Liao Huilin

01 · Lineage & Regional School

Liao Huilin, Male, Unspecified, from Jiangmenshixinhui, Guangdong, is a third-batch national representative bearer of Xinhuikuiyi (Ⅶ-92). The tradition is documented in Jiangmenshixinhui, Guangdong. Within the regional tradition and school record of Xinhuikuiyi in Jiangmenshixinhui, Guangdong: Xinhui palm-leaf art is centred on Huicheng in Xinhui District of Jiangmen City; the villages along the Tanjiang River such as Tianma, Huancheng and Shuangshui are the main areas of palm cultivation and processing, and the Huicheng Palm Township Traditional Craft Business Centre in Xinhui District is the protecting unit. In former times almost every household grew palms and every family wove fans; the fans were graded and sold after being cut, branded, painted and embroidered, and were shipped by water from Huicheng to Guangzhou, Hong Kong and overseas. Over the two hundred or more years from the Qianlong reign to the end of the Guangxu reign of the Qing dynasty, the development of Xinhui palm-leaf art reached its peak. After the 1990s, under the impact of modern household appliances such as air conditioning, palm-leaf fans gradually withdrew from people's daily lives, Xinhui palm-leaf art declined day by day, related enterprises closed one after another, and many inheritors of the craft were forced to change trade.

02 · Mastery & Signature Works

Male, Han ethnicity, born in August 1956 in Jiangmen, Guangdong Province. He is a Guangdong Provincial Master of Arts and Crafts. From the age of sixteen he studied palm-fan pyrography under the veteran craftsman Zhao Wenda, and has worked in palm-leaf craft design and production ever since. He once served as director of the Xinhui Palm Craft Products Factory. Twenty years ago he raised funds on his own to establish the Xinhui Kuixiang Traditional Craft Development Centre, devoted specifically to the development and transmission of palm-leaf craft. Within the documented technical tradition of Xinhuikuiyi in Jiangmenshixinhui, Guangdong: Xinhui in Guangdong is a historic city of profound cultural foundations; it has been established as an administrative unit for more than eighteen hundred years. The area produces abundant Chinese fan palms and has long been known as the "home of the palm". Xinhui palm-leaf art has a long history: the planting of palm trees and the processing of palm-leaf products began as early as the Eastern Jin dynasty. After more than a thousand years of exploration, the people of Xinhui have fused weaving, embroidery, painting and printing into a single whole, bringing the processing of palm-leaf products to a state of consummate skill. At its height the area under palm cultivation in Xinhui reached 60,000 mu, and annual output of palm-leaf fans reached as much as 150 million; the products were exported to Europe, America and the countries of Southeast Asia. In 1952 the fire-painted fans made by the veteran painter Chen Wan were listed by the state as special handicrafts, and Xinhui palm-leaf art took this opportunity to recover, developing into ten major categories with more than a thousand designs, including patterned mats, flower baskets, seat cushions, toothpicks and tongmao hats. Guo Moruo once praised the palm-leaf fans produced in Xinhui with the verse "A world of cool, produced by hand; finer than a demon's workmanship, excelling nature's own skill; flying across the whole globe, overwhelming the western breeze", giving Xinhui palm-leaf art the highest praise. The inheritor of the Zhao family's fire-painted palm-leaf art gathered several veteran palm-leaf craftsmen and established the Huicheng Palm Township Traditional Craft Development Centre in Xinhui District to carry on workshop-style production of palm-leaf art, but output was very limited. Representative repertoire, works and technical entries recorded for the project include: "Fire-painted fans": A red-hot iron stylus burns landscape, flowers and calligraphy into the fan, depth set by the speed of the hand. "Bamboo-sheath fans and three-rib fire fans": Specialities created by the inheritor Liao Huilin, who learned fire painting from Zhao Wenda at sixteen. "Fan palm and a thousand varieties": The palm-rich district redeveloped after 1952 into ten categories and a thousand varieties from mats and baskets to hats and toothpicks. "Guo Moruo's poem on the fan": The poet Guo Moruo praised the Xinhui fan as a cool world made by hand, its craft surpassing nature.

03 · Transmission & Safeguarding Status

Representative bearer of Xinhuikuiyi (Xinhui palm-leaf fan craft), a third-batch national intangible cultural heritage project. The bamboo-sheath painted fan, the three-ridge pyrographic fan and the double-sided embroidered woven fan that he created have either won awards such as the China Arts and Crafts Hundred Flowers Award, been listed as provincial or ministerial quality products, or been collected by the Guangdong Folk Craft Museum.

04 · Associated Heritage Item Dossier

05 · Fellow National Bearers Lineage

National representative bearers recorded under the same item code, ordered from the first to the sixth batch. Batch order is not a teacher–student relationship.

06 · Archival Sources & Bibliography

1. Liao Huilin · National Representative Bearer Archive