4
Jan
BLOGS
Master Jin Wen: The First Craftsman of Weaving Dragon Robe in China
Born in Nanjing, 1954, known as “the first craftsman of weaving dragon robe”, Jin Wen is a famous Brocade YUNJIN artist, the only national Brocade YUNJIN master of arts and crafts in China, a representative inheritor of China’s intangible cultural heritage (Brocade YUNJIN).
Brocade YUNJIN is one of the representatives of the traditional Chinese culture. Every pattern, every decorative design, even every single thread, is permeated with the historical and cultural details of Chinese culture for thousands of years.
During Qianlong, Jiaqing years of Qing Dynasty, brocade YUNJIN reached its peak of development. There were 30,000 looms in the Nanjing Weaving House, and nearly 300,000 people engaged in weaving production and related industries.But, with the passage of time, the historic Brocade YUNJIN gradually declined, and the craft skill also faced to fail to be handed down.
In 1955, in order to resume the production of Brocade YUNJIN, Nanjing Handicraft Administration openly recruited the apprentices of Brocade YUNJIN, and only two half-century old craftsmen were found as teachers in the whole city of Nanjing.
In 1980s, the Emperor WANLI’s dragon robe, unearthed in the Ming Tombs of Ming Dynasty in Beijing, was being gradually destroyed and needed to be copied.
Jin Wen took this challenge which even his instructor was afraid to take, and started to research the handicraft process of Dragon Robes, completely by his own effort. It takes a whole year to do the weaving. The robe need to be divided into four pieces to splice seamlessly and perfectly. The most difficult part is registration because silk will produce different degrees of atrophy in different humidity due to the unpredictable weather of Nanjing.
Jin Wen took this challenge which even his instructor was afraid to take, and started to research the handicraft process of Dragon Robes, completely by his own effort. It takes a whole year to do the weaving. The robe need to be divided into four pieces to splice seamlessly and perfectly. The most difficult part is registration because silk will produce different degrees of atrophy in different humidity due to the unpredictable weather of Nanjing.
The most difficult part is registration because silk will produce different degrees of atrophy in different humidity due to the unpredictable weather of Nanjing.
But Jin Wen overcame many difficulties, and finally made three Dragon Robes all by himself. Therefore, his works of Dragon Robe not only won the “Gold Treasure Award”, the highest prize of China’s Arts and Crafts Award, but also was exhibited in Japan's Tsukuba International Exposition, as the a representative achievement of ancient Chinese science and technology by the State Science and Technology Commission.
On the basis of inheriting traditional brocade artistry, Jin Wen also continuously did a lot of research and innovation, and created a large number of modern brocades, all of which won many prizes. So, he was revered as “Master Jin Wen”.
Jin Wen summed up his fate with the Brocade YUNJIN: “From an ordinary worker to a designer, I have transformed my interest in Brocade YUNJIN into a responsibility to inherit it. Brocade YUNJIN is my pursuit of lifetime career.”
