CUTTING EDGE
Zhou Shuying spent years injecting new life into an age-old folk craft, which saw her develop new colors, patterns and techniques. Yang Yang reports.
“When my father decided to teach me the art of paper-cutting, he asked me not to have romantic relationships before I was 40 years old.”
The comment prompted a general buzz when 54-yearold Zhou Shuying addressed more than 900 middle school students at a recent opening ceremony of an exhibition of intangible cultural heritage at Beijing No 80 Middle School.
“Thirty-four years ago, people paid little attention to such crafts as paper-cutting, and craftspeople were relatively poor. But there were people sacrificing a lot to preserve the arts,” Zhou said.
During the speech, Zhou did not explain why her father made such a demand, but she later told China Daily: “My father worried that if I was married, I wouldn’t have time to work on paper-cutting.” Besides, her three brothers needed to make a living from it, so if she married into another family living off this craft, she would become a competitor to them.
Traditionally, at the school in her hometown in Yu county, North China’s Hebei province, paper-cutting could only be inherited by male family members. But Zhou, one of the most well-known masters and the representative of the multicolored paper-cutting school, is an exception.
“It is because my father discovered my talent when I was little,” she says.
However, it was still not a smooth process.
Zhou’s father Zhou Yongming was the only student taught in person by Wang Laoshang, who founded the paper-cutting school in Yuxian county that originated in the Ming Dynasty (13681644).
In northern China, in ancient times before glass became affordable, people used opaque white paper on their windows to keep out the wind and cold while letting light in. But stark white was considered dull and ominous since it is used as a funeral color, so people gradually formed the custom of pasting papercuts using red or other colors onto their windows.
At the age of three, Zhou started learning the papercutting craft using colors. Unlike many other paper-cutting schools in China, papercut works from Yuxian county tend to be multicolored rather than in the single colors of red, black, green or blue. After drawing and cutting out the patterns, craftspeople always added color to them.
There were traditionally only five colors — pink, green, yellow, red, and blue — used in Zhou’s hometown. Flowers had to be pink or yellow, but little Zhou always wanted to make them different.
Once she watched a spider accidentally blend two colors into a beautiful pinkish purple while scurrying from one color into another and leaving marks on paper. She then managed to replicate the purple color and used it on one of the flowers she was assigned to work on. Worrying that her father and elder brothers would scold her, she hid the purple flower under other works, but when it was found, she felt relief because they thought it beautiful too.
Despite her talent and diligence, Zhou’s father firmly refused to teach her all the skills. She always observed her father closely and imitated his skills. She would put the patterns she learned to draw on his desk, but he always tore them up immediately.
It was not until Zhou turned 20 years old that her father finally agreed to teach her, but solely on the proviso that she did not fall in love before the age of 40.
True to her word, Zhou did not have a romantic relationship until in her 40s, by which time she had long been regarded as a laughing stock in her village and “a bit crazy”. But in order to fulfill her promise to her father and realize her dream, she was determined to overcome these difficulties.
In 1995, Zhou’s paper-cut work Peace Dove was chosen as the emblem for the 4th United Nations World Conference on Women. In 1996, she graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing with another representative work Tree of Life, in which she adapted more than 50 propitious Chinese symbols to represent life.
“I drew many patterns before the final Tree of Life, which were all disapproved by my professor Lyu Shengzhong. But in the end, he was pleased with Tree of
Life,” she says.
In 2006, Chinese paper-cutting was included on the list of the World Intangible Cultural Heritage. As one of its inheritors, Zhou has become wellknown with many of her works collected by art galleries and museums around the world.
But she always bears the last words of her father in mind: “Keep this art alive and pass it on to later generations.”
That was why as a National People’s Congress deputy, Zhou proposed at the two sessions meetings in March that national intangible cultural heritage should be included in elementary school syllabuses as well as for higher education, in order to protect, maintain and develop national art forms such as paper-cutting.
That was also why she agreed to work with other five paper-cutting masters to publish a three-volume book, titled World Intangible Cultural Heritage of Paper-cutting Art Series, which combines the most representative Chinese poetic works from the Tang, Song and Yuan dynasties with the art of paper-cutting.
“I know that many publishers have invited Ms Zhou to publish her works. When I visited her in Yuxian county at the end of 2016, she wore a polite smile at the beginning, but when I described our detailed plan about the book and our aim to let children appreciate this beautiful Chinese art by reading the poems and verses represented through the form of papercutting, her eyes lit up,” the editor of the book Yuan Jingya says.
“Although paper-cutting is not so familiar to children these days, it will help them better understand the art form and the great poems and verses from Chinese history.”
The book is divided into three volumes, each containing works from the three different dynasties: poetry from the Tang Dynasty (618-907), poetry from the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and verses from the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368). Yuan carefully chose 24 archetypal works for each category and gave a modern explanation on the right side of each work, with paper-cut interpretation of the work in other pages.
She also puts in an introduction about the two masters in both English and Chinese at the end of each volume, so that “English readers will also understand the skills of each school and the contribution of the masters to the art,” she says.
At the same time, curious readers can create their own paper-cut works using the patterns and red paper offered in the book set.