Editor’s Note
This exhibition highlights a fascinating intersection of art and sustainability, transforming industrial byproducts into vibrant artistic mediums. It offers a unique glimpse into both traditional techniques and contemporary creative innovation.
The first Huizhou Famous Artists’ Mineral Pigment Fine Art Exhibition is currently being held at the Sijiaolou Jewelry Creative Park, showcasing dozens of traditional Chinese paintings, oil paintings, and other works created with mineral pigments by renowned local artists. The exhibition will run until January 31, and admission is free for the public.
A salon event focused on discussions about personal experience with mineral pigments and their market application and promotion.
He Jianchang, inspired by classical works like the Dunhuang murals and “A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains,” collaborated with a research team to conduct repeated studies and experiments on the gemstone waste from the Sijiaolou Jewelry Creative Park. They successfully transformed the waste into mineral pigments.
Zhou Yongzhong, President of the Huizhou Chinese Painting Academy, stated that Huizhou’s Sijiaolou possesses unique advantages in mineral pigment manufacturing.
The gemstone processing industry in the Sijiaolou area of Huizhou’s Xiaojinkou began in the 1980s. At its peak, there were over 4,000 processing workshops, generating tens of thousands of tons of waste and hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of wastewater annually, causing severe local pollution.
The birth of the Sijiaolou International Jewelry Creative Park was driven by the urgent need for local environmental governance and industrial transformation. It aims to create a demonstration park for the circular economy in the gemstone processing industry and a model base for energy conservation and centralized treatment of “three wastes.” Small workshops entering the park undergo unified pollution treatment, preventing contaminated wastewater from being discharged and turning solid waste into valuable resources.
To ensure scientific and technological achievements continuously support the transformation and upgrading of Sijiaolou’s colored gemstone processing industry, the Huizhou R&D Center of the Guangdong Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Resource Utilization and Rare Earth Development was established within the Sijiaolou International Jewelry Creative Park and officially inaugurated on May 28 this year.
As the leader of the scientific and technological team, Yu Lianxiang introduced that the Huizhou R&D Center currently has over 20 researchers and will gradually expand to around 50. More than 20 million yuan has been invested in infrastructure and equipment, with over 3 million yuan initially spent on advanced domestic testing instruments and high-end professional equipment.
Sijiaolou, a world-renowned manufacturing base and distribution center for colored gemstone raw materials, gathers over a thousand types of colored gemstones from around the world. A new exhibition hall has been created to help visitors understand gemstone sources and expand geological knowledge.
A Colored Gemstone Trading Center within the creative park provides an innovative business model integrating display, wholesale, retail, and e-commerce.
To adapt to new consumption trends like e-commerce and live streaming, the Sijiaolou International Jewelry Creative Park base is building a cross-border e-commerce platform integrating functions such as commodity display, transportation, warehousing, distribution, information processing, and circulation processing.
It is reported that the original intention of establishing the Sijiaolou International Jewelry Creative Park was to solve the long-standing environmental pollution problems caused by gemstone processing wastewater and solid waste in the Sijiaolou area of Huizhou, and to assist in the transformation and upgrading of the local gemstone industry.
According to the plan for the Sijiaolou International Jewelry Creative Park, a comprehensive and intelligent tourist destination—the “Sijiaolou Jewelry Cultural Park”—will be built within the park.