Chinese idiom · 成语
弄巧成拙
Meaning
To overdo cleverness and become clumsy; to botch through overthinking.
Character by character
Origin and story
Literary usageSong-period writings attest this expression for cleverness that defeats itself. Huang Tingjian's Zhuo Xuan Song places it beside adding feet to a snake and building a house beneath another house: images of needless elaboration. The Buddhist collection Wudeng Huiyuan also records Layman Pang using the phrase after an exchange with the Chan master Mazu, acknowledging that his attempted cleverness has gone wrong.
The two settings share a warning about contrivance, not a rule that all careful thought is harmful. An extra flourish, shortcut, or display of ingenuity can spoil what it was intended to improve. The surviving attestations need not be turned into a single securely dated invention story.
Sources and further reading
In everyday life
我想用滤镜让照片更自然，结果弄巧成拙，连肤色都变了。
I tried using a filter to make the photo look more natural, but it backfired and even changed the skin tones.
A supposedly clever improvement produces a worse result.