimpose the texture, thickness and height of the fibers. The mottled and broken surface of "Weathering" is like the product of thousands of years, and Tang Guo will also retain the rough beauty left by nature and time in his works. ”
Yukoku is created with a variety of plant fibers
Plant fibers are processed to a clean state
The work "One Page" is like a book spread out, and the oxidized powder presents a picture of the passage of time. Tang Guo was inspired by the fire in the Library of Alexandria, the oldest library in 48 BC, which was destroyed by a sudden and mysterious fire.
When creating works with rice paper materials, Tang Guo said that he often enters a realm of "forgetting things and forgetting things", and the evolution of plant fibers is a soul washing from the heart and hands, "In the whole process, sometimes I just create a basic field, so that the fibers are pushed, flowing, gathered, and diffused in the water, and finally form some natural state, which is a life cycle process of sublimation and 'rebirth' after plant death." In his hands, the fiber is steamed at high temperature to remove the vegetable protein, and then washed with water after the sun is exposed, kneaded and tempered, and then filtered repeatedly, so that the fiber can be resurrected and rejuvenated. "This wonderful fiber may be value and meaning in itself. ”
"The processed plant fibers will definitely be more resistant to oxidation and have a longer life than ordinary paper, and these works are a long experiment of 'paper life for a thousand years', and I continue to extend its life and reshape the toughness of the material. Fibers exist just as the land exists. Tang Guo said.
Tang Guo, The Bottom of the Lake, 2010, Mixed Materials on Paper, Plant Fibers
Think of existence with plant fibers
In our culture and history, paper has stored a lot of information. Papermaking is one of the four major inventions of the mainland, historians agree that papermaking was invented in the Western Han Dynasty 2000 years ago, the earliest "Western Han hemp paper" appeared when it had the function of literati to write poetry and painting, and the people pasted paper windows, and gradually formed a mature papermaking technology after Cai Lun's transformation.
"The world of paper holds a lot of important cultural information. From the court to the people, the amount of paper is very large, after the Tang Dynasty is to develop to a peak, to the Ming and Qing dynasties is even more popularized to the people, the number of books published and distributed is amazing. Tang Guo shared it all with us. "Folk prints, woodcut New Year paintings, Taoist paper horses, letters, rubbings, inscriptions, title deed books, ticket number leaflets, card paper money, etc...... In the past, it was made of paper and fiber. Although the paper era may soon be over, the paper lamps of today's lantern festival have been replaced with chemical fiber fabrics, and many paper cultures have disappeared, but there are still many people who insist on the contemporary art innovation of paper culture, which may be a kind of inheritance!" he remains optimistic and hopeful about the development of paper technology. Tang Guo once mentioned in an interview, "What I want to show in the dark is not the future or the past, I always pay attention to those things that are lost and lost, and others do not pay attention to." ”
When we asked what is lost and unnoticed, Tang Guo gave the following answer: "Staying away from vulgarity, this brings another possibility to good works, leaving the mainstream and the group, and using the state of transcending everything to create physical works of plant fibers." It's real, real, real, and exists because of my presence...... So I decided to think about existence in terms of plant fibers. ”
Tang Guo, Pear Garden, 2005, Mixed Materials, Plant Fibers on Linen
During the Western Han Dynasty, people already understood the basic methods of papermaking, and in the Eastern Han Dynasty, Cai Lun used plant fibers such as bark, hemp heads, rags, and old fishing nets as raw materials for papermaking, improved the papermaking process, and greatly improved the quality of paper. Since then, paper has been used as a book, and this material has become a widely used writing medium. Ancient Chinese paper books have also undergone a transformation from scrolls to albums in the past millennium—dragon scale binding, which is a special form of binding that appeared in this transitional stage. It began in the Tang Dynasty and was used in the Northern Song Dynasty, only for the reading of the Son of Heaven, and very few people knew about it, and then lost it in a long history. Artist Zhang Xiaodong, who has spent 16 years working with paper day and night, has been deeply cultivating the art of dragon scale book making, and the only intangible inheritor of dragon scale clothing in China humbly calls himself a "book maker", who makes reading in a more beautiful form through his daily labor, handmade. Reading, a concept with a strong sense of ritual and aesthetic demand
