Furniture making skills (fine woodworking skills)

Name of China's national intangible cultural heritage: furniture making skills (fine woodworking skills)

Applicant: Jiangsu Gongmei mahogany culture and Art Research Institute

Item No.: 395

Project No.: VIII - 45

Time of publication: 2011 (the third batch)

Category: traditional art

Region: Jiangsu Province

Type: Extension Project

Applicant: Jiangsu Gongmei mahogany culture and Art Research Institute

Protection unit: Jiangsu Gongmei mahogany culture and Art Research Institute

Brief introduction of furniture making technology (fine woodwork Technology)

Applicant: Jiangsu Gongmei mahogany culture and Art Research Institute

Nanjing, Nantong, Changzhou, Suzhou, Changshu and other cities in Jiangsu Province and their surrounding villages have gathered scholars and skilled craftsmen since ancient times. Their unique advantages of human and geographical environment have created a profound and solid tradition of folk woodworking. Since the Ming Dynasty, a large number of hard and precious wood (mainly mahogany) were imported and used. With the active participation of many scholars in the south of the Yangtze River and the vigorous advocacy of the royal family, the level of folk woodcraft in Jiangsu Province has been greatly improved. At the same time, it has gradually developed in the direction of delicacy and delicacy, and formed a special craft specially applied to hardwood sculpture and woodwork, which is the tradition "Fine Woodworking Technology". By the end of the Qing Dynasty, because of the large use of imported hardwood, such as red sandalwood, this craft was gradually changed to "red wood craft" by the folk custom, and has continued to this day.

Fine wood craft requires artists to have special skills far beyond those of ordinary wood carvers, which are mainly manifested in: being able to deeply understand the woodiness of each piece of hardwood used, being skilled in applying crafts according to the wood, and being able to maximize the added value of rare mahogany wood resources; having the high difficulty of hard drawing quantification by relying on keen handle operation on hardwood (mainly mahogany) With the help of special tools, we can manually complete very complex traditional mortise and tenon structure combination and exquisite artistic modeling.

Jiangsu arts and Crafts Industry Association founded Jiangsu Gongmei mahogany culture and Art Research Institute in the 1990s. It has done a lot of work in the protection of this craft, but this work is far from enough. It is necessary to mobilize the strength of the whole society to make joint efforts to make the protection work better.