"Life is a river, and every life deserves to be treated with pride. ”
This is an important experience of Luo Yicheng, a veteran advertising man and "Chinese guardian artist", who visited craftsmen in the Yellow River Basin and wrote the non-fiction work "Yellow River Map" related to it.
In the book, he shows two rivers. One is the Yellow River. One is the river of life. The 27 craftsmen and 27 old crafts he visited happened to correspond to each node of his life.
Most of us have to go through these life nodes once.
At those juncies, our ancestors were treated with ceremonies through the hands of craftsmen. You and I, who enjoy the benefits brought by technological progress, can you not be moved to see this time that has been treated ceremoniously?
Paying attention to old crafts and old craftsmen is because of the perfection of time
Prior to the publication of The Yellow River: Craftsmen and Their Hometowns in the Yellow River Basin, Luo Yicheng's work that was publicly displayed and better known was The Fulfillment of Time. This is a micro-documentary, as the director, Luo Yicheng chose three craftsmen of the age of the old, middle and young as the protagonists, showing the perfection of time for those who are willing to devote themselves wholeheartedly. It's a commercial documentary about a single malt whisky for a Scottish brand, and another example of pushing boundaries to spread traditional craftsmanship.
Luo Yicheng is a native of Hengshan, Hunan Province, and after growing up in a relatively isolated village, he engaged in the advertising industry, and most of the brands he came into contact with were international brands or brands with international influence. In the advertising industry, he has grown into a well-known advertising person in the industry, specializing in creative and copywriting.
In his own words, 8 years ago, he suddenly left the advertising industry because he couldn't keep up with the rhythm of Internet communication - many content products only have a "life" of one day, and he wanted to settle down and "find a way to extend the life of content".
The search for traditional craftsmen began 8 years ago - compared with the "life" of Internet content products for a day, the traditional craftsmanship that has been accumulated over time and has not been eliminated by time is incomparably longer and thicker.
Over the past 8 years, Luo Yicheng has been in "real" contact with more than 300 traditional craftsmen, observing their working environment, growing up environment and their families, recording the stories they tell, and "precipitating together" his observations and records to form an overall understanding of them and the craftsmanship behind them, and extracting the core information on this basis. This has the previously published "One Hundred and Eight Craftsmen of Chinese Guarding Artists" and "Seeking Common Ground and Preserving Art: The Ingenuity Dialogue of Craftsmen on Both Sides of the Strait", as well as the micro-documentary "The Perfection of Time".
In the past 8 years, in the process of searching for and recording craftsmen, Luo Yicheng still has a close contact with the advertising industry, whether actively or passively. He skillfully plays the role of "translator", grafting some old skills with brand owners.
After dealing with craftsmen for a long time, Luo Yicheng called himself a "keeper", "like a warrior, guarding his craft with a stubborn spirit".
Luo Yicheng's stubborn spirit may be ** in a cradle made of bamboo in his house. This is the cradle he slept in as a child, and it is the cradle that his father slept in when he was a child. This cradle is now in his study, and he often looks at it. He noticed that above the cradle there were also two thin poles roasted in an arc, which were usually lowered and could be erected and hung with mosquito nets in the summer, like the roof of an convertible.
Seventy years later, through this still-well-preserved cradle, I see the wisdom, the thought and the time invested by an unknown craftsman in a single object. In the "Ba" of the new book "The Yellow River: Craftsmen and Their Hometowns in the Yellow River Basin", Luo Yicheng writes. This cradle is the "fulfillment of time" that he first experienced and experienced. It was with this initial accomplishment that he later withdrew from the advertising industry at the forefront of the times and came to the ranks of craftsmen who were left behind by the times.
Every node of life has a corresponding craft
I believe that folk crafts have been passed down from the past to the present, not because the people who inherited them did not accept new technologies, or because they were pretentious in order to reflect the superiority of the craft. In the era when industrialization technology has not become dominant, folk craftsmanship is so down-to-earth, it is taken from the civil and the people, and has a unique practicality and aesthetic ......”
For example, Luo Yicheng's comment on folk crafts in the preface, he also adopted the kind of "down-to-earth" that matched the craftsmanship he wrote about in the writing of "The Yellow River: Craftsmen and Their Hometowns", and he no longer seemed to be the well-known creative and copywriter in the advertising industry, but like a simple craftsman, he recorded his encounters, intersections and acquaintances with craftsmen in simple words.
