The 2025 Guiyang Lantern Festival Party was launched in the cultural park of Guiyang County on the afternoon of February 11. Multiple activities integrating intangible cultural heritage performances and folk customs provided a cultural feast for the citizens.

 

 

Among them, the most impressive was the paper cutting performance. Li Yanqing, an inheritor of Paper Cutting, a municipal-level intangible cultural heritage project, made beautiful and exquisite paper-cuts with a scissor, including landscape paintings, celebrities, and “Fu” characters. 

 

 

A variety of beautiful paper cutting works are presented in the Paper Cuttings pavilion of the Cultural Park.

 

Paper Cutting is an ancient art. As early as 2,000 years ago, since Cai Lun invented papermaking in the Eastern Han Dynasty, various paper cutting techniques have emerged among the people in Guiyang. During festivals, there is a custom among the people to make paper-cuts for window decorations and “喜(xǐ)” characters.

 

 

Li Yanqing was born into a family of ordinary rattan weavers in Chonglingjiang Town of Guiyang County. Under the influence of her parents, she developed a preliminary understanding of graphic symmetry and color matching from a young age, and often painted on walls and floors with charcoal. She also often watched her grandmother do paper cutting. She became interested in paper-cutting when she was young.

 

In 1996, she was admitted to Hengyang Art School, where she received systematic training in fine arts. In her spare time, she also practiced calligraphy, seal carving, printmaking, and so on. It was at that time that she began to learn about paper cutting and gradually showed her unique talent for it.

 

Once, she spent more than a month completing a large-scale work “Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix”, which was unanimously praised by teachers and classmates, which strengthened her determination to learn paper cuttings.

 

 

It was an old man named Hong Yuan that really taught her the paper cutting techniques.

 

In 2005, she was attracted by his exquisite and lifelike paper cutting works at the Chenghuang Temple in Shanghai. Later, she met him again at the Hunan Yuhua Intangible Cultural Heritage Hall in Changsha and was impressed by his exquisite skills. 

 

 

The old man can make any character come alive with his scissors by covering his eyes. Li Yanqing immediately decided to learn from him. Hong Yuan also agreed for her talent and persistence.

 

After then, she visited her teacher in Changsha to learn paper cutting by train every Friday after work, and then caught the last train to return to Guiyang on Sunday evening. This lasted for five years.

 

 

 

Hong Yuan is an inheritor of Hong’s Paper Cuttings and has the unique skill of “Yin and Yang one-cut”. It’s not difficult to cut window decorations for Li Yanqing, but it is much more difficult to cut characters well. 

 

In order to cut a “Fu” character well, she practiced at least tens of thousands of times for several years. She gained a sense of space and grasped the form and structure of characters through countless exercises. She can cut a “Fu” character in just over a minute. She also can cut any character she sees now.

 

 

In her view, paper cutting not only inherits the classic moments in history and real life, but also creates its unique cultural connotation and artistic form. She has read the Four Books and Five Classics, Cartoon Picture Book, Complete Collection of Chinese Patterns and other books, and repeatedly studied the works of paper cutting masters such as Ku Shulan, Gao Fenglian and Lyu Shengzhong to increase her knowledge and enrich her experience. She even read the Book of Changes for more than 100 times. At that time, most of her salary was used to buy books and paper cutting samples.

 

 

Nowadays, Li Yanqing is engaged in the inheritance and promotion of paper cutting art. She has carried out paper cutting teaching activities in schools and communities for many times, explaining paper cutting symbols and meanings, patterns and operations by integrating paper cutting with daily life. She has also led the students to create a large number of paper cutting works with contemporary and local characteristics, so that more people can understand and love this traditional art.

 

 

“Paper cutting is an indispensable part of my life, and I will keep doing it,” said Li Yanqing. She has cut tens of thousands of works now. Next, she will continue to cut out works about the local history and cultural attractions in Guiyang and Chenzhou by combining characters and paintings, and then publish a paper cutting book, so that more people can understand the art of paper cutting, and this ancient art can shine with new glory.

 

 

Chinese source: rednet