Wang Duchun

01 · Lineage & Regional School

From the age of thirteen he studied wood carving under his father Wang Fengzuo, a master of boxwood carving. Within the regional tradition and school record of Yueqing Huangyang Wood Carving in Yueqing, Zhejiang: Yueqing lies at the mouth of the Oujiang River and is frequently subject to flooding; the local custom of making “dragon screens” (longdang) to avert disaster and ward off evil arose there. In 1909, the boxwood-carving work “Ji the Insane Monk” by Zhu Zichang of Wenzhou won an excellence prize at the Nanyang Industrial Exposition, and in 1915 his work “Playing Hide-and-Seek” won second prize at the International Panama Exposition.

02 · Mastery & Signature Works

Male, of Han ethnicity, born in October 1932 in Yueqing, Zhejiang Province. He is a Master of Chinese Arts and Crafts. In 1953, while studying at the East China Branch of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he created Hide and Seek (Zhuomicang), which was selected for exhibition in Moscow and collected by the Shanghai Museum. The large boxwood carving group Xiao Dao Hui (The Small Swords Society), which he helped to create, together with works such as Xiangyin (Voices of Home) and Chunnuan (Warm Spring), were collected by the National Museum of China, the Zhejiang Provincial Museum and other institutions. Within the documented technical tradition of Yueqing Huangyang Wood Carving in Yueqing, Zhejiang: Yueqing City lies on the coast of southeastern Zhejiang Province, facing Wenzhou across the river. Yueqing boxwood carving is an ornamental round-carving art made from boxwood; it is popular mainly in Nanjie Village of Wengyang Town, Houheng Village of Xiangyang Town, Liushi Town, and Yuecheng Town in Yueqing City, and has spread to Wenzhou, Yongjia, Hangzhou, Shanghai, and other places. When boxwood carving began in Yueqing cannot be known for certain. The “Statue of Li Tieguai” (Iron-Crutch Li), now held by the Palace Museum in Beijing and bearing a date of the Zhizheng era of the Yuan Dynasty, is the earliest dated boxwood carving extant; however, Yueqing boxwood carving appeared later and should postdate this statue. The “dragon screen” (longdang), made of camphor wood and carved with human figures, is precisely the folk craft that nurtured Yueqing boxwood carving. In 1876 Wenzhou was opened as a treaty port and foreign trade flourished; many Yueqing boxwood carvings were collected by Chinese and foreign merchants, and folk artisans formerly engaged in “dragon screen” and Buddhist-figure carving switched in large numbers to the boxwood-carving trade. Besides Zhu Zichang, renowned masters such as Ye Furu, Wang Fengzuo, and Ye Yizhou also emerged in the boxwood-carving trade. Yueqing boxwood carving has three types, and the three types differ in design concept, technique, and procedure. The first is the traditional type, centered on single-figure forms, though group carvings and assembled carvings also exist; the second is the root-carving type, which uses natural boxwood root blocks and exploits the form of the roots; the third is the split-carving type, in which blocks of wood unusable for figure carving are split open and carved according to the concept suggested by their natural split grain — everything following nature, without fine, detailed work. Traditional carving has figure models with which the form of the material must accord, hence the procedures of clay-model drafting, material selection, rough blocking to fix the shape, and solid blocking to set the form. Root carving, by contrast, adapts to circumstances, allowing great flexibility of conception; it requires no clay-model drafting, but attention must be paid to preserving the distinctive formal character of the root. Split carving shifts the focus to the expressive basis of the grain. Boxwood is a precious timber: tough in texture, fine in grain, and slow-growing — hence the saying that “a boxwood of a thousand years can hardly grow to the size of a cypress.” Yueqing boxwood carving fully displays the wisdom of folk artisans; over the course of its history it has shown a variety of styles — for example, the knife work of Ming-dynasty wood carving is rounded, succinct, and fluent, while that of Qing-dynasty wood carving is clear, smooth, and rounded in turn. The boxwood-carving process is complex: the refinement and technical demands of each process step are hard for other carvings to match and cannot be replaced by modern technology. Today the sources of material for Yueqing boxwood carving are in crisis, while the loss of skilled practitioners is severe, newcomers are hard to come by, and individual workshops are scattered and unable to exert much influence. Representative repertoire, works and technical entries recorded for the project include: "Archival Records of Process Steps": The boxwood-carving process is complex: the refinement and technical demands of each process step are hard for other carvings to match and cannot be replaced by modern technology.

03 · Transmission & Safeguarding Status

He is a representative bearer of Yueqing Boxwood Carving, a third-batch national intangible cultural heritage project. Works including Song of the Plateau (Gaoyuan zhi Ge) were shown in exhibitions at home and abroad and received awards. He served as director of the Yueqing Boxwood Carving Factory and trained a group of boxwood carving artists, including his own children.

04 · Associated Heritage Item Dossier

05 · Fellow National Bearers Lineage

National representative bearers recorded under the same item code, ordered from the first to the sixth batch. Batch order is not a teacher–student relationship.

06 · Archival Sources & Bibliography

1. Wang Duchun · National Representative Bearer Archive