One is 1 meter long and 1 meter wide..The 5-meter workbench is covered with a black rubber leather pad with tools and materials such as knives, pens, air pumps, adhesives and pigments. Cleaning, splicing, matching, painting and glazing … At the contest site, No.27 contestant Yang Yujie was wearing a mask and holding a pen, holding her breath and burying her head in repairing. She was “healing” a blue-and-white patterned bowl with a gap of nearly a quarter in the Qing Dynasty.
As a world-recognized ancient civilization, China has the world’s leading precious cultural relics. How to protect more than 760,000 immovable cultural relics and over 100 million pieces (sets) of cultural relics in the country? How can China’s cultural relics skilled talents face the future? This should start with a big game.
At 9: 00 on March 25th, the finals of the National Cultural Relics Industry Vocational Skills Competition kicked off in Taiyuan, Shanxi. Known as “the vocational skills competition with the widest participation and the largest number of participants in the cultural relics industry so far”, it attracted 219 cultural relics skilled talents from 27 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities) in China.
China is a country rich in cultural relics resources, and has not yet established a talent training system that matches the rich cultural relics resources, the arduous task of cultural relics protection, and the requirements of high-quality development of cultural relics. “We have a lot of cultural relics that need to be repaired urgently, but the skilled talents who match them are far from enough.” Cyndi Luo, director of the Science and Technology Education Department of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, said.
In 2018 and 2021, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage of China held two national cultural relics vocational skills competitions respectively, which built a platform for practitioners in the cultural relics industry to display their skills and learn from each other, and became an important way to cultivate cultural relics skilled personnel.
In order to strengthen the professional system construction of cultural relics restorers, in 2021, China officially issued the Guiding Opinions on Further Strengthening Personnel Management in Cultural and Cultural Institutions, and in the same year promulgated the National Professional Skills Standard for Cultural Relics Restorers, which is of great significance for strengthening cultural relics restoration and the construction of cultural relics restoration talents.
Compared with previous years, this year’s competition has a higher level and a larger scale. In this regard, Jiang Daoyin, an expert on the restoration of ancient ceramics in China, who was the referee for the third time, was deeply touched. “Overall, the students played better than the previous two times.” He said that he hopes to push these outstanding talents to the front line through the competition.
Yang Yujie, a 36-year-old representative of the Palace Museum in Beijing, participated in the restoration of precious cultural relics such as painted pottery in the Neolithic Age and white pottery in the Shang Dynasty during his seven years of cultural relics restoration. She said that this is her first time to participate in the competition, and she came with a learning attitude. “The main thing is to learn from the predecessors and peers and increase the repair experience.”
At the scene of the ceramic cultural relics restoration competition, a smell of glue came to the nose. Located in the metal cultural relics restoration competition area next door, the tools in the hands of the players make a sizzling sound from time to time.
The reporter found that there are many young faces among the contestants, from Tongxiang, Zhejiang..Li Jiajin is one of them. “My father is a bronze restorer. I have been fascinated by the restoration of cultural relics since I was a child.” Today, only 24-year-old Li Jiajin has been engaged in the restoration of cultural relics for five years. He said that the competition will be taken as a new starting point to inherit the cultural relics restoration skills.
Seeing many young people taking part in the competition, Fan Zaixuan, the referee of the mural color plastic cultural relics restoration division and an expert in mural restoration in China, was very pleased. In his view, on the one hand, the contest is a skill competition, on the other hand, “it is necessary to arouse the attention and attention of all sectors of society on the restoration of cultural relics and attract more young people to like this work.”
“I have done one thing in 72 years”, “Restoring a period of history” and “Bringing cultural relics to life” … At the opening ceremony of the contest, a special promotional film was broadcast. In just four minutes, it shows the professional ethics and professionalism of several generations of cultural relics people in China, who use their hands to “save” time and bring countless broken cultural relics back to life. Author Gao Yuqing