Paper-cutting

Ⅶ-16Traditional Fine ArtsFoshan, GuangdongBatch 1 (2006)Newly Added Item

01 · Historical Records

Foshan papercutting is said to have originated in the Central Plains, and to have developed in combination with local folk customs and the local handicraft and commercial trades; by the Qing dynasty it had gradually become an established trade, and guild organizations appeared. In the early 20th century, the twelve trades connected with Foshan papercutting all flourished: door money, paper toys, paper charms and funerary clothing paper, stream paper, gold flowers, polished flower paper, dipped-material paper, copper beating, copper foil, cinnabar New Year red dyed paper, pink dyed paper and assorted dyed paper. There were several hundred shops and nearly three thousand workers, and the dipped-material paper and dyed papers of various colors that they produced were the material sources for Foshan papercutting. In 2003, more than fifty Chaoyang papercutting works were included in A Complete Collection of Chinese Folk Art: Papercutting Volume, A Panorama of Chinese Folk Auspicious Art and A Complete Collection of Chaoshan Folk Art: Papercutting Volume. In 1997, Chaoyang District was named by the Guangdong Provincial Government a "Home of Ethnic and Folk Art (Papercutting Art) of Guangdong Province". Chaozhou is a port city on the eastern coast of Guangdong Province. Chaozhou papercutting is distributed mainly in eastern Guangdong; it was popular in the Ming dynasty, prosperous in the Qing dynasty, and reached its peak during the Guangxu reign. In the mid-Qing dynasty, the rebuilding of ancestral halls and temples became fashionable in Chaozhou. Against this background, papercutting came to be used as an ornament in folk activities such as sacrificial rites, festivals, god-procession temple fairs, weddings and funerals. Monks and nuns in the temples also cut paper flowers to give to devout believers, and Chaozhou papercutting accordingly developed rapidly within the temples. By the early 20th century, Chaozhou papercutting artists trained by nuns such as Jiang Genhe, Li Mulin, Yang Xueyou, Luo Ruiyu, Gu Qiuquan and Xie Chuzhou were still playing a role in local papercutting creation. After 1962, because the temple monks and nuns left no heirs and few people took religious vows, Chaozhou papercutting gradually lost its successors.

02 · Core Techniques & Process

Guangdong papercutting consists mainly of Foshan papercutting, circulated in the Foshan area; Chaoyang papercutting, popular in the Chaoshan area; and Chaozhou papercutting, circulated in the Chaozhou area. Foshan is located in south-central Guangdong Province, in the heart of the Pearl River Delta. Papercutting techniques fall into two broad categories: cutting with scissors and carving with a knife. With scissors, pieces are generally cut freely, two or three sheets at a time; gift flowers, lantern flowers, candlestick-stand flowers for the Qiqiao Festival, incense-table flowers and cake flowers were all made in this way. With a knife, twenty to thirty sheets can be carved at a time, and fifty to one hundred sheets if the pattern is bold, which makes large-scale reproduction easy. The carving knives used in Foshan papercutting vary in size and are usually ground casually by the artisan, with widths ranging from 3 millimeters down to 1 millimeter; a set contains more than ten knives. When cutting, the knife is held in the manner of a writing brush and moved vertically; the lines stay joined without breaking, and the finished piece takes a web-like form. Traditional Foshan papercutting takes its content and form from popular sentiment and social conditions; festivity and auspiciousness, exorcising evil and welcoming fortune, and abundant offspring and long life are its eternal themes. It is extremely popular among the people and has remained in fashion for a long time. In keeping with these themes, Foshan papercutting pairs the splendor of copper foil with brightly colored paper to form a distinctive local style, and has developed unique expressive forms such as copper-chiseled papercutting. The rise of Chaoyang papercutting is connected with people from the Central Plains who migrated to settle in this area. This style of papercutting mostly depicts auspicious subjects such as festivity and good fortune, prosperity and longevity, five blessings, unbroken descent, abundant harvests and thriving livestock. It is generally used as decoration to heighten the festive atmosphere at god-procession temple fairs, the closing of lanterns at the Lantern Festival, mid-autumn moon worship, wedding celebrations and the worship of ancestors and deities; it also depicts everyday subjects such as flowers, birds, insects and fish, animals and beasts, folk legends, mythological tales, opera figures and ordinary townspeople. Besides the above types, Chaoyang papercutting also has some small decorative patterns, such as offering flowers and gift flowers. Chaoyang papercutting has flexible modelling; its composition is mainly symmetrical, with a rigorous structure that is full yet not cluttered. Its most distinctive feature is the "flower-within-flower" layout, with well-judged density and delicate, translucent workmanship. The knife work is fine and delicate, based mainly on positive cutting, with negative cutting used in combination. Positive cutting leaves neat, fine lines, while negative cutting gives thick, bold lines; combined with the "flower-within-flower" technique, this yields very rich expressive power. However, the surviving senior artisans are on average over seventy-five years old, and there is an urgent need for young people to join in and carry on the inheritance. An extant work from the Yongzheng reign of the Qing dynasty, Bats (from Simapu Town, Chaozhou), was cut from brown silk thread; its workmanship is extremely fine, showing that Chaozhou papercutting reached a very high artistic level long ago. Chaozhou papercutting subjects cover flowers and fruit, animals, human figures, landscapes and character-and-pattern designs, and it has a strong local cultural character. Different papercutting artisans often show different styles, such as meticulous, bold and refined. By form, Chaozhou papercutting includes single-color, multicolor, positive-carving and negative-carving types. Chaozhou folk papercutting artisans are skilled at stacking three or five sheets of colored paper together and moving the scissors deftly to cut out all kinds of patterns with practiced skill. Single-color papercutting, for example, fully exploits the character of scissor cutting, using slender, elegant lines together with flat areas and employing exaggeration and distortion to create vivid artistic images; the flavor of the scissors is very pronounced and the work is highly decorative. A distinctive feature of single-color papercutting is that no draft is drawn: relying only on memory and imagination, the artisan holds the paper in one hand and works the scissors with the other, cutting the pattern out directly. This ingenious method of cutting is highly creative; the forms are lively and varied, and repeated works are rare. In multicolor papercutting, the different parts of a subject are cut separately from several colors of paper and then assembled into one complete papercutting work, which is vivid, detailed and distinctive. One variety of Chaozhou papercutting is called "zan paper": the pattern is placed on colored paper or gold foil and engraved with a carving knife. Zan paper is further divided into color-backed papercutting and written-material papercutting. In color-backed papercutting, the outline is first cut in gold foil or black paper and then backed with colored paper; in written-material papercutting, the linear skeleton of the image is engraved in single-color paper or gold foil and then painted in colors as a backing. Of the zan paper craft, the colored zan paper of Loujin Village in Raoping County is the most famous. Colored zan paper is commonly called "big money" and is used in rites for gods and ancestors and in god-procession activities; its subjects are mainly opera figures, birds, beasts, insects and fish, flowers and antique-motif designs, and poetry and calligraphy.