With the long paper as the base, the pages are staggered on the bottom paper, put away is a hand scroll, open to see, the page is regularly warped, and the wind is smart to fly, this is the dragon scale outfit. Every time the dragon scale book is opened, for Zhang Xiaodong, it is the beginning of a ceremony. "I have a sense of time and space intersecting, and the moment I open the book, it's hard to tell whether it's the past, the present, or the future, or if all three tenses exist at the same time. ”
From turtle bones, silk silks, and bamboo slips to paper as the main writing and printing materials, the evolution of the binding of ancient books is first and foremost about practicality. "In my personal understanding, with the dragon scales, there are plates and flips, and therefore there is the beginning of the book in the modern sense. "The dragon scale pack can greatly save paper, just as the transition from paper books to e-books is essentially a compression of reading space. At the same time, its shape has also brought changes to the way people read, and its "scales" have formed an information retrieval logo, "which is equivalent to us combing a bunch of words into a mind map." Zhang Xiaodong said.
Secondly, in ancient times, reading was a very ritualistic act, which had great requirements for aesthetics and perception. When the ancients read books, they had to hang pictures and burn incense, and turning the pages with their fingers would leave sweat stains and fingerprints, which were not beautiful, so they used books made of bamboo, jade or jade to turn the pages and read. "The ancients believed that reading was a dialogue with the sages, like a banquet at home for a very important guest, and it was necessary to be well prepared. Zhang Xiaodong introduced. The history of the development of Chinese book binding is also the history of the ancients' pursuit of a more elegant and sacred reading experience. The dragon scale costume is a very beautiful and elegant form of binding.
Zhang Xiaodong's dragon scale costume "Ripples"
Paper, which exists for the sake of perceived pleasure
In 2008, when Beijing hosted the Olympic Games, it was a time of rapid change, with the rise of the mobile Internet, and people had a premonition that network technology was about to bring revolutionary changes to their lives, including reading - will paper books soon be replaced by e-books? When people open a book, if they see beautiful pictures, read beautiful words, and touch the texture of the paper, they will feel pleasant, then such works will not be overwhelmed by the development of the times, but will be preserved for a long time. ”
He is sure that although some paper books will be replaced by e-books, the forms of reading will become more diverse, and people's demand for books will be more abundant. So after learning about the beautiful but unfortunately lost form of dragon scale binding, he decided to go against the grain, get in touch with paper, and become a "book maker".
Dragon scale bound books have always been only available to the royal family, and the physical object is only one piece of "Printing Fallacies and Cutting Rhymes" collected by the Palace Museum. Zhang Xiaodong visited China's top conservators, post-press experts, and scholars who study book binding, and asked them for advice. "The experts were very supportive of my exploration, but Mr. Lu Jingren, a master of Chinese book design, poured cold water on me, and he told me that making books is a very poor thing. ”
For Zhang, however, passion is the most important thing. When a person has the opportunity to choose something he loves and feel the boundless beauty of it, then why not try it? "Later, every time I saw Teacher Lu Jingren, he would ask me a question, do you have anything to eat?"
Zhang Xiaodong will use a carving knife to trim the texture of the work
Craftsmanship is like Tang monks learning scriptures from the west, and it is difficult to do it without it
The tools for making a dragon scale book are very simple, a workbench, a stack of paper, a knife, a ruler, a pen, and an iron. The production process is the most testing of the book maker, measuring, cutting, folding, ironing, pasting...... There are more than 50 processes in total.
