Chapter 1,796 Antique craftsmanship has a long history
In the local area, some farmers cannot make the original models they need, so they will buy them from other farmers who have such carving skills.
Depending on the size, the price ranges from several hundred yuan.
For example, the original wax model of a bronzeware being made in the shop just now was purchased from other farmers.
In Yanjian Village, although there are some people who make a living by selling original wax models, more farmers still make wax models by themselves.
This is because Yanjian Village has a history of making antique bronzes for many years, and many people have such skills.
They will make exquisite wax models for production in their own workshops and will not sell them to the public.
This also makes the bronze wares made by oneself more competitive in the market.
This is one of the technical joints, and the other is antique craftsmanship.
Rusting is the most difficult technique to master on antique bronzes, and it is also the technique that best demonstrates the level of craftsmanship of each manufacturer.
In this place, only slightly larger and better companies and shops can master the formula of chemical raw materials needed to make rust.
The workers in this kind of factory don't know how to cast bronze.
In such factories, there are often some technicians who can master only part of the formula at most, so that they can have a helper when they are overwhelmed.
Of course, this recipe will not be written on paper, it will only exist in their minds.
Similarly, in some family workshops, the spread of craftsmanship is limited to a small range of relatives.
If the workshop is large in scale and has been in the business for a long time, then there will be a total of about ten people in the family and a few hired workers making bronze wares.
Since I have been engaged in the production of bronzes for a long time, I have explored many production techniques in the past few decades.
If you live in such a family and have been exposed to it since childhood, you will be more familiar with bronze craftsmanship.
His family purchased some bronze books and saw the distinctive shapes among them, so they imitated them.
Not only the external shape, but also more complex techniques such as silver inlays were gradually explored.
With this kind of craftsmanship, its products are relatively unique and sell at a relatively high price.
Of course, relatives also teach each other.
Although the craftsmanship of these bronzes is not a secret, it can be found in many materials.
However, for producers in family workshops, it is still difficult to master many detailed methods.
In the village, craftsmanship and technology are relatively secretive from each other.
Only some relatives can teach each other. Generally, friends only give some hints at most. Whether they can master it or not depends on their own understanding.
Things are rare and expensive, and only a few people can make money when they have them. If there are too many people doing it, they will lower the price, and no one will make money.
Everyone in the world has the same idea, they all keep it secret and prepare to imitate the bronze ware as a long-term undertaking.
Chen Wenzhe saw these secrets very clearly.
He knows better that the imitation of cultural relics has a long history in our history of thousands of years.
In the history of our country, there have been four upsurges in counterfeiting of cultural relics.
The first climax occurred in the Song Dynasty. At that time, because the imperial court adopted a policy of suppressing martial arts and cultivating literature, and officials received generous salaries, a group of literati pursued antiques.
In that era when arty art was the fashion, imitations of Shang and Zhou bronzes were the main products.
The second climax was during the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, when the imitation of cultural relics focused on celebrity calligraphy and paintings.
What reflects the "grand occasion" at that time is that Emperor Qianlong also collected many fake calligraphy and paintings at that time, regarded them as authentic works, and made imperial inscriptions and postscripts on them.
The third climax occurred from the late Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China. At that time, folk craftsmen copied and imitated various cultural relics from various historical periods in China to the extent that they could create and imitate everything.
The fourth climax is from the 1990s to the present.
With the rise of folk collection craze, various cultural relic imitation workshops and factories have appeared in various places, especially in traditional historical and cultural provinces.
They are popping up like mushrooms after a rain, and the types of counterfeit cultural items are also diverse.
Moreover, there is already a certain division of labor among some imitators, achieving specialization and division of labor in each link of the cultural relics imitation chain.
Nanhe is the distribution center for imitation cultural relics across the country, but in other provinces and cities, there are also markets for different types of imitation or counterfeit cultural relics.
For example, Fanjiajing near Jingzhen Railway Station is home to pottery merchants and porcelain vendors from all over the country.
Judging from the equipment, some of the local antique porcelain kilns can even be called ceramic research units.
From the formula of pottery clay, the extraction of clay materials, the molding of porcelain and the configuration of colored glazes, painting methods and firing methods, all are based on the scientific testing data of unearthed cultural relics, and every process is strictly operated according to the standards.
It is worth noting that these kilns use firewood kilns for firing. Each time a kiln of porcelain is fired, at least four trucks of pine firewood are consumed, which takes more than 20 hours.
Under normal circumstances, one firewood kiln can only produce one or two pieces of porcelain.
Therefore, such high imitation products are very expensive to produce.
The selling price of "official kiln wares" from the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties is generally not less than 200,000 yuan.
In some alleys in Sichuan, you can always see calligraphy and paintings by Zhang Daqian and Xu Beihong.
Most of these are imitation paintings, and their imitation methods are also strange.
For example, using tea fumigation, that is, hanging calligraphy and paintings on the wall, placing a large pot filled with tea in the house, boiling the tea over high heat, and using the gas evaporated from the tea to smoke the calligraphy and painting yellow, making the rice paper and paint crispy and deteriorating, accelerating aging.
change.
Another method is to get snakes, insects, rats and ants to bite the new paintings and calligraphy. Some people see traces of insect erosion on the paintings and calligraphy and think they are genuine.
At present, high-tech means have also been applied to the imitation of cultural relics.
For example, using three-dimensional scanning technology, the objects produced can be exactly the same as the original objects.
Silicone rubber molding technology is used to ensure that the patterns on the imitations are indistinguishable from the originals.
Although these works are a bit rigid or soulless, they are really realistic.
This time I came to Nanhe, Chen Wenzhe really gained experience and learned a lot of antique craftsmanship.
Especially for the imitation of bronze mirrors, he has now gained some knowledge.
Compared with other bronzes, ancient Chinese bronze mirrors have some advanced technologies that can really shock the jaws of modern people.
The mirror he came here to look for this time was a treasure, considered the most magical ancient bronze mirror in the country.
This "magic mirror" of the Han Dynasty is known as the pinnacle of ancient "black technology" and cannot be copied to this day.
It is in this kind of bronze mirror that there may be some information about the jade seal passed down from the country. This is the clue of some jade seal passed down from the country he found. He doesn't know if it is true or not.
Fortunately, the No. 1 Village of Nanhe Imitation Bronze was famous, so he knew that a long time ago, a bronze mirror had been unearthed here, and it was damaged.