The tiger image created by folk artists is not the atural image of a tiger at a specific time and place; it is a surreal conceptual tiger, a totem that protects the community. For example, the chubby, short-legged "Loving tiger" is meant to keep an eye on the kids and play with them. The tiger in "A tiger coming down the mountain" showing a fierce-looking tiger with his four feet at full length is for afeguarding the residence. They are not tigers in a natural form. In the early 1980s, China National Fine Art Institute invited six elder women from northern Shaanxi and eastern Gansu to demonstrate paper-cutting in class. When they first arrived, I wanted to show them around Beijing. They wanted to go to Beijing Zoo and see a real tiger, something they had never seen even after cutting paper tigers for a lifetime. They rushed to the tiger mountain and gazed at the real tigers without a blink of an eye. At night, they stayed up all night trying
to make a paper-cut tigers in various postures from what they saw. However, having never learnt sketche, they didn't do too well, as, after all, those are two different art categories.