Zhang Xiaodong's dragon scale work "Thousand Pages of Ink"
Each process has a great error rate, which has a great relationship with the material chosen by Zhang Xiaodong - rice paper. "There are many people who say that paper is cheap, but it can be preserved for a long time, and we have heard a saying that paper lives for a thousand years. Therefore, it is a very useful creative material, especially for artistic creation. "However, soft, thin paper is extremely uncertain. Will the paper shrink after printing and ironing? After sticking to the bottom paper, can the scales of the pages be closely connected? The processes are interlocking, and the slightest mistake is missed, and the difference is thousands of miles, and the small mistakes are superimposed, and the errors will have a great impact on the whole book. "It's like Tang Seng learning scriptures in the west, there are ninety-nine eighty-one difficulties on the way, and one difficulty is not successful. The long process of making books has allowed Zhang Xiaodong to endure loneliness, practice his skills of getting along with paper little by little, and also cultivate his patience and concentration little by little.
Zhang Xiaodong's first dragon scale work "32 Compilation of the Diamond Sutra" has a total of 217 pages, the text part restores the carved Diamond Sutra of the Ming Dynasty, and on the front and back of the page scales with a copy of the Qianlong painter Ding Guanpeng painted the exquisite picture scroll of the "Source of the Law Realm", the classics, calligraphy, painting, binding skills into one, when the viewer will unfold the dragon scales all the stretch, the total length is 73.4 meters, the whole scroll is like a colorful real dragon.
For the second work, he chose Cao Xueqin's "Dream of Red Mansions", which combines the original book, Cheng Jiaben and the album. Cheng Weiyuan's wooden movable type was used for the Chinese part of the book, and Sun Wen's 240 paintings based on his Cheng Jiaben were also included in Zhang Xiaodong's collection, "My original idea was to invite Cao Xueqin, Sun Wen, and Cheng Weiyuan to have an afternoon tea and present the best of these contents to the viewer in an immersive way." "The best way to present paintings is to fold the scriptures, which began in the Tang Dynasty and are commonly used in the binding of Buddhist scriptures and books, like an organ-like fold for storage and relaxation—in order to better combine words with paintings, Zhang Xiaodong created the "Sutra Dragon Suit", that is, the combination of the warp fold and the dragon scales, a fold is slowly unfolded, and the inner scale mouth meets to present the painting. The whole book consists of 8 letters, each 50 catties, and requires 3000 square meters of space to fully unfold.
Zhang Xiaodong and the unfinished dragon scale costume
When the books are stacked, the two sides of the facets are combined to form two complete paintings. Zhang Xiaodong explains, "The stack of works is not the concept of a book, it is more like a sculpture or installation. "After reading Dream of Red Mansions, I felt that I had stepped from the bustling Grand View Garden to the vast white and quiet earth, which was not an end, but a new beginning, so I painted these two pictures on the side of the book." At the diagonal fold of the book, Zhang Xiaodong also made a 45-degree angle connection with cloth.
In 16 years, Zhang Xiaodong has only produced 8 books, but he hopes that each one will outperform the time. Parallel to the handmade books, there is also Zhang Xiaodong's contemporary art series "Thousand Pages Series". This series originated by chance, when he visited Lhasa to exhibit his works, he found that due to the climate in Tibet, all the pages were warped so badly that they presented a 2.5-dimensional paper space.