I started from Maduo County, Qinghai Province, walked more than 100 kilometers west, successively to Zhaling Lake and then Ngoling Lake, and as the altitude gradually increased to more than 4,600 meters, my altitude sickness became more and more intense. ”
This is the beginning of the first chapter, "Seeking a Child", in which Luo Yicheng takes the reader to the vicinity of the source of the Yellow River from the perspective of a seeker, and he likens the flow of the Yellow River to Zhaling and Ngoling Lakes as being "conceived" twice and "reborn" twice by these two lakes. In the chapter "Seeking a Child", he writes about three crafts related to "Seeking a Child".
Before Luo Yicheng wrote this book, in the process of searching for the traditional crafts of the Yellow River Basin, he vaguely felt that he had plunged into another river that went hand in hand with the Yellow River - a life from being expected by his family, to birth, growth, establishment, longevity, and finally back to dust, like a river, constantly flowing in one direction. He noticed that at every node of the river of life, there are corresponding folk crafts: mud dogs when seeking children, cloth tigers when the full moon, inseparable kang head stone lions before the age of 12, paper-cuts in the new house when they get married, purses and purses that they carry with them when they go out to make a living, dough sculptures when they celebrate their birthdays, tuanhua that still has far-reaching meaning after a hundred years, and Han Yan who pays tribute to their ancestors during the Qingming Festival, etc.
Luo Yicheng's interest is not focused on the materials, processes, patterns or inheritance of traditional crafts, so what readers open is not a manual of traditional crafts. In the book, the unfolding of life nodes is the unfolding of craftsmanship, the unfolding of the life of craftsmen, and the unfolding of the relationship between crafts, craftsmen and our lives today.
In the book, Luo Yicheng does not have a tendency to beautify or deify any of the crafts and objects he writes, but what he conveys and expresses is the warm emotions he perceives from these crafts and objects.
Just after the snowfall, the gray mountains, the gray trees, the gray houses, the gray roads, and the unmelted snow are like tabbys, interspersed one by one between this piece of gray, and it is about to be dyed gray. This is the deep impression left by Qinghai Mutual Aid County on Luo Yicheng. It was in this impression that he walked into a yard that was cleaned up with a sense of life.
Luo Yicheng walked into the courtyard of Xi Yuxiu, the inheritor of Qinghai Tu Pan Embroidery, and saw that she was nearly sixty years old and wearing a bright red national costume. Xi Yuxiu took out her dowry - a brand-new bridal dress to show Luo Yicheng, "It's so new, it's hard for me to imagine that Xi Yuxiu, who has become a grandmother, wore it to usher in an important moment in her life 40 years ago."
Xi Yuxiu's bridal dress embodies the craftsmanship and hard work of herself and her mother, aunt, sister, cousin and others - when she was 16 years old, her mother, who had just started to guide her in embroidering bridal clothes, died. With the help of her relatives, she spent 4 years completing the Tu Pan embroidered bridal dress.
When Luo Yicheng recounted these, there was no rendering, no sensationalism, just like Xi Yuxiu took out her own bridal dress just to show her beauty, Luo Yicheng recorded these with words without any emotions, but also to show the beauty - the beauty of objects, the beauty of human feelings.
Conversation|We need the healing power of craft, but it's not our staple food
Xiaoxiang Morning News: I'm curious, as a native of Hengshan and Hunan, how did you pay attention to the craftsmen in the Yellow River Basin?It stands to reason that the Yangtze River basin is closer to us.
Luo Yicheng: In 2015, I was taking my child with me – my second child was only 8 months old at that time, and I was looking for an answer on how to be a father, and I think there should be an answer in the top ten famous families in ancient China. At that time, I was not looking for a family like Li Ka-shing, but a big family that has been influential for hundreds of years in history, and I think they should have left something worth learning from. took the child to Rizhao for the first time;Then I went to Linyi, Langya Wang's family;Then went west to Gansu, Longxi Li. Later, when I returned from Ningxia, I saw that this was not the Yellow RiverAt that time, I hadn't moved back to Hunan from Beijing, they were all born in Beijing, and we went back to Hunan from Beijing, or I went on a business trip from Beijing, as if we had to pass through the Yellow River everywhere. So, I think I have a relationship with the Yellow River.
