Traditional Chinese paper-cutting once lived on windows — red silhouettes blooming during weddings and the Spring Festival. Today, it's turning up in product design and art exhibitions far from home.
Among the artists bringing this thousand-year-old craft into contemporary design is Gen Z creator Chen Fenwan.
Chen's work moves easily between tradition and modern life. She designed a paper-cut-themed gift box for the perfume brand Jo Malone and created smartwatch accessories for Huawei, weaving paper-cut motifs into everything from strap clasps to digital watch faces.
She calls herself "an artist made of paper". "Paper shapes both what I create and how I think," Chen said.
Traditionally, paper-cutting is about what remains: the cut-out parts are discarded, and the intact pattern is what people keep.
Chen challenges this logic. "Can the hollow itself become the main subject?" she asked.
This vision shaped her exhibition, Paper Cutting, displayed on Paris's Champs-Elysees during the 2024 Summer Olympics. Chen imagines a world where paper is not just a craft material but the foundation of an entire civilization. Her installation presents everything — from trees to architecture — in symmetrical paper-cut forms, suggesting a society built on restraint and balance.
"What matters to me is the logic of subtraction," she said. "The interplay of solid and void in paper-cutting reflects Eastern philosophies of coexistence."
To Chen's surprise, when she introduced her work to Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, he immediately brought up yin and yang.
"That moment made me realize it isn't just an Eastern concept," Chen said. "It's a universal language of balance."
Another signature of Chen's work is her bold use of pink. "Pink was once off-limits to me," she admitted. "I used to think it symbolized the 'good girl' stereotype."
The turning point came in 2016 when Chen began to see pink differently — as the natural hue of Asian skin, a color of life itself. Since then, she has fully embraced it. "My early pinks were soft," she said. "Now they are fluorescent and sharp."
For Chen, color is a way of speaking to her audience — and the shifting shades of pink mirror her growing courage to break free from old ideas.
In her view, the modern vitality of paper-cutting does not lie in color, form, or technique, but in the contemporary spirit and ideas it carries. "I want my works to draw attention, but more importantly, to make people think about the stories and realities they reflect," she said.
