The earnest art of framing goes a long, long way

In a stuffy room, we found a man in his 30s sweating over painting frames. My friend showed him an oil painting with a boat under the rising sun. She explained to him the canvas was loosely mounted and the original frame didn't match the painting. From the piles of sample frames, we finally settled on one that had silvery abstract relief patterns. The man quickly set to work. He sawed a stick about 4 m long into four parts and stuck them together to make a frame. While he was working on the frame, his wife took the canvas off its old frame and retightened it.

"We've been working in Beijing for some eight years," said the woman with a slight Jiangsu province accent. "It is only in the past few years that we've seen a sharp increase of customers asking for Western style mounting."

Most people who mount paintings come from Jiangsu and its neighboring Zhejiang province, where small private factories are quick to produce new painting frames according to market demands, she said.