Southeast Asia Information Port News (www.dnyxxg.com) – “This is an ancient brick with a Taotie (a mythical beast) pattern from the Jin Dynasty. Legend has it that the Taotie was so greedy that it devoured the brick, leaving only its face on it.” In an ancient brick museum in Hangzhou, Ma Yu, a post-95s generation owner, is introducing the exhibits to customers. Each vividly patterned brick attracts a crowd.
Ma Yu has been systematically collecting and researching ancient bricks since 2018. Having loved antiques and bronzes since childhood, she studied Chinese painting at the Chinese Academy of Arts. While studying the works of renowned artists, she developed a desire to explore the artistic expressions of the ancients, and ancient bricks provided her with the answer – the works of these folk craftsmen, with their images and texts, are vivid expressions of the lives of the ancients.
In 2022, she and a friend founded a museum in Hangzhou, focusing on collecting ancient bricks from the Eastern Han to the Southern Dynasties. The two have collected bricks from private collectors and rescued them from old houses, accumulating a collection of over ten thousand pieces, of which more than three thousand are on display. Ma Yu has also established two major collection systems: inscribed bricks containing surnames, reign titles, and auspicious phrases, and patterned bricks encompassing animal, plant, and human motifs.
As the system matured, Ma Yu shifted her focus from "collecting" to "disseminating" her knowledge, striving to tell the stories of ancient bricks in an accessible way. She actively engages in live streaming on social media platforms, using straightforward language and vivid anecdotes to interpret the history of ancient bricks, attracting many viewers from casual observers to loyal fans; live streaming has become part of her daily work.
Offline, Ma Yu innovates the presentation of patterns, creating cultural and creative products such as refrigerator magnets and canvas bags by printing ancient brick patterns, integrating the beauty of ancient bricks into modern life. During the Year of the Horse, she launched the "Horse Shooting a Sparrow" and "Horse Treading on Auspicious Clouds" series, which were widely popular and attracted orders from customers in Singapore and Japan.
Customer recognition has deepened Ma Yu's understanding of ancient brick culture: ancient bricks are not only carriers of ancient craftsmanship but also bridges connecting the past and present; the wisdom and philosophy of the ancients can still nourish the present. She picked up an ancient brick inscribed with "Auspicious Day for Wine and Food" and remarked, "The ancients enjoyed fine weather; this simple wisdom is exactly what we need in today's fast-paced life."
Now, Ma Yu regularly conducts rubbing workshops at the museum and is also in talks with the museum to prepare an exhibition on ancient bricks, hoping to allow more people to understand the wisdom of the ancients hidden in the brick patterns. (End)
