Our Story - FANHUA 繁华
One window,
on the north side.
The room has one window, on the north side. For most of the day the light is flat and grey. That's fine for carving, useless for photographs.
Around four it changes — it turns gold and moves across the bench, and whatever is on the bench either survives that light or it gets put aside and reworked.
A lot of what sells as "ancient Chinese style" is loud: dragons, gold, red, all at once. It photographs well. It doesn't say much.
This is an attempt at the opposite — fewer elements, more space, a surface that shows someone touched it. It doesn't always work. Some pieces come out too plain and get sanded back or thrown out, and I usually can't tell which ones will work until they're finished.
Peach wood, jujube wood, cinnabar, rice paper, silk. None of it rare. The material was never the selling point.
Nothing goes out the way it came in. Things get re-shot, re-cut, re-graded, and half of them get abandoned and picked up again a week later.
The material is maybe half the work. The other half is deciding what to keep — which is slower, and less interesting to talk about.
Inheritance
The carving isn't mine. It was taught, and before that it was taught again. What's added here is only the last sanding.
The Instant
A grain in the light, a curl of wood that only holds for twenty seconds — everything photographed has already gone.
Eternity
The stone doesn't keep anything. Neither does the wood. What lasts is the habit of looking up.
One bench, one window, a camera, a screen. Objects for the hand, editions for the screen, films in between. Nothing here is finished quickly, which is sometimes a problem and usually not.
The objects explain this better than the text does.