CREATORS OF CHINESE FOLK ART
5 min readThe creators of Chinese folk art come from millions of labourers among the People. They include both “the dexterous-hands”who engage in agricultural labour and the folk crafts-persons who bave been completely or partly out of the agricultural labor. These folk artists have contributed to the handing-down and development of the Chinese culture through their works.
The Art of the Laborer Community
The creator of Chinese folk art is the working class community. Over several thousand years, Chinese society was based on natural economy of farming, animal husbandry, fishing and hunting. The labor division in the society placed men in the field and construction work, leaving women in charge of house work and custom cultural and art activities. The rural female workers formed the majority of this art community. Using the most basic tools like a pair of scissors and a needle, they created a variety of art works going from one generation to the next, greatly contributing to the heritage of original Chinese culture. Special credit is given to those elderly women, the illiterate grandmothers who take care of every-day household works in China’s rural areas. They are the owners, creators and carriers of original Chinese culture. Issues that had been disputed for years in the literature and art circles were unraveled by them in few. In northern Shaanxi, many of those grandmothers were born inside the cave, lived and raised their families there, and then passed away peacefully in the cave. For a life time, they decorated their cave with a full range of art works of their own, expressing their understandings and their emotions.
Their cave is like a miniature world of the universe, filled with people laughing, horse roaring, birds soaring and fish jumping. It is a living museum of the original ecological culture The daughter-in-law of the nameless paper-cut crackajack in Ansai, Shaanxi, Yan Xifang’s family.
Late paper-cut expert Qi Xiumei from Zhen Yuan, Gansu(named as master of Chinese folk art in paper-cut), coaching her grandchild to make paper-cut for window decoration.
In old China, rural women did not have any social status. This grandmother in Nuanshuiquan, Ansai of northern Shaanxi, did not even have a name of her own.
People referred her with her daughter-in-law’s name Yan Xifang. She lived to 81 yearsof age and died in 1997. In her last days leaning against her daughter-in-law, she managed to change all the window and door decorations in the cave with new paper-cuts she made. Large horizontal border flowers were along the wall above the brick bed; black kitchen range was decorated with beautiful egg shells. Before she died, she handed over to her daughter-in-law a stack of original paper-cut patterns and said solemnly, “I have nothing to leave you. I have loved cutting out window flowers all my life. It is my last wish to leave these patterns for you to keep. There are similar stories in other families too. They are the true folk artists.
There are many female laborer artists in the rural areas. In 1970 when I was working in Yan’an Mass Art Museum in northern Shaanxi, we conducted a survey on cultural art in 13 counties and cities. Take Ansai County for example where we went through every single household, among population of fifty-thousand, over half were female; and twenty-thousand of them were in the age group that could make paper-cut, embroidery, or floury flower. Some 5,000 were considered capable hand and 250 were outstanding. We selected 40 persons as excellent candidates and called them the “seeded players. “(It was at the time of.S.-China Ping-pong Diplomacy. Seeded players were selected for ping-pong- match.)Only two out of 404 were under age 40.
Later in 1980, in my nationwide research of rural culture, I had similar statistics in other parts of the country.
Rural female paper-cut expert Ku Shulan cutting window decoration flower in her residence cave. She was named Master of Chinese Arts and Crafts by UNESCO.
Those elderly women are owners of the authoritative folk art, folk customs. With a pair of scissors in hand, they are experts in paper-cutting; picking up a needle and thread, they are excellent in embroidery work; they are also superb cooks in making floury flowers, and they can also paint when picking up a brush too. They are good housewives at home, and capable hands in farm fields. As the folk saying goes, “A capable hand in one thing is capable in all. At age 4 or 5, they started to learn paper-cutting from their mothers, and practiced for decades till senior age, laying solid foundations in art image styling; at young age they learnt embroidery skills from their mothers and made embroidery undergarment pillow case, shoe soles, cigarette bags, needle holders, and developed deep-seated appreciation for coloring; they knead floury flowers, jujube mountains at Chinese New Year and cold swallow on the Pure Brightness Festival, year after year, well trained on three-dimensional art styling.
Through a lifetime practice, they are well versed in traditional art patterns which have been passed down for centuries. Every Spring Festival they will make window paper-cutting and circular flower pattern to decorate their cave houses. During the Pure Brightness Festival they will do dough modeling and cold swallow. In leisure time, they will embroider belly covers for their husbands, shoe flowers and pillow flowers for themselves and tiger patterns for their children. They will make tiger shoes and tiger pillows. Whenever wedding ceremony is held in the village, they will offer help by cutting out cluster flowers and angular flowers for the arrangement of the bridal chamber. They will make hand-in-hand melon dolls and paste them on the door lintels to ward off the monsters and evils. When the rainy and cloudy spell lasts for too long, they will cut out sky-sweeping- nanny, tie it to the head of pole, and erect the pole in the courtyard so that the nanny will sweep away the cloud and rain away for them.
They are fully entitled to a group of well accomplished folk artists.
Design of wax printing
Women in the rural area along the Yellow River reaches making floury flower ‘cold swallow’on the Pure Brightness Day.
