Chipping Away: How We Made This Issue's Cover

For the cover image of the January issue of the Beijinger, we considered a number of ideas. Ice isn’t plentiful in Beijing in December, when we shot it, so the skating couple on the Summer Palace’s Kunming Lake was out. Masked hockey goalie? Frozen Houhai at dusk? Then we hit upon the idea of an ice cover. A cover made from ice. Now that’s cool. So we opened up our golden rolodex to the page with “ice sculptors” on it and called Zhang Xueguo. He asked us to meet him at his workshop, which we of course expected would be an airplane hangar-sized frozen world, complete with an encased woolly mammoth in the corner. His work space turned out to be a very cold shed in Fengtai District, somewhere between the Marco Polo Bridge and the middle of nowhere.

Zhang, whom we nicknamed Chainsaw, a friendly, soft-spoken ice sculptor with a fondness for power tools, was ready when we arrived, and took us carefully through the steps of making an ice sculpture.

The ice was placed on a rolling table illuminated from below with colored light. This not only allowed him to work more comfortably on the sculpture, but to add color and effect to the final product. It would also make it easier for transport once the sculpture was finished.

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Photo: Mitchell Pe Masilun