Flying on the wings of a butterfly

Butterfly wing pictures by Li Jianjun. [Photo by Yue Tao for China Daily]

"How do they do that," murmured a visitor surnamed Sun at an art gallery in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, who was lost in a portrait of Yang Yuhuan, a concubine known for her beauty during the Tang Dynasty (618-907). The picture was "drawn" with butterfly wings.

Li Jianjun, the creator of the portrait, was also in the gallery and had been asked the same question many times. Since a butterfly symbolizes beauty in the Chinese culture, Li said he often thought while "creating" the portrait whether Yang was transforming into a butterfly, or the other way round.

After retiring from the army in 1996 at the age of 23, Li began working as a coal miner in his hometown of Changzhi in Shanxi. During the same time, he started learning from his father how to use cloth cuttings to make pictures, a craft passed down for five generations in his family.

"The idea of replacing the pieces of cloth with butterfly wings originated during a trip to Yunnan province," Li recalls. He visited the country's largest butterfly museum in Xishuangbanna in Yunnan in 2002, where he saw swarms of colorful butterflies dancing in the air.

"But when I saw a cleaner sweeping the dead butterflies, I felt sorry and bought the dead but beautiful insects," Li says. He wanted to use them to create pieces of art. But on returning home in dry and cold Changzhi in North China after a long trip from the moist and warm southwestern corner of the country, Li found that many of the butterflies' bodies, especially their wings, had broken into pieces.

While Li was thinking what to do with the dead butterflies, his wife pasted some of the butterfly wings on the pattern of an angel on paper. The natural, delicate and fluid colors of the wings gave the angel such a special appeal that Li decided to replace them for the cloth pieces used to make pictures.

In fact, butterfly-wing pictures date back to the early Ming Dynasty (1368-1644); it is a less-talked about creative technique, although it is exclusive to China, according to Zhou Shuren, a renowned writer and painter. Unfortunately, many consider the skills to have been lost.

With no masters left to learn from, Li tries to harness the fragile and brittle "natural pigments" and seek inspiration from the "living beauty" the butterfly wings represent. Through trial and error, he has learned that dried petals, wheat straws, silk cloth pieces and leaves can be used along with butterfly wings to create artistic handicrafts.

"Pasting the wings on canvas is at the core of the craft, as the wings are not only thinner than paper and brittle, but also covered with a layer of dust that brightens the colors, which makes it difficult to apply glue," Li says. He tried hundreds, rather thousands of times, before finding a way to apply glue to the wings without damaging their color and texture. Understandably, he says it is "an industrial secret" and declines to reveal how to do it.

Li uses eyebrow tweezers to paste the butterfly wings on the picture as they are very brittle. The entire process has to be precise and timely; the butterfly wings have to be glued and pasted on the canvas, and then they dried and "sanitized". It takes about 10 steps to complete a butterfly wing picture which could stretch between two weeks and a month.

Li's works have been exhibited at home and abroad since 2008. In 2017,Li won the title of an honorary arts and crafts master of Shanxi province."Shanxi has a long history and rich cultural resources, which are the source of inspiration for me," Li says."I want to show Shanxi through my work, and seek a seamless combination of content and form."

Saying that many of his "students" have given up after trying to learn the art of making "butterfly picture" from him because the process is very complicated and difficult, Li hopes to get more chances to introduce this special art form to schoolchildren so that more of them can learn this traditional art form.

"I want to find gifted children who have a passion for traditional art," Li says. No wonder he is teaching some physically challenged people the art of making "butterfly pictures", so the traditional art is passed down to the next generations. He and his wife now run a cultural workshop near a small butterfly farm and the mine he works in. Hopefully, his wife says, this art form will flourish.