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"If you look closely, the place where the sorghum straw is connected does not need to be fixed with glue or nails, and it can bite very tightly. On April 11, in an ordinary farmhouse courtyard in Dawangzhuang Village, Liujie Township, Yongqing County, Langfang City, Xu Yanfeng was skillfully using a knife to carve grooves on six sections of beige sorghum straw of the same length and thickness, and spliced them according to the mortise and tenon structure.
"People say I'm a legend, but people don't know that if you spend your life studying one thing, you will become a legend. Xu Yanfeng, who is over seventy years old, is the representative inheritor of the national intangible cultural heritage project Caizha (straw carving), those sorghum straw that is used as firewood, feed and fertilizer by people are skillfully made by him and transformed into ancient architectural models such as the Forbidden City Corner Tower, Yellow Crane Tower, Feiyun Tower, etc., some of which are collected by major art museums, and some are even sent overseas as gifts.
On April 11, Xu Yanfeng (left) was instructing her son Xu Jian to create a straw carving work. Photo by Hebei Daily reporter Shi Xiaoduo
Xu Yanfeng has been involved in carving for more than 60 years, but when it comes to the origin, he said that "it all started with a chance encounter". When Xu Yanfeng was 11 years old, he and his friends were on the way to hunt pigweed, and they were attracted by several delicately shaped gnator cages, so they figured out how to make this small cage. Stalking, trenching...... After a few attempts, he imitated a simple cage of gnats, and later he made two more cages of gnats woven together, and at most he was able to weave 15 cages together in an orderly manner, each independent.
If weaving a gnather cage is just an attempt, then his later works are more shocking than the other. When he was 14 years old, Xu Yanfeng saw Tiananmen Square in a movie, and the magnificent city tower piqued his interest - can you carve a model of Tiananmen Square out of sorghum stalks? In order to fulfill this dream, Xu Yanfeng often did not eat or sleep, the people in the village laughed at him, and his parents also thought that he was not doing his job, but he did not stop, because straw carving is his heartfelt interest and pursuit.
"It took three years and seven months, using more than 700,000 sections of sorghum stalks, to create and complete the Tiananmen model with a base 2 meters long, 1 meter wide and 0.9 meters high, and every process was as perfect as possible. Recalling the creation process of this work, Xu Yanfeng's face was full of relief. Since then, Xu Yanfeng has created nearly 100 works such as the corner tower of the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven and the Tengwang Pavilion, and won more than 50 awards at different levels, among which the straw carving "Yellow Crane Tower" won the "Mountain Flower Award and Folk Craft Gold Award" in the second China International Folk Art Expo.
With so much time to make, and spliced with tiny sorghum stalks, will they fall apart or rot within a few months? "Not at all! One of my works, The Corner Tower of the Forbidden City, has been collected by the National Art Museum of China, and according to experts, it can be preserved for at least 500 years. Xu Yanfeng explained that this is closely related to the unique material used in Zake, "hardcore sorghum".
In the east house of Xu Yanfeng's farmhouse, the reporter saw dozens of bundles of sorghum stalks stacked high and low. "These are all home-grown, and our family has six acres of land, all of which are planted with sorghum. However, not the whole straw can be used, and the hardness and toughness are the most suitable for the section next to the sorghum ear, so there is not much material to choose in the end of six acres of land. Xu Yanfeng pulled out a sorghum stalk and told reporters that the sorghum stalks that had not been improved were either soft in texture and not dense enough, or brittle in texture and hollow in the middle, which was either easy to bend or easy to break, which was not conducive to the creation of large-scale carving works.
In order to find the most suitable materials for her creation, Xu Yanfeng began to try to use hybridization to breed excellent sorghum varieties by herself. "I didn't go to school and didn't know much about reading, but after trial and error, I crossed the Northeast Datou sorghum with local sorghum to breed a new variety. This new sorghum is so tough and glossy that I gave it the name 'hardcore sorghum'. Xu Yanfeng said that the creation of straw carving has started from planting sorghum, and only by planting sorghum can we create better.
"After the autumn harvest, it is also very troublesome to choose straw, according to the size of the diameter, every 0.1 or 0.2 mm to be divided into a category, a total of 70 or 80 categories. While speaking, Xu Yanfeng led the reporter to the warehouse, where there were bundles of straw bundled into categories, each bundle was marked with a size, ranging from 1 mm to 12 mm in diameter, "You see, these well-classified straws were harvested last year, the autumn before last year and even earlier." ”
Before constructing a complex architectural work, in addition to planting sorghum and subdividing the types of straw, it is necessary to draw a floor plan on paper according to the pictures of the actual object. "Don't underestimate the floor plan, it seems simple, but it is the most difficult and critical step. Xu Yanfeng said that in the process of drawing, it is necessary to clarify the number and position of elevation angles and bright columns in the building structure. "Although I am already familiar with some buildings, I will patiently draw drawings for architectural models that use more than 100,000 sections of sorghum stalks to ensure precision. ”
"Thousands of tall buildings rise from the ground. All of our carving works are made of sorghum stalks, and the locked stalks are made from the bottom to the top, from the inside to the outside, from the whole to the details, layer by layer, just like building a house. Xu Yanfeng explained that in the specific production process, it is necessary to first use a knife to dig a "small groove" on the straw, which is called "carving", and then use the technique of "don't buckle" to "lock" multiple sorghum stalks through each other's small grooves to make rafters, ridges, corners, tile ridges, etc., this link is called "tie". The whole carving work, without any nails and glue, is the same as the traditional woodworking mortise and tenon structure, so it is most suitable for imitating ancient buildings.
The material selection is complex, the process is difficult, and the production cycle is long...... Son Xu Jian and daughter Xu Jingjing studied hard under the guidance of their father Xu Yanfeng, and the carving works of these two "post-80s" inheritors have emerged. In recent years, they have walked into many primary and secondary schools in Beijing, Tianjin and other places, opened straw carving elective courses, explained the ancient building structure to students, introduced straw carving skills, and taught everyone to make "Luban locks".
Nowadays, with the growth of age and the decline of physical strength, Xu Yanfeng can no longer devote himself to artistic creation without sleep and food as he used to, but he still picks up straw and carving knife whenever he has time, and creates a few small works that he likes. When he was in good health, he would go into the classrooms of nearby primary and secondary schools and some colleges and universities to explain the straw carving skills and tell his story back then. (Hebei Daily reporter Shi Xiaoduo)
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