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The amazing microscopic world of a micro-carver
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EDITOR’S Note:
The marketplace at the popular Yuyuan Garden tourism area in Shanghai is a potpourri of traditional Chinese folk arts. Shanghai Daily is running a series on the craftsmen who are carrying ancient culture into the modern age.
AT the Yuyuan Garden, where the din and bustle of tourism goes from dawn to dusk, Zhou Yukun sits over a microscope every day, carving names on stones.
It is an exacting art. One English name carved on a minute piece of stone is no more than six or seven millimeters in length. Zhou’s personal record is 251 English letters carved on a human hair under a centimeter long.
Zhou, 55, has honed his skill as a micro-carver over 30 years. He traces that interest to his childhood and a story surrounding his grandfather.
“I was told that my grandfather, a cultured man, was able to write an article on the shell of a watermelon seed with a very slim brush, although none of these supposed works ever survived,” Zhou says.
His father was a factory worker, well versed in ancient Chinese literature and crafts. Zhou began learning calligraphy and seal carving at a young age. It was obvious early on that he was a gifted craftsman.
“Learning the skills was never painful for me,” he says. “I always felt like I was doing something that I had done in a previous life.”
His first inspiration was Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) master Wen Zhengming’s Kai-style transcription of the famous “Zui Weng Ting Ji,” or “On the Drunken Old-Man Pavilion,” penned by Ouyang Xiu, a renowned writer of the North Song Dynasty (960-1127).
“I enjoyed the sheer sight of the transcription even when, as a child, I wasn’t able to fully understand the text,” he says.
Zhou would later apply the Kai style, which is characterized by disciplined and defined strokes, to many of his works.
Knife work comprises 70-80 percent of his carving work. The rest is sheer skill, according to Zhou. The most important trait he brings to his work is utter patience.
In a rented 12-square-meter farmer’s shed in Wujiaochang, which is today a fashion shopping center in Yangpu District, Zhou began his carving career. He was working in a factory at the time.
“My little private space wasn’t far from my factory, and, most importantly, its surroundings were very quiet so that my intense working was undisturbed,” he says.
He spent two years grinding his special knife under a microscope of up to 100 times magnification, which he bought for 2,000 yuan (US$299) in the early 1990s — roughly five times his monthly salary at the time. It was the knife he was to use for carving on human hair.
“The knife had to be infinitely more pointed than a needle and shaped at perfect angles,” he says. “Even the slightest bit of too much grinding set me back weeks or even months.”
The knife was made from specialty steel inured with the hardness he needed for grinding.
For most micro-carving masters, ivory has been a favored material since ancient times because of its high density and ease in coloring with ink. Some micro-carvers use pig bristles for hair carving. Human hairs represent the penultimate challenge.
In 1995, Zhou was so committed to carving on a human hair that he resigned his job to devote full time to his passion.
“I would never have been able to find the time to do it if I had kept my job,” he says.
Before putting the knife to the hair, Zhou says he had to “rest his heart.”
“I drank tea and read books every day to prepare myself for the task,” he recalls. “Carving on hair requires one to be totally poised and stationary.”
The human hair, 0.2 millimeter in diameter, was magnified 60 times under Zhou’s microscope.
“I felt as though I was floating when carving,” he says. “The technique is ‘aerial’ because the hair with its rich fiber is easily slit into slices with the knife.”
After numerous failed attempts in six months, he finally succeeded in carving 243 English letters, which are the names of 10 famous Chinese guzheng (Chinese zither) tunes, on a human hair that is 0.982 centimeters long. He then set a new record with 251 letters. Both records were verified by a local record-collecting organization.
Zhou started to sell his micro-carvings in the late 1990s. In 2011, he produced what he considers his masterpiece, managing to carve the 276 Chinese characters of the translated Buddhist classic Prajna Paramita Heart Sutra in his favorite Kai style on a hair 5.86 centimeters long.
Carving in Chinese, where the characters are usually in vertical order, is more challenging than carving in English, he says. Chinese characters are more complicated to reproduce.
“A carving knife is not a writing brush, so carving a slash in a Chinese character in the Kai style, for example, actually means hollowing out a triangular dent,” Zhou says.
But that is not the sole challenge.
“When carving on such thin materials as human hair and pig bristles, you can hardly see the first two or three characters you carve, which means that you can only carve with your senses, not your eyes,” he says.
Carving for hours in front of tourists in the Yuyuan Garden every day often leaves him exhausted and too tired to continue his work at home.
“I give my best in carving every piece of work I do,” he says.
Hair carvings aren’t a money-spinner at Zhou’s stall in the Yuyuan Garden. Most customers want works on stones and pearls. Even if someone wanted a hair carving, determining a price would be hard.
“I’m reluctant to give up these works because nothing can measure the value of effort I put into them,” he says.
Zhou says he needs to keep fit to do his work well. He neither smokes nor drinks much, and he refrains from doing anything that might damage his eyes.
He has taken on apprentices. A few of them have evolved into quite good craftsmen.
“I love to teach anyone who is calm and patient by temperament and who maintains personal integrity,” he says.
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