Paper-cutting · Chinese Craft Stories

01 · Historical Records

Quanzhou paper carving began in the Tang dynasty and flourished in the Song. At every Spring Festival, Lantern Festival, and other festive day, every household in Quanzhou cuts red and carves green, hangs lanterns and festoons and peachwood charms, pastes round flowers on the windows, and sticks up red paper slips, creating an atmosphere of archaic, opulent festivity.

02 · Core Techniques & Process

Li Yaobao paper carving is a representative form of Quanzhou paper cutting that arose in this environment. Li Yaobao (1892-1983), courtesy name Guofu, was born in the Licheng District of Quanzhou City. His father made a living as a painter in lacquer and color, was skilled at folk traditional patterns and adept in the use of color, while his elder brother was skilled in paper carving. From childhood Li Yaobao learned his craft from his father and brother; under the family's influence, relying on his natural talent and hard work, he quickly stood out. He not only fully inherited the Quanzhou paper-carving techniques, but also widely drew nourishment from such arts as paper cutting, piled clay sculpture, applied porcelain, wood engraving, block carving, architecture, and color painting, creatively employing tracing, cutting, carving, and chiseling to form his own unique art of paper carving. Li Yaobao paper carving expanded the traditional range of subjects; his works fall into six major categories, including celebrations, dragons and phoenixes, flowers and birds, and figures. They are rich in content, profound in conception, lifelike in image, and elegant in style, with a strongly decorative quality. Great care is taken in composition and imagery; the knife work is vigorous yet fine, and the lines are full of rhythm, giving the works extremely high aesthetic value. Quanzhou (Li Yaobao) paper carving condenses the essence of the decorative art of southern Fujian and holds a certain representative place among the folk arts of southern Fujian.

The four methods: tracing, cutting, carving and picking

Li Yaobao drew on paper-cutting, relief, porcelain inlay, woodblock, architecture and painting, applying tracing, cutting, carving and picking to create his own art.

Frameless cut paper and filigree lanterns

Quanzhou carving enriches the local art of frameless cut paper and filigree lanterns, the two forms mutually reinforcing.

Li Yaobao (1892-1983) and his career

Born in Licheng district of Quanzhou, Li Yaobao learned from his painter father and carving brother, mastering the whole local craft.

The six subject categories

Li Yaobao broadened the repertory into six categories—festive, dragon-and-phoenix, flower-and-bird, figure and others—dense in meaning and elegant in style.

Huang Lifeng and Golden Snake Dance for a Bountiful Year

Born in 1968, Huang Lifeng is a fifth-batch national inheritor whose figure works combine negative and positive carving, as in Golden Snake Dance.

03 · Regional Records & Related Items

This custom has continued unbroken in the locality down to the present day. It has enriched the cultural content of the boneless paper-carving and liaosi (silk-filament) art of Quanzhou, and to a certain extent forms a relationship of mutual promotion with the art of liaosi festival lanterns.

04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding

Under present circumstances, the traditional folk customs of Quanzhou are fading day by day, the market for folk artworks is shrinking, and few successors are coming forward, all of which makes the development of Quanzhou paper carving extremely difficult; the endangered situation is daily becoming more severe, and rescue is urgently needed. Huang Lifeng (associated inheritor, official archival record): Master of industrial arts of Fujian Province. Her figure and pattern works employ both negative and positive carving techniques; they are lofty in conception, with plain and elegant forms, and display the strongest southern Fujian local character. She has also combined paper-carving techniques with the art of Quanzhou lanterns, expanding the artistic forms of expression of Li Yaobao paper carving. Her representative works include Golden Snake Dancing to Greet a Bumper Year. Female, of the Han nationality, born in November 1968, from Quanzhou, Fujian Province; a representative inheritor of the paper cutting (Quanzhou [Li Yaobao] paper carving) project of national-level intangible cultural heritage, fifth batch. In 2004 she received the title of "National Rural Youth Folk Craft Expert" awarded by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League and the China Folk Literature and Art Association. For many years she has devoted herself to research on the techniques of Li Yaobao paper carving and the training of inheritors, and founded the Li Yaobao Paper-Carving Liaosi Research Studio.

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 ↗