Lu takes up his scissors to regain childhood skills
Print Edition
GUYI Garden, Twin Pagodas of Nanxiang Temple, Nanxiang’s old streets, hospitals and schools, all these have become the subjects of paper-cuts by a retired teacher Lu Linyuan from Jiading No. 2 Middle School.
Lu started making paper-cuts when he was in primary school. Lu was fond of drawing and paper-cut.
At that time paper-cuts were quite popular for decorating the windows and doors, and those best ones were even made as good luck symbols for weddings.
Lu liked to cut paper and started to make them by himself. He drew his favorite patterns on red paper and used scissors to cut out the patterns.
Because his patterns were different from those old ones such as the flowers, birds, insects and fish, they were quite popular among his neighbors when they had weddings.
Having graduated from the college, Lu became a physics teacher and worked on this post for over 40 years.
Teaching was a hard work and paper-cut gradually faded from his life.
However, last year’s paper-cut exhibition at Nanxiang Town Culture Center in June rekindled his interest.
Now he is retired and has plenty of time, so he bought red paper and a pair of scissors starting to cut paper again.
However he had to throw away those paper-cuts because he was out of practice for a long time. To save the money he cut waste newspaper to produce the patterns.
Practice makes perfect. Gradually he can master the scissors quite well. His fingers became dexterous and ideas for patterns are full of imaginations.
He was tired of only cutting old paper patterns for pasting on windows and started to cut new ones with the design of his own drawings.
This required more tools than just scissors and Lu bought books on paper-cutting to explore the various techniques using paper-carving knives in conjunction with scissors.
It wasn’t easy at first. The handles of paper-carving knives are small and working with them for just a few minutes can make the hands sore. Lu rebuilt the handles to make them bigger so as to handle them easier.
He also experimented with different backing boards. Glass was too hard, hard paper too soft and three-ply board too rough. After a long search he eventually found the most appropriate choice — stencil plate.
The main subjects of Lu’s paper-cuts are his hometown and its local people.
He drew Nanxiang scenes on paper and then used paper-carving knives and scissors to make them into paper-cuts, which makes his paper-cuts different from those traditional works with its themes of just flowers, birds, insects and fish.
After Nanxiang series, Lu is planning to make paper-cuts of characters from Chinese classics including “Dream of the Red Chamber” and “Romance of the Western Chamber.”
To attract more people to join in this work, Lu has also organized a paper-cut salon with over 20 paper-cut enthusiasts.
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