Wo Ye attended some of Beijing’s best schools as a child, but she bypassed a university education in favor of three years of rigorous training as a traditional porcelain painter. Opportunities in her chosen field were limited, so she spent most of her twenties as a trade-magazine art director. It was during this period that she was baptized and met Bishop Jin, who invited her to work as an artist for his diocese. In her early thirties, she went to Milan for four years of intensive training in the Vatican’s liturgical art program. There, at the Scuola Beato Angelico, she learned about everything from the New Testament to vestments, then spent two more years of study at a small Benedictine college on the Minnesota prairie. She admits that when she went abroad, she had no idea where the training would lead, other than back to Shanghai, where she had promised the bishop she would return.
When she did go back to work for the bishop, she had to cobble together a workshop from scratch—China’s last religious stained glass window workshop had closed more than 50 years earlier. She tries to use as many Chinese-made materials as possible, but the country has only one manufacturer of stained glass, in the northeastern coastal city of Dalian, and she needs more variety of color than it can provide. Many of the other materials she requires are also scarce. She often presses foreign friends into service as “mules” to bring her essentials in their suitcases, including glass and grinding wheels. Obtaining basic materials has proven so difficult that the project, originally scheduled for completion within five years, is now in its sixth, with only 2 0 percent finished.
But that initial 20 percent is a revolution in the art of stained glass. The first section of windows is a retelling of the life of Jesus in 44 scenes spread across the cathedral’s nave. Before designing the sequence, Wo Ye developed a flowing visual style based upon the ancient Chinese craft of cut paper, wherein an artist (traditionally, a woman) uses a knife or scissors to create complex characters and scenes from brightly colored paper. Often, the designs are made during holidays and hung in windows or on doors. Wo Ye adapted this tradition’s vernacular style to be etched into the handmade, two-layer German glass that dominates this section of the church.
The actual biblical scenes fill the middle panels of three-panel windows. In the lower panels, four Chinese characters etched into the glass in the manner of an ancient block seal act as captions that explain those scenes. In the upper panels, etched Chinese iconography comments upon the scenes. For example, a magpie on a plum blossom appears above the image of the three kings visiting Jesus in the manger. For Chinese viewers, that particular
combination of the magpie with the blossom reads as a pun that means, roughly, “good news.” The fact that the pun is unintelligible to most foreigners is of little concern to Wo Ye. “It is not for them,” she says with a shrug.
Wo Ye’s Chinese reinterpretation of Christian iconography has provoked some dismay from older members of Shanghai’s Catholic community, who still identify with (and have suffered for) the long-departed European missions. But Bishop Jin dismisses objections from the more conservative elements of his flock. “The windows are for the young people, the Catholics to come.”
SIX SUBWAY STATIONS northeast of the nave, Wo Ye’s sprawling church basement workshop is busy assembling windows destined for the cathedral’s third level. During my most recent visit, she was in the midst of sighing over a recently delivered shipment of poor-quality lead from a Chinese factory. “In America, you can just order the right lead from the catalog,” she says. “But here, I have to find a lead factory and teach them to make it.”
She walks me through a kiln room, a sandblasting room, and the main workroom. Her four employees—three young nuns and a layman in his mid-twenties—are soldering the lead that holds together the massive 4-foot-high windows that will line the top level of the cathedral nave with a “celestial garden” of bamboo, lilies, and magnolias. These plants are rendered with the delicately applied brushstrokes of a traditional Chinese watercolor. To achieve this effect in glass, Wo Ye airbrushes the individual pieces of glass with ceramic paint, and then fires them in a kiln. “There is no textbook for this,” she says. “You just have to learn by trying.” In the process of learning, she admits, she has ruined a lot of glass. But if early reviews are any indication, the sacrifice was worth it: Among the small number of diocesan officials and parishioners who have seen the new windows, the reception has been rapturous.
For Wo Ye, good reviews are always welcome; but most important to her is recognition that the new windows are innately Chinese. In a story often repeated around the diocese, she recalls that on the day, four years ago, that the first nave chapel windows were installed, a young cathedral tour guide stopped to look at the new panels being unpacked, and exclaimed, with surprise, “They’re Chinese!” Wo Ye has shown the windows to Catholic and world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel last year. But that impromptu response from her countryman is what pleases her most. “That made me feel really good,” she says. “I am doing the right thing.”
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