[阅读小分队] 【揽瓜阁 外刊精读7.0】Day8 2021.04.19【人文科学-传统艺术、文学】

This spring the usual 100,000 or so applicants vying for just 1,700 places at one of China’s most prestigious art colleges were not squeezing into vast halls for the gruelling four-day entrance exam. Instead, as a result of the Covid pandemic, the China Academy of Art hopefuls found the whole process had been moved online.

All the CAA’s courses, which include fine art, ceramics, architecture and fashion, are wildly oversubscribed and for those wishing to study jewellery, there are just 20 places on the undergraduate course and a handful for the masters degree. The jewellery course also attracts international students from around the world.

The CAA was founded in 1928, but the jewellery department is just 10 years old. Its evolution reflects a desire to rediscover and celebrate traditional Chinese culture while building a bridge to the modern world and serving a soaring consumer market.

“We want to teach students how to use traditional techniques in a contemporary way but also keep a global view on what is happening in the international scene,” says Zhenghong Wang, vice-dean of the college of crafts and head of the jewellery school at the CAA. “Chinese culture is the key point of our programme. Every class is linked with a tradition — even the basic technical classes are linked with a cultural background.”

This includes teaching the enamelling technique of cloisonné as well as metal folding — both are practised by a dwindling number of craftspeople in the country. Ms Wang is also keen to teach the jewellery-making traditions of China’s minorities in the west and south of the country.

It is a challenging undertaking, particularly given that China is “starting from zero” when it comes to building a contemporary jewellery sector. This is the opinion of Ruudt Peters, one of the Netherlands’, and Europe’s, most eminent artist-jewellers. He has a close relationship with the CAA’s jewellery studio, which he has visited many times to teach.

“In fine art there are some really intriguing artists who have found their own identity based in their Chinese roots,” he says. “In jewellery I feel there is still a missing link. Their teachers have been sent to Europe to get their training, then they come back and coach students to become good westernised jewellers.”

But Mr Peters also sees work that he much admires and even finds “heartbreaking”. He recently curated a jewellery exhibition sponsored by the CAA, and first shown in Hangzhou in 2018, called 21 Grams. It showed works by 160 jewellers, split evenly between those from the west and China. The pieces were made in response to the name of the show, which refers to the amount of weight lost by a human body at the moment of death. This was observed by a US doctor in the early 1900s and was interpreted to represent the weight of the soul. Each piece of jewellery weighed 21 grammes.

“21 Grams was a challenge and I am very happy the CAA allowed me to do it. But they were very afraid of the ghost of the soul,” says Mr Peters. “Some Chinese jewellers made strong work in the traditional way but brought it up to date. I loved those pieces. But some in China thought they were not good or relevant, only old-fashioned.”

“During the cultural revolution Mao eradicated all China’s heritage. Jewellery was forbidden; no one was allowed to wear it,” says Anja Eichler, a German contemporary jeweller who spent three years in China from 2011, studying and researching its contemporary jewellery scene. “Now that the country is a strong economic power it wants to reinvent its heritage and it sees a strong culture as an indicator of a developed country, although crafts are still not very well appreciated.”

For its part, the CAA jewellery studio is firm in its aims of teaching its students to reach into the past for inspiration and to teach them the skills to make their work by hand. The jewellery of the final-year students, displayed in their graduate show in June, was inspired by a field trip to the Buddhist caves of Dunhuang, in north-west China. The purpose of the trip was to study the cave paintings, which date back to the fourth century, and the local architecture.

Of those graduating students, typically almost half would continue their studies overseas, some would become teachers and a few would set up their own studio.

Qian Zhongshu, a graduate of the CAA, first studied sculpture there. He now runs a successful jewellery studio in Hangzhou. He became fascinated by antique jewellery, and began collecting often broken pieces with little monetary value. He used his sculpture skills to redesign and embellish them, to “give old pieces new value and meaning”.

“I aim to combine classic Chinese style with modern art. I love goldfish, butterflies, folding fans and moon-shaped fans, and I make a lot of jewellery pieces of them. They have become my signature work. I have attracted a celebrity following.”