Clay Sculpture
01 · Historical Records
In the late Qing and early Republican period, the renowned central Sichuan sculpture masters Yang Ziyuan and Luo Ticheng took Xu Deqin as their final disciple, marking the beginning of the Xu family's painted clay sculpture. From 1981 to 1990, the father-and-son team Xu Deqin and Xu Xingguo were commissioned to undertake the sculpture project for restoring Fengdu Ghost City; over eight years they designed and completed more than 2,000 statues, making Fengdu a world-renowned tourist destination. In 2001 they began the sculpture work for the Ten Thousand Buddhas City at Luohan Temple in Mianyang, completing more than 12,000 small Buddha statues as well as over forty Buddhist and bodhisattva statues more than nine meters tall — a scale surpassing the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in the United States, rarely seen anywhere in the world.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
Xu Deqin's son Xu Xingguo studied sculpture, painting, and calligraphy under his father from childhood and inherited the complete body of the craft. The Xu family's painted clay sculpture is executed with traditional techniques: first drawing and design (including line drawings, renderings, and construction drawings), then framing, rough clay modeling, and the application of fine clay. After the white clay body has dried through, it is repaired, coated with putty and sanded, decorated with raised-color patterns, then painted and gilded, and finally completed with the painting of the facial features. The works adopt traditional modeling, painted costume decoration, gilding, and fine-brush heavy-color painting, fully displaying an archaic elegance. The Xu family's painted clay sculpture mostly takes religious stories and historical figures as its subject matter, promoting truth, goodness, and beauty and exhorting people to follow the Way. The finished works are mainly found in Sichuan, Hunan, Taiwan, and elsewhere, and are especially welcome at tourist sites and temples. The Xu family's painted clay sculpture takes religious stories and historical figures as its subject matter, executed with fine-brush heavy-color painting, gilding, and raised-color patterns, the painted costume decoration fully displaying an archaic elegance. From 1981 to 1990, the father-and-son team Xu Deqin and Xu Xingguo were commissioned to direct the restoration project of Fengdu Ghost City, designing and completing more than 2,000 statues over eight years; from 2001 onward they also undertook the sculpture work for the Ten Thousand Buddhas City at Luohan Temple in Mianyang, completing more than 12,000 small Buddha statues as well as over forty Buddhist and bodhisattva statues more than nine meters tall, and they once restored the Qing-dynasty Five Hundred Arhats at Baoguang Temple in Xindu.
The masters behind the Xu lineage
The Sichuan image-makers Yang Ziyuan and Luo Ticheng took Xu Deqin as their last pupil, founding the Xu lineage carried on by his son Xu Xingguo.
The two thousand images of Fengdu
From 1981 to 1990 the father and son designed and completed over two thousand images for the restoration of the Fengdu ghost city.
The ten-thousand Buddha city
From 2001 they made over twelve thousand small Buddha figures and more than forty images over nine metres tall, a scale unmatched elsewhere.
Armature, rough body, fine clay and opening the face
Design drawings precede the armature, rough body and fine clay; once dry come repair, smoothing, relief patterning, gilding and finally the opening of the face.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
The Xu family's painted clay sculpture is a folk clay-sculpture art with distinctive local characteristics, mainly transmitted in the area of Daying County, Sichuan Province.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Clay Sculpture · Clay Sculpture · Clay Sculpture · Clay Sculpture · Clay Sculpture · Clay Sculpture · Clay Sculpture · Clay Sculpture · Clay Sculpture · Clay Sculpture · Clay Sculpture · Clay Sculpture · Clay Sculpture · Clay Sculpture.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
As society develops, fewer and fewer people appreciate traditional arts such as painted clay sculpture; the Xu family's painted clay sculpture has very few transmitters, making its inheritance and development extremely difficult, and its protection is urgently needed. Xu Xingguo (as recorded in the official inheritor archive): Male, Han ethnicity, born in March 1953, from Daying County, Sichuan Province. From childhood he studied clay sculpture, painting, and calligraphy under his father Xu Deqin, continually summarizing the techniques of the Xu family's painted clay sculpture through long practice and forming his own unique artistic style and technical character. He restored the Qing-dynasty Five Hundred Arhats at Baoguang Temple in Xindu, Sichuan; rebuilt more than 2,000 divine statues for Fengdu Ghost City in Chongqing; and sculpted more than 2,000 ancestral figures for the Hundred Family Surnames Ancestral Hall at the Shenzhou Ancestral Temple in Nanyue, Hunan, as well as more than 140 divine statues for Zihao Palace in Taichung, Taiwan. He is a representative inheritor of Clay Sculpture (Xu Family's Painted Clay Sculpture), a national-level intangible cultural heritage project of the third batch.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Yu Xianglian 01-0108
- Wang Nanxian 01-0109
- Hu Shen 01-0110
- Wang Xuefeng 01-0111
- Wu Yucheng 03-1251
- Wu Guangrang 03-1252
- Xu Xingguo 03-1253
- Yang Qihe 03-1254
- Nie Xiwei 04-1791
- Shuangyan 05-2622
- Zhu Wenqian 05-2623
- Xu Shuzhang 05-2624
- Wu Weiqing 05-2625
- Wang Dengshu 05-2626
- Hu Xinming 05-2627
- Yang Jianian 05-2628
- Liu Chengyin
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
This static English edition is rendered at the edge for search engines, AI crawlers and readers without JavaScript; it mirrors the bilingual dossier. 阅读中文版，或返回 英文名录。