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Paper-cuts in Modern China: The Search for Modernity, Cultural Tradition, and Women’s Liberation.

Authors :
Wu, Ka-ming
Source :
Modern China. Jan2015, Vol. 41 Issue 1, p90-127. 38p.
Publication Year :
2015

Abstract

In the twentieth century, paper-cuts have been variously regarded as a domestic craft, a site of rural purity, a marker of Chinese civilization, and more recently, a national intangible cultural heritage. This article analyzes paper-cuts not merely as a cultural practice but as a medium of articulation through which Chinese urban intellectuals have understood the countryside and traditions at specific historical moments. It also explores paper-cuts as a cultural medium through which urban elites have expressed their visions of the nation’s path to modernity and women’s liberation. During the Yan’an period (1937–1947), paper-cuts served as a Communist marker to distinguish an “art form of healthiness and honesty” from urban decadence under Nationalist rule. Since the 1980s, however, the art and practices of paper-cutting have come to share new discursive spaces: as the site of recovery of a lost Chinese civilization, an urban nostalgia for vanishing rural ritual practices, and most recently, a discourse of capital, profit, and personal success. By analyzing the shifting meanings assigned to paper-cuts, this article explores the relationship among the state, culture, and capital as it has been actively manufactured and negotiated through this folk practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
00977004
Volume :
41
Issue :
1
Database :
Academic Search Index
Journal :
Modern China
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
100001028
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1177/0097700414526133