Negative Space: The Art of Papercutting

Papercutting is a long loved art of Chinese culture. I have always been fascinated by it. Old PoPos and YeYes sit on the sides of roads and in malls with a cart full of dangling, delicate red paper. With the tiniest pair of scissors, they can render you a tiny red version of whatever you ask. They find joy in small children and will often gift a small paper cutting to them. I remember treasuring a tiny red rabbit made out of that velvety but delicate paper. Some of the art is layered, to make a unique and 3D setting. Some of the art is meant to be a shadow art, complete when a light is shone on it. But my favourite type are the complex circles where a full scene is created, the paper so full of holes that a single errant finger could rip the whole scene away.

Of all the famous Chinese arts, I find that papercutting is frequently overlooked. Calligraphy is famous and for good reason. The art of the brush is hard to master but is also far sturdier than paper cutouts. I remember calligraphy lessons as a child, my focus completely directed towards a single stroke only to not notice my other hand completely smudging another stroke.

There is an old story of a boy who works very hard to write a word in calligraphy and shows it to his father, in hopes of garnering his praise. But his father doesn't respond verbally, only dips his brush in ink to add a single stroke. The boy takes his rice paper to his mother, who says that he has not put effort into any of his strokes except the one stroke that his father completed. At this, he is upset and asks his mother how he can make his writing to be as good as his father's single careless stroke. She responds that when he can turn all the water in the courtyard urns, stocked there in case of fire, into ink, he will have mastered the art of calligraphy. But that is the inherent problem with calligraphy. You can spend years and years without it looking anything like a calligrapher's hand, your careful strokes no better than a calligrapher's careless stroke. It is too easy to get wrong and too hard to get right.

But papercutting is the opposite. Like calligraphy, you start with a blank piece of paper. But where calligraphy would have you add to the paper to create your art, papercutting will have you take away the parts you don't need to create a work of art. You can plan for it and sketch out the parts you want to cut out before you begin, making it a far more forgiving craft than calligraphy.

Negative space has always fascinated me. You look at something and take away what you don't need to make something beautiful. It is the sign that we are whole as is, and don't need to add embellishments for perfection. It is elegant in its simplicity, without excessive colours or flourishes, only what existed in the paper to begin with. The artist must make do with what already exists and does not add their own touch to it beyond what their scissors can do.

Perhaps the most common iteration of papercutting today is making paper snowflakes. You fold your paper with three or four careful folds before making a few snips, unfolding to make a distinct six or eight pointed snowflake of your own creation. In calligraphy, an amateur's work is joy for the process of art, but in papercutting even an amateur's work can be joy beyond the simple process of art. As a child, I would spend hours cutting frogs and rabbits and little scenes out of paper, making the rest of the envisioned scenario out of origami. Papercutting also has the benefit that it is easily portable and less messy, making it an ideal craft for me to have on the go as I waited in cafes between lessons. When one cannot handle scissors, one could buy hole-punches in different shapes to create little paper cuttings for them.

I hope that the mastery of papercutting survives the modern age. I hope that there will one day be more tiny scissors making a mastery out of negative space to continue in a rich cultural tradition of storytelling.