A morning at a nuo mask studio in Chengdu

The first thing we noticed, climbing the stair to Master Zhou Wenkai's studio above a stationery shop on Yulin South Road, was the smell. Not paint, exactly, and not the woody dust of a carving room either, but something between the two: camphor shavings warm from a low heater, a faint mineral note from the pigments ground that morning, and underneath it all the resinous sweetness of the persimmon tannin he uses to seal the wood before the first colour is laid down. He was at his bench when we came in, sleeves rolled, a half-finished mask face-up under a swing-arm lamp. He nodded once and went back to the brush.

The mask he was working on was for a nuo troupe in a village in northeast Sichuan, four hours by road from Chengdu, where the seasonal exorcism cycle is still performed on the fifteenth night of the first lunar month. The troupe had ordered three new masks this winter: a door god, a black-faced general, and a child-spirit with crossed eyes. We had come to sit with Zhou for a morning because the studio is one of perhaps six in the city still cutting and painting masks that will be danced in, rather than hung on a wall.

Zhou is forty-one. He trained at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in the late nineties, intending to paint scrollwork, and drifted into mask-carving after a visit to his maternal grandfather's village in 2003, where he watched a nuo performance he could not afterward stop thinking about. He apprenticed under an older carver in Mianyang for six years, opened the Yulin studio in 2014, and has since worked alone except for an apprentice, Xiao Liang, who comes in on weekends from her job at an animation house.

The wood he prefers is camphor from the lower slopes around Dujiangyan, cut in winter when the sap is down and stored under his bench in rough rectangles for at least two years before he touches them. Camphor resists insects without treatment, takes a clean cut along the grain, and holds carved detail for decades. The block on his bench that morning had been drying since 2023. He weighed it in his palm before drawing the first line and said, half to us and half to the wood, that it was finally ready.

“This is the part of the conversation where we expected the standard lament about a craft drifting toward extinction, the young uninterested, the festivals shrinking.”

This is the part of the conversation where we expected the standard lament about a craft drifting toward extinction, the young uninterested, the festivals shrinking. Zhou did not say any of this. He said that the festival cycles in the villages had actually expanded in the last decade, partly because returning migrant workers brought money home and partly because county cultural bureaus had begun listing nuo on intangible heritage rolls and paying small stipends to active troupes. His commission book was full through the following autumn.

What was changing, he said, was the relationship between the mask and the maker. His teacher in Mianyang had carved for two specific troupes whose families he knew by name. Zhou now carves for troupes he has never met, in villages he has not visited, working from descriptions sent over WeChat by troupe leaders who photograph the older masks they are replacing. He has begun keeping a notebook of these conversations, with sketches and the leader's annotations, so that the mask he sends back retains some thread of the village it is going to. The notebook sat open on a shelf above the bench. We did not read it.

The painting sequence follows a fixed order he learned from his teacher and has not varied. After the persimmon tannin has sealed the carved face, a base coat of titanium white (he switched away from the lead-based ground in 2019) is laid over the entire surface and allowed to dry overnight. Then the eyes are cut in with black, then the mouth, then the eyebrows. The skin tone arrives last, painted around the features rather than under them. He works on three masks in rotation so that one is always drying while the next is being painted.

The pigments are mineral and traditional with two exceptions. The vermilion he uses for the door god's cheeks is cinnabar from a supplier in Hunan who still grinds it by hand. The black for the general's face is a soot ink stick from Anhui. The blue, however, is a contemporary cobalt and the gold is an acrylic he buys at the art-supply chain three blocks south, because the historical equivalents are either prohibitively expensive or have become legally complicated since the tightening of cinnabar controls a few years ago. He is matter-of-fact about this. The dancers in the village do not care whether the gold is leaf or acrylic. They care whether the face holds together under firelight at midnight.

We asked, late in the morning, what made a mask danceable rather than merely accurate. Zhou set down the brush and thought for a while. The weight has to sit forward of the cheekbones, he said, so the dancer's neck does not tire across a three-hour rite. The eye holes have to be cut high and wide enough that he can see his feet on uneven village ground. The interior has to be hollowed enough to hold sweat without warping. None of these constraints showed on the outside of the mask, and none of them appeared in the photographs the troupe leaders sent. They came from his hands, working against the inside of the wood, in the part of the craft that nobody but the dancer would ever feel.

By noon the light through the studio window had shifted, and the child-spirit mask on the bench had its eyes for the first time. Zhou set it on a small wooden stand and stepped back. Xiao Liang, who had arrived quietly an hour earlier and was grinding pigment at the second bench, looked up and said something we did not catch. He laughed. Outside, a delivery scooter went past on Yulin South Road, and somewhere on the floor below a woman was unlocking the stationery shop for the afternoon. He picked up the brush and turned back to the bench, and we left him to the mouth.