As a southerner, I write about the craft of the South, of course, there is a logic to it. But what I want to know more is what it would be like to see northern craftsmanship from my perspective as a southernerSo, first of all, there's a curiosity with that. Another reason, as far as the Yellow River is concerned, I think it is not simply a river that belongs to a certain region, it is different from other rivers, and even from the Yangtze River. Our Han nationality migrated from the upper reaches of the Yellow River along the Yellow River to the Central Plains, and then from the Central Plains to various places. Many of us and many of our families may be traced back to the Yellow River Basin.
Xiaoxiang Morning News: In this way, it is a bit of a root-seeking.
Luo Yicheng: The modern and modern times of the Yellow River basin are not developed enough - compared with the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta in the south, the gap is actually quite large. The existence of this gap allows us to see a lot of original craftsmanship in the Yellow River Basin, as well as caves, etc., which are naturally present, just like those buildings and customs that still exist, and are a living existence. These old crafts are like a passage into history.
Xiaoxiang Morning News: The old crafts you wrote about in the book make people feel the warmth of feelings and sincerity. What is especially touching is Guo Rulin, who made cloth piles and painted bun dolls, he had never met his mother, but he cut a lot of mother's images. The craft also has a healing effect on the craftsman itself.
Luo Yicheng: On the day of the interview at Mr. Guo Rulin's house, I asked my wife and children to go to a hotel, and I stayed on his kang for one night. We were lying on the kang and chatting, and when we talked until the second half of the night, I asked him curiously, why did you cut so many images of your mother-in-law?He told me that because he and his mother had only spent a bag of cigarettes in this world, his mother died the time he gave birth to a bag of cigarettes. In the past, there was no **, he never knew what his mother looked like, and he never had the opportunity to call his mother in his life. So he created a lot of images of his mother-in-law, he tried to make up for his regrets, and he called Mom to the mother-in-law he created in his heart. If there is no story shared by Mr. Guo Rulin in this book, the weight of the book may seem lighter.
Xiaoxiang Morning News: We must admit that in our traditions, there are some concepts that are very backward, outdated, and unequal, especially those that are not accepted by modern civilization, such as "grandfather", "grandmother", "grandson", etc., with the addition of "outside". What makes it warm is that even so, like the grandmother who made a quilt for her grandson and the uncle who made lanterns for your nephew, they still do these things with a lot of love. In these crafts, there is humanity.
Luo Yicheng: Yes. This is actually a point I want to express, I am a person who misses the old but does not love the old. In the past, because of the underdevelopment of culture and technology, it brought a lifetime of hardship to many people. For example, the death of Mr. Guo Rulin's mother, and so on. Although his paper-cutting can heal him and soothe him, we would rather have his mother accompany him throughout his life than have his paper-cutting and cloth pile paintings.
In today's civilization, we still need this little thing, and we need its so-called healing effect, but we must also understand that it is not our staple food, not all of us, and I will not magnify the value of the old craft.
Xiaoxiang Morning News: So, although we can't and don't want to go back to the past, do you think some old crafts still have the value of continuing to exist and can continue to be passed on?
Luo Yicheng: Russell said that heterogeneity is the source of happiness. We keep the technology, not to say that we can use it to compete with Huawei and Apple. There is a person who makes a cloth tiger and is very happy to do it, and we have to find a way to make him do it and continue his happiness. There is a young man who sees that an old man is in a good state to do this craft, and he has the idea of learning, which is OK, and there is no need for everyone to rush to learn it.
In my first book, the definition of craft is the poetry and nostalgia of a country. This definition represents my thinking about craft. The preservation and inheritance of traditional crafts is not to bring them into the orbit of materialization and die quickly, but to create a space that still grows organically by them. In this space, it carries the poetry and nostalgia of a country;In this space, we will continue to incubate ingenuity and live as an inspiration to the general public to face the people they love and what they do. There is such a space, where craftsmanship can return to craftsmen, craftsmen can return to their hometowns, and objects and self can return to their due temperature.
Xiaoxiang Morning News reporter Liu Jianyong.
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