A bouquet of flowers and fruits

Stone carvings are big things nowadays. Due to the shortage of resources, the price of seal stones has escalated steeply. What used to be selling around 10 dollars per kg is now selling hundreds of thousands per kg. If you talk about the top grades such as Tianhuang, it can be as high as fifteen thousand per gramme. No wonder stone carvings of precious stones such as the chicken blood and Lychee stones are fetching millions of dollars in auctions.

I have here a stone carving of a bouquet of flowers and fruits. It is carved from a type of seal stone called the Kaoshan sih (literally means stone from the high mountain). The carving weighs a staggering 20 kg and I had great trouble transporting it home from the shop. The carving is done all round as you will be able to see something if you go to the back of the carving. The master must have spent a long time crafting out this bouquet of flowers and fruits from a big raw stone. He needed to carve and blend the items according to the colours exhibited in the stone. This requires skills, talent and some artistic training. For sure I will not be able to draw the whole thing on paper, let alone crafting it out of a stone.

 

A good stone usually need an equally good craftsmaster who can turn the stone into a beautiful art piece. Unlike paintings, the craftsmaster is limited by the material at his disposal in terms of size, texture and colours in the stone. Before he starts work, he would normally spend a few weeks or even months to study the stones. What he wants is to understand the stone well so that he knows what is best to carve the stone into. Once the idea comes, he will start work and the whole process can take him months or even years to complete. The carving process is slow and delicate as he has to follow the colours in the stone and carve out his masterpiece. He doesn't want to damage any part as this will destroy his work and a good stone can become worthless.

Today it is difficult to engage great masters to carve your stones as they normally charge very high fees, to the tune of millions. If you can buy anything of the shelves and it doesn't cost much, you better do so as these things are going to get more and more expensive in the future.