In a narrow sense, micro-carving refers to carving paintings and poems on ivory chips, bamboo chips and hair the size of beans and rice. His works need to be examined with a magnifying glass or even a microscope to distinguish between calligraphy and painting. They are the finest and smallest of China's traditional arts and crafts. Micro sculpture has a long history. On the Oracle Bone Inscriptions in the Western Zhou Dynasty, a miniature lettering of only 0.6 silk meters was found. Micro-carving technology is represented by Suzhou micro-carving, which reached a high level in the Ming Dynasty. The story of the nuclear boat learned in the Chinese class in middle school tells the story of Wang Shuyuan, a Suzhou folk sculptor, who carved a peach stone no more than one inch long into a night tour of Dongpo Chibi, which is amazing.
During the light years of the Qing Dynasty, Wuxian Shen carved a hunchback old man with an olive nucleus, which was so lifelike that even the four poems on the fan in the old man's hand were clearly recognizable. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, celebrities such as Liang Xiaoyou and An Songyuan have appeared in Suzhou Micro Sculpture, and rising stars such as Dong Lansheng and Shen Weizhong.
After liberation, Suzhou established the Academy of Arts and Crafts, and made great efforts to visit micro-carving folk artists to encourage them to return to their old jobs. In recent years, the micro-carving art has developed to an amazing height, and a number of fine micro-carving masterpieces have been born. The most incredible thing is that the artist combined ivory micro-carving with hair carving, carved ivory the size of mung beans into a globe, carved longitude and latitude lines thinner than hair on it, carved grooves at the equator, embedded a hair, and carved "Our friends are all over the world" on the hair in both Chinese and English. This miniature sculpture named "Friendship Globe" caused a sensation and was regarded as a rare treasure.
Although micro-carving art is a traditional art with a long history, with the passage of time, scientific innovation will be carried out in both carving tools and carvings.