Therefore, he began to use scissors to "engrave" the plates, exploring their infinite possibilities in space, and with the cooperation of light and shadow, the thin rice paper can also simulate three-dimensional and vivid pictures. In the "1000 Pages Series", "Dustless" points to Zhang Xiaodong's discussion of Zen, in which he rejects the concrete image of the carved Buddha statue and instead uses plates on pure white rice paper to create a vague outline, inviting the viewer to judge for himself. "It could be Guanyin, it could be a bodhisattva, it was entirely up to the mind of the viewer. ”
Zhang Xiaodong's dragon scale costume work "Half and Half"
Zhang Xiaodong has always insisted on conducting various experiments on paper, and in Jing County, Anhui Province, he has a paper laboratory that develops various new materials of paper. He uses the water used to soak chestnuts or tea leaves to dye the paper, and different soaking times will achieve different dyeing effects, and by chance, a new paper material can be born. In addition to exploring the plant dyes that nature has given him, he is now experimenting with gold leaf to draw on paper. "It's like the Thousand Pages series was born by accident, and I don't have any preconceived notions about it. ”
Until now, Zhang Xiaodong still does not think that paper books will be completely replaced by e-books, and he has a great affinity and attachment to paper. However, he did not believe that books could only be carried in the form of paper. In his view, paper books are like the 1.0 version of the metaverse, it is constantly changing, and it is also constantly changing the way we read, "I think books can make people feel the beauty of this world, it is a building where words and poetry dwell, it is a spaceship that travels through time and space, and it is also a black hole that contains all things, it does not have to be limited to the form of paper, but there must be a big world that we need to explore and perceive." ”
Details of Zhang Xiaodong's dragon scale costume work
Chen Jundai's work In Simplicity uses paper, dyes, glue, aluminum, stainless steel, brass and other materials. This work has been selected as a finalist for the 2024 LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize
In the modern papermaking process, people mix plant fiber materials with hot water, screen out impurities in the pulp, cook them into pulp, and then spread these pulps on the paper machine, and various fibers are perfectly intertwined to form a film, and this film is paper. After a series of processing, each piece of paper is made into books, newspapers, notes, leaflets...... They are closely related to the lives of modern people.
However, when the viewer first sees the works of Taiwanese artist Chen Jundai, they are often surprised that these sculptures are actually made of paper – they resemble the undulating mountains and clouds in nature, like the rolling waves of the ocean in a moment captured by a high-speed camera. If you look closely, you will find that the works are actually composed of layers of thin paper, the paper of these old books is compressed, colored, the surface or edges are cut, the pages are reshaped into various shapes by adjusting the angle, like the wind blowing through the paper, and the memory is condensed into the product of time.
Chen Jundai's "Scenery in the Brain - Novel"
The intimate connection between humans and paper fibers
"If the journey of life were a book, read page by page, and it turned out that the best part of me had already been turned over, and I only discovered it after the passage of time. "Books, memories, and time are mostly related to people's feelings, so it is not so much that Chen Jundai's works express time, but rather that she deliberately uses the stagnation of the pages to preserve the feelings that have experienced the precipitation of time. In order to create, she collected a large number of books, first making works from books on her own shelves, and later began to search for second-hand bookstores. The materials chosen for the work "Scenery in the Mind" are telephone books and dictionaries, which were the most common in life in the past, but are now gradually withdrawing from the stage of history. "In the past, phone books were in phone booths or downstairs in apartments, and people would look up words in their dictionaries. After a long time, I realized that no one used a phone book anymore, and the dictionary was replaced by a more convenient electronic dictionary, so I took this problem very seriously, and I gradually began to feel nostalgic. ”
Chen Jundai experiments and creates a variety of materials in the studio
For the artist, "nostalgia" is not Chen Jundai's original intention, and the production of works is often the result of intuition rather than the result of inferring backwards from the purpose. The emergence of new carriers is an inevitability of the times. It's just that under the rolling wheels of the times, people are distracted by various realistic scenes and new things, and neglect to pay attention to their own emotions, which makes her feel pity and regret - this seems to form an intertextuality with the fact that paper carriers such as telephone books and dictionaries have disappeared in life, leaving people melancholy and nostalgia in vain.
