Timely revival

Shi Liping, a craftsman of ethnic Miao embroidery, says more than 200 villagers in Guizhou province's Songtao county have learned embroidery from her. Training has equipped 6,800 locals with skills for jobs that help them to raise their families.

Huayangjing, a Shanghai papercutting art form, was listed as a citylevel intangible cultural heritage in 2007. In the old days, craftsmen would chant the words huayangjing as they cut paper in stalls along the alleys. As a huayangjing craftsman, Zheng Shulin has uploaded 532 short videos of his work on the Douyin app since March 2018. Every Wednesday and Saturday since May last year, Zheng holds livestreaming sessions, which, so far, has attracted 4,000 followers.

As he shapes the papers into masterpieces, Zheng speaks in the Shanghai dialect and shares his knowledge about the patterns and techniques of huayangjing in his videos and livestreams.

"I'm confident of passing on the traditional art to younger generations. It's time that the craftsmanship embraces more down-to-earth, trendy approaches to appeal to the public, instead of just displaying works at exhibitions," Zheng says.

A Douyin report released on June 12 shows that paper-cutting ranks among the five most popular traditional intangible cultural heritage videos, followed by bamboo weaving, wood carving, stone carving and clay sculpturing. Related papercutting videos also received over 130 million likes on the app.

"Traditional arts have always been part of our lives, although their influence has somehow been overshadowed by industrialization and technological advancement. But due to intangible cultural heritage protection in the country over the last five years, traditional craftsmanship has found its contemporary value in the modern world," says Zhang Lili, one of the exhibition curators and a professor of design at Shanghai University's Academy of Fine Arts.

"Age-old craftsmanship is still developing. It is full of possibilities."