The art of paper cutting (jiǎn zhǐ 剪纸) in China may date back to the second century CE, since paper was invented by Cai Lun in the Eastern Han Dynasty in China. As paper became more affordable, paper-cutting became one of the most important types of Chinese folk art. Because the cut-outs are often used to decorate doors and windows, they are sometimes referred to as chuāng huā (窗花), window flowers or window paper-cuts. People glued the papercuts to the exterior of windows, so the light from the inside would shine through the negative space of the cutout. Usually, the artworks are made of red paper, as red is associated with festivities and happiness in Chinese culture, but other colours were also used. Normally paper-cutting artwork is used on festivals like Spring Festival, weddings and childbirth. Papercuts always symbolize luck and happiness.
Though paper cutting is of high traditional and cultural importance, the channels through which ordinal people can learn about it are very few. Even though people can have access to paper-cutting works from the internet, the resources are scattered, not cleaned and hard to locate. This makes people, especially people of younger generations, know little about this art though they are aware of its existence.
To promote paper-cutting and better preserve the works, we want to build a portable exhibition of Chinese paper-cutting works that is more than just collections of paper-cuts. It should be an integration of many aspects of paper-cutting that people may be interested in, these include a brief introduction of Chinese paper-cutting, the history of it, the process, tutorials for beginners and a digital gallery of paper-cutting artists’ works.
WeChat is a popular social media that have had more than 1.17 billion active users by the first quoter of 2020. There are many embedded sub-applications in this social media, which are called Mini Programs. The inner mechanism of WeChat allow its users to access the sub-apps easily and share the content in them to contacts. We build a prototype of WeChat Mini Program to help promote Chinese paper-cutting.
Below is a video that demonstrate our prototype. (Note that the icon on the top right within the Mini Program page is just to complete the cycle. In a real WeChat Mini Program there will be fixed buttons that allow the user to share content and go back to WeChat.)
The prototype has five sections. The ‘ABOUT’ section that gives a general introduction of the art; the ‘HISTROY’ section that elaborates paper-cuttings in different dynasty; the ‘METHOD’ section that shows the process of producing a paper-cut; the ‘TUTORIALS’ section that gives instructions on several paper-cuts instances; the ‘EXHIBITION’ section that offers a digital gallery of paper-cuts made by paper-putting artists. On clicking an exhibit in ‘EXHIBITION’ section, the user can view the detail information of the exhibit.
Below are screen cuts of different sections.
