CARVING ink stones and repairing old porcelain are rare skills these days but three masters are plying their arts in Changning District. Fei Lai visits their studios.

Changning District is enhancing its cultural atmosphere by preserving China's intangible cultural heritage, such as carving ink stones and repairing antique porcelain.

Both are labors of love, requiring meticulous work, long hours and a deep understanding of China's arts and culture. Not many young people relish such exacting work.

Since few people spend hours perfecting their calligraphy, there's not a huge demand for ink stones, especially those that are works of art in themselves. And there's a great shortage of qualified restorers of porcelain, though many people collect it.

To master ink stone carver Lu Xiaohua from Changning, Fuzhou Road is the most cultural street in Shanghai.

It's his favorite place to stroll because it's filled with shops displaying ink stones.

For the past 14 years, Lu has been running his ink stone carving workshop in Changning and promoting the art that combines utility with aesthetics.

Lu says the artists of his generation are heavily influenced by master Chen Duanyou, who took the art to its peak during the 1920s and 30s.

In 1912, Chen accompanied his teacher Zhang Taiping, a sculptor from Yangzhou in Jiangsu Province, to open an ink stone carving store in Shanghai. Later he met famous painter and calligrapher Wu Changshuo, whose artistic style influenced him greatly.

Time-consuming

Chen's subjects were taken from nature, such as a lotus, turtle, mushroom and bamboo, all rendered so vividly that people marveled. Chen's work is collected by the Shanghai Museum.

In the 1950s, Zhang Jing'an inherited Chen's mantle and began to teach apprentices in Changning. After three decades, the district's stone carvers were very advanced and prosperous since they exported to Japan.

Ink stone carving is very time-consuming and in 30 years master Chen made only around 30 ink stones.

Tao Changpeng, another inheritor of the art, has witnessed many ups and downs.

"There used to be in Shanghai more than 10 people like me who clung to our dream of making ink stone carving popular and doing research," Tao says.

But many have changed professions and only carve as a hobby.

Very few can still make a living in art.

It usually takes around a month to carve an ink stone but the immature market cannot bear the high price of such labor-intensive work, he says.

Meanwhile, the popularity of porcelain, jade, gold, silver and rosewood furniture has eclipsed ink stones.

To Tao's relief, the Changning government is now protecting intangible cultural heritage, such as ink stone carving.

"We hope our work will pass the test of time," he says, "and leave a wonderful inheritance for future generations."

Facing 100 pieces of broken porcelain is daunting, but 64-year-old Jiang Daoyin embraces the challenge, not just of putting them back together but "healing" and restoring the whole.

With 30 years' experience in repairing cultural relics, Jiang believes the art of restoring antique porcelains is almost nonexistent and he believes he has a mission to save it.

"Porcelain restoration is more than just sticking broken pieces together. It is an art," he says.

"A maker of perfect porcelain is no equal to a master of repairing it."

The procedures are complicated, involving cleaning, gluing, creating missing parts, coloring and applying an antique finish. All must be done by one person to be consistent, Jiang insists.

"It requires the artist to grasp knowledge of chemistry, firing and glazing technology, sculpture, painting and history. Repairing the damage is more demanding than creating the original work."

There are three golden rules for flawless restoration - the work must look true to the original; it must involve the least intervention; and it must be made in such a way that it can be broken again into the same pieces for future research.

"If a piece of porcelain depicts a young woman of 18 in ancient times, I make it look exactly like an 18-year-old of the time. This requires knowledge of history and culture.

"If a man's ear or head is missing, only when I know exactly how a man of that dynasty looked will I go ahead. If I do not know, I'd rather go without that ear or head."

To restore ancient porcelain requires a thorough knowledge of ancient techniques and history of porcelain making.

Since the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, Shanghai has developed its own style of restoration and Jiang has answered the call of museums and collectors in China and overseas to "heal" porcelain.

Since he began working at the Shanghai Museum in 1974, Jiang has mended shattered and damaged art objects for museums and collectors in Beijing, Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as in countries such as Singapore and Japan.

According to the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, there are less than 500 certified porcelain restorers in China.

That means that if each repaired one piece in a month, they would have to spend at least 2,000 years to restore almost all the known relics requiring "healing" in Chinese museums.

"As the number of collectors increases, so does the demand for artists who can repair porcelain," Jiang says.

Porcelain is restored for archeological reasons, for museum display and for commercial sale.

"While a huge market is emerging, the art of restoration is not easily handed down," he says.

To tackle the shortage of talent, Jiang opened the Shanghai Ancient Porcelain Restoration Training Center in 2006.

He says the shortage of restorers is temporary and mainly results from the tradition that only sons in an artist's family can inherit the repairing know-how. That greatly restricted the spread of knowledge and skill.

"My generation is an exception," he says. "Because of demand in the country, people like me who have no family background can study the art. Now it's time for me to pay back and promote the art with unremitting efforts."

Jiang says no university arts department offers a major in porcelain restoration as yet, to say nothing of the lack of teachers and textbooks.

The artist now teaches at the government-supported training center in hopes of helping other people learn how to pick up the pieces and mend them.