(Going to the grassroots in the New Year) Fish skin paintings are selling well and Chagan Lake fishing and hunting culture goes overseas through innovation

　　China News Service, Songyuan, February 14th: Fish skin paintings are selling well, Chagan Lake fishing and hunting culture is going overseas through innovation

　　China News Service reporter Guo Jia

　　During the Spring Festival of the Year of the Dragon, Xu Wei, the provincial inheritor of Chagan Lake fish skin making skills in Jilin Province, was busy again. In a yurt-style studio, Xu Chun and his apprentices cut pieces of fish skin into radicals of Chinese characters, edged them with soap thread, and then carefully pasted them in the frame to create a festive fish skin painting. "Fu" is complete. This is their most popular item. During the Spring Festival this year, they rushed out more than 400 such orders as scheduled.

　　Chagan Lake in Songyuan City, Jilin Province has a fishing and hunting culture that has been passed down for thousands of years. Fish skin painting is one of the Chagan Lake fish skin products. At first, people used fish skin to cover their bodies, which was the prototype of fish skin clothing. With the development of the times, people began to use fish skin to make various totems, pendants, ornaments and other daily necessities. Because it is entirely handmade, fish skin painting is also known as "fishing and hunting culture on your fingertips."

Xu Wei displays fish skin paintings. (Information picture) Photo by Zhang Yao

　　Xu Hui has been fond of traditional hand-making techniques since he was a child, and later studied fish skin-making techniques with a master. After years of study, she developed the Chagan Lake fish skin production skills into "seven major processes" of creativity, design, material selection, modeling, cutting, sewing, and mounting, as well as three-dimensional sewing and embroidery, three-dimensional kneading, two-dimensional engraving, and two-dimensional art stacking. The "Four Major Techniques" give latecomers a set of rules to follow when learning fish skin painting.

　　In Xu Chun's studio, there are fish skin paintings created by her and her apprentices. A set of blue flower-style necklaces, rings, pendants, and earrings are particularly eye-catching. Xu Wei said that this is made up of dyed fish skins and fish scales piece by piece. The technique is very demanding and there must be no traces of pasting. She named the piece "Mermaid Princess." In the 2023 Chinese Specialty Tourism Product Competition, this work won the gold medal.

　　Xu Hui said that in the minds of many people, intangible cultural heritage projects are either "cold" or "unfashionable". Both of these characteristics make it difficult to develop the market. The previous fish-skin paintings were indeed rougher, and their market positioning was also vague. Over the years, she has tried to effectively connect intangible cultural heritage and tourism products, using fish skin to make various murals, prints and ornaments, etc., and has obtained a total of 40 appearance patents, 1 utility model patent and 89 copyright protections.

Xu Chun (second from left) is making fish skin paintings. (Information picture) Photo by Zhang Yao

　　Xu Mie's fish skin crafts are always based on the fishing and hunting culture of Chagan Lake, which gives her works strong regional characteristics. She created a series of fish skin paintings such as "Chagan Lake Winter Fishing Sacrifice Lake" and "Chagan Lake Winter Fishing", which artistically represent traditional winter fishing scenes. These works have sold a lot in domestic and overseas markets.

　　In recent years, with the help of Jilin Cultural Tourism Week held around the world, fish skin handicrafts have also opened up markets in Europe and Southeast Asia. Xu Chun said that fish skin paintings are particularly recognized in areas where there are Chinese people. Among them, prints such as the "Fu" series, "Fish (surplus) every year", "Joyful" fish (happy), "Lotus" (continuous) fish every year, and the twelve zodiac signs are very popular.

　　Taking advantage of Jilin Province's effort to create a "Courtesy Jilin" tourism product brand, orders for fish-skin paintings from home and abroad have continued to flow in the past year. Faced with strong market demand, Xu Wei allocated some orders that only required simple processing to local farmers, which not only increased production but also helped farmers become rich.

　　As an inheritor of intangible cultural heritage, Xu Wei has also developed 10 high-quality study routes and more than 300 intangible cultural heritage courses around Chagan Lake fishing and hunting culture, including fish skin painting teaching. From the spring of 2023 to now, there are more than 10,000 students Primary and middle school students go to Songyuan City to study.

　　Nowadays, many provincial-level intangible cultural heritage projects in Jilin are trying to turn their horizons overseas, which not only achieves economic benefits, but also promotes the innovative development of traditional crafts. Xu Wei believes that projects with a strong local flavor must keep pace with the times. Appropriate addition of some artistic expression will often produce unexpected effects. “The most important thing in this is to have cultural confidence.” (over)