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Paper Cutting Activity with Wuxi Mandarin Students

中国剪纸艺术

Chinese Paper Cutting or Jianzhi (剪纸) is the first type of paper cutting design, since paper was invented by Cai Lunin the Eastern Han Dynasty in China. The art form later spread to other parts of the world with different regions adopting their own cultural styles. Because the cut outs are also used to decorate doors and windows, they are sometimes referred to "chuāng huā" (窗花), meaning Window Flower.

Today our curious French students first experienced this traditional Chinese art. Our mandarin teacher Carla teach them how to cut Chinese character “囍”，  which is only used as an ornamental design motif associated with Chinese weddings. With two 喜 compressed to assume the square shape of a standard Chinese character,Shuangxi means ‘double happiness’ to coincide with the new couple. Chinese culture also believes  that “happiness comes in twos” (好事要成双 hǎoshì yào chéng shuāng), and weddings especially follow the auspicious sayings. Just like our cute French student couples Pauling and Cyrille, you see the way they cut red paper, fully concentrated, cautiously take every step to cut each paper details. And other people keep asking me:“ Carla, is this drawing like this? This is too difficult, how can I cut this; Carla, please come to help me….”   I suddenly realized our French students really not good at cut papers~~~, what a huge pressure! Lucky I have assistant—— Eve teacher, she patiently showed students how to fold papers, how to draw the pattern on the paper and paper cutting.

But those naughty children laugh at each other’s achievement, said:“oh~ look at yours, mine is much better than yours, yours is so ugly, Loool~~~”

You see in the photo, how proud they are ,showing off their master achievements~

Wuxi Mandarinedu Teacher : Carla