Arts & Craft Museum

The last field trip for our culture class took place in the Shanghai Arts and Craft Museum. Located in the French concession, the museum is tucked away within the busy streets inside a former businessman's mansion not far away from where we had the cooking work shop (consult previous entry).

walked in a walled off property and see this, then to think I was just dodging mopeds on the side walk outside of here...

obnoxious white house

always good to enjoy some sun shine and peaceful times away from the busy city street

Inside the museum were ivory, jade and other precious stone sculptures/carvings. There were other traditional art works such as silk embroidery and paper cutting made by working artists at the museum that were also for sale.

incredible scene of a village on a tusk, accompanied with corbin, not for sale

ridiculous microscopic printing, the figure on the right is the magnified version, still cant read it

carving made out of 1 piece of ivory to showcase craftsmanship

sometimes Chinese artists like to write novels on tiles

Weiqi arranged one of the artists to demonstrate the soon-to-be-lost skills of paper cutting and it blew everyone away. No rough draft, just paper and a pair of scissors, within 20 minutes, she made three pieces for us.

when asked how long it takes to master this skills, the answer was "never, there's always room to improve"

no paper wasted, the paper she cut the figure out of is used as the "frame" of the figure

how to make a dragon within 10 minutes

snowflake paper cutting you say? try to get 4 butterflies out of yours. lul

Touring around, we checked out some artists' workshop and ran into this man who happened to be identifying precious gem stones and was about to cut an ore open. Unfortunately we could not stay and see it... :(

There is apparently a fad for people to scout for ores in many "ore shops" around the mountainous region in China and buy them blindly as a scheme to "get rich overnight". Of course, the real money makers are probably all gone, but there are still occasional winning which is enough to drive this trend.

This piece was identified to be potentially "gem rich" and was polished, about to be cut open

supposedly, good ores are almost see through under strong light

a shot of the artist's workshop, I think we can all agree coffee and tea are what keeps the world running.

browsing around the gallery, aka expensive souvenir store. some jade were going for about 30k RMB a piece. we all need to make a living right

at the embroidery gallery

elaborate head dress used as a stage prop in Peking Opera, the color seen are either made from sewed on gems or feathers off rare birds, none were dyes. lul

Before we leave, there was another artist that made T-shirts for us with our very own design, it's never easy to make decision within the group, and it's even harder with the added translation problem for Chinese calligraphy. Luckily. Weiqi's an expert at this and threw us some good recommendations.

As he was painting, I couldn't help but think how many art work he needed a month to maintain livelihood and I bet he loved us tourists because all we ever asked for is simple translations, and anything goes, provided we don't read Chinese...

At the end, we went with "Purdue University" because the Boilermaker pride is deep within all our bones

Funny side story here: After the field trip, we were encouraged to make our own paper cutting and then by chance, the class was asked to be interview by a local Shanghai newspaper (because we are a big deal now), some of our work were even featured on the news paper (for lack of other things we had), you may find the article here.The English version is here, yes i translated it so don't be surprised about the bad grammar and let me know if you can't access it.

In all honesty though, these skills were all very impressive, the fact that there are unpractical craftsmanship like these that exists proves that how high of a place the Chinese civilization had placed for aesthetics and visual entertainment, although some skills are dying as modernization becomes more and more relevant, museums like these serve as a good indication and it's comforting to know that there are still focus on preserving this part of the culture.