Folk custom and annual flavor in paper-cutting

During the Spring Festival, founder county, known as the "hometown of paper cutting", is busy again. Many scattered folk paper-cutting artists have picked up their scissors, cut couplets, cut blessings, cut window grilles and cut New Year pictures. If you carefully study these different forms of paper-cutting works, you can not only taste the unique charm of paper-cutting, but also learn a lot of interesting folk knowledge.

According to founder county paper-cut artists, the characters, flowers and birds, fish and insects in paper-cut have their own meanings. Artists will not add meaningless things to their works. For example, the most obvious words such as "blessing" and "longevity", such as rich peony, pine and cypress crane and big money ingot, need not be explained, and the viewer will know what they mean at a glance.

There are still some patterns that need some folk knowledge to understand. For example, the pattern of fish symbolizes "there are more fish every year", the pattern of upside-down bat symbolizes "Fu (Bat) has arrived (fallen)", the pattern of elephant symbolizes the renewal of Vientiane, and the pattern of badger symbolizes "Happiness (Badger)" and so on.

The most interesting thing in paper-cut works is that several things are combined to express a moral concept and design. For example, there is a big cock standing on the back of the tiger, which means "the year of the tiger is good (chicken)"; There is a carp dragging on the lotus, which means "the lotus (even) has more than (fish) every year", and a chrysanthemum grows in the purse, which means "gathering (chrysanthemum) wealth into treasure (bag)"; There are three goldfish in the pond, which means "golden jade (goldfish) is full of houses (ponds)"; The combination of four animals, namely, magpie, sika deer, bee and monkey, means "magpie deer Hou Feng".

After listening to the endless explanations of the paper-cut artists, the reporter not only lamented the richness of China folk culture and the artists' whimsy, but if you also bought couplets, blessings, window grilles or New Year pictures at home, you might as well study them carefully and find many blessings and auspiciousness hidden in the pictures and texts.