Paper is often classified as a fiber product, and thanks to papermaking, the earliest paper books of mankind date back to 179 BC. Chen Jundai believes that the intimate connection between people and paper fibers has actually been written in the long history of mankind, so human beings can perceive the temperature of the book, almost out of instinct. The paper, printing, binding and typesetting styles of books also illustrate the evolution and development of human aesthetics, she said: "In addition to the fact that we project our own thoughts and emotions on books, there are some indescribable and intertwined ancient connections between people and books. ”
In Simplicity, each piece of paper sculpture is repeatedly sanded and colored, revealing subtle changes in the gaps and gaps of the paper
Inspiration and philosophy from nature
Chen Jundai likes to walk, there is a river near her residence, every noon, she always likes to walk by the river, at this time she can feel that everything is dynamic, and time is still, but in fact, this kind of "movement" and "stillness" are her subjective judgment. The philosophies gained from her observations and reflections in life are also introduced into her works, so she blurs the characteristics of paper, allowing "movement" and "stillness" to be captured by paper.
In the "Landscape in the Mind" series, she uses ink to dye more than a dozen telephone books and dictionaries black and gray, and these old books, either mutilated or incomplete, are spread out and laid flat to look like they have been burned from a distance. The processed books are lined up in rows, and the surface of the cut and processed paper is like a tiny ocean wave, or like an animal hair that has accumulated the power of a beast, trying to spread its "tentacles" to contact the air, and in such an instant the paper is condensed and turned into stillness. When making this work, Chen Jundai had conceived the idea of displaying it in a darker space, where the edges of the cut paper would be slightly reflected under the low-angle side light, "I wanted to express a lonely situation, where the viewer stood in front of it, like standing in front of the sea at night, surrounded by darkness and shimmering light." ”
In the production of a series of works, the volume of each work and how to contrast the size in a space are also carefully considered by the artist. Another work in the "Landscape in the Mind" series, completed by a separate dictionary, Chen Jundai cuts the edges of each page of paper, processing it into small squares, such as dense fish scales, and the specially treated pages have thickness, and are deliberately shaped into a mountain, or a wave, the audience can only adjust the angle of the body to look carefully, and only then can they find that there are dense words, word meanings, and words buried in it—the functionality of Chinese words in the dictionary, which seems to be dissolved by time at this moment.
Chen Jundai carved and trimmed on white porcelain material
Finalist for the 2024 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, Chen Jundai's work In Simplicity continues her creative line of practice by compressing layers of tissue paper into a series of three paper sculptures, each of which has a gentle gradient of dents, jagged and dyes on each layer. In her view, the production process of the work is a combination of craftsmanship and creation, "My work usually requires a certain degree of labor, first the edges of the paper are zigzag, then condensed into blocks, and the structure is made of brass and aluminum, and then colored and polished, and the last two steps can be counted as the category of creation, because it involves how far I want to control the picture, but it is also relatively painful, because it may not be what I imagined it to be for a long time." ”
The artist's preference for low-chroma colors stems from the fact that she never needs to use strong color stimuli to achieve a certain purpose in her creative philosophy, and secondly because of her observation of nature during walks in her free time while making In Simplicity. It was summer, and because of the hot weather, she liked to go out for a walk after dark, and at night the mountains were dark green and dark blue, and the dark black was pure black without reflection, "I liked that scene in summer, so I incorporated this color into my work." If it's winter, I'll probably use some warm colors. Do not deliberately pursue innovation, but look forward to "unexpected encounters"
Chen Jundai's "Scenery in the Mind - Jewelry"
When she was in college, Chen Jundai studied in the design group of the Department of Fashion Design and Management at Fu Jen University in Taiwan, China, and at that time, paper had become the material for her creation. She has studied bamboo weaving and pottery, but she still has a special preference for paper.
For artists, paper is easy to obtain in life, and does not require complex tools or huge equipment to start creating, it is lightweight, and there are all kinds of possibilities. Compared with relatively stable materials such as metal and marble, its state is also unstable, for example, in the process of coloring and cutting, the paper may be relatively difficult to control, and if the humidity changes, the paper may also change its original appearance.
