Qiu Shuangjiong was born in a poor family on the first day of the first lunar month in the 21st year of the Republic of China. His father died when he was 5 years old. His younger sister was sold as a child bride at the age of 2. The orphans and widowed parents depended on each other for survival. Xiaozu's mother earns a meager income by renting a small amount of land on the outskirts of the city and doing small craft processing. He entered Minglun Primary School at the age of 7, and later attended Xunzhong, Yuying, Yanta Primary School, and the Provincial Kedehua Normal School Affiliated Primary School. In the 34th year of the Republic of China (1945), Xia graduated from primary school and was admitted to the Provincial Jinjiang Middle School (today’s Quanzhou No. 5 Middle School, Dehua Confucian Temple was relocated during the Anti-Japanese War) and Dehua County Junior High School. Because his mother was bedridden with lung disease, she was unable to enter. Read and drop out of school. Later, he worked in the Gemaoyuan Porcelain Sculpture Workshop in Chengtian Temple and sometimes practiced porcelain sculpture craftsmanship. Not long after, Xu Jinxuan, the owner of the porcelain sculpture workshop, was caught as a prostitute and the workshop closed down. Xiao Shuangjiong also lost his job. Her mother is recovering from an illness, her financial resources are cut off, and her life is extremely difficult. The following year, Xiao Shuangjiong entered Yunyu Porcelain Manor as an apprentice, and became a disciple of Su Qinming, the owner of the porcelain manor and a famous sculpture artist. This was a key step for him to later climb the peak of porcelain art. After going through many hardships, I also developed a persevering character.
For 40 years, he dedicated the best years of his life to Dehua’s hydropower industry. During this period, Dehua successfully promoted the new technology of using electricity instead of firewood to make porcelain, promoting the rapid development of the ceramic industry and achieving a win-win situation for the ceramic industry and environmental protection.
Growing up in the hometown of white porcelain in China, he is obsessed with the creation of porcelain sculptures. He uses his spare time to learn professional theoretical knowledge of ceramics, engage in porcelain clay formulas and ceramic creations. While adhering to the traditional folk sculpture skills of Dehua, Committed to creating a new chapter in sculpture techniques, Dehua ceramics will become more perfect and go further.
He is Qiu Shuangjiong.
Master Qiu Shuangjiong at work
A poor boy became a master of porcelain carving through many hardships
Qiu Shuangjiong traveled all over his life, experienced countless ups and downs, and honed his capable style. When the reporter interviewed him, he got to the point without too many pleasantries. Most of the time he talks about his past.
At Yunyu Porcelain Manor, he showed the advantages of being intelligent, diligent in learning, and receptive. He often extended his homework time and used a small oil lamp to work overtime at night. He was good at observing and pondering, dared to try boldly, and deeply understood things. He gained the respect of his master and made rapid progress.
Later, due to poor access to porcelain, the master’s porcelain business went downhill. All the brothers and sisters around him changed careers, and the number of people gradually decreased from five or six to just him. The porcelain village also had no business for a long time Develop new products. He took out the previous molds and made them again. A room was full of finished products, so the master had to borrow a room from a neighbor to install them. Soon, the borrowed room was also filled with finished products. Six years after he entered the porcelain village, his master had no choice but to let him go home first and then find a way out.
At this time, he had already learned the preliminary basic knowledge and basic techniques of ceramic sculpture, and thus formed an inseparable lifelong relationship with the art of ceramic sculpture.
In the summer of 1951, Dehua recruited two correspondents, and he was lucky enough to be selected. In the late 1950s, he took up leadership positions in the county water and electricity department. Because he was busier at work and had no time to take into account his interests and hobbies, he temporarily said goodbye to his porcelain sculpture work. Fast forward ten or twenty years.
During this period, he never let go of his passion for sculpture art and always looked for opportunities to get closer. When traveling on business trips, he often visited bookstores to look for books on sculpture art and crafts, and kiln knowledge, such as "Human Anatomy for Art", "Ceramic Technology", "Ceramic Sculpture Technology", etc., and bought them back, devouring them in his spare time. Read freely, find "old love" from books, and fill spiritual needs.
