Mythical creature players bring ancient legends to life

SHINE | 24-Jun-2022 | By Ke Jiayun

In the South China Sea, there is a clan of Jiaoren, or Chinese mermaids, whose teardrops become pearls after they fall. To the north of Kunlun Mountains, there’s a monster called Xiangliu, which has nine heads with human faces but the body of a serpent. These magic creatures from the ancient book of mythical legends “Shan Hai Jing,” or “The Classic of Mountains and Seas,” which inspired JK Rowling for her “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” series, now are brought back to life by two young women using beautiful makeup and costumes.

Zhang Xin, 26, who learned painting as a child, said she started dressing up for photo series to commemorate the days she spent with her grandma. Every night before she went to sleep, her grandma told her stories in “Shan Hai Jing.”

“I remember, especially in the summer nights, my grandma stayed outside to enjoy the breeze,” Zhang said. “She sat on a rocking chair while I counted the stars and listened to her stories.” These stories opened her mind to an imaginative world with fantastic creatures. Prior to her “Shan Hai Jing” tour, Zhang mainly drew illustrations for children. To design the makeup and look, she checked documents and combined the images with the appearance of animals. She used various means and materials to make the items look like horns or tails. “I used to make horns with clay by hand or with 3D printing technology,” Zhang said. “I also used real yak horns. It’s difficult to fix them onto the head and face of models, as they will drop. So it takes long time.”

She chooses places whose geographical conditions meet the descriptions of the creatures for photos. “For instance, some creatures live in areas surrounded by rocks, so I will try to find such place,” she said. She once carried a large piece of glass and climbed up a mountain for six hours. Another time, her car broke down in a desert at night. “Once when crossing a river, the water rose up halfway and I nearly got stuck,” she recalled. “Another time when I climbed a snowy mountain, I found I didn’t wear enough clothes; It was really freezing.” Recently, Zhang is working on another two photo series about the 24 solar terms and Chinese food. “I’m happy that more and more people are now paying attention to and falling in love with traditional Chinese culture,” she said. According to Zhang, there are also many foreigners showing interest in the “mysterious” Eastern culture, so she hopes that her works can attract more of them to the Chinese classic.

“In the future, I will create more works on traditional culture,” she said. “Besides photos, now I have turned the stories of ‘Shan Hai Jing’ into stage plays and installation art. I think the traditional culture and arts have infinite possibilities.” Another mythical creature player Jia Ling from Zhangjiagang, Jiangsu Province, has also created a series of “Shan Hai Jing” videos and photos with two of her friends, Xiang Yang and Da Ke, from Shenyang, Liaoning Province. The trio, born in the 1980s and 1990s, spent about three years traveling to 82 cities across China filming the series. While Jia dresses up as the mythical creatures, gods and goddesses, Xiang does research, writes scripts to make the difficult classical Chinese content understandable to the public and dubs the videos. Da is in charge of filming and editing.

“‘Shan Hai Jing’ is so beautiful,” said Xiang. “Its rich content and geographical records are beyond our imagination. We think such treasure should never be neglected so we try to interpret it in a way that is more acceptable to the young.” Usually it takes them 15 to 20 days to prepare the costumes and props for one creature. And the filming can sometimes be dangerous. Xiang recalled that once they filmed the series of Baimin, a mythical ancient country in “Shan Hai Jing,” and their ideal place was Baishuitai in Shangri-la, Yunnan Province.

However, heading to Baishuitai meant that they needed to pass a very narrow passage with a cliff. “Although it’s dangerous, we still decided to go,” she said. “All of us bought insurance and called our families before setting out. Fortunately we made it.” When they decided to do this project four years ago, there was little support. Many thought that no one would watch their videos because young people mostly preferred Japanese animations or Marvel movies. “It made us ponder why so many people thought ancient culture is no longer appeals to the young,” Xiang said. “We have made efforts to show it to the public in a way that is favored.” Now they have an increasing number of followers who look forward to updates of their works. There are more than 250,000 fans on Weibo and over 240,000 on video platform Bilibili.

“We’ve received many messages from parents who said they didn’t know how explain ‘Shan Hai Jing’ to their children when they were required to learn about the book during vacations,” Xiang said. “Through our videos, their kids understood what this classic is about and some even fell in love with it. We also learned that many teachers played our videos at class, which greatly inspired and encouraged us.” They plan to do a new series about traditional culture and will release it next month. Unlike Zhang and Jia, who dress up as the mythical creatures, Qian Jiangyue makes models of the creatures with her hands. Though she majored in visual communication and worked as graphic designer for a few years after graduation, Qian felt she was more attracted to three-dimensional modeling. She spent several years learning sculpture and sketching. “I’m fascinated by Chinese mythical creatures,” Qian told Shanghai Daily. “They came from nature but surpassed nature. They reflect the pursuit for divinity and the admiration of nature. “I started with ‘Shan Hai Jing’ because it’s representative and has rich details.”

In 2019, she began making models of them and created her own brand “Mountain & Sea.” But later found the mass production and sales occupied too much time. “I wanted to do more works so I stopped that,” she said. The main body of her models is mostly made of polymer clay and she often uses more than five materials in each work. “I prefer a mixture of different materials,” she said. Once she used a lot of liquid resin but later it emitted too much heat. She had to place the work in the refrigerator, which frightened her family members when they opened it. Her works are not only appreciated by her fans, but also by those who are not familiar with “Shan Hai Jing.” “Once my mother had acute cerebral infarction, I took the work I was doing then to the hospital while keeping her company,” she said. “Then all the people in the ward got attracted. Later those from other wards, and even the doctors and nurses, came and said my work looked beautiful. A grandpa tapped on my shoulder and encouraged me to go on.”

Qian believes that no matter how far the Chinese people go, their roots are always in the Chinese culture. “Our culture keeps innovating so that it has great resilience and vitality, which allows it to show different styles in different eras,” she said.