Chen's solution is often to overcome the instability of paper. She believes that no matter what kind of material you have in your hand, you should adapt to the characteristics of the material or challenge its limits. She never deliberately pursues "innovation", but from the results, it seems that many new ideas are born in the accumulation of continuous experiments, "We often do something bad, and then have a kind of broken jar and broken mood, but since it is broken, it is better to try other possibilities, many new things are produced in this process." "It's like going for a walk, even if you go the wrong way and go to an unfamiliar place, you can still expect a lot of unexpected encounters.
In Simplicity is to compress layers of tissue paper together and cut out a full groove to place metal brackets to reinforce the structure
Hei Yu's work "Ruins · Recycled, made from homemade rush fiber pulp, straw mat woven offcuts, and recycled pulp from stock magazines
Artist Hei Yu has been "dealing" with paper for more than ten years, and most of his works use homemade handmade paper as the material, just like a microcosm of paper, and the unstable state and unique effect of handmade paper give the works a special form and appearance. Hei Yu's work "Like a Moth to a Fire", in which the words of the rush fiber paper flashes under the reflection of candles, and the texture of the paper fiber looms in the light; "Ruins", which is constructed of pure cotton pulp, uses fragile wet pulp to finally form a shape similar to "architecture", while retaining the traces of "imperfection" in the process; "Untitled" tears the paper into small sheets, then rolls it into rolls, and constantly pastes them to form a large roll, and finally wraps it into a paper installation full of shape, and then to a series of works about the relationship between paper and words, "The Great Dictionary" and "The Great Dictionary", which tells the relationship between paper and words. Diamond Sutra", etc., for paper, Hei Yu has a more proficient skill and philosophical expression......
"When I first started working with paper materials, I found it inexplicably close to human nature, which is difficult to describe in words, and I developed a sense of closeness to paper materials. In 2006, while studying art in France, Heiyu was unintentionally exposed to the handmade papermaking process of the French (European) system, from the original major of animation director, and began a long creative journey out of control. The experience of studying in France brought Hei Yu the biggest impact was a change of mind, and as he created with paper, it became more and more intense, "The world has long begun to work paperless, and suddenly I came into contact with handmade paper in France, and I found that people don't have to blindly chase the world's ever-changing scientific and technological development, technology can't replace everything, can people go back a little?" Hei Yu is eager to use his hands, eyes, and body to do something as much as he can.
Hei Yu is experimenting with paper art
Naturally, the raw materials of papermaking come from nature, such as mulberry bark, bark, three oaks, wattle flowers, bamboo and other plants, and now the handmade paper used by Heiyu is also commonly used in plant fibers, not only materials, he believes that he is keen on the creation of paper materials The internal reasons are also closely related to nature. Born and raised in the mountains of Fujian Province, Heiyu was surrounded by nature in his childhood, "There are mountains and trees everywhere, and the vegetation is very rich, and I have been in the fields and mountains with my children since I was a child, and these experiences must have had a potential impact on my cognition." In the days that followed, Hei Yu once recorded his love for nature and hometown life in his essays: "I have a sense of the vegetation and scenery around me...... As far as the mind can see, it is still the small world of grass and trees. ”
In the context of the current era, he calls on people to look back at the "regressive" people who are willing to be with "nature" and their thoughts and actions, and these accumulations are projected into Hei Yu's views on paper: " Paper is not a completely natural thing, but it comes from nature, and the scale of industrial papermaking today and the chemical products such as strong alkalis and bleachs used in the process, it will in turn affect the environment, so I think paper is a very contradictory thing, it is neither completely natural, nor completely industrial, it is an intermediate state. Such a substance is able to use it to think about the relationship between us humans and nature. Much of my interest in paper has to do with this property and its state. ”
Hei Yu believes that the second extended meaning of nature is "natural", that is, everything in the universe is growing and dying at the same time, and this continuous cycle of "birth and death" is "nature" in a broad sense. Under this definition, paper itself presents a kind of "cycle of birth and death", at the beginning of the emergence of paper is to carry words, images and people's concepts, until now under the development of science and technology, digital products, artificial intelligence or more technical means have been able to completely replace these functions, the identity of paper as a cultural carrier has been severely challenged here.
