These Days, Someone Still Makes Lacquer This Slowly | 100 People With Ideas
Liang Feng wants to know whether the market will give him a chance, but he won't lower himself to meet it — he has refused mass production, and he has no plans to copy the Japanese lacquerware young people love. Best case, someone pays a high price for his work, the way people buy a piece of contemporary art they can't quite make sense of.
Liang Feng wants to know whether the market will give him a chance, but he won't lower himself to meet it — he has refused mass production, and he has no plans to copy the Japanese lacquerware young people love. Best case, someone pays a high price for his work, the way people buy a piece of contemporary art they can't quite make sense of.
Liang Feng is from Fujian. He likes to drink tea at a table he lacquered himself.
One afternoon, in a small lane house on Changle Road in Shanghai, Liang Feng is making tea. The tea table is three wooden boards stacked one on another. The color of the top board is hard to describe — the result of more than twenty coats of lacquer — and the wood's natural bumps and hollows still show through, so the teacups on it, two inches across, sit and wobble a little. The layer below is a flat board in red lacquer; the one under that alternates red and black, and is made of golden-thread nanmu, an expensive wood.
Liang Feng's wife, Dong Qi, is from Shanghai and talks fast and playfully. Right now she is sitting on the far side of the tea table, on a wooden bed finished in raw lacquer. She points to a woven bamboo storage box behind Liang Feng. Inside it is a lacquered tea caddy: Liang Feng shaped the core out of cloth (think of it as the outline of the piece), then laid the raw lacquer over it.
Raw lacquer, or da qi, is a pigment distinct from chemical lacquer; it is also called sheng qi. Traces of it survive on wooden bowls 7,000 years old. Set against the 14 categories of lacquerware listed in the Ming-dynasty manual Xiushilu (《髹饰录》), many kinds are no longer made at all. But in Fujian, where Liang Feng grew up, lacquer still stands for a signature craft that has been famous in the region since the Qing dynasty.
In the 1990s, Liang Feng left Changsha Village on the banks of the Min River for Fuzhou, to learn lacquer from a lacquer artist trained at an art academy. He still spends much of his time in that city, where banyan aerial roots hang over everything and the damp, overcast weather is good for letting raw lacquer dry on its own. In Fuzhou he found an old house to use as a studio. He may have traded an early set of his work for it.
Master Lin, who is nearly seventy, has been the only year-round assistant in the studio for seven or eight years. He retired from a lacquer factory in Fuzhou — in the 1950s and '60s a great many lacquer factories sprang up around the city, meant to turn this traditional craft into large-scale industrial production. The results were poor, and almost none of those factories are left. What followed is the story everyone knows: the rise of Japanese lacquer art.
Carrying the factory in his memory, Master Lin helps Liang Feng haul materials and brush on lacquer, and worries about whether Liang Feng can make a living. This young man with the shaved head and fine features spares no cost on his lacquerware; a single set often takes a year. He charges high prices, and his methods are odd. In last year's series Dust, Seemingly Settled (《尘埃若定》), he built it up in layers — a coat of raw lacquer, a layer of ash, a layer of dust, another coat of raw lacquer. Master Lin shakes his head: it looks like neither lacquerware nor painting.
Master Lin isn't entirely wrong. Mandala, a Dream Left Behind (《坛城遗梦》), Liang Feng's largest lacquer-painting series of recent years, sat at Shanghai's Anyi Gallery for a while and did not sell.
Liang Feng hurried to bring the paintings back. "I don't actually like taking things out to sell. People out there are rough with them... there's no heart in the way they handle things." For the largest piece in the series he brushed on one coat of lacquer a day, let it dry, and brushed on another the next day, for a year. From the side you can see nearly a centimeter of thickness, grainy to the eye.
A man who runs a gallery in Shanghai thinks selling Liang Feng's lacquerware and lacquer paintings for a good price is no trouble at all. "A lot of people who come in get pulled in by these colors, especially the ones who know nothing about it," he said. People like him have also worked out the trick of selling Liang Feng's work: treat it as art, not craft, and ideally "put it among more expensive artworks — then it sells well."
Money aside, Liang Feng wants his lacquerware and lacquer paintings to stand alongside other contemporary art. "They still see raw lacquer as a traditional craft, but all of us want to push our way into contemporary art," Liang Feng said. He drifted around that scene for a time; later he explained that the drifting "was actually good for me — it kept me out of a purely craft frame of mind."
Liang Feng learned lacquer painting in his teens, from a local master: traditional craft art. Then he went to Beijing, studied photography, painted in oils and made installations — the contemporary art track, more or less. He took his lacquer-painting tools with him, but Beijing's climate is wrong for lacquer. He went back to Fuzhou after that and painted mostly in oils.
