Sculpture Art of Chenjiaci

The architecture of Chenjiaci is famous for its exquisite decoration and grandeur. Wood carving, stone carving, brick carving, clay sculpture, pottery sculpture, iron casting and other decorations are all over the eaves, halls, courtyards and corridors inside and outside the ancestral hall. With a wide range of design themes, vivid modeling, exquisite carving skills and simple and extensive brushwork, it is integrated with the majestic hall and is known as the "Pearl of Lingnan Architectural Art".

Between the walls in front of the Chenjiaci, there are six large brick carvings in scroll style, each 4 meters long. They are carved from pieces of blue bricks and then connected into a whole. Three-dimensional multi-level pictures include myths and legends, landscape gardens, flowers and animals, Zhong Ding Yi Ming and so on. Pottery and plastic handicrafts are concentrated on the tile ridge of the roof of 19 hall; Brick carving is the largest in the east and west walls; Gray sculptures are concentrated on tile ridges and courtyards, and are made by Nanhai gray sculpture artists. In addition to the beam frame, gate and screen, Juxiantang has a 1 1 double carved shrine in the back seat, which is tall and has inscriptions such as "16th year of Guangxu", "Made in Liu Dechang, Huilan Bridge" and "Made in Taiyuan Street".

Various carvings and decorations on buildings are mainly organized by builders in various provinces and counties to hire a large number of skilled craftsmen to concentrate on production in Guangzhou. According to the available data, the artists who participated in the brick carving system are Huang Nanshan, Yang Jianting and Li in Panyu, and Chen, Chen, Chen and Li in Nanhai County. Among them, Huangnan Mountain has the largest number of sculptures.

Chen's Ancestral Hall was renovated on 1958 and transformed into Guangdong Folk Arts and Crafts Museum. Comrade Guo Moruo once left a five-character poem after his inspection in 1959: "Heaven can be replaced by workers, but man-made heaven is inferior. Sure enough, creating a world is better than studying for ten years. " As early as the 1920s, the architectural decoration technology of Chenjiaci attracted the attention of architectural experts and scholars at home and abroad, and was introduced in German and Japanese architectural art monographs. Wood carving is the largest and largest architectural decoration of Chen Academy. The wood carving industry gradually flourished in the Ming Dynasty, and grew with the development of hardwood (commonly known as mahogany) furniture, a traditional handicraft in Lingnan. The screen door, niche cover, flower cover, beam frame, pier, bucket arch, cornices and sparrows of Chen Academy are widely decorated with wood carvings.

The wood carvings of Chen Academy are mainly reliefs and carvings, and countless historical stories and auspicious patterns are carved on almost all the wooden components up and down the building. The beams of the first entrance are engraved with woodcarvings with historical stories and folklore as themes, such as "The Queen Mother's Birthday" and "The Union of Practitioners". Among them, in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a group of bronze pavilions at Cao Cao's banquet depicts the scene of Cao Cao sitting on the bronze pavilions and watching the contest between tinker generals, highlighting the scene of Huang Xu and Chu Xu competing for brocade robes after the contest.

Twenty double-sided carved screens with historical stories and folklore as themes are known as "historical story corridors carved by folk artists with wood and steel knives". Houdian 1 1 The 8-meter-high woodcarving shrine is large in scale, with countless stories of dragons and phoenixes. They are the largest extant masterpieces of Qing Dynasty woodcarving in Guangdong. The stone carvings of Chen Shuyuan are mainly granite. Widely used in Baogushi, Shishi, platform, abutment, dado, column base, door, vertical belt, steps, railings, railings, cornice columns, moon beams, beam houses, sparrows and other places. These building components, which are easily eroded by sunlight and wind and rain, are made of granite stone, which is moisture-proof, mildew-proof and durable. The light gray tone of granite contrasts with the profound theme of brick-wood architecture, which sets each other off and has distinct layers.

The platform in front of Juxian Hall of Chen Academy is the representative of Lingnan stone carving decoration technology, which integrates various techniques such as round carving, high relief, relief, engraving and intaglio. A variety of flowers, birds and fruits are carved on the railing of the platform. Plates with hollowed-out railings and carved Lingnan fruits such as pineapple, carambola, peach and bergamot are full of Lingnan customs, which also reflects the sincere respect of Chen's descendants who sacrificed fruits to the gods and ancestors of heaven and earth all the year round.

The facade of the eaves gallery of Chen Academy is composed of eaves columns, moon beams, beams, sparrows, railings, railings and so on. The upper end of the stone pillar is inlaid with ornaments carved with circular stories, with themes such as "Wei Shui visits sages", "Ceng Zi kills pigs", "Kong meets Jiang Wei" and "He Erxian". Liang Shu, Queti and Fenban are all engraved with auspicious patterns or stories. There is also a pair of stone lions in front of the gate (the pedestal has been lost). Masons carved a lively, peaceful and smiling beast with rounded and concise lines, which is the representative of Guangdong Shishi style. Brick carving is one of the main decorative techniques of Chen Academy. Brick carvings are used for the decoration of exterior walls, stilts and eaves. The six large-scale brick carvings on the front of Chen Academy are exquisite Dongguan blue bricks, which are rare large-scale brick carvings at the same time. Among them, two brick carvings, Liangshan Juyi and Liu Qingfu Langju, are1.75m in height and 3.6m in width, while the other four brick carvings are "Hundred Birds", "Five Wheeled Springs", "Phoenix of phoenix tree and willow tree" and "Songbird", with poems of different styles engraved on both sides of the characters. Chen Shuyuan's brick carving, which combines poetry and calligraphy, is rare at the same time. Decorative lines under the eaves of external walls and along the porch doors are arranged neatly, dense, vigorous, slender and even, vertical as lines, and beautifully carved, which is called "hanging line brick carving".