For some time after that, he felt poor and empty, and rekindled his urgent need for practical skills. He continued to contact and explore ceramic production and practical craftsmanship, and "secretly" "kneaded" porcelain clay in private. Come. He built a "small laboratory" at home to test recipes; he used a small table to set up a porcelain sculpture workbench, and used a small porcelain sculpture scraper to create small works such as characters and animals. He also designed and built a miniature electric kiln by himself, and tried firing porcelain with electricity.
In 1977, he served as a member of the Standing Committee of the Dehua County Party Committee (later deputy secretary), in charge of industry. Due to work needs, he often went to the countryside, factories, and construction sites to get in touch with the actual situation and check the progress of the project. quality. He often took advantage of this opportunity to collect ceramic raw material ore samples, and brought them back to the relevant porcelain factories for various experiments, or conducted experiments himself.
From 1984 to 1985, in order to test a new type of glaze porcelain, he spent more than 100 nights conducting more than 100 experiments, and finally accidentally succeeded in a simple and elegant iron-based flower. Glaze "Agate Glaze". The color of this kind of enamel is like agate, which is gorgeous, dazzling and extraordinary. It looks like black glaze on the outside, but when illuminated by strong light, it flashes with the color of bleeding ruby.
In the late 1970s, Dehua had two state-owned ceramic factories, seven or eight township factories, and more than 30 village-run factories. There are not many porcelain factories, but every porcelain factory is a "firewood tiger" and consumes an astonishing amount of wood. At that time, every porcelain factory had piles of firewood piled up in the shape of a pagoda, with the base being more than 10 meters long and wide and 5-6 meters high.
According to statistics, in 1982, Dehua Ceramics Factory developed to more than 100 factories, with an annual output value of less than 100 million yuan and an annual wood consumption of up to 100,000 square meters. If this continues, the nearby forests will be cleared and burned. At that time, experts calculated that Dehua's forest stockings could only meet the needs of the porcelain industry for nine years.
"Corresponding to the wooden towers piled up by the ceramics factory at that time, the surrounding hills were all bare, and even the masson pine trees were cut down to only the last three branches of the treetops, becoming a veritable 'horsetail' The sky is also gray, as if it has been covered by fog all day long. If you go outside, your nose will be full of black dust. In the long run, the mountains will become bald and the air will become turbid, which will bring harm to future generations. Endless disasters." Qiu Shuangjiong, then deputy secretary of the Dehua County Party Committee, still feels sad when talking about the scene at that time.
“We can’t continue burning, we must know what is most important!” After long-term exploration, experimentation, and debugging, he came up with the idea of ??“using water to generate electricity and using electricity to burn porcelain” and was determined to promote the implementation of Dehua Use electricity instead of firewood to make ceramics.
In March 1981, Dehua established an energy conservation office and organized a number of scientific and technical personnel and 150,000 yuan of capital to invest in electric kiln technology. After three months of research, the first "electric kiln" was successfully tested for porcelain firing at Erqing Porcelain Factory in Dehua County.
The success and implementation of this technological reform have promoted the sustainable development of the ceramic industry to a certain extent despite the energy shortage. And smoothly transitioned to the later era of open supply of petroleum and liquefied gas, and implemented the simultaneous use of electricity, oil and gas for porcelain firing.
In the spring of 1991, Qiu Shuangjiong retired and set out to establish the "Dehua Phoenix Ceramic Sculpture Research Institute". Dedicated to the study of porcelain sculpture art.
For many years, he has been unswerving in his determination, forgetting to eat and sleep, and immersed himself in his "second spring" ideal - ceramic art. He continues to complete the ceramic scientific research and experimental projects he has determined and launches new works one after another. For example, there are traditional themes of historical figures such as Confucius, Zhuge Liang, Guan Yunchang, Yang Guifei, Taoist and Buddhist Laozi, Guanyin, Bodhidharma, Arhat, Maitreya, etc. in various postures, and even animal and flower vessels such as deer, leopard, eagle, galloping horse, etc. Small vases with flower glaze, small pen holders, etc.
