A Masterpiece of Barley-Straw Collage
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“Qingming Festival on the River” is a 528-cm long, 24.8-cm tall painting created by Zhang Zeduan (1085-1145), a Song dynasty painter. Over the last 30 years, many artists in China have tried their hands at recreating the painting in various media―wood carving, embroidery, animation, etc. The latest one is by Jiang Yunhua, a woman folk artist designated as a master artist for straw collage, a national intangible cultural heritage.
Jiang Yunhua is a folk artist in Pujiang, a county in central Zhejiang Province. The unique genre is pride of place in the hearts of people in the small county. This recreated masterpiece was made for Zhejiang Pavilion at 2010 Shanghai World Expo.
This straw collage is four times the original created in the Song Dynasty (960-1279). It measures 23.8 meters in length and 1.2 meters in height. It is so huge that it is composed of 7 sections. Jiang Yunhua reveals that the whole piece was made of more than 1 million straws which weigh some 100 kilograms.
Jiang chose Zhang Zeduan’s painting as her re-creation for the World Expo in Shanghai for a few reasons. The original panorama portrays the urban life in the Song Dynasty. It is regarded as an ode to the long history of the Chinese civilization and the country’s prosperity in ancient times. Recreating the ancient masterpiece was designed to demonstrate the significance of the painting again at the World Expo, and demonstrate our determination to carry on the Chinese culture. Widely recognized as one of the best paintings of the ancient China, the kaleidoscopic masterpiece is a perfect choice for highlighting the techniques and aesthetics of straw collage in Pujiang.
The woman artist’s magnum opus displays unique features. The natural texture and glow of the straw add a special touch of harmony to the collage and make people and objects in the original look more graphic.
It is hard to trace how straw collage first started in Pujiang, but the folk art is something magic between paper-cutting and collage. Its first national renown was made in 1978 when a number of straw-collage artworks made by Pujiang folk artists were displayed at a national crafts and arts exhibition. Since then resourceful artists in Pujiang have displayed their amazing originality in exploring the possibilities in straw collage. They keep displaying their latest new creations at various national art shows. Straw collages have found their way into various art forms such as screens, wall hangings, vases, boxes and jars. In 1990, Jiang Yunhua recreated “100 Doves”, a painting by Zhang Shujin with his ancestral roots in Pujiang, as a gift to the 1990 Beijing Asia Games. The CCTV made a special report on this and praised its artistry.
Straw collage is a demanding and complicated art. Choosing straws can be time consuming and costly. Artists choose the best barley straws and they have a complicated system to judge the quality of straws. And they use only the second section of a barley straw. After they put their hands on the best straws, they spare no efforts to process the raw material. Choice straws go through 20 some processing stages before they can be used onto a background of cloth, silk or other materials. Straws can also be glued onto bamboo-woven artifacts. Pujiang straw-collage artists are broad-minded people. They study other genres and apply what they learn from traditional Chinese painting, print, paper-cutting and sculpture. That is how these straw-collage artworks offer an amazing pleasure of texture and glow, a charm of magnificence and elegance.
Jiang Yunhua traveled around China to find best barley straws for her masterpiece for the world expo. While handpicking quality straws, she needed to kneel on the ground. She spent more than a month kneeling and choosing. She went through heaps and tons of straw and handpicked 500 kilograms of barley straws piece by piece.
For a year, Jiang and her eight women assistants worked and lived at the workshop. First of all, they used scissors to cut up straws into threads, chips and hairs. Then they put these basic straw building blocks together and cut images of humans and horses and trees out of them. These images came together and formed small scenes. Then they created bridges and houses in the same way. Step by patient step, the whole masterpiece materialized. It was finally framed in mahogany.
Jiang Yunhua graduated from Jinhua Normal College in the 1950s. Over years, she worked as a primary school teacher, a cadre of a women’s league at a people’s commune and an official of the county government. A folk artist of straw collages since her childhood years, she later set up a business and devoted herself to the art. As a creative artist, she has brought many new techniques to the straw collage art, making it more expressive. She has created many masterpieces.