Peninsula all-media reporter Duan Shanshan correspondent Guan Chuanzhong
Little scissors flying up and down, eyes staring at the pattern, one cut and one cut, the knife makes a slight "rustling" sound when the paper is hinged, the animal is "alive", the flower is "blooming"... During the spring, Huangdao paper-cutting artist Xu Wei was particularly busy, shutting himself in his studio almost every day and concentrating on creating his beloved paper-cut works.
"Our Huangdao paper-cutting has a long history and strong characteristics, and it has been more than three hundred years, especially the Xin'an paper-cutting. In 2006, Huangdao paper-cutting was included in the first batch of intangible cultural heritage by Shandong Province. "Speaking of Huangdao paper-cutting, Xu Wei couldn't hide his excitement between his words." Huangdao paper-cutting is born in response to folk customs, and after years of vicissitudes, generations of paper-cutting artists have passed on the torch, making the art of paper-cutting endless and deeply loved by people. ”
Xu Wei's ancestral home is Mencius' hometown of Zou City, which is the birthplace of Confucius and Mencius and the birthplace of Zou Lu culture, and his ancestors have been engaged in inscription rubbing, calligraphy and painting exchanges and hanging pots for generations, and they practiced paper-cutting art with their grandmothers at an early age. The profound cultural heritage and the cultural influence of the family made Xu Wei hear and see from an early age, which was quite affected, laying a solid foundation for his later paper-cutting skills. In his youth, when Xu Wei was working at the Huangdao Power Plant, he happened to meet Yue Chang'e, a local older generation of folk paper-cutting artists, and began to learn paper-cutting skills from her. Through several years of personal teaching by Teacher Yue, Xu Wei's paper-cutting works are more simple and natural, coupled with decades of dedication to the research and creation of paper-cutting art, not disturbed by fame and fortune, and have today's artistic achievements.
"In terms of paper-cutting modeling, I have absorbed elements such as folk embroidery, clay sculptures, and wooden board New Year paintings, and integrated these elements into paper-cutting, which can better reflect the Chinese paper-cutting culture and more in line with the aesthetic art style of our Chinese." When Xu Wei was creating, he tried to transplant the rough and bold artistic atmosphere of the patterns in the Han portrait stone and portrait brick into the paper-cut works, and achieved good results.
As a member of the China Paper-cutting Artists Society and a non-hereditary inheritor of paper-cutting, In recent years, Xu Wei has won the first and second prizes and gold medals in the national, provincial and municipal paper-cutting competitions. In 2018, his paper-cut works "Liang Zhu Xiang Send" and "Zhuangyuan Baita" were included in the Qingdao Humanistic Olympic Series "Sail Love and Sea Rhyme" published by the Qingdao Municipal Federation of Literature and Literature. His representative works "Confucius", "Guanyin", "Zhu Shou", "Mouse Marrying Daughter" and many other works have been collected by friends at home and abroad.
In the process of inheriting the art of paper-cutting, Xu Wei has inherited both traditional techniques and his own innovations. For more than 30 years, he has visited old folk paper-cutting artists in Shandong Province, collected and sorted out a number of old paper-cutting samples that are about to be lost, tried to maintain the original appearance of Shandong paper-cutting in his creation, and then integrated into the characteristics of Huangdao paper-cutting, and finally formed a style with the specialty of cutting opera stories. As many as three or five pieces of paper, as little as one or two pieces of paper, you can present a wonderful drama in front of the audience.
In addition to creation, Xu Wei is also enthusiastic about public welfare undertakings, actively participates in social practice, goes deep into nursing homes, schools, and communities to carry out public welfare teaching and charity sales of works, and also volunteers to serve as a paper-cutting teaching task in a primary school.