In order to create an environment more conducive to ceramic scientific research and porcelain sculpture art creation, he chose the beautiful northern slope of Fenghuang Mountain in the north of the city from 1993 to 1994 to build a small art garden that combined art and scientific research. During the Spring Festival of 1995, he took his wife and young artist away from the downtown area of ??Chengguan to the elegant and quiet Xiaoyiyuan, where he devoted himself more to the research and pursuit of art and technology.
In just a few years, he has continuously created new works and achieved new achievements in the research of "thin-body colored sculpture" and water-based pigment "underglaze decoration" technology. Its liquid pigment underglaze multicolor and thin-body colored sculpture techniques break through the traditional technical framework in a sense and embark on a unique craft path, which not only inherits tradition but also pioneers and innovates.
He was recognized as a "senior arts and crafts artist" by the Fujian Provincial Title Reform Leading Department, and was also elected as the president of the Dehua County Ceramic Culture Research Association.
A somewhat thin but wise and open-minded old man, this is the first impression Mr. Qiu Shuangjiong left on me.
A friend in Dehua once said that when interviewing him, one should observe his demeanor and then compare it with the Maitreya Buddha he created, and you will find many similarities. Upon closer inspection, it makes sense. In addition to his bright eyebrows and charming smile, he is "tolerant, generous, optimistic and optimistic".
His home is an ordinary building located at the foot of Phoenix Mountain in Dehua. The small building is close to the mountain, with green trees and frogs croaking from time to time from the pond. It has the artistic conception of "picking chrysanthemums under the eastern fence and leisurely seeing the southern mountain".
When we walked into his house, our biggest feeling was "simplicity". The large living room, apart from the coffee table, only contains books, works and a computer needed for work. Other rooms, apart from daily needs, are used for artistic creation.
In this house, he always maintained a calm smile, pursuing his own artistic ideals, pursuing the charm of He Chaozong, a master of porcelain sculpture in the Ming Dynasty, and pursuing the use of unique sculptural language .
As a representative figure of Dehua porcelain carvings, some people call him a leader and master in the industry. But when he talked about these titles, he only said lightly that he was not a master, but a veteran engaged in the research and creation of Dehua traditional porcelain carving art; he was not a master, but just a person responsible for inheriting traditional porcelain carving skills. teacher.
In his opinion, being able to carry forward the art of porcelain carving and cultivate many promising students is his greatest achievement.
There is an old saying that after the fifteenth month, there is little light, and when a person reaches old age, everything will stop. However, the unremitting pursuit, perseverance and hard work he showed after his retirement completely rewrote this sentence. At the age of 76, he is still devoted to the creation of various ceramic works, adding luster to the palace of ceramic art.
For many years, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to creating sculptures and was extremely busy. After "The Drunken Concubine", "The Concubine Leaving the Bath", "Mulan in Disguise", etc. were collected by the National Museum of History of China and the China Art Museum of Arts and Crafts, he also thought of using the newly developed luminescent ceramics to create more masterpieces that will be handed down for generations. After spending two or three years creating large-scale porcelain sculptures of 500 Arhats and 108 Generals from Water Margin, he set a new goal for himself: In his limited energy, he would inherit the style of He Chaozong's works and devote himself to completing several orphan sculptures. Taste. The old man is brave and ambitious, and his ambition is thousands of miles. "Creating difficult works and original works" is his pursuit and ideal of ceramic creation.
Famous Honors: Member of China Arts and Crafts Society, Senior Arts and Crafts Artist of Fujian Province, Honorary President of the Former Dehua Ceramics Industry Association, President of Dehua County Ceramic Culture Research Association, Dehua County Phoenix Ceramic Sculpture Research Institute Director, Honorary Advisor of Dehua Ceramics Station.