Ningxiang boy wins national prize for paper cutting

Peng Kangyao and his paper-cutting work Xue Xiangling, an opera figure [Photo by He Wenbing/Changsha Evening News]

Jianzhi, a Chinese style of paper-cutting, is now no short of successors to carry on as a traditional art form, as a boy from Ningxiang county, Changsha, amazed the judges in a national contest by his outstanding paper cut.

Peng Kangyao, a 16-year-old high school student from the Ningxiang Experimental Middle School in Central China's Hunan province, was the top winner of a nationwide campus paper-cutting competition held in December, 2014.

Peng's prize-winning works is the cutting of a figure from Suo Lin Nang, one of the most well-known plays from the Peking opera, which is a form of traditional Chinese theatre that combines music, vocal performance, mime, dance, and acrobatics.

His piece of work stood out among more than 3,000 paper-cutting entries from all across the country.

"To cut out a figure, especially a traditional opera figure, is the most difficult task in paper-cutting," said Zhang Shuxian, chief of the paper-cut art committee of Chinese Culture Promotion Society and also a judge in the competition.

Zhang said that even a senior artist who has practiced cutting for decades can hardly achieve such a resemblance in facial expressions. Peng did it.

It took him more than one month to finish the cutting as he could only do it after class, said Peng, who is also a fan of the theatre. Peng studies the art of cutting paper designs in a club along with more than 300 other students in the Ningxiang Experimental Middle School.

Qiu Tianmin, the headmaster of the school, said that 70 percent of its students are left-behind children from the countryside, who have been brought up away from their parents, and when students from well-off families can afford to learn piano or dancing, the school found it necessary to open some free training courses for the enthusiastic kids to learn something interesting and useful.

So they set up the paper-cutting club. Scissors and several pieces of red paper are all it costs to keep this traditional art alive among the teenage generations, said Qiu.

The Chinese paper-cutting has a history of more than 1500 years and it represents cultural traditions of the people throughout China. It was listed in the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists in 2009.