Heiyu is using traditional paper to make paper
Hei Yu said to us: "When I create, I think about where we are in the world today, whether we want to oppose or merge with nature, so I use materials such as paper and plant fibers to reflect on our relationship with the world. For example, in the "Ruins" series, he "let the wet pulp be constructed" into various forms of "architecture", you can read the traces of handiwork and the texture of the material from the appearance of the works, Hei Yu shared a few times, the shape of these works collapsed because it could not withstand the weight, and Hei Yu tried to retain all kinds of traces in these processes, because in his opinion, the so-called works themselves are only a special form of recording of time. It's just a trace.
"Paper itself has its own language, it has its own life direction, and I, as a creator, just present and excavate its existence. I don't set a limit for myself to be a leaf or a flower, this form is natural, I hope that in the process of creation, I can open people's minds to contact the paper, so that the paper should be the way it should be. This is the same as the arrival of spring and the germination of plants in nature, and whether it is a work or a person's thoughts, they are all closely related to this natural state. ”
黑余，《草·书 | 金刚经》，自制蔺草纤维纸
Inheritance and continuity
After returning from France, Hei Yu went to some of China's most representative paper-making places, such as Guizhou, Yunnan, Anhui, Sichuan, Hunan, Zhejiang, Jiangxi and his hometown Fujian, hoping to find a localized expression in China, the birthplace of paper, but when we asked about the current situation of paper technology, Hei Yu said frankly, "To be honest, I am actually quite disappointed." ”
In addition to the investigation, Hei Yu has also done some paper art courses in some art colleges, and has given some lectures in the inheritance class of the intangible cultural heritage of papermaking technology in the University of Science and Technology of China, so he has the opportunity to communicate and discuss with more peers and teachers in the handmade paper industry, and in the process he understands that paper technology is currently facing the problem of marginalization and the dilemma of commercial transformation. Because paper has industrial attributes from the beginning, its functionality has always been put in the first place, and this functionality is being challenged by the times, and if it is said that its ornamentality, it is far inferior to lacquer, wood art and other intangible cultural heritage handicrafts, which leads to people are not accustomed to appreciating it as a work of art. Nowadays, many craftsmen who are engaged in handmade papermaking are over 60 years old, and the discontinuation of craftsmanship is also a possible problem. Yunnan makes tea cake packaging, Guizhou makes the inner packaging of Moutai, Dongba sacrificial tradition, these are the demand for handmade paper in some places before, Hei Yu believes that the inheritance of paper craftsmanship still depends on many efforts, the government, industry, artists, designers, universities, tourism market, etc. are indispensable.
Combined with the traditional papermaking process, Heiyu is picking impurities
Hei Yu returned to his hometown in Fujian last year to live and work, and his current studio is a 1,500-square-meter renovated factory located on the edge of the city." When I create, it is a very pure state, I guess all the people who paint can understand, like to immerse themselves in the things at hand, and concentrate all the beliefs on a brush tip, I am now in a calm state, every day to the studio will sweep the floor, make tea, make coffee, do all kinds of experiments on paper, create, little by little to arrange the studio, slowly arrange one thing after another, I hope to make paper art a state of life. ”
When it comes to new plans for the future, in addition to continuous creation, Hei Yu also wants to present the survival status of the handmade paper industry in his works, and even use paper materials to do some exploratory collisions with the market, so that this craft can be integrated into the living space, and do some expansion as much as he can.
Planning and co-ordination / Liu Zhuang
Photography / Pei Tongtong (Tang Guo, Hei Yu), Li Yinyin (Zhang Xiaodong)
采访、撰文/ lalarobot (汤国、黑余)、雷妮(张晓栋、陈君岱)
Photography Assistant / Ah Chao (Tang Guo, Hei Yu)
Courtesy of Tang Guo's work / Courtesy of Tang Guo and ShanghART Gallery Chen Jundai Courtesy of the artist