How to write a thesis on the history of Chinese arts and crafts?

The Development of Metal Craft in the Stage of Chinese Historical Arts and Crafts

Executive Summary: This paper shows what is Chinese Arts and Crafts, the position of one of the Chinese Arts and Crafts, the development of Metal Craft in Chinese Arts and Crafts, the development of the market of Metal Craft in the contemporary demand, as well as some feasible creations of Metal Craft in the design and art, and introduces a person around us who creates art with Metal Craft and her artistic behavior. metal craft for artistic creation and her artistic behavior.

Keywords: ancient Chinese arts and crafts, cloisonné\fired porcelain\filigree inlay\spotted copper craft\tin craft\iron painting\gold and silver jewelry, etc., today's market for metal crafts, metal craft uses, creating metal crafts, "Tieguo", Guo Xin, Twocities

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First we need to understand, what is the ancient Chinese arts and crafts?

Ancient Chinese Arts and Crafts is a general term for the artificial artifacts created by the Chinese people to satisfy their material and spiritual needs under different historical conditions, using various material materials and craft techniques. It is an important part of the plastic arts of the Chinese nation, which not only embodies the general essential characteristics of arts and crafts, but also maintains the unity of practicality and aesthetics in terms of connotation and form, and shows the distinctive character of the Chinese national culture itself. Chinese arts and crafts, with its long history, distinctive style, superb skills and rich and varied forms, has written a chapter full of wisdom and spiritual light for the history of cultural creation of the whole mankind. Arts and crafts have the attributes of both material and spiritual civilization. Although it is not pure art, and its creation does not aim at shocking people's hearts or moralizing, its influence on human beings is by no means less than that of pure art. Because people can not appreciate pure art, but do not have to specifically appreciate it, but it is always in a constant supply of formal language, subconsciously cultivate the basic aesthetic consciousness of people, like the shadow of the shadow of the ultimate aesthetic judgment of people. Ancient Chinese arts and crafts have long been renowned as a vehicle for the spread of Chinese civilization, and when people outside of China use Chinese arts and crafts, they are also aware of Chinese civilization in a subtle way. (Referring to "Heavenly Public Objects")

The term "arts and crafts" refers to traditional arts and crafts with a long tradition of skills, rich in local and national characteristics, reflecting the spirit of classical Chinese culture, whose main categories are firing, calcining and smelting, dyeing and weaving, weaving and tying, carving, carpentry, painting and decorating, etc. Metalwork is one of the Chinese arts and crafts. Metalwork is one of China's outstanding traditional national skills. Metal craft is a special category of Chinese arts and crafts, mainly including cloisonné (cloisonné is made of fine flat copper wire pinched into a pattern, welded to the copper tire, and then filled with colorful glaze, after firing), porcelain (also known as "copper enamel", and cloisonné the difference is that the pinching is not necessary, but in the copper tire, after the tire, in the body of a layer of white glaze, and then fired. Apply a layer of white glaze, after sintering with the glaze for painting, after two or three fill color, correction and then sintering, gilding, polishing and become.) The color of the stone is made of gold, silver and other materials, and then it is inlaid with gold, silver and other materials. It is made of gold, silver and other materials, inlaid with various kinds of gems and pearls, or made by weaving techniques.) Spotted Copper Craft (Spotted Copper Craft is Yunnan's unique folk traditional crafts, which uses high-grade copper-based alloy raw materials, through casting molding, precision polishing, as well as complex post-processing made of it, it is "wonderful in the spot, the noble in the thick", the maroon surface showing bizarre flashes, magnificent mottled, subtle changes in the spots and flowers and is unique, is known as the crown of the metal crafts.) The metal craft, tin craft, iron painting (also known as iron flower, is a low carbon steel as raw material, iron and iron wire forging and welding into a variety of decorative paintings.) , gold and silver jewelry and so on.

Chinese metal art has a long history, many varieties, exquisite skills, unique style, is the bright treasure of the Chinese nation, but also the crystallization of China's outstanding cultural traditions. I think the Chinese metal art from ancient times to the present in the years of change, is in the half extinction half inheritance of the state of the next. This relative to the development of other Chinese arts and crafts category seems to tend to be a sad but not desperate state, a development of the state of the surge.

Metal craft in today, also occupy a very large demand. It's not as if we're going to replace lacquer with plastic, glass with ceramics, and traditional fabrics with industrially dyed fabrics in today's life. We now have many bars, villas, environmental sculpture, green landscape fences and so on, these need to go to many traditional metal craft along the means, and will be metal craft to carry forward, and then design and then create, so that it is different from the traditional form, making the metal craft is more fancy, and more of today's industry, humanities, public aesthetics, or the artist's creation of the materials and technology provided by the service! The metalwork of today is purely aesthetic and technical. However, today's metalwork is almost extinct in its purely handcrafted form, and these elements are only accomplished by industrial means, utilizing machines and technology. The only traditional, time-consuming, handmade metalwork we see is perhaps in some art schools, or metalwork studios.

