Chinese Paper Art

While there are many kinds of paper arts which have a long history in China, we are going to talk about the paper-cut.

I have a romantic story. In 140 B.C —86 B.C, Western Han Dynasty, people used hemp fiber papers. The Emperor Wu of Han Dynasty lost his Princess Lee. He missed her so much and wanted to call the spirit of the dead Princes back, so he invited a warlock who can cut the image of princess lee with hemp fiber papers. This was probably the earliest paper-cut, and this was also the origin of shadow puppetry.

Let’s see these pictures: the civil artists who lighted the characters; they hid behind a white curtain to manipulate these opera characters, and they acted a traditional story by their local tunes.

If you watch the shadow puppetry you will feel a strong local flavor and the shadow characters were cut lively by these civil artists. Shadow puppetry had been introduced to Persia (Iran), Arabia, Turkey, Siam (Thailand), Burma, Malaysia, Japan and Britain, France , Germany, Italy, Russia and other Asian and European countries with the land and sea military expeditions and exchanges since the Yuan Dynasty (thirteenth century).In 105 AD, Cai Lun improved papermaking, and paper-cut developed rapidly in the civil. I think there are two kinds of paper-cut craft, one is knife-paper-cut which like shadow puppetry, please look at the picture, and we can see the man make it very carefully and cut it little by little.

The second craft is scissor-paper-cut, look at the old woman of this picture, her designs are very popular, and Chinese always post these patterns of papers on the windows and doors for a good luck. We always say that the best artists are among the ordinary people.

And then, I will show you the paper-cut which were used in my wedding ceremony, you can see some 喜喜 which are Chinese words were cut in the red papers, the 喜 means happiness. We posted 喜喜 on the window that means two happy families would be together. That’s a big happiness. We hoped our life would be happy and lucky forever. So 喜喜 is not just usual, it must be used in the Chinese wedding ceremony.

Thank you for listening my presentation, and FAN LIN will talk about more interesting things of paper-cut, let’s welcome him!

This is a carp, a kind of fish. The Chinese pronunciation of fish is like surplus. This picture means something left over year after year.

This picture depicts two ancient Chinese women. Though they are made of paper, they look like vivid and gorgeous.

As the development of the times, people’s aesthetic standard was changing by the influence of modern arts. I’ll introduce some spectacular paper-art works.

These are heart-shaped roses. All of the roses are made of pink paper.

This is a very special wedding gown.

There is an obvious appearance. Most of these works only use red color. Red is the most significant color in China. It means auspiciousness, happiness, prosperous and peace. To some extent, red presents China.

Contributor: Qian & Linxuan