Sugar Sculpture
01 · Historical Records
In former times, Chengdu sugar-painting artists mostly traveled from village to town with Sichuan opera troupes, melting sugar and painting on the open threshing grounds of temple fairs, lantern festivals, and market towns; wherever the opera troupe performed, a sugar-painting stall would be set up, and so Sichuan opera figures became the subject the veteran artists knew best. This trade flourished in Chengdu's urban and rural areas in the first half of the 20th century, with artists assigned stalls by street lane and market town, each keeping to his own territory.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
Sugar sculpture is a distinctive category of traditional Chinese folk modeling art, one that primarily exploits the plasticity of sugar to shape it into forms. Unlike Western sculpture, Chinese folk modeling incorporates rich formative elements such as painting, sculpture, carving, seal-engraving, and decoration, reflecting more strongly the aesthetic inclinations and technical character of its own tradition. Sugar sculpture generally uses malt syrup and corn sugar — the malt syrup being colloquially known as "tang xi" (sugar syrup) — as its raw materials, and completes its pieces through a combination of shaping techniques: pinching, piling, pasting, cutting, blowing, rubbing, pulling, pressing, pouring, and stretching, together with decorative methods such as painting, dyeing, carving, scratching, dotting, poking, stamping, inserting, and attaching. Sugar-sculpture pieces can be appreciated and played with, and can also be eaten directly. In Chinese folk life, sugar sculpture is found throughout the north and the south, with a broad popular base, and is closely bound up with everyday customs. Chengdu sugar painting, colloquially known as "pouring sugar cakes" (dao tang bing er), "sugar cakes" (tang ba ba er), and "sugar shadow figures" (tang deng ying er), is a folk art popular in the Chengdu area of Sichuan Province that combines both sculptural and painterly qualities. Chengdu sugar painting has a long history. According to the Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao Gangmu): "When white sugar is melted and molded into the forms of human figures, lions, and elephants, it is called xiang tang (feast sugar); this is what the commentary to the Book of the Later Han refers to as ni tang. "Sugar painting, which uses melted sugar as its raw material, evolved from xiang tang; in the course of its development it continuously absorbed the expressive techniques of shadow puppetry, paper cutting, and other folk arts, gradually forming a special folk plastic art characterized by modeling through masses and lines. Chengdu sugar painting takes flowers, birds, fish, insects, flying birds and running beasts, and dramatic figures as its subjects; its finished works are both sweet sugar food and art objects for appreciation — as the saying goes, "viewed as a painting, eaten with flavor." Chengdu sugar painting embodies people's wishes for blessing and their aesthetic ideals; its products are deeply loved by children and young people, and so traces of sugar painting can be found at urban and rural temple fairs, markets, and other mass cultural occasions in the Chengdu area.
Poured sugar cakes and sugar shadow figures
Its popular names include poured sugar cakes and sugar shadow figures, the latter echoing the shadow puppetry it absorbed.
Copper ladle and stone slab
A copper ladle pours the molten sugar onto an oiled stone slab where the figure sets, a bamboo stick pressed in while it is still hot.
Flat pieces and filled pieces
Two modes of work; the inheritor Fan Deran excelled at flat and filled pieces and at opera characters.
Flooding Jinshan, Fengyi Pavilion, Battle of Changsha
Signature pieces by Fan Deran, all famous episodes of Sichuan opera whose troupes he followed as a young man.
A picture to the eye, a sweet to the tongue
Its products are at once sweets and pictures, bearing wishes for good fortune and loved by children at fairs and markets.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Chengdu sugar painting is most concentrated in the temple fairs around Qingyang Palace and Wenshu Monastery in the urban center and in the market towns of the eastern suburbs; Jinjiang District still preserves the activity of sugar-painting artists, and Pidu, Wenjiang, Jianyang, and other places also have transmission. The works mostly use bamboo skewers as their armature; the artist draws out the lines in a single motion while the sugar liquid is on the point of setting but not yet set, and once cooled the piece is removed and stuck into a bamboo skewer rack for sale.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Sugar Sculpture · Sugar Sculpture.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
Fan Deran (recorded in the official archives of the associated inheritor): He performed for pay with his teacher in the area around Jianyang, mostly following Sichuan opera troupes on the move, and so the "pouring" (casting) of Sichuan opera figures was his specialty. After the War of Resistance, he drifted to Chengdu, settled there, and made his living by performing. The sugar paintings he made excelled at "flat-panel pieces" (ban ban huo) and "filled pieces" (tian zhuang huo) as well as dramatic figures, and he could accurately capture both the form and the spirit of his subjects. His modeling technique was steady and composed, his forms based primarily on mass; the stable masses and the flowing lines are ingeniously combined and set each other off. His representative works include The Flooding of Jinshan, Fengyi Pavilion, and The Battle of Changsha. Before 1949 he took five disciples; after the reform and opening-up he took on young apprentices including Chen Changji, Wu Fengquan, Xie Fengkun, and Zhang Daocheng, enabling the transmission and development of the sugar-painting craft. Male, Han ethnicity, born in July 1924, died in August 2015, from Jianyang, Sichuan Province. He was a representative inheritor of Sugar Sculpture (Chengdu Sugar Painting), a national-level intangible cultural heritage project, in the third national-level batch.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Fan Deran 03-1297
- Luo Zhaoying 05-2699
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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