Brick carvings are decorated on the heads of outsiders in the ninth hall of Sanjin Road, the main building of Chen Academy. The top of these brick carvings is a ray of carved arches, the middle is the theme pattern, the upper and lower sides are decorative patterns, and the lower part is the subtitle pattern and signature. Its themes include auspicious patterns, folklore and historical stories. Such as: the magpie climbs the plum blossom, the mouse gnaws at the grape, and from then on, it is happy, the dragon and the phoenix become auspicious, the great teacher Shao Shi, a picture of a bamboo crane, a persistent melon, a stolen peach, a birthday present stolen by Magu, the harmony between the two immortals, and the secret.

The brick carving of Chen Shuyuan is mainly in relief, and adopts techniques such as through carving, round carving and hollow carving. The brick carvings of Chen Academy are carefully made by famous folk artists from Nanhai and Panyu, such as Huang Nanshan, Yang Jianting, Li, Chen,, and so on. Artists arranged patterns and decorations as needed, which enriched the monotonous wall surface, highlighted the style of Guangdong brick carving, and added a lot of color to Chen Shuyuan's architecture, becoming the representative of Lingnan architectural brick carving art in Qing Dynasty. Grey plastic is a kind of architectural decoration art widely used in traditional buildings in the Pearl River Delta. Folk artists use lime as the main raw material, add fermented straw or toilet paper, and after repeated tempering, make straw reinforced ash or paper reinforced ash, and then design patterns according to the needs of building space and decorative parts, and make them on the spot where decoration is needed. Generally, straw reinforcement and ash pile are used for molding first, and then paper reinforcement and ash are used for fine plastic surface. After drying to a certain extent, it is finally painted with various colors.

Chen Shuyuan's grey sculpture is 2,562 meters long, with a total area of about 2,448 square meters. It is mainly used for roofs of house foundations, gable ridges, porch roofs, wing rooms, courtyard corridors and east-west halls, and its scale is the highest in Lingnan. Judging from the theme of the gray plastic decoration of Chen Academy, there are myths and legends, historical stories, opera figures, various auspicious patterns composed of auspicious birds and animals, flowers and fruits, auspicious words, and landscape patterns such as landscapes, pavilions and pavilions, which are mostly loved by the people. Shiwan pottery ridge decoration, also known as "flower ridge", is made of clay sculpture and then calcined. It is a special craft specially decorated in temples, ancestral halls, halls and other large buildings. This decorative technique originated in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties, flourished in the late Qing Dynasty, and was mainly popular in Lingnan area of China, reflecting the rich decorative style of folk architecture in South Guangdong.

The main spine of the Academy is made of Foshan pottery sculpture *** 1 1, which was made by Wen, Bao Yurong, Mei Yucheng and Wu Qiyu respectively, and its quantity and scale reflected the economic strength of the Chen family in Guangdong at that time. The first five articles and Juxiantang Ridge were in the 17th year of Guangxu (189 1) (Juxiantang Ridge was blown down by typhoon in 1976 and rebuilt in 198 1 year) and 19th year (1893) respectively. 1 1 Among the ridge ornaments, Juxiantang is the largest, with a total length of 27 meters, a height of 2.9 meters and a total height of 4.26 meters, and a gray plastic base. The whole spine is carved with 224 characters, and the themes include Happy Birthday of the Eight Immortals, promotion of officials and knights, tramps and Li Jing. The themes of other ridge decorations are mainly dragons and phoenixes, flowers and birds, animals, landscapes, historical stories and group images. Copper and iron casting and painting are two methods of architectural decoration of Chen Academy. Although it is rarely used in the whole academy building, it plays a role in making the finishing point.

The columns of Chen Shuyuan corridor and the railings of platform fence are all decorated with iron castings, which are rare in traditional buildings in Qing Dynasty. Folk artists skillfully embedded the cast iron flower fence into the stone carving frame of the fence. The platform fence uses the color contrast between iron and stone and the transparent three-dimensional modeling of cast iron to produce a unique decorative effect like traditional Chinese painting, which has become a major feature of the architectural decorative art of Chen Academy. Among them, "Kirin Jade Book Phoenix Map", "Happy Ever After" and "Sanyang Kaitai" are all made of Foshan pig iron by casting, stamping or casting. These iron casting decorative techniques absorbed western architectural decorative techniques and combined with the theme elements of China traditional culture, which brought out the best in each other.

Gorgeous painted door gods on the gate of Chen Academy. There are many murals in the east wing and west wing of the college. The theme of the mural is Teng Wang Ge, Tao Li Banquet, and the figures are Wang Bo and Li Bai. Academy couplets mainly express the praise and memory of the achievements of the ancestors and the ideals and wishes of the ancestors. Couplets are mostly regular script, which is unique.