Yuan Yao
Mastery, Signature Works & Repertoire
Deputy chief craftsman, senior arts and crafts artist, national senior technician, and Master of Arts and Crafts of Shanghai. He began engraving seals at the age of nine and went on to study calligraphy, carving and ceramics. He excels at fusing qiaose colour-led carving, miniature carving and micro-engraving into a single work; his pieces are conceived according to the material and executed according to its nature, fully drawing out and expressing the essence of the stone to achieve unexpected effects, while his ideas and forms are ethereal and exquisitely fine, his craftsmanship delicate and his technical difficulty outstanding, reaching the level of the marvellous. In 2004 he created the first jadeite miniature carving, Qian Shou Qian Yan Guan Yin (Thousand-Handed and Thousand-Eyed Guanyin), a rare treasure entered in the Guinness records. Works such as Han Jiang Du Diao (Fishing Alone on a Cold River), Wu Bai Luo Han (Five Hundred Arhats), Bai Hu Tu (Picture of a Hundred Tigers) and Qian Long Xia Jiang Nan (Emperor Qianlong's Southern Tour) blend the spirit of calligraphy, and his knife moves with effortless assurance.
Honors & Recognition
Male, Han ethnicity, born in February 1949 in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, he is a national representative bearer of jade carving (Shanghai-style jade carving), a fourth-batch national intangible cultural heritage project. His works have received numerous awards. Among his students, Huang Yiming and Zhao Huaxin have achieved notable success.
References & Archival Sources
Representative Items of This Bearer
- Jade Carving Ⅶ-57
- Jade Carving Ⅶ-57
- Jade Carving Ⅶ-57
- Jade Carving Ⅶ-57
- Jade Carving Ⅶ-57
- Jade Carving Ⅶ-57
- Jade Carving Ⅶ-57
Profile
This static English edition is rendered at the edge for search engines, AI crawlers and readers without JavaScript. Compiled from official national representative bearer archival records, organized by topic and translated into English. 阅读中文版。