Zhou Guang

01 · Lineage & Regional School

Born into a family of paper-cut artists, at the age of nine he learned paper-cut design, knife work and colour work from his father, Zhou Yongming. He not only inherited his father's dyeing techniques and mastered the whole range of painting, cutting and dyeing skills, but also created a new multiple dyeing technique. Within the regional tradition and school record of Paper-cutting in Wei, Hebei: Yu County paper cutting is also called 'window flowers' (chuanghua). It is a traditional decorative folk art of the region with a history of more than two hundred years; its early patterns were mostly auspicious motifs such as flowers, and later it absorbed the artistic features of the Yangliuqing New Year paintings of Tianjin and the Wuqiang New Year paintings, forming a style of its own. In the early 20th century, driven by artists such as Wang Laoshang, Wang Shouye and Zhou Yongming, the style of Yu County paper cutting became increasingly distinctive, breaking free of the general conventions of folk paper cutting and acquiring deeper cultural connotations.

02 · Mastery & Signature Works

Male, Han ethnicity, born in November 1955, a native of Yu County, Hebei Province. His original reversed-pull beard technique can cut and pull more than forty beards of opera figures on a strip of xuan paper 1.8 centimetres wide, and can cut eyebrows, eyes, nose and mouth on a face only 0.5 centimetres across, with a vivid expression and a lifelike appearance. His main works include Rich Peonies and The Six Harmonies of the Zodiac Animals. Within the documented technical tradition of Paper-cutting in Wei, Hebei: Yu County is located in the northwest of Hebei Province and is famous for producing paper cutting. Through the joint research of paper-cutting artists including Liu Laobu, the creative tools were reformed: some patterned work shifted from cutting single sheets to batch engraving with knives, giving the Yu County paper-cutting craft a new improvement. Yu County paper cutting is a product of folk society and, even more, a portrayal of the lives of ordinary people. Its subject matter is wide-ranging and its patterns numerous, covering opera figures, opera masks, myths and legends, flowers, birds, fish and insects, domestic fowl and livestock, auspicious birds and beasts, and much besides. The knife work of Yu County paper cutting possesses both the bold, unadorned character of northern folk paper cutting and the delicate, refined style of southern paper cutting. Its colors are rich and strong and its contrasts sharp; it is highly decorative and richly folk in flavor, full of rhythmic charm, presenting an artistic appeal at once graceful and gorgeous, plain and splendid, and it is cherished far and wide. On the crowded stage of folk paper cutting with its many varieties, Yu County paper cutting stands apart through its full compositions, vivid forms, brilliant colors and distinctive craft. It is based mainly on yin carving (cutting the lines away), with yang carving (leaving the lines standing) as a complement; the two are combined, and multi-color dot-dyeing and painted tinting are applied, achieving an effect at once meticulous and lifelike, suited to both refined and popular tastes. The process steps of Yu County paper cutting include drafting, smoking the pattern, carving and dot-dyeing: first the design is drawn in ink lines and smoked onto thin paper with an oil lamp to leave a black outline pattern; then a knife is used to carve according to the pattern; finally a brush dipped in dyes applies the color layer by layer. Cutting and dyeing proceed separately, and a single work is often completed through the cooperation of several people — this is also why Yu County paper cutting can be produced in batches with such a great variety of designs. Representative repertoire, works and technical entries recorded for the project include: "Yin carving dominant, yang carving secondary": Yuxian paper-cutting is mainly negative carved with positive carving as a supplement, then coloured with multiple dyes. "The shift from single-sheet cutting to batch carving": Led by Liu Laobu, Yuxian craftsmen replaced single-sheet cutting with knives that carve a stack of sheets at once, raising both output and precision. "Wang Laoshang, Wang Shouye and Zhou Yongming": Early in the twentieth century Wang Laoshang, Wang Shouye and Zhou Yongming pushed Yuxian cutting beyond the common run of folk paper-cutting. "The 'reverse-pulled beard' technique": The inheritor Zhou Guang's 'reverse-pulled beard' method carves over forty opera-character beard strands on a very narrow sheet of xuan paper.

03 · Transmission & Safeguarding Status

A representative bearer of paper-cutting (Yu County paper-cutting), a fourth-batch national intangible cultural heritage project. In 2010 his work The Eight Immortals won a gold award at the China Paper-cut Art Festival sponsored by the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and other bodies.

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. Zhou Guang · National Representative Bearer Archive