On August 3, 2016, View of the Sea - Xie Caihua Folk Paper Cuts Art Exhibition was inaugurated in the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC). The exhibition was jointly sponsored by the publicity department of the Ningbo municipal committee of the Communist Party of China, Ningbo Municipal Federation of Literary and Art Circles, and Ningbo Association for Cultural Exchanges with Foreign Countries. It put on display 120 pieces of paper-cut works that Xie created elaborately on the theme of marine culture, including maritime labor, marine folk customs, marine legendary stories, and marine life tools. They showed strong maritime cultural features.

Xie is a national senior craft artist, and successor of intangible cultural heritage paper cuts in Zhejiang province. From childhood, he has practiced paper cuts, as a result of family influence. Later, he studied paper cuts under Gao Miaolan, a famous farmer painting master. Gao was good at farmer painting, and also a master-hand in paper cuts. Xie, as a child, was impressed deeply with the lifelike paper mandarin ducks, magpies, swallows and butterflies that Gao cut with scissors. Little by little, Xie was fascinated by paper cuts, and became a genuine admirer of the art.

Xie has his own unique style in paper cuts. He has inherited the fine tradition of Chinese paper cuts, and absorbed the nutrients of Chinese folk art elements including ancient pottery patterns and blue print fabric designs. He has also borrowed expression techniques of modern art, and made improvement and innovation in expansion of material textures and themes.

Xie has firmly seized the pulse of the times in paper cuts creation to truly reflect the true, the good and the beautiful in life and human nature. His representative work Hundreds of Boats portrays the evolution process of fishing boats in all ages in Xiangshan. His works Hundreds of Fishes, Hundreds of Conchs, and Hundreds of Crabs reproduce the rich and long-standing fishing culture of Xiangshan county, a fishery giant, with profound implications and connotations.

In the exhibition rooms, audiences may appreciate the unique artistic charms of Chinese cultural treasures through the paper cuts art of Xie’s in various subjects.

The exhibition lasted till August 9.