She made shadow puppets of modern anime characters and showed them to her father but got an irritating reply: “It’s ridiculous!” For a long time after that, they ignored each other, but both were considering how to confront the challenges in the future. Haiyan learns techniques from her father. Her father’s masterpieces were sent to the museum for exhibitions, but most people only paid attention to the appearance of shadow puppets instead of appreciating the inner culture and beauty. “The present situation of shadow puppets strikes a strong resemblance to a person wearing colorful dress but walking in the dark night.” “I was so depressed when I saw this artistry made by efforts of decades cost a low price,” Wang’s daughter Haiyan (汪海燕) said. People can get a set of machine-made shadow puppets with a few tens of yuan online anytime. Today, it is hard to find young people willing to contribute the ten years plus it takes to learn the traditional shadow puppet handicraft. Image: 南方人物周刊īut things have changed since 2000. “A Phoenix Flying through peonies”(《鳳穿牡丹》) is a fan-shaped illustration made by Wang. The audience waiting for the puppetry could not be shooed away even in the heavy snow, and foreign customers quickly bought out all the shadow puppets made by Mr Wang. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed the golden time of shadow puppetry in China. Three years of hardworking practice guaranteed his hand never trembled in the following decade’s work. No matter how many heavy things pressed on my left hand, my master always asked me to keep my hand stable.” Months later, my master put a couple of bricks on my left backhand, and after years he hung three bricks on my wrist. “In the beginning, I just pushed the leather with the three fingers of my left hand and held a carving knife in the right hand to carve patterns. Wang Tianwen is carving on a piece of leather. His master Mr Li Zhanwen (李占文), decided to teach Wang the secret carving technique known as “leading knife by pushing leather” (推皮走刀). “I believed only if I spared no effort to take good care of my master, he would be willing to teach me everything he had.”įortunately, Wang got his just deserts. “At that time, master and apprentice are more like father and son.” Mr Wang said, “I not only learned skills from my master but also did chores for him, including errands and even cleaning the toilet.”īut Wang was not complaining at all. He started to learn the technique at 11 in the early 1960s. Wang Tianwen (汪天穩) is an old shadow puppet craftsman in Shaanxi Province (陝西省). But new problems have emerged which are impossible to ignore. Right up to now, shadow puppetry has been popular in Xi’an (西安), the capital of the Han. Craftsmen first polish a big piece of leather until they are semi-transparent, then brush tung oil (桐油) on the leather surface and carve the facial expressions and costumes of the puppets on the smooth two-dimensional plane. Traditional authentic shadow puppets are 100 per cent handmade. Image: 南方人物周刊Īs time passed, makers of shadow puppets (皮影) gained raw materials which were more malleable and less corruptible: the leather of sheep, oxen or donkeys. Shadow puppetry is an ancient two-dimensional art. Watching the dancing “Lady Li” in the candlelight, the emperor was delighted, and since then, shadow puppetry (皮影戲) spread across China. Inspired by the scene, he cut a piece of stiff cloth into Lady Li’ s figure, painted it with bright colors and a beautiful face, and installed thin wooden sticks at the joint of “limbs”.Īt night, he set a gauze screen with a candle behind it, operating the sticks in his hands to let the “cloth Lady Li” move. One day a minister, Li Shaoweng (李少翁), saw children holding dolls in their hands, and the dolls’ shadows on the ground were eye-catching as they were moved around. MORE THAN TWO THOUSAND years ago during the Han Dynasty, Emperor Wu’s beloved concubine Lady Li passed away.
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