Master designer helps keep art form alive

Through his apprentices, inheritor of Chongqing filigree inlay ensures craft will live on

Li Changyi, a 72-year-old master who has been preserving and modernizing filigree inlay art in Chongqing for 50 years, is now glad to see it gaining a firm foothold in the domestic art market.

A renaissance of traditional Chinese clothing known as hanfu, brought about in recent years by popular TV dramas, has also helped breathe new life into the 1,000-year-old craft, especially among the young.

In 2008, filigree inlay was listed as a national intangible cultural heritage, and in 2014, the Chongqing style was listed as a cultural heritage of the city. Li is the only inheritor.

Born into a silversmithing family in the city's Shapingba district in 1949, Li showed strong interest in the craft as a child.

A self-taught painter and former fitter at a ship-repair factory, he was recruited as a craftsman at the age of 22 by Chongqing Metal Art and Craft, which sent him to study for a year in the arts and crafts department at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute.

In 1974, Li officially became a filigree inlay designer－drawing outlines, crafting models, and completing orders with foreign trade companies in Beijing.

An intricate form of metalwork often used in jewelry, Chinese filigree uses twisted threads of gold, silver, and copper weaved into a structure onto which jade and precious gems are mounted. Art takes various forms.

Li's hands have been roughed by the daily work of forging and rubbing the metals. Even so, he finds pleasure in the tedious tasks.

After years of practice, he can draw the metal into threads thinner than hair and make striking pieces of art.

He has created sensations with his breathtaking miniatures, which have included models of the Chongqing People's Hall and the Empress Dowager Cixi's carriage.

"Of all handicraft arts, those involving metal are the most complex," Li said.

Making the inlays can also involve chiseling, precision casting, coloring, using enamel, color painting, and resin dyeing.

"Any of those individual skills might take a person years to learn, but Teacher Li masters them all, which is quite rare nowadays," said his apprentice, 36-year-old Shi Qianya.

China's reform and opening-up in the late 1970s helped bolster the handicraft industry, which reached its peak in the mid-1990s. With so many overseas orders for his pieces at the time, Li often struggled to complete the orders.

Around the turn of the millennium, more advanced equipment and designs, along with the lower cost of gold and silver, created more competition in China's coastal regions and resulted in a devastating decrease in orders. Li's company went bankrupt in 2004, and filigree inlay work in Chongqing has been on the decline ever since.

But he did not give up. From 2004 to 2006, Li traveled to cities around China, including Beijing, Chengdu in Sichuan province, Guangzhou and Shenzhen in Guangdong province, and Zhangzhou in Fujian province, to learn different techniques.

In his view, the continuous honing of one's skills is a basic criterion for any craftsman, but a true artisan should also be able to innovate.

Li said his filigree inlay art is inclusive, consisting of elements from the south of China to the north, much like all-embracing Chongqing.

The delicate craft, mainly used in the past to decorate imperial ornaments like crowns and hats, has developed into precious modern-day folk art.

"Now, we mostly do jeweled brooches, hairpins, and corsages, depending on demand," Li said.

In 2006, he returned to Chongqing with plans to tutor a qualified inheritor. "I have to do my best, even though I am old," he said.

Li usually goes to bed at 2 am and gets up at 7 am. He visits his apprentices at their studios to offer technical guidance and supervision and paints in his spare time.

So far, he has tutored more than a dozen apprentices. Three now run filigree inlay sales shops and six-run studios making jewelry and offering training courses. The combined annual revenue from the studios now stands at around 6.4 million yuan ($1 million).

Shi, who became Li's apprentice six years ago, opened a studio in Chongqing in April.

"As the country attaches more importance to intangible cultural heritage, there might be an opportunity," she said.

Another apprentice, 32-year-old Zuo Shuqiao, makes about 6 million yuan a year and employs over 60 workers.

Around 1,700 students have been trained at the six studios since 2014, helping revive the art form all over the country.

Source: China Daily