Creation of filigree is fiddly, but a joy

A young man in Southwest China's Chongqing who set out to update traditional filigree inlay art seven years ago has given the exquisite 1,000-year-old craft a modern twist, helped it regain its former glory and popularized it, especially among the young.

Gu Guoqiang's brand Shugong has annual sales at home and abroad of more than 1,000 pieces worth over 1 million yuan ($156,900), and the filigree designer's creations have been exhibited in museums and jewelry exhibitions in Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong.

An intricate form of metalwork often used to make jewelry, filigree weaves twisted threads of gold, silver and copper into structures onto which jade and precious gems can be mounted. The delicate art takes various forms.

Once mainly an embellishment for imperial ornaments like crowns and hats, filigree has since developed into a precious modern form of folk art.

Born in Chongqing's Yubei district in 1994, Gu showed keen interest in painting as a child. He studied sketching and traditional Chinese painting in middle school.

In 2010, he enrolled in the School of Ceramic Art at the Jingdezhen Ceramic University in Jiangxi province. Jingdezhen is the birthplace of Chinese porcelain. The university is the only one that specializes in ceramics in China.

He majored in ceramic design, which entails creating elaborate paintings on ceramics and requires a tremendous amount of study and practice to master.

After graduating four years later, Gu worked as an auction appraiser before getting the chance to study ceramic restoration under a master who repairs cultural relics in Beijing's Palace Museum. During his month with the master, he was introduced to filigree inlay art by chance.

"There are fewer practitioners of filigree inlay, and most are elderly," Gu said. With a desire to keep the craft alive, he returned to Chongqing in 2015 to study the intangible cultural heritage art form under Li Changyi, a master who has been making filigree inlay work for more than 50 years.

In 2008, the tradition was listed as a national intangible cultural heritage, and in 2014, the Chongqing style of filigree was listed as a cultural heritage of the city. Li is its only practitioner.

"The training was very, very difficult and tedious, at first," said Gu, adding that he often became frustrated trying to weld 0.8-millimeter silver thread on a silver plate. "It is incredibly intricate. A little too much melting can ruin an entire piece."

"But if others could learn, why shouldn't I?" Gu told himself whenever he felt like giving up, and remembered his dream and practiced even harder.

His eyes often felt dry after a day's work, but little by little, he learned to draw the metal into threads thinner than a hair and create vivid pieces of art.

Gu said that he tended to make copies at his teacher's studio, mostly large display pieces for orders from Beijing, but what he wanted to do was make new filigree inlay pieces better suited to modern tastes.

In 2017, he opened a tiny studio－the Shugong Classical Jewelry Studio－in Chongqing's Jiangbei district and started to work for himself.

"It was a tough start," he said, adding that although he had invested all his money in the studio, the traditional craft is extremely time-consuming to make and cannot be underpriced.

As a result, it proved difficult to sell and left him with a huge financial burden.

After struggling for a year, his stylish, highly aesthetic pieces－mostly jeweled brooches, earrings, hairpins, rings and pendants－gradually gained recognition and began to be recommended by customers.

Business suddenly bloomed in 2018 along with the rise of the China Chic trend.

Guochao, as it is known in Chinese, is known for fancy designs using different elements from traditional culture. It became widely known in 2018 after the sportswear brand Li-Ning took the fashion world by storm with its Oriental-style designs during New York Fashion Week.

This led to a growing number of Chinese brands joining the trend and creating the China Chic wave.

The renaissance in traditional clothing known as hanfu, created in recent years by popular TV dramas, has also helped breathe new life into the ancient craft, especially among the youth.

Gu said that competition is fierce, but his modern, trendy designs have built up a good reputation and given him a steady foothold in the industry. Shugong has since expanded and now employs 15 craftspeople.

Last year, 50 beautifully designed phoenix coronets, a bestselling item priced at over 10,000 yuan each, were sold to a group of hanfu models and aficionados who planned to take part in a show in the Hanfu Cultural Festival in Xitang, Zhejiang province. One buyer even bought 200,000 yuan in items.

"I am proud that my pieces are sold abroad," Yang Fan, a 48-year-old female craftsperson from Shugong, said.

"I want to be able to make fine art and pass on this ancient craft in the future, too."

Currently, Gu is focused on product design and promotion.

"Although most of our buyers were born in the 1970s and 80s, this ancient craft also appeals to younger generations," he said, adding that Shugong's very first livestream session on Kuaishou, a video sharing platform, got hundreds of likes, mostly from young people.

He is doing a series of online promotions and is optimistic about the future.

Recent statistics from Kuaishou show that every three seconds, a short video on intangible cultural heritage is created and more than 15 million registered creators have uploaded such videos. The videos created revenues of over 1.5 billion yuan ($23.73 million).

Of the 1,372 listed national cultural heritage items, 1,321 can be found in Kuaishou, or 96.3 percent of the total.

Last year, the social media platform launched online and offline activities to bring intangible cultural heritage creators together, with the aim of attracting more young people to traditional culture.

Gu said he plans to diversify his studio's products and upgrade from designing accessories to high-end jewelry, using better quality gems and 18-karat gold.

In his spare time, the quiet, gentle man enjoys going to traditional art exhibitions and collecting antiques.

Shugong is applying for designation as a creator of intangible cultural heritage.