When an intangible cultural heritage of paper-cutting meets modern installation art, delicate lines are combined with bold colors, and dragon totems are vividly revealed on papers. Thereafter, the art of paper-cutting is not static and silent anymore, but can “unfold” and “overlap” space.

The modern art exhibition entitled “Fingertip Dragon” is currently on display at Shenyang’s Tiemao 1956 Cultural and Creative Park, which is a cultural exchange between a grandparent and a grandchild across time and space, and also a spiritual collision between the old and the new.

Zhu Yuelan (1950-2015) is a representative inheritor of the provincial-level intangible cultural heritage “Zhu Yuelan’s Paper-cutting” in Liaoning. Zhu’s paper-cuts cover a wide range of forms and subjects, including door decorations, booklet displays, window decorations, themes of farming seasons and folk customs, etc. Her works lay stress on cutting patterns, possess complete conceptions, and have rich connotations, which are highly praised by experts and scholars at home and abroad. Among them, the Hongshan Culture Series has been collected. Huang Linhe, the exhibition planner, is Zhu Yuelan’s granddaughter and also an intangible cultural inheritor of “Zhu Yuelan’s Paper-cutting”.

Zhu’s paper-cutting works not only embody her delicate craftsmanship and deep emotions for paper-cutting, but also represent the inheritance of China’s traditional skills. Her granddaughter Huang Linhe further makes a flexible change to the traditional skills of the elder generation through modern installation art.

Huang Linhe, a post-2000s young woman, has been trying to use modern art forms to innovate traditional Chinese paper-cutting techniques. “The interactivity and artistry emphasized in installation art can present an intangible cultural heritage more comprehensively and make it more acceptable to the public, thereby spreading it more widely. I believe modern art forms and innovative technology means can impel traditional Chinese skills to go farther.”