In Bishan District of Chongqing, a place steeped in profound cultural heritage, there lies a century-old fingertip intangible cultural heritage — Zhengze Embroidery, also concretely called Random Stitch Embroidery. It is by no means a messy pile of needles and threads, but an artistic treasure that breaks the shackles of traditional Embroidery and integrates the essence of Chinese and Western painting. It is also a highly representative intangible cultural card of Chongqing, praised by the world as “oil painting on needle”. This skill carries the cultural perseverance during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, has been passed down through generations of craftsmen, and still depicts the delicacy of Bashu land and the profundity of Oriental aesthetics with every stitch and thread.
The origin of Chongqing Zhengze Embroidery is closely bound up with Mr. Lv Fengzi, a renowned art educator. In the 1920s, to break the rigid limitation of “neatly arranging needles and threads” in traditional embroidery, Mr. Lv Fengzi boldly integrated the principles of light, shadow, perspective and color layering of Western oil painting with the stitches of traditional Chinese embroidery, creating a brand-new embroidery technique. Named “Zhengze Embroidery” because it first originated from Zhengze Girls’ School in Danyang, Jiangsu Province, Mr. Lv moved Zhengze Art College to Bishan, Chongqing to avoid the war during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression. He ran schools and taught near Wenfeng Bridge, specially set up a painting and embroidery major, making Zhengze Embroidery take root and develop systematically in Bishan. Since then, it has become a unique intangible cultural heritage skill in Chongqing, making Bishan the core inheritance place of Zhengze Embroidery in Southwest China. Having experienced nearly a century of trials and tribulations in Chongqing from the war years to the peaceful era, Zhengze Embroidery has always retained its original aspiration and ingenuity.
The core charm of Zhengze Embroidery lies in its unique skill of “order in chaos, and integration of virtual and real”, which completely subverts the neat thread arrangement mode of traditional embroidery, and is also the key difference between it and traditional embroidery varieties such as Shu Embroidery and Su Embroidery. Its stitches take random needles as the bone, abandoning the uniform flat stitches, and use threads of different lengths, thicknesses, crisscrossing and overlapping to freely outline the outline of objects. The density, direction and superposition of lines create a strong three-dimensional and dynamic sense; color is the soul, drawing on the color principles of Western painting and the light and shade relationship of Chinese sketch, using threads of different color systems to apply colors layer by layer and overlap repeatedly, making the picture rich in layers and soft in tone. It can perfectly present not only the hazy beauty of mountains, rivers and clouds, but also the delicacy of human skin; thread splitting is a skill that tests the craftsman’s foundation. Top craftsmen can split an ordinary embroidery thread into 1/48 thickness, and use extremely fine threads to depict details, making the works lifelike and indistinguishable from real ones. Even subtle parts such as hair, petals and water waves can be embroidered vividly and naturally.
With a century of inheritance, Chongqing Zhengze Embroidery has formed a complete inheritance vein, and is now full of new vitality in Bishan and other places. Mr. Lv Fengzi is the founder and initial disseminator of Zhengze Embroidery, and his descendants and disciples have devoted themselves to research, enabling the skill to continue; craftsmen like Chen Qi, the fourth-generation inheritor, are rooted in Wenfeng Primary School in Bishan, setting up Zhengze Embroidery Workshop, compiling special courses, and teaching skills to thousands of students hand in hand, letting intangible heritage enter the campus and take root in the hearts of teenagers. Nowadays, Zhengze Embroidery is not only an artistic treasure on the desk, but also an important carrier for Chongqing’s foreign cultural exchanges. Its high-quality works have been used as national gifts and government cultural and creative gifts, traveling to more than 80 countries and regions including Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Thailand, showing the unique charm of Chinese intangible heritage embroidery to the world, and making Chongqing’s intangible heritage go out of the Southwest and into the international arena.
From the perspective of artistic value, Chongqing Zhengze Embroidery breaks the boundary between Chinese and Western art, being both embroidery and painting, with both practicality and ornamental value. It covers a wide range of themes, including Bashu-style stilted buildings, Three Gorges scenery, camellias, as well as classic flowers, birds, fish, insects, portraits and landscapes. Each work is infused with the craftsman’s hard work, taking weeks or even years to complete. Compared with traditional embroidery, Zhengze Embroidery has a stronger sense of modern art, with strong three-dimensional effect and natural color transition. It can be adapted to Chinese-style home decoration and cultural and creative gifts, and can also be displayed in art exhibitions as a collection-level intangible heritage work. At the same time, the inheritance of Zhengze Embroidery has been integrated into the current cultural and tourism development. Zhengze Embroidery Workshops opened in Bishan, Ciqikou and other places in Chongqing not only allow tourists to watch craftsmen embroider up close, but also enable them to experience the simple embroidery process, turning intangible heritage from a “niche skill” into a cultural life that the public can perceive and experience.
As a municipal-level intangible cultural heritage of Chongqing, Zhengze Embroidery is not only a fingertip skill, but also a witness of history and a kind of cultural inheritance. It carries Mr. Lv Fengzi’s school-running philosophy of “seeking integrity in life and conforming to principles in work”, contains the craftsman’s spirit of striving for excellence, and integrates the essence of Chinese and Western aesthetics. In the current wave of intangible heritage revival, Chongqing Zhengze Embroidery is taking a brand-new attitude, adhering to traditional skills and innovating expression forms, letting the century-old embroidery charm shine in the new era, becoming an indispensable bright pearl in Chongqing’s cultural tourism and intangible heritage Culture.
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