One layer at a time

In an age when a painting can be scanned in seconds and reproduced endlessly by artificial intelligence with a few lines of text, it may seem strange to spend months reproducing a single work by hand.

Yet that is exactly what practitioners are doing inside Rongbaozhai, or Studio of Glorious Treasures, the venerable art and stationery shop whose history stretches back over three centuries.

There are no shortcuts here. A traditional Chinese painting is broken down into its component layers, stroke by stroke and color by color. Artists trace the lines onto thin sheets of paper, then transfer them onto wooden blocks and carve them by hand. The blocks are inked and pressed onto paper one after another, sometimes thousands of times, until a new image emerges.

Known in Chinese as muban shuiyin, or woodblock water printing, the technique is one of Rongbaozhai's defining crafts and was named a national-level intangible cultural heritage in 2006. Its basic process consists of three stages: gou — tracing and separating the color; ke — carving the blocks; and yin — printing.

However, calling it "printing" can actually be misleading. The real challenge begins long before the first impression.

After tracing the original work and breaking it into component layers, the artist uses those layers to carve the blocks. The number of blocks depends on the painting's complexity.