The emergence of a large number of purely technology-led metal crafts will inevitably lead to more business opportunities for metal crafts in our society, and the emergence of business opportunities will drive the demand for this kind of crafts, and will also increase the variety of the crafts themselves. To achieve what we could not achieve through craftsmanship before. In ancient times, our ancestors basically only used metal to make weapons and tableware, or women's decorations and home decorations. Nowadays, metalwork is used for everything from the construction of skyscrapers and aerospace tools to scientific instruments that are invisible to the naked eye. It is needed for electrical appliances, for storefront decorations, for urban sculptures, and for rotating staircases in houses ......

The ancient Chinese were fascinated by metallurgy, and they were fascinated to discover the decorative qualities of metalwork that could be used to create objects of different natures. However, the achievements of ancient Chinese metal technology and its place in science and technology are not well understood by the world and even by the Chinese themselves. Chinese bronzes have long been world-famous, but until the early 1960s, the smelting and casting of Shang and Zhou bronzes was still regarded as a difficult mystery. The ancients of China were more than happy to be decorated with metalwork. Take the Chinese women's hairpin as an example, Chinese women's hairpin in ancient times in various forms, but it does not pay attention to its functionality, as long as it can be tied in the hair for decoration can be, it attaches more importance to its decorative effect, such as the Ming Dynasty, phoenix gold zan hairpin; the Song Dynasty, the gold hairpin chai, hairpin shaped like a fork, is a hairpin with two heels of pins; Tang Dynasty, the four butterflies of silver shakes; the Song Dynasty, the silver pectin zhi, pectin below the teeth, above the back, teeth have The silver pectus zhi, pectus has teeth below and a back above, and the teeth are sparse and dense, and the sparse ones are called combs, which are used for combing hair, and the dense ones are called grates, which are used for grating out the hair dirt, etc. And nowadays, we live in the metal craft more concise, pay more attention to its performance aspects, such as: black metal two-flap hairpin, simple and generous from the little girl to the grandmother can be used. Spring-loaded barrettes; ringlets dingbats and so on;

In addition to the use of these metal crafts, we are more happy to see that metal crafts are created and designed by us. More and more artists and designers like to use metal as the material for their artistic creation. For example, the famous Scandinavian furniture designer IKEA also likes to use metal craft to make some metal furniture, such as beds. In China, our major art colleges and universities are also trying to cultivate a large number of metal craft followers. And there are also specialized exhibitions of contemporary metal art works. For example, Tsinghua University Academy of Fine Arts 50th anniversary of the founding of the Academy, the Academy of Arts and Crafts Department from October 26 to November 5 in the Academy held a metal art exhibition. In their academy, metal art profession with the establishment of their academy of fine arts department of special arts, after decades of gradual improvement and development, at present the formation of metal art and jewelry art of these two specialties with characteristics of the direction. Their works, these metal art works also reflect the connotation of traditional Chinese culture from different degrees. (Refer to "Modern Art and Design Series" - "Goldsmithing Art")

In this field trip, I went to No. 50 Moganshan Road to see the "Tieguo" studio, which is a studio of artists, who make toys out of metal materials that usually seem to be discarded. This studio artist, some usually seem to be abandoned metal materials made into some toy works, there are singing Beijing opera with a big sword of the corner, there are European knights, small dinosaurs, the door of the colorful tin wind chime cans and so on, are very interesting and vivid, and will be scrap iron into treasure, this is a very good environmental protection concept of the initiative, in front of the increasingly depleted resources, the arts should be as a kind of preemptive to the existence of human things, to the form of it, widely and In the face of depleting resources, art should exist as a kind of preemptive thing to inform people who have not yet realized the problem. In the future, we should be more environmentally conscious. Metals should not be made without limit, as they will always be used up, so they should be used again and again. This "iron brother" out of the hope of the pace, a pile of waste metal into a highly decorative works of art. It's worth thinking about and learning from.

I also focused on interviews, and contact with our Shanghai University College of Fine Arts mixed-materials modeling studio, doing jewelry art female artists, Guo Xin teacher and her Twin Cities Handicraft Studio (twocities). Ms. Guo holds an M.F.A. and an M.F.A. from Indiana University. She makes "art jewelry" using metalwork as a form of artistic creation. Art jewelry is the most avant-garde form of artistic expression in jewelry design. It is directly rooted in modern art. She teaches her students to be creative in designing jewelry and to create something artistic and personalized. Art jewelry can be expressed in many different materials without restriction, and metal is one of the most common and frequently used in art jewelry. She said that metal craftsmanship has been nearly lost in the Chinese tradition. This is something that is very much to be deplored. In the West, on the other hand, the rapid development of technology has not caused the extinction of handmade art. In the West, there are many fine arts colleges that offer courses in goldsmithing. Many goldsmithing courses are studied in the same specialty as jewelry. A fully hand-forged teapot takes nearly two months to hammer out. In the modern artisanal arts movement, hand-forged tableware and utensils are a perfect combination of modern design concepts coupled with traditional craftsmanship. (Refer to Guo Xin: Shanghai University College of Fine Arts Faculty Portfolio)

Technology-led metal crafts can be described as "processed" metal crafts, which require the so-called "creative" interplay between our brains and craft practices, and are the result of a later influence. This requires the combination of brain and craft practice, the so-called "creative" each other, and the latter influence pulls the development of the former. Then with the improvement of people's artistic cultivation, metal crafts will be better and better from the ancient times to the present. And create a brighter future of metal creation