Let’s talk about something a little weird.
A few days ago, while scrolling through my cell phone, I met Hu Guangsheng, who makes wheat straw paintings in Changzi County. I heard that he can transform the straw used for fires in the fields into hundreds of different styles of paintings, and these paintings are also sold to the United States.
I stared at the screen for a long time.
An idea suddenly emerged in my mind: Will those wheat straws hurt at the moment they are cut open and burned with a soldering iron?
Don't laugh, I really think so.
It was originally a grass
In spring, it strives to dig out of the soil. In summer, it continues to grow taller in the face of the poisonous sun. At the beginning of autumn, it is ruthlessly cut down by a sickle. After threshing, the remaining parts either rot in the ground and are returned to the field, or are carried into the stove and finally turn into ashes with a bang.
This is the fate of wheat straw.
This has been the fate for a thousand years.
But some people didn't agree.
For a craftsman like Hu Guangsheng, he saw wheat straw paintings for the first time in Henan more than 20 years ago, and he fell in love at first sight.
This is a good word.
It's not that you are attracted by money, but you are attracted by things.
When I was a child, I saw a cartoon for the first time, or drank secretly for the first time, and it felt like something had hit me in the heart.
He picked up the straw that was supposed to be burned.
Craftsmanship is violence
Fumigated, steamed, bleached, scraped, blanched, and cut.
These words are written lightly.
You think about it.
Steaming is to push the heat to death.
To burn, just put the iron straight up, two to three hundred degrees, and voila, the surface of the wheat straw has been carbonized, the color has darkened, and it has turned brown, as if it had been exposed to the sun for millions of years.
This is not painting, this is using fire and iron to leave marks on the straw.
Hu Guangsheng often stayed up all night, stayed behind closed doors for several days, and forgot to eat or sleep.
Outsiders say this is ingenuity.
I thought it might be an addiction.
Just like someone has to beat a piece of iron into a sword, and someone has to carve a piece of stone into a Buddha.
If you don’t do this, your hands will be itchy and your heart will be empty.
He and Wheat Straw, who is polishing whom?
Those invisible cracks
The reporter wrote it well, "a piece of wheat straw as thin as cicada wings".
Cicada wings.
You use cicada wings to collage them into petals, and then use a soldering iron to outline the flexible shapes.
How beautiful.
But the cicada's wings are ripped off from the cicada's body.
So does wheat straw.
Every split wheat straw has invisible cracks.
Like every one of us, we look bright on the outside, but on the inside, we have been smoked, steamed, and scalded countless times by life.
Hu Guangsheng has created more than 300 works.
More than three hundred kinds.
Fish, lotus, all seasons are like spring.
## Do fishes know that water is hot?
Fish means having more than enough every year.
The lotus symbolizes harmony and beauty.
This is imposed on them by humans.
Fish swimming in the water don't know what "surplus" means.
The lotus grows in the mud and does not understand what "harmony" means.
Just like the wheat straw, I don’t know if it has turned into a painting, whether it will be hung on the wall in New York or Hong Kong.
It only knows that there were hands in the past that picked it up from the fire when it was still a blade of grass.
The hands were red with heat.
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