Dong Qi remembers that when she first met him, he struck her as a bit "otherworldly," surrounded by a crowd of young contemporary artists, younger than he was, who talked all day and swaggered. "Later I felt all that was shallow. A lot of it didn't need to be so precious, so laid bare," Liang Feng added after a silence.
The two of them took a trip to Dunhuang, and the trip is said to have meant a great deal to him. When they came back he found an old house in Fuzhou and went back to lacquer, "slowly drawing inward."
After he turned thirty, Liang Feng began to like old things. He went around collecting old furniture, re-lacquering and repairing it himself, and started painting his own lacquer paintings. The paintings carry a hint of Sean Scully. In color he no longer held to the black and red common in traditional lacquer work, though the new colors still come from mineral powder mixed into raw lacquer. Those colors used to be more expressive; in Dust, Seemingly Settled, he covered the color of the lacquer with a layer of ash.
Mandala, a Dream Left Behind and Dust, Seemingly Settled are the two most recent lacquer-painting series. Liang Feng says he has gone back to the simplest state: just brushing on lacquer.
For Mandala, a Dream Left Behind he spent three years on more than twenty pieces, brushing on one coat a day; some paintings have close to four hundred coats. For the largest one he used a pure blue as the ground and built the layers upward until he reached a flesh tone at the top, but repeated sanding brings out the deep green, black and red underneath, an effect close to relief carving.
Liang Feng cannot foresee how the raw lacquer will finally set, though he is not without a grip on it either. "It's like drawing a circle around yourself for a prison and chanting sutras inside it, over and over. The repetition gives you illusions," he said.
While he was making Dust, Seemingly Settled, a close friend of his died, and he decided to scatter a layer of ash over the bright lacquer. The phrase "dust, seemingly settled" comes from Zen: a thing looks finished when it is only beginning again. A screenwriter friend later turned the phrase on Liang Feng himself, calling him "like a handful of salt dried out of seawater, dissolving again the moment it touches water; like dust in the air that settles and then starts drifting again." Dong Qi forwarded us the message after the interview ended.
Dong Qi has become something like a half-time assistant. She is quick and warm, and she knows Liang Feng hates socializing. "I'm the filter," she said loudly, sitting across from him.
Helping run the business, Dong Qi noticed something interesting: young people take to these old objects more readily, as if they had known them a long time.
Chen Jie, another lacquer artist of some local renown in Fuzhou, has noticed the same thing. "The old stuff clearly can't meet what the market wants anymore. The main buyers now are young people, and they want to see a new face," Chen Jie said in an earlier interview. He has developed a number of new products using the xipi lacquer technique — furniture, stationery, vases, even jewelry — which look more like the Japanese lacquerware in fashion today. They sell well.
But Liang Feng still leans toward large pieces: art. Once a friend turned up carrying a laptop and asked him to lacquer the case. Liang Feng didn't stop to think; he told the man to get lost, and still won't speak to him. He has also turned down offers from manufacturers to mass-produce his work, partly because of his particular tuotai (bodiless lacquer) technique, and partly because the collapse of Fuzhou's lacquer factories left him doubtful that industry could revive the craft.
What annoys Dong Qi is that even so, the academy crowd still takes Liang Feng for a second-rate artisan. The masters of traditional craft art, meanwhile, think he has a good instinct for the work and decent hands but has wandered off the proper road. He should make things people can understand, Buddha statues and vases, they advise the younger man, and he shouldn't be ruining golden-thread nanmu, which is precious to begin with.
"Lacquer is better than nanmu. Raw lacquer will last a thousand years," Liang Feng answers. What he wants to make is "a purity that no system of classification can reach."
Liang Feng's work has almost never been shown in full; early on he published one collection of lacquer paintings. This year Dong Qi has begun taking him to meet the press and exhibition organizers more often. But they are not happy with what exhibitions do. Beyond worrying about knocks and losses and the surroundings, they hesitate over whether the shows help the work at all.
At the China International Stationery & Office Products Fair in October, Messe Frankfurt invited Liang Feng to show under the theme "Elements of Eastern Culture"; they felt what he makes "has a hint of a lacquerware revival about it." In the end the organizers put all the home-goods categories together, and Liang Feng found it wretched to be mixed in among them. "They still don't understand culture. This isn't about selling booths."
Dong Qi and Liang Feng are working on new approaches. Three years ago they held an event in the manner of a yaji, the old literati gathering, sending individual invitations to just 30 people, setting out objects and paintings, and serving afternoon tea.
This July they held a similar small show in a courtyard house in Wenchang Hutong, near Fuxingmen in Beijing. It ran 15 days and showed five small pieces of furniture: three small tables and two book chests. Each day they invited a few friends, who invited friends of their own, and everyone drank tea and talked.
In the end, one piece sold.
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.