Qingyang city, Gansu province.

In Qingyang, on holidays, when a woman marries her daughter and celebrates her birthday with a full moon, rural women have to clean the courtrooms, paste the walls, cut hinge paper and make window grilles. Stick red and green paper-cut flowers on window frames, kang wai, walls and door leaves, and make your room colorful and prosperous. These paper-cut flowers have different names because of their different positions. They are called door flowers posted on doors, window flowers posted on windows, kang wai flowers posted on kang walls and ceiling flowers posted on ceilings.

When you walk into Qingyang farmhouse, you can see paper-cut flowers stuck on the walls everywhere. On the window frames and kang walls of some cave houses that are no longer inhabited, paper-cut flowers blackened by fireworks are still firmly stuck there. Paper-cutting is as essential as whole grains in Qingyang. Where people live, there are paper-cut flowers. Paper-cutting has become the spiritual support for rural women to beautify their lives and express their emotions in Qingyang, while windows, doors, kiln walls and kang wai have become the art world for women to show their skills.

Qingyang paper-cut materials

Qingyang paper-cut has a wide range of materials, including the sun, moon and stars, landscape flowers and trees, people, birds and beasts, and stories and legends. In particular, the male and female dolls, cattle, sheep, mules, horses, pigs, dogs, cats, rabbits, fruits and vegetables in this sacred land in the family courtyard have become permanent themes for women to cut, and they decorate and beautify the family environment by cutting these themes and express their understanding and feelings about life.

Qingyang paper-cutting has a long history and has long been influential at home and abroad. As early as the Han Dynasty, with the invention of papermaking, the paper-cutting art of cutting people's images with paper instead of living people began. In the Sui and Tang Dynasties, the use of paper-cutting was further expanded. People cut out the images of military commanders Qin Qiong and Jingde with paper and pasted them on the doors to ward off evil spirits and ghosts. Since then, the art of paper-cutting has evolved, the theme has been broadened and the use has been increased. Qingyang, as a place of capital city at that time, was one of the first areas where paper-cutting art rose.

above content reference: Baidu Encyclopedia-Qingyang Paper-cut