A ubiquitous art roots in Tibet

As an important genre of Tibetan Buddhist arts, the Regong art includes paintings (murals and scrolls called "thangka" in Tibetan), barbola, clay and wooden sculptures, color paintings on architectures, designs, and yak butter sculptures, etc, which can be found almost everywhere in Tongren -- on the walls, bricks, stones, clothes and buildings. Its content ranges from Sakyamuni, Bodhisattvas, Buddhist guardians and fairies, to Buddhist stories. But telling more worldly stories, including local practices and customs, has become the latest trend. It's given the ancient genre some fresher life. The major types of Regong art include:

1. Thangka

The unusual art form of thangka is intended to nurture humankind's path toward enlightenment, and from the mundane world to sacred reality. Cotton canvas and linen cloth are the common fabrics for thangkas, while silk cloth is reserved for important subjects. Before painting begins, the fabrics are stitched along the edges with flax thread and stretched on a specially made wooden frame. Then a paste made of animal glue mixed with talcum powder is spread over the surface to block up the holes in it. After the paste is scraped off and the cloth gets thoroughly dried, the artist works out the sketches of the images with charcoal sticks. Coloring comes last. The pigments are mixed with animal glue and ox bile to make the luster stay. The whole process usually lasts a month or more.

2. Barbola

This is a special art that employs the techniques of "cutting and piling" to portray objects. In terms of specific techniques, barbola can be subcategorized into "jian dui" (literally, to "cut and pile") and "ci xiu" ("embroidery"). The barbola works in Regong are mainly of the jian dui style.

To make jian dui barbola, artisans select silks and satins of different colors according to type of expression desired, cut them into human, animal, flower and bird shapes of a certain size, and then paste the patterns onto the pre-cut papermodels. After that, they are stacked from dense to light colors.

Since the middle of the barbola is slightly convex, the work creates a strong three-dimensional effect that looks like a colored embossment made of silk material. Barbola subjects generally come from Buddhist stories, and most of them are about people. Barbola pays much attention to posture and the details of human figures, and values the arrangement of silks and satins of different colors. It features an exquisite touch amid roughness, gives prominence to its major subjects, has vivid colors and forms a strong contrast. Barbola is an innovation in embroidery art, combining embroidery and embossment.

3. Sculpture

Sculpture, which holds an important position among Regong art, mainly includes clay sculpture, woodcarving, brick engraving and so on, among which clay sculpting is the most popular. The art of clay sculptures had matured from the mid-17th century to the early 19th century when the sculptures were exquisitely carved and were lifelike, with smooth clothing lines, a sense of reality and a strong contrast in colors that were arranged harmoniously.

The clay sculptures in Regong were combined with monastic architecture to express the wide-ranging contents related to the architecture. The range of subjects is also very wide. Besides the sun, moon and stars, mountains, flowers and trees, birds, beasts, fishes and worms and other patterns used as decorations and foils, different colors and other various images also appear in sculptures. These include the bizarre motley Buddhist guardians, Buddha's warrior attendants with horrifying features, horse-headed and red-haired gods, and so on.

In addition, woodcarving and brick engraving can also be found in many places. Woodcarving is mainly employed to make decorative patterns on door lintels and chapiters of a house, as well as wooden josses. Brick carving is mainly seen in such forms of architecture as decorative patterns, dragons and phoenixes and pairs of lions on the ridge of a house, beasts on flying roofs and basso reliefs on walls.