Chinese Paper-cutting — 中国剪纸艺术现场表演
On Thursday, January 19, 2017, Maria A. Shchuka Branch hosted a program on Chinese paper-cutting, a very distinctive visual art. Artist Li Xiqin (李西秦女士) gave the audience a wonderful demonstration and coaching on this unique Chinese art form.
Xiqin has worked with Chinese paper-cuts for 50 years. Trained and practicing as a traditional Chinese medical doctor, she employs some medical and psychological concepts into her paper-cuts work. She showed the audience how make paper-cuts to demonstrate emotions and feelings such as joy, anger, worry, thought, distress, fear and nervousness.
The images above are from her presentation. In addition, Xiqin made paper-cuts based on traditional Chinese medicine prescriptions.
Here are the some pictures taken from our event:
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Local Chinese TV station Fairchild interviewed Xiqin during the event. You can also view her video on Youtube.
Bridlewood Branch has the similar papercutting program. At least two other branches (Sanderson and McGregor Park) were interested in the program and planed to have one during May Asian Heritage Month 2017.
Library users may be interested in borrowing this book ("The art of paper cutting") at TPL.
3 thoughts on “Chinese Paper-cutting — 中国剪纸艺术现场表演”
Fabulous!!Paper cutting is a traditional Chinese art for holidays, special occasions or purely decoration. I learned it as a child, but have never been as good as the above. Hopefully more such workshops come to libraries.
When I was a little girl, I was impressed by the beauty of this Chinese folk art. We called them window flowers or window paper-cuts. We often used them to decorate doors and windows. I glued the paper-cuts to the windows, so the light from the inside would shine through the space of the cutout. It was so beautiful.
Really impressive! Love the beautiful butterfly, want to learn how to make one, too.