Scissors versus knife: two or three sheets against thirty

Cutting is freehand on two or three sheets, while carving handles twenty to thirty at a time—up to a hundred for coarse patterns—allowing mass reproduction.

Knife widths and the brush grip

Its knives are ground at will in widths from three millimetres to one, over ten to a set, held like a brush and cut vertically so the lines join as a mesh.

The four classes of Foshan cutting

Foshan cutting falls into plain, backed, painted and copper-chiselled classes, subdivided by material into nine kinds including copper, silver and dyed stock.

Copper-chiselled paper-cutting

Pairing brilliant copper foil with vivid coloured paper produced Foshan's distinctive look and the copper-chiselled variety.

Chen Yongcai's Foshan Autumn Festival mural

Born in 1941, Chen Yongcai has worked over fifty years and is known for huge architectural murals; his Foshan Autumn Festival is four metres high and twenty-one metres long.

The twelve trades behind Foshan cutting

Early in the twentieth century twelve related trades—from door money and copper foil to dyed papers—flourished in hundreds of shops with nearly three thousand workers.

03 · Regional Records & Related Items

Foshan papercutting is a folk art that developed out of local folk activities; it is distributed mainly in Chancheng District of Foshan and in some townships of Nanhai District. Foshan papercutting falls into four major categories: single-color papercutting, backed-material papercutting, written-material papercutting and copper-chiseled papercutting. According to the materials used, it can be further divided into nine kinds: single-color material, paper-backed material, copper-backed material, dyed material, woodblock overprint material, copper written material, silver written material, paper written material and copper-chiseled material. Chaoyang papercutting is distributed mainly in the Chaoshan area of Guangdong Province, with Tongmeng, Xilü, Heping and Guiyu townships in Chaoyang District as its representative centers.

04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding

The main inheritors of Foshan papercutting technique today include Lin Zaihua and others. Foshan papercutting has a tradition of industrial production. Strengthening its excavation and protection will help research folk activities and folk cultural forms in the Pearl River Delta, and at the same time can enrich the folk culture market and strengthen regional cultural character. At present, however, the ranks of professional Foshan papercutting practitioners are aging with no successors. Copper-chiseled papercutting, the most distinctive form, can no longer be produced because the tools have been scattered and lost and the copper foil that serves as its main material is no longer manufactured; with senior artisans retiring or dying of illness, many traditional techniques face the danger of being lost and urgently need rescue. Since the 1980s, the Chaoyang District government has organized efforts to excavate, collate, protect and research Chaoyang folk papercutting. In 1989, 181 items (sets) comprising nearly five hundred patterns were collated, and the book Chaoyang Folk Papercutting was published. The main inheritors of Chaoyang folk papercutting today include Zhang Peilong, Cai Mingying and Li Chanxian. People's way of life has changed greatly today, and Chaozhou papercutting has gradually lost the environment in which it once survived. Fewer than ten well-known papercutting artisans remain, and they are growing old; traditional Chaozhou papercutting has no successors and urgently needs rescue and protection. Chen Yongcai (record in the official file of the associated inheritor): Male, Han ethnicity, born in October 1941, from Foshan, Guangdong Province. He has been engaged in papercutting art for more than fifty years and has rich experience. His works are known for slender, flowing lines and exquisite, translucent workmanship, broad subject matter, novel forms and varied techniques; he is especially skilled at making giant papercuttings used to decorate modern buildings. One of his representative works, the large papercutting mural The Grand Autumn Festival in Foshan, is 4 meters high and 21 meters long. Representative inheritor of Papercutting (Guangdong Papercutting), a third-batch national-level intangible cultural heritage project. His works have been shown in many exhibitions at various levels and have won prizes. He has actively taught papercutting technique to a number of apprentices, ensuring that successors would carry on the art.

05 · Associated Representative Bearers

Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:

06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography

Sources

China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)

Read the official ihchina.cn record ↗

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