Hi Peter, Pat, and all,
Yesterday I was talking with the owner of a local Chinese restaurant and telling him he needs to collect something. He said he didn't have big money to invest, so I suggested inside painted snuff bottles of the Very Modern period. I told him that he should buy good bottles now and they will appreciate over the next 5 to 10 years. So I asked for his email address and it turns out his family name is Liu. I told him that there are famous IPSB artists with that name and that I would email him some information. First I searched the internet and found some interesting information. When I searched the forum I found this very interesting thread.
I noticed that there were some open questions about Liu Shouben, so I thought that the following might be appropriate to add here. Almost as if the China Daily was following this thread
, they published an article about Liu Shouben with some interview comments on May 18, 2011 - just a few days after this discussion. The article in part:
Liu was introduced to the art form at the age of 17, in 1960, when he learned traditional Chinese painting and inside-bottle painting at the same time in a factory with several "classmates".
"There were no so-called talents or gifts. All of us had no background in it. It was like hopping on a random train. You ended up wherever it took you," Liu said.
The "train" used to send students to Liu regularly in the 1970s and 1980s, when he sometimes had as many as 40 apprentices. But the figure quickly dropped to four when the policy changed and no jobs were allocated to the young.
Liu said if the government does not come up with policies to support the art form, soon no one in Beijing will know how to practice the craft.
Liu's works sell for more than 20,000 yuan, and a basic crystal bottle sells for about 2,000 yuan.
Some bottles on the market cost only about 50 yuan but, Liu said, they are not fully hand-painted. Using photolithography, the lines of the paintings in the cheap bottles are copied, with the colors then filled in by hand.
Some of Liu's students have already become famous craftsmen in their own right. Yet Liu is still desperate to recruit more.
"I will be more than happy if young people come to me to learn the craft," he said. "But they'll have to stay with me for at least two years, not a few hours or a few days," he said.
The link to the whole article:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2011-05/18/content_12529556.htm