The surprising art of a mechanical engineer
Print Edition
Automobile expert Zhou Dekuan, an associate professor with Tongji University, has an unusual hobby — painting on fans. His hobby dates back to his childhood when he lived near Shanghai’s City God Temple.
Many shops near the temple sold ancient books and paintings, and during holiday periods the city’s renowned calligraphers and painters, such as Qiao Mu and Cao Jianlou, would come to the temple to paint in front of the crowds.
Though Zhou was still very young, he was always attracted by these vivid paintings.
Each time he viewed a live painting show, he will repaint it from memory after he got back home. Gradually, his painting skills became more and more mature, laying a solid foundation for his painting on hand fans.
Zhou’s first painting on a hand fan came about in unusual circumstances. When SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), hit Shanghai, Tongji University distributed a large number of hand fans to students to promote knowledge about the disease.
Zhou thought that too many of the fans were being left blank and he took out his brushes to paint on one of them.
His actions attracted praise from colleagues and students and that’s how his hobby came about.
Compared with painting on rice paper, painting on hand fans can be much more difficult. It requires special tools and high levels of skill. In art circles there is a saying: a painting on a hand fan equals an ordinary painting three times the size.
Zhou is good at painting crickets and his depiction of crickets is very vivid. Zhou spent a lot of time observing crickets and imitating other artists’ cricket paintings.
He says: “Crickets’ heads should be depict round, antennae should be painted thin and long, its neck should be painted wide and its back legs should be depicted as very strong as well as its wings should be depicted as thin, transparent and vivid.”
His painting skills are also a great help in Zhou’s teaching work. He teaches automobile structure and mechanical design at Tongji University and usually uses chalks to draw 3D pictures of structures of automobile to make students understand them. Zhou uses a metaphor of drawing tigers to depict his profession.
“If you want to paint tigers, you need to understand the skeleton of tigers,” he says, “so if we want to produce attractive automobiles, we first have to understand their internal structure.” Students say that Zhou’s lectures make it easy to understand complex structures.
In Zhou’s view, painting on hand fans is more than his hobby but a profession to kill time after retirement. To date, Zhou has completed more than 300 paintings on hand fans covering themes such as flowers, birds, insects and grass and attracted attention from buyers.
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