China Trip Part 10: The Mystery of the Painted Vase

A cross stitch painting at the restaurant we ate for dinner.

 
In the previous entry, I talked about jade hunting in Nanjing. I left off on about seeing a special person. On the same day, we were then driven off to two unique destinations. It was a 2 hour ride to see the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge. Historically speaking, this was the first bridge that China had ever built made to withstand the weight of 6 tanks. To see the bridge, you take this small elevator upstairs. So we all basically took the same elevator that Mao Zedong took and were able to stand in the exact same spot to get a view.

You can tell by my photos that there is this fog around the scenery. If I remember correctly, the weather was ok, just really foggy.

Afterwards, we visited a gallery of a grandmaster specializing in nei hua, the art of painting within vessels. It's like the ship in the bottle, how the hell do you paint the inside of a bottle? It was a very highly intricate and meticulous process. We had one of the "students" doing a demonstration. There are a variety of vessels to choose from varying from domes to small glass bottles to flat glass panels. Like any painting you need paint and brushes. What was curious was the brush. All the brush tips were shaped into 90 degree angles. As the demonstration went on, I finally understood why it was said that at a certain age you have to stop painting. The artists paints by sticking the curved brush inside the vessel and turns according to the image in his mind. It puts a tremendous strain on the eyes and requires utmost concentration on one's hands.

The special person we were going to meet was sitting right there in the room. Our local guide said that we are extremely lucky to see him in person today. He is the grandmaster of the gallery we were visiting. His greatest work is this humongous glass sphere painted with the famous Song dynasty ink painting, Along the River During the Qingming Festival (清明上河图). Seen up close you can admire all the time and effort that went into the painting. Once again, no photos were allowed, but I manage to break the rules.

This grandmaster, as they keep calling him, had quite an appearance. Our guide said he is 45 years old and anyone that decides to purchase his work must leave their contact info with him as a way of knowing where is work is located. He was very quiet and wore a serious expression for the most part. When he spoke, his voice surprised me. He had this booming kind of voice. It may have been my imagination, but did I catch a glimpse of shyness when he let out a chuckle? One customer bought his piece and spoke rather confidently. For some reason, it felt like he didn't like it very much, the idea of commercializing his work. He gave off a very interesting aura.

The girls working at the gallery were trying to sell us stuff. Again. It gets pretty annoying. I feel like they're using his name. When I got permission to photograph one of his works under the condition that it will not be publicly released, one of the girls commented that the DSLR I had could have taken multiple shots of many works. I'm not gonna lie that I put the settings to "continuous shot", but if you wanna do business, you should let us take as many pictures as we want. I will leave my other thoughts unsaid. There were smaller works that are worth purchasing, but they are extremely heavy and not to mention fragile. I still have places to visit. The more cheaper pieces were poorly painted.

We were leaving Nanjing and going to Wuxi. Wuxi is a really small place actually, a small but ancient city. Our new guide is Mr. L. Mr. L took us to Xue Garden, home to Xue Fucheng, a Chinese diplomat during the Qing dynasty. His garden and mansion is now open to public as a museum. According to Wikipedia, the Xue mansion violated architecture rules. As his rank as an official of Positive Third Grade, your house cannot exceed five room doors in width. To bypass this violation, Xue changed his home by adding walls making it look like there were several houses instead of one. Talk about finding loopholes. For architecture buffs, it's a nice place to go see ancient architecture and the reasoning behind the design.

After viewing the Xue mansion, our final destination planned for the day was Lihu National Wetland Park. I expected it to be swampy, but there wasn't a single swamp. How can it be called a wetland? It's connected to an amusement park and we were told to stay on the wetland path. As we walked further, the more disappointed we all got. There was a bridge you can stand on to look at the river and it smelled quite fishy. I checked online afterwards that they are currently trying to restore the wetlands hence the lack of diverse wildlife. It's a place to walk and take photos, but other than that there's not much to do.