Chinese Minority Women Headdresses

Chinese folk papercuts are usually treated as anonymous art, differentiated only by local styles. More recently some scholars have argued that it is necessary to study the artists who make the papercuts to really understand regional styles and the subject matter. Additionally, many of the things portrayed in papercuts are traditional objects no longer commonly used today but remembered through paper art. The study of these papercuts may be able to tell us something about local minority art and culture in China.

The author and artist of this book, Hongyi He, is a professor at the School of Literature and Journalism of South-Central University for Nationalities and the director of the Folk Literature and Foreign Literature Department. Her academic work focuses on researching the folk papercuts of the various ethnic groups in Southern China and the folk arts and crafts of the Yangtze River Basin. She is also a folk-art artist herself, with awards from the Chinese Folk Artists Association and the Wuhan Municipal Government.

The Library of Congress is the only other US library that owns a copy of this book, making the Freer and Sackler Library’s copy a relatively rare and important resource for the study of Chinese papercuts.