The Inheritance Significance of Coconut Carving

Coconut carving producers will inevitably encounter many obstacles while opening up the market. First, according to the traditional carving process, it takes a long time to finish a coconut carving by hand, and the process is complex, with low natural output and high price. However, the mass-produced processed products sell well in the market, resulting in the imbalance between process production and market sales. It is difficult for folk artists to support their families by this skill, and traditional crafts are facing a crisis. Second, most products produced by local artists are mainly self-operated. Due to insufficient funds and limited market development, it is difficult to form a leading industry. Haikou Coconut Carving Craft Factory disintegrated in the restructuring more than ten years ago, and the workers had to find another job. Coconut carving products are bound to enter the market, and traditional technology has become the "bottleneck" of production. Faced with such a contradictory reality, the inheritors' two voices expressed their thoughts. One view is that the inheritance of coconut carving skills in national intangible cultural heritage protection projects is the foundation and should be a positive inheritance, because the times are progressing and people's aesthetic tastes are changing accordingly, so we should keep pace with the times. It can't be carved one by one like in the past, which is far from meeting the market demand. Another voice believes that since it is a heritage, we should strive to maintain the traditional state, let alone produce it by machine. Otherwise, it will lose the meaning of "non-legacy". Coconut carving focuses on one word "carving". On the premise of protecting traditional skills, we should organically combine tradition with modernity, hand with machine, and high-end and low-end products. High-end products are naturally traditional handwork; Low-end mass-produced products may wish to cooperate with mechanical processing, seek a balance in market sales, and protect and inherit traditional skills to a certain extent.