Sculpture restorer devoted to traditional technique for over 20 years

(ECNS) -- Shi Yanchun is an inheritor of the traditional technique of Shanxi Painted Sculpture.

Born in 1970 in north China's Liaoning Province, he began to study the art of traditional sculpture while he was quite young.

The connection between Shi and the restoration of cultural relics started in 1998, when he restored a painted sculpture of a Bodhisattva at a temple in Shanxi.

For more than 20 years, Shi has restored thousands of cultural relics, including those in the Yungang Grottoes in Datong and Shuxiang Temple in the Wutai Mountains.

China's famous writer Feng Jicai spoke highly of Shi's restoration work, praising him as an outstanding inheritor of a thousand-year-old intangible cultural heritage.

Besides restoration, Shi also creates his own art work. He built an art institute for researching painted sculptures in 2010. There, he created a Buddhist sculpture and was collected by the National Art Museum of China in 2020.