The Bamboo Screen Paintings of Liangping County,Chongqing
This handicraft combines bamboo weaving with painting and is produced in Liangping County,Chongqing Municipality,on the north bank of the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River.Here can be found a sea of bamboo,dozens of kilometers wide,and also a bamboo-weaving industry that has been handed down from 1,000 years ago.The bamboo screens for sedan chairs,doors,windows,lanterns and halls are practical handicrafts.Later,artists started to paint on these bamboo screens and created the bamboo screen paintings of Liangping County;these have both practical and aesthetic value.
Liangping County produces all kinds of bamboo in abundance.The local bamboo has long fibers,excellent tensile strength and strong resilience,suitable for weaving
painted screens of all shapes. Of the bamboo articles of Liangping, the most noted is the bamboo screen. The history of making such screens can be traced back to the Song Dynasty.
In the Northern Song, Liangping bamboo screens were listed among the tributes to the imperial family.Over the past 1,000 years and more, they have been honored as“no.1 screen in the country”because of their clever craftsmanship,fine workmanship, beautiful decorations and a multitude of designs.
The bamboo screens of Liangping are made with cizhu bamboo as the raw material.The bamboos are hand split to get the filigrees.Filigree preparation is a very delicate job.It is necessary to split bamboos into hair-thin filigrees.In making a bamboo screen, it is necessary to trim each bamboo filigree by letting it pass through three needle-tip-sized holes.The bamboo filigrees will be used as wefts and silk threads as warps to be woven with a traditional wooden loom to make bamboo screens through dozens of processes.The bamboo screens woven this way are as thin as a cicada’s wings, fine and smooth,with a texture of silk and brocade.They are soft,resilient and flawless.
By the Qing Dynasty,the craftsmanship of bamboo screens was further developed and gradually evolved into bamboo screen paintings by combining calligraphy and painting.During the reign of Emperor Guangxu(1875–1908)of the Qing Dynasty,Fang Bingnan,a painter of Liangping County,became the founder of bamboo screen paintings.He was good at using thin bamboo filigrees to weave bamboo screens and other handicraft articles,and he painted flowers,birds and human figures on the bamboo screens and he turned bamboo screens into pictures by adding a pole at the top and a roller at the bottom of the screen.
The painting of a bamboo screen painting is different from doing a traditional Chinese painting on rice paper,because bamboo screens are made of bamboo filigrees which are not water absorbent.Therefore,it is very important to control the water content of the writing brush.In the past,the usual practice was to paint a white background on the bamboo screen before painting with other colors.Later,some artists did not paint the background but painted the pictures directly onto the simple,elegant green covering base of the screen in order to emphasize the beauty of the natural texture of the bamboo filigrees.Still later,artists improved and innovated the painting by merging embroidery,stitching and flocking with the screen,thus forming the advanced method of combining embroidery with painting.
Bamboo screen paintings have the special features of traditional Chinese paintings.In bamboo screen painting,great attention must be paid to the quality of ink and application of colors,and the general appearance of the pictures must be both bright and quietly elegant.Landscapes,flowers and birds,beasts and human figures and historical stories are their usual subject-matter.A bamboo screen painting named The Twelve Beauties of Jinling vividly portrays the images of the 12 beauties described in the celebrated literary classic A Dream of Red Mansions on a bamboo screen two meters long with such
episodes as“Xichun Does a Painting”and“Lin Daiyu Buries Flowers”as the focus.Pandas,an embroidered bamboo screen painting, vividly reproduces the scene of several pandas leisurely cavorting by a brook. With a high workmanship and artistic value,both artworks were granted gold prizes of the state at a national bamboo cultural festival.
More than 100 varieties of bamboo screens can be found in Liangping,including screens for windows,doors,sit t ing-rooms and lant erns,hanging screens, vertically hung scrolls and horizontally hung scrolls.They are used by regular people as interior decorations and have found their way into the grand buildings of the state,such as the Great Hall of the People and Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing,and have been collected as state treasures.They are excellent gifts for foreign state leaders as well as for friends and relatives of the average person.