Tang Chunfu: an Outstanding Statue Sculptor

Zhou Rongchu, Sun Minghui

The 1,400-year-old Guoqing Temple in central Zhejiang is three kilometers north of the capital seat of Tiantai County. Located between the county capital and the famed Buddhist sanctuary stands a grand structure in ancient architectural style. It is a 60,000-m2 gallery of sculpted statues, all designed and created by Tang Chunfu, a senior master of arts and crafts and president of the Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese of Tiantai County.

Tang Chunfu was born in Tang Village at the foot of Mount Tiantai.His father died when the junior was seven. At twelve, the boy was sent to a school near the temple. He often hanged around the temple after school and did small jobs such as sweeping the ground or fetching water for monks there. A senior monk noticed the diligent boy and asked if he was willing to learn a craft. The boy said he was willing, thus started his six-year apprenticeship at the famous temple. Tang learned the basics before he was qualified to learn creating woodcarving religious statues. The basics he mastered through painstaking lessons included applying paint to statues.

In 1982, Tang Chunfu started a gallery by the temple. The retail business handled woodcarving statues, traditional writing materials, paintings, and calligraphic works. The business was brisk. He later moved his retail business to Beidaihe, a famous summer resort in Hebei Province in northern China. His gallery was visited by top state leaders such as Deng Yingchao and Wan Li. It also attracted attention of some cultural celebrities such as Sha Menghai, Lu Yanshao, Su Yuanlei, Wang Bomin, Chu Tunan, and Yu Guangyuan. Some of these masters wrote inscriptions for his gallery.

As Buddhist temples across the country began to start large scale refurbishment projects and needed woodcarving statues for their new temples, Tang saw his opportunity. He began to make statues. He also set up a joint venture with a Singaporean business to introduce religious statues to overseas Buddhist temples, museums and galleries. In 1989, 218 statues made by Tangs gallery were exhibited in Singapore. The exhibition was a whopping success and all the statues were purchased by clients from Southeast Asian countries. In September, 1989, he held another exhibition in Singapore. This time he displayed 50 statues of ancient Chinese emperors and kings. It was another huge sensation. Four years later, he repeated his sensational success in the United States by exhibiting 158 statues of ancient Chinese emperors and other historical personages.

With a giant statue of 1,000-hand Guanyin, Tang Chunfu won nine gold prizes in a national exhibition of arts and crafts. Experts from the National Palace Museum in Beijing described the 3.48-meter-tall gold-plated statue as the best artwork of its kind in recent years. It is now in the collections of the National Palace Museum. This statue and many other statues have been awarded numerous prizes for one single reason: they were made by a lost technology Tang Chunfu has revived. The special technology, now included in the directive of national intangible cultural heritage, was first invented more than 15 centuries ago. A man named Dai Kui created woodcarving statues for Buddhist temples in Mount Tiantai. All the beautiful statues, however, had cracks a year later. Dai Kui and his sons researched and developed a 48-step procedure to make perfect statues. With dried paint and ramie fabrics, they successfully made statues that never cracked, never warped out of shape, never had insects eat into statues, and never allowed mildew to occur. Though Tang Chunfu knew there had been such a procedure, history does not leave a textbook to specify all these steps. Tang Chunfu spent more than 20 years researching and experimenting. After about three hundred tests, he successfully reinvented the technology and now knows exactly what to do to make perfect statues.

The millennium-old technology makes his statues perfect. So far, more than 20,000 statues in various sizes he has made are in collections of numerous museums and galleries in forty-nine countries such as the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Japan and Singapore.□