Zhu He
Zhu He
Zhu he is a calligrapher, painter and bamboo Carver in Ming Dynasty. Zi Ming, Songlin, Songling. Shiben Xin'an (now Shexian County, Anhui Province) moved to Huating (now Songjiang, Shanghai) and Jiading (now Shanghai) since Song Jianyan, and was a guest of Lu Shen. He is noble and versatile. In his early years, he learned six books from Cao Shi in Songjiang. He was good at rhyme, painting and calligraphy, fine copying and printing, especially bamboo carving. He integrated calligraphy into bamboo carving, and expressed the tree and stone levels with the depth of carving, creating a new style of bamboo carving with deep and high relief. If people can get his carving works, they don't call them "Zhu Songlin". There is a poem: "jade cloud temple pile crow place, oblique inserted Zhu Songlin a branch." Songlin is famous for his unique bamboo carving art and is the founder of profound techniques. Nanjing Museum has one of his "Songhe penholder". Together with Ziying and sun Zhizheng, they are good at bamboo carving, which is known as "Jiading three Zhu".
He is good at poetry and painting, and has a high artistic accomplishment. He can carve beautiful and vivid landscape figures and flower and bird pavilions on a very small bamboo surface. Because of the exquisite carving, people all over the world cherish it very much. Zhu He has profound literary and artistic attainments and creative spirit. He is eccentric and uncommunicative, but he often interacts with famous calligraphers, painters and writers. Because he is good at calligraphy and painting, and has a good command of ancient seal script, and in his early years he got the secret that Miao seal script is not passed down. Therefore, in his bamboo carving design and production, he often uses the brush technique in the knife technique. Although some of his pen barrels, incense barrels, armrests, Buddha statues and so on are simple and clumsy. Some of them are exquisite, but most of them are made of five or six layers of deep openwork. Zhu he thought: if we don't carve through and deeply, it's not carving. Therefore, he combined Nanzong School of painting with beizong School of sculpture to create a profound method, which opened up a new way for the development of bamboo carving art since the Tang Dynasty. His works were highly valued by scholars at that time. People were eager to buy his utensils. Those who got his utensils did not call them by their names, but directly called them "Zhu Songlin". Even in the middle of the Qing Dynasty, Emperor Qianlong saw his bamboo carving, and praised it with a poem entitled "high branches should hold high soil, and it is better to convey spirit than good at conveying spirit". Beijing Guguan Museum has a pen holder of his relief "Begonia flower". In particular, the bamboo carving "Songhe" pen holder in Nanjing Jiangsu Provincial Museum shows a section of pine trunk with twists and turns on it. There is a crane standing between the schools. The composition is harmonious, the west is elegant and quiet, and the knife technique is very sophisticated, which fully reflects the outstanding skills of Zhu's Bamboo carving. Bamboo carvings were carved from cranes, which were handed down for more than 280 years from Ming Dynasty to Qing Dynasty. Zheng ruoyong of Changzhou gave it as a song to songlinzi, which he highly valued.
Chinese PinYin : Zhu He
Zhu He
