Exaggerated shapes in Manchu folk paper-cut patterns
The Manchu ancestors exaggerated and deformed their bodies according to the laws of natural shape and formal beauty. They put aside concreteness as much as possible, extended their imagination, and sublimated the natural images in objective things. For example, "a ten-pound lion has a nine-pound head, and a pound of tail loses its head." This method of exaggerating its typical features and abandoning ordinary features enhances the strength of the works shape.
Manchu paper-cutting is mostly characterized by contour shapes in two-dimensional space. It captures typical dynamics, exaggerates the characteristics of objects, selects appropriate angles to make exaggerated generalizations, uses silhouettes to express modal and dynamic outlines, omits all details within the form, and highly summarizes , creating strong visual tension. It is not like Western art modeling that focuses on the true imitation of objective objects and passively experiences natural phenomena. Instead, it emphasizes subjectivity, perception, ideas, and active understanding of the objective world. It pays attention to spiritual thinking and feelings, and aims to reconstruct beautiful ideals. . The source of creation is to start from ones own subjective understanding of aesthetics and to feel nature with ones heart. Manchu folk paper-cutting has its own complete artistic modeling system. It is a conceptual plastic art with its own unique subjective image view, subjective image color, and subjective image multi-point perspective. Change the shortcomings of the natural image in the aesthetic structure and create the ideal image. The most commonly used modeling technique is to consciously change the normal shape and proportion of natural objects through exaggeration, enlargement, reduction, bending, elongation, and variation. This type of modeling requires the author to be very familiar with the natural objects depicted and have an in-depth understanding of them. He can grasp the key points, distinguish the beauty and ugliness in the messy natural images, and use the imperfect and defective parts of nature to express them subjectively. The imagination turns into an artistic image with aesthetic taste.
The picture is a paper-cut pattern of a shaman image. Because the level of productivity at that time was not high enough, peoples understanding of forms was still at a simple cognitive level, and their grasp of various shapes was still based on basic types. Coupled with the mysterious tendency in the early national consciousness, many primitive spiritual thoughts were injected into the modeling imagery. The images in Figure 2-2 are all based on the aesthetic concepts of the Manchu people, exaggerating certain parts of the human body. The characteristics of the image are round faces, thin eyebrows, and thin lips. The deformation of each character has a stylized and standardized formal beauty.The picture is a typical paper-cut of Changbai gods. In order to emphasize the sense of movement between gods and humans, the body of the gods is intentionally elongated. The S-shape once again emphasizes the tendency of movement and expresses the natural sense of movement in a deformed way. Come out, very dynamic.
