Our reporter Ren Shan
For those who have met Lang Jiaziyu for the first time, it is difficult to connect this 1.91m tall, youthful and handsome graduate of Peking University with the status of "the third-generation inheritor of the national intangible cultural heritage of Mian Renlang".
"Post-95" is not very old, but he has been in contact with "mianrenlang" for more than 20 years, and decided to regard this craft as a lifelong career.
"Mian Ren Lang" was created by Lang Jiaziyu's grandfather Lang Shao'an. In Lang Shao'an's hands, the dough figurines have changed from street toys to elegant works of art, and they were also brought to London's handicraft exhibition.
Lang Jiaziyu's father and aunt are also good kneaders.
Influenced by his family, Lang Jiaziyu has developed a strong interest in kneading kneaders since he was a child, and he really fell in love with kneading kneaders when he was about 4 years old.
The material characteristics of dough figurines determine that craftsmen must think carefully before making, know all the details of expression, and take shape at one time when creating.
Using kneading, pinching, pulling, picking, pressing, rubbing, rolling, grinding, chopping, dialing, pressing, cutting and other techniques between square inches, the subtle portrayal of the characters is completed layer by layer, and the body is not added or supplemented. The seamless connection between them all depends on the control strength of a pair of masterful hands.
This is undoubtedly very difficult for children.
Lang Jiaziyu remembered that when he was in the second grade of elementary school, he cried because he squeezed his hands.
"To make dough sculptures, one needs to have a better understanding of the structure of the human body, to match the age of the characters, and to look agile, all of which require long-term practice. I was stuck in my hands at the time. I couldn't make one pair of hands, and I couldn't make another pair. A bunch of little hands are piled up into a hill." The father encouraged his son to stop and go somewhere else to change his mood when he saw it, and he would do another demonstration with his own hands when he came back.
Sometimes when guests came to the house, the father would quietly greet his friends and ask them to ask Lang Jiaziyu for a face-to-face, in order to give his son a sense of accomplishment.
Driven by interest, coupled with his father's relaxed education method of entertaining and entertaining, Lang Jiaziyu pinched each face person down.
In 2008, when "Mianren Lang" was listed as a national intangible cultural heritage, 13-year-old Lang Jiaziyu had already mastered this skill very well, and became an associate member of the Beijing Folk Artists Association three years later.
On the road of intangible heritage inheritance, Lang Jiaziyu has created many ingenious works, allowing more people to see new ways of playing the old craft of dough sculpture.
He makes dough figurines based on current hot spots, and popular TV dramas, animations, and social hot events have become his creative materials.
"Vulcan Zhurong" is the work of Lang Jiaziyu when he was studying for a master's degree.
Inspired by "Southern Zhurong, with a beast body and a human face, riding two dragons" in "Shan Hai Jing", he added his own imagination and spent 2 months to create an image of Zhu Rong with a red body and a pink dragon coiled around him.
On March 8 Women's Day in 2021, in order to pay tribute to the female medical staff who are fighting on the front line of the epidemic, Lang Jiaziyu created the work "Women". Medical staff wearing masks, a fusion of tradition and modernity, expresses respect for women.
In recent years, Lang Jiaziyu has not only devoted himself to creating dough figurines, but also put a lot of energy into the promotion and dissemination of the "mianrenlang" skills and intangible cultural heritage culture.
In August 2020, Lang Jiaziyu released the first short video of making a maid mask on Kuaishou.
Since then, in various video works, dough of different colors has been transformed into unique and creative images such as Ao Bing and Nezha in his hands, attracting more young people to pay attention to dough sculpture skills.
Many fans privately messaged him, saying that they also want to learn how to knead dough.
Getting young people interested is the key to Lang Jiaziyu's inheritance of intangible cultural heritage.
On February 5, 2022, General Secretary Xi Jinping met with foreign heads of state attending the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics in the Great Hall of the People.
Lang Jiaziyu, as the inheritor of the younger generation of intangible cultural heritage, displayed the dough sculpture works and skills, and demonstrated Bingdundun's creative process on the spot.
His interaction with the Prince of Monaco was widely disseminated on social media platforms, showing the world the demeanor of Chinese traditional culture and Chinese youth.
Lang Jiaziyu said that in the "post" of "Mian Ren Lang" inheritor, he wants young people to understand the context of culture, not only to be Chinese geographically, but also to be Chinese culturally.
(Beijing Daily)