If you don’t know the carving when buying jadeite, you deserve to be taken advantage of!

How to look at the craftsmanship of jadeite when appreciating jadeite needs to be discussed from two aspects. On the one hand, it emphasizes the exquisiteness of jade craftsmanship, and on the other hand, it emphasizes the simplicity of jade craftsmanship. These two things seem contradictory, but they are true at the same time. Since the more sophisticated the craftsmanship, the better, someone may ask the leader why we emphasize the simplicity of craftsmanship? Isn’t it even more rare to see a piece of jadeite carved with patterns? Jade experts have a saying to explain it: "No knots, no flowers."

The chief leader of Tiandihui will first talk about the techniques of jade carving: round carving, relief carving, openwork carving, chain carving, double groove expansion method, hollow carving, and color matching, etc. It refers to the method of dealing with the image and space of jade carvings, which is mainly reflected in the carving and engraving in the sense of subtraction. By subtracting waste materials, the skills and techniques of excavating and displaying the shape step by step from the outside to the inside are used. Today I will talk about four of these techniques.

Round Sculpture

Round carving is a three-dimensional carving, which is the overall expression of art in jade carving works. It is also called three-dimensional carving or round carving. The image of a round sculpture is a complete three-dimensional shape. This form requires the sculptor to carve from all directions from the front, back, left, right, top, middle and bottom, allowing the viewer to appreciate all aspects of the jade carving from different angles, just like a real object.

Relief

Relief is a semi-three-dimensional sculpture, which refers to a three-dimensional image carved on the surface of jade. It is a decorative carving technique that appeared after the round sculpture. The round sculpture can show the three-dimensional sense of the jade carving work from all directions, while the relief sculpture can only show the semi-three-dimensional sense of the pattern from the front. The back of the work is attached to the jade material or roughly carved according to the condition of the jade material. Relief is a raised pattern, which means the non-patterned parts of the jade are dug out. It is divided into shallow relief and high relief.

Bas-relief uses the method of reducing the ground to dig out the base of the lines or the outline of the pattern, creating the effect of raised line decoration. It has a single layer, relatively simple content, a strong sense of flatness, and is close to the form of painting.

High relief is created by hollowing out the bottom surface to form a three-dimensional pattern, which is then shaped with negative lines. It has rich layers and complex content, and is close to the round sculpture model. High relief first appeared in the Warring States Period and became popular in the Ming and Qing Dynasties.

Openwork

Openwork carving means retaining the raised part of the object and partially hollowing out the back part. The commonality among openwork, hollow carving and chain carving is that they all have the characteristics of penetrating carving. The difference is that openwork carving is based on relief, with the background part hollowed out, and the back is mostly expressed in the form of a screen. There are two types of openwork: single-sided openwork and double-sided openwork. Single-sided openwork carving only carves the front side, while double-sided openwork carving carves the objects on both sides. The essential difference between openwork carving, hollow carving and chain carving is that hollow carving and chain carving have no front and back sides, and are 360° all-round carvings, which belong to the round carving technique; while openwork carving is an extension of the relief carving technique.

Carving

Openwork carving is also called hollow carving, which means hollowing out the parts that do not represent objects and retaining only the parts that represent objects. The main feature of openwork carving is to express the three-dimensional spatial layering of objects, which is developed on the basis of perforation. Hollow carving is difficult and has very high requirements on the stone, carving knife techniques, and the skills of the sculptor. The stone for hollow carving must be fine and pure, and the hollowed-out part cannot have any cracks or sand grids, otherwise it will break easily.

Jade carving has a long history in China. The techniques of jade carving have been passed down from generation to generation. As time goes by, people continue to inherit, improve and innovate. Today, jade carving techniques are almost perfect. Over the years that the leader of Tiandihui has been in the jade industry, he has seen the price of jadeite rise to one peak after another, but he has also seen the jadeite industry become mixed and as complicated as the human world. Let me tell you an open secret: many merchants never touch the materials, and they only know a little bit about them based on hearsay. If you ask them to be appraised, you may be misled. Some unscrupulous merchants even do this on purpose, making mistakes in order to earn huge profits. Therefore, it is important to find a reliable merchant and go to an authoritative appraisal agency for inspection.

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