TAIYUAN, Oct. 2 (Xinhua) -- A father and his two sons in north China's Shanxi Province have made a giant collage of silk, cotton and beads.
The four-meter by two-meter work, a copy of a famous mural at the Yongle Temple, contains 35 human characters.
It took Yan Xiangjun, his father and his younger brother, two and half years to finish, using nearly 50 kinds of material.
"My father did the faces and other details, while my brother, apprentices and I did the bodies," said Yan.
The technique, called Changzhi Dui Jin (Changzhi collage relief) unique to Changzhi City dates back 400 years.
By putting pieces of cotton and silk together and onto a board, the collages or mosaics have a three-dimensional effect.
Instead of a traditional way of drawing sketch first, Yan's father made the faces first. The eyebrows were made by removing the warp thread, leaving only weft thread of silks, said Yan.
The dragon head at the emperor's chair, for example, is stuffed by 106 tiny packs of silk, with the smallest part less than 2 mm, he said.
To make their work resemble the original mural, they experimented with various colors.
"We have seven kinds of green in our collage to imitate the original portrait," he said.
Located on the northern bank of the Yellow River in Ruicheng County, Yongle Taoist Temple was built in the 13th and 14th centuries during the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) and took about 100 years to construct. It is known for its exquisite murals totaling 960 square meters.
"Combining the famous mural and the collage technique, is a perfect way to pass on our intangible legacy of Shanxi," he said.
In late August, the collage won the special golden prize for art and craft at the Third Shanxi Cultural Industries Fair.
