The normally sleepy town of Sanyi (三義), Miaoli County (苗栗縣), got a jolt this weekend when the annual Sanyi Wood Carving Festival (三義木雕節) got off to a thunderous start. The pounding of drumming teams performing at the opening ceremony, the din of cars and buses vying for parking slots and the incessant buzz of the wood carvers' tool, the chainsaw, reverberated throughout the small town on Saturday.
Residents of Sanyi and visitors from across the country were joined by Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄) and Minister of Transportation and Communications, Yeh Chu-lan (葉菊蘭) for the nine-day festivals' noisy opening ceremony. All were treated to spectacular performances by Hakka dragon dance teams and Aboriginal folk dancers from Sanyi.
So as to remind visitors that the festival is a celebration of woodcarving rather than of political rhetoric and dragon dancers, a couple of the towns' more enterprising resident woodcarvers took the extraordinary step of taking their chainsaws to a huge block of ice. The aim being to carve an ice dragon before the blistering heat of the noonday sun melted all the ice. The stunt proved a huge success. Not only did it attract crowds of curious onlookers the carvers also managed to complete the icy dragon before the ice melted.
It was, of course, the woodcarvers themselves who drew the biggest crowds on the day. Even the premier made time to drop by one store for a chat and to watch as woodcarver, Hsiao Chin-lien (蕭進連) began work on a new carving.
For wood carvers such as Hsiao, the annual festival is an opportunity to demonstrate the carving techniques and prowess which has enabled the Sanyi wood carvers to become possibly the finest, and certainly the quickest, wood carvers in the world.
The town is in fact one of the oldest known centers of camphor woodcarving in Asia. Historical records and artifacts show that the town of Sanyi has a tradition of woodcarving dating back over 400 hundred years. Aborigines originally used the gnarled trunks and roots of local camphor trees as a base for their carvings.
While the town saw an influx of art students keen to learn the art of woodcarving from the 1920 onwards, it wasn't until the 1970s that the town's woodcarving tradition went global. Works by local woodcarvers such as Yang Cheng-yu (楊正育) and Chien Ming-kunag (簡明光) found their way to Taipei and in turn onto the international market. Like many of his peers, Hsiao also suddenly found himself carving works not only for the local market but also for export to Korea, Japan, Thailand and the US.
"I started woodcarving over 30 years ago and was soon getting orders from Thailand and Japan. My father was a woodcarver and so was his, but neither of them had any opportunity to export their works. I can't really explain why there was a sudden interest in our woodcarvings in the 1970s, but I guess it had more to do with the art dealers in Taipei than with us. After all, people have been carving sculptures out of camphor here for too many years to remember," explains Hsiao while meticulously shaping the eyeballs on a half-finished carving of a pot-bellied Buddha. "Since then the number of pieces I make for export has increased so much that I'm now getting orders from the US, Korea and even Europe. And then there's the local market. I don't think I've been busier."
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