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Chinese Arts
and Crafts
China
has as wide variety of arts and crafts with exquisite workmanship. They
can be classified into special folk types. Special arts and crafts, such
as ivory carving, jade carving and Shousan stone carving use precious or special
materials, and undergo elaborate designing and processing. They are
elegant and expensive.
In
technique, Chinese folk arts fall into the categories of cutting, bundling,
plaiting, knitting, embroidering, carving, molding and painting. Cutting
includes paper cuts, paper engravings,
paper cut silhouettes, paper folding,
paper sculpture, and leather-silhouettes, all of which evolved from paper
cuts. Bundling includes kites and colored lanterns bundled up with paper,
silk or bamboo. Plaiting, a popular folk art, includes various straw or
thread plaited articles.
The products include cloth tigers, cool pillows,
cushions, tiny fragrant bags, colored silk balls, shoe-pads, and velvet flowers
and birds. Knitting, including wax printing, bandhnu, color printing,
drawn work and flower knitting, is created by weaving, knitting or
stitching. Embroidering includes picture weaving in silk, printing and
dyeing.
China's four famous styles of embroidery are those of
Suzhou,
Hunan, Guangdon and Sichuan. Carving includes art depictions of various
shapes, such as masks, puppet heads, figures, animals and flowers, which are
created with bamboo, wood, jade or horn. Molding includes dough modeling,
clay sculpture, frozen butter sculpture and pottery sculpture. The
products serve not only as ornaments, but also as children's toys.
Painting involves such techniques as hand painting, incision, patchwork, and
pyrograph, each having a style of its own.
China
is the home of chinaware, porcelain being produced in both the south and
north. Famous porcelain-making centers are Jindezhen in Jiangxi Province
and Liling in Hunan Province in the south and Tangshan and Handan in Hebei Province
and Zibo in Shandong Province. The long-lost techniques of the
celebrated ancient porcelain kilns such as Longquan, Jun, Ru, Guan, Cizhou and
Yaozhou have now been recovered, "like old trees putting forth new
blossoms" as the saying goes. The purplish brown sandy potteries of
Yixing, the noted pottery center in Jiangsu Province, are much sought after for
their classic elegance and splendid luster.
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