Ancient architecture through a new view

Beneath the shade of a towering tree, Veldesen Yaputra paused over his sketchbook. The Indonesian architecture student at Tsinghua University had come to Foguang Temple in Xinzhou, Shanxi province, determined to paint its Tang Dynasty (618-907) main hall, one of China's oldest surviving wooden structures. Instead, the tree became his biggest obstacle.

The hall sits halfway up a hillside, with only a narrow courtyard in front. No matter where he stood, the perspective never felt quite right. Branches obscured parts of the roofline, making it nearly impossible to capture the building in a balanced composition.

Nearby, Qin Zhizhen, a Shanxi-based illustrator who has spent the past four years documenting the province's historic architecture, watched quietly.

"Forget drawing every branch exactly as it appears," he told Yaputra. "Loosen the tree. Let it breathe."

Yaputra followed the advice, then added an idea of his own. While painting the ground in front of the temple, he scooped up a handful of soil and mixed it into his watercolor, using the earth itself as pigment.

By the end of his seven-day journey across Shanxi, he realized something had changed.

"My drawings became much more relaxed," Yaputra says. "I could clearly feel myself letting go."

The sketches were done during the second Discovering Shanxi's Ancient Chinese Architecture international cultural exchange program in July, which brought artists from several countries to some of China's best-preserved heritage sites in Shanxi, including the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, Foguang Temple, the Yingxian Wooden Pagoda in Shuozhou, and the Hanging Temple in Datong.