KU SHULAN:A GENIUS OF TRADITIONAL FOLK ART OF PAPER-CUTTING

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ku shulan, a master ofpaper-cut folk art inShaanxi Province, in the northwest, has been dubbed“female paper-cut dab hand’by some, but to those most familiar with her, she is simply “Aunt Ku”.

In more rarefied art circles Zhang Ding, former president of the Central Academy of Arts & Design accorded her the epithet of“real peasant artist”. While Yang Xianrong, professor of the Central Academy of Fine Arts described her ‘as a master of folk art in China, who has a profound understanding of ordinary life and inspired gifts. I think that each of her works is excellent.”

In 1993, I had a chance to visit Aunt Ku at her home on the loess plateau. After a trek of three hours, I arrived, entering her house through the backyard.The south facing, tile-roofed house had some coloured paper-cuts on its little wood-framed windows, which had faded over time in the sun. A string of eye-catchingly red dried chilies, was hung over the window lattice.

“Come in, please, young man!” said the voice of an elderly woman. I walked in and as my eyes adjusted they fell on a woman with tiny feet sitting on a kang in the corner. In front of her,was a small table with several pieces of paper in various colours. Getting up from the kang, Ku warmly greeted me in the traditional clasped hand wayand invited meto sit beside her.

Even though her feet were stump like, the result of the old custom of binding women's feet in childhood, Ku could often be seen out and about in her home village on the Loess Plateau in Shaanxi, invariably hurrying home with a large roll of paper.

She usually used a large pair of scissors and never hesitated whenworking on a new paper-cut. If she got part of a pattern wrong, she simply cut it off and used it somewhere else, with the finished products looking flawlessly conceived.

Her passion for paper cutting left her with little time for either her children or neighbours, and she was often scolded by her husband for forgetting to make his meals. In 1996 she was knocked unconscious in a fall. The family, thinking she would die even prepared her coffin. But to everyone's astonishment she came to and promptly asked for her scissors.

To welcome me, Ku sang several beautiful ballads with a passion, tinged withsomething sad and almost shrill. Looking more closely at this plain and guileless master of folk art, I found that she looked older than I had imagined. She wore an old Chinese-style padded jacket with and an apron holding a pot of paste for gluing paper-cuts was tied around her waist. On a piece of shabby mat, she spread a colourful patchwork cover, another of her handicrafts.She asked me whether I had come for her paper-cuts. I nodded and said I was eager to collect some of herworks about which I had heard much. She moved the small table and lifted the mat. Taking away a brick used as a press, she showed me a pile of paper cuttings, each about a square metre in size. "I hide these under the mat as there are too many rats in the house and they try to gnaw at my paper cuttings," explains Ku, in answer to my unspoken question.