Traditional wood carving process no one?

All kinds of hand carved seats, flowers, miniature wood statues come to life... in a small, three-square-metre, irregularly carved wooden handicraft shop.

These arts and crafts that people love to put down, all from the 61-year-old artist Zhong Shu's hands. He has been doing this for more than 50 years. He said that young people are not willing to do this. He has not recruited students for three years. He hopes that he can meet the hard-to-be learnt youngsters and teach them the craft of wood carving to develop this traditional craft. .

Overseas tourists favor hand-carved arts

A carpenter's desk, put a variety of tools such as rakes, horse teeth, sandpaper, open the lamp, start! Every afternoon at 4:30 in the afternoon, Zhong Su was busy on this carpentry table. 61-year-old Zhong Shu does not need to wear reading glasses. She just picks up the sandpaper and begins to grind a few feet. The feet are as small as a drumstick. It takes at least two or three hours to grind the rough feet to stone-like smoothness. Planing, carving, carving out... A series of processes were all completed by Zhong Shu’s “kick kick”. The stalls were not helpers and he was alone.

“Learning to do the border line, I was born on Wenchang North Street, so I ran back to this street to open the file.” Zhong Shu, named Zhong Qingpei, who was an apprentice in the craft factory in Zhongguancun, Guangzhou, The master, in 1996, began setting up stalls on Wenchang Street to make wood carvings. Zhong Shu is a wood carving "small piece", which is specially used to put bonsai, jade, crafts and Other base, the process requirements are very delicate.

The "Fukurhou", Yunlong, the Lotus, and the few exquisite carvings and clever graven designs on the flowers have attracted many repeat customers, not only in Guangdong but also antique lovers in Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia. Specially came to Guangzhou to find Zhong Shushu orders, and even the United States guests took their own plans to find Zhong Shu.

"After the newborn does not love this line"

“In the past when working in a craft factory, Premier Zhou Enlai also met with the master craftsmen and gave them medals.” Zhong Shu said with emotion that since the reform and opening up, handicrafts have become less and less important to the government. Hand-carved wood carvings, slow work and fine work, take a long time, but also hard to earn money, many of the same batch of colleagues with Zhong Shu turned out to change. "In Guangzhou, there are few master craftsmen who like me to kick." Zhong Shu is proud.

It takes 10 days to make a wood piece 25 centimeters long. Zhong Shu revealed that, in addition to paying rent, each person who is engaged in this manual work only earns two or three thousand a month. Sometimes he cannot open a market for a month. Sometimes orders suddenly increase and he is unstable.

In the past few years, Zhong Shu had also recruited many apprentices. From the beginning of more than 10 to the later, less and less, and now oneself as a boss and working person. “There are not many young people who can calm down and work hard to do this kind of manual work.” Many apprentices have left for a year and a half, and Zhong Shu, who is disappointed with this, has not applied for apprenticeship for three years. We also changed from the previous more than 10 square meters to the current 3 square meters small stall. Zhong Shu said that he hopes to meet apprentices who are interested in learning and to teach their own hand-carved wood carving techniques to future generations.