Piling on the creativity

Demanding skills

However, creating traditional jinhuidui artwork is much more difficult compared to pop art, as all the images are painted as if they were copied and pasted.

It requires a good command of calligraphy — cursive script and seal script, as well as excellent skill in painting flowers, birds, fish, insects, landscapes and figures, and a mastery of techniques such as seal carving.

The composition of jinhuidui artworks may seem random, but it is in fact very elaborate and cleverly arranged, haphazard but not dull; the shades are staggered between the fragments, and the same shades are echoed in different parts.

Geng Xuezhi, 50, from Zibo city, Shandong province, is one of the masters of jinhuidui.

Geng has been learning Chinese painting and calligraphy since he was 16. He came into contact with jinhuidui painting skills through his father in 2006.

The artist says the distinctive feature of jinhuidui can be summed up as "broken", which means that it has to present fragments in forms such as broken, rolled, overlapped, torn, burned or smoked.

He says it will take at least 10 years to master the skill.

The creation of jinhuidui is complex and lengthy, and the process of dyeing is laborious and time-consuming. Sometimes a fragment needs to be dyed a dozen times.

Geng reveals that it is sometimes necessary to look through ancient books and go to antique shops to find materials to enrich his work.

"A simpler work of jinhuidui takes about 20 days to complete, while a more complex one will take several months, and sometimes some extra effort has to be made," he says.

A few years ago, in order to complete an artwork on the theme of bronze ware, Geng went to a local museum to observe the shape of the bronze relics and the font of the inscription, visited antique shops to look for old envelopes, and went checking the relevant documents and historical materials at a local library.

Geng usually works for 10 hours a day."There's no shortcut on the path of learning. It's all about long-term and consistent practice," he says.

"Jinhuidui depicts miscellaneous objects in fragments, but artists nowadays are normally creating based on the original objects that are intact. Turning the complete object into fragments as the artist imagines is the core artistic expression of jinhuidui painting."

As for the painting standard, he says there is no specified pattern, either sparse or dense, or size anyway, or color contrast.