Wednesday 12 March 2008

Liu Ren's Paper cuts

Beijing city government has promoted traditional folk arts by encouraging artists to set up shop in an area of old hutongs in Beijing city. These are traditional court yard houses which are rapidly developing in the name of modernization. One of these hutong is occupied by Chinese paper-cutting artist Liu Ren. Liu Ren set up a paper-cutting home museum in 1999 for the purpose of carrying forward the traditional handicraft and sharing with others the joy brought by paper-cutting. It seems she regularly holds workshops at her home.

Her work has a graphic quality that really appeals to me. Its organic nature and imagery is not rigid and formalized though it obviously relies on a rich corpus of traditional symbols.

See more of her home by following this link


1 comment:

Gillian Mowbray said...

What a great talent. very inspiring.

Thanks for explaining about the silk paper. Is it generally available around the world - sounds wonderful.

I'd love to see some insights into your working methods - I imagine you must have to keep replacing knife blades for such accurate work?