1962, Yao Chen was born in a scholarly family in Linzi Town, Rugao City, Jiangsu Province. When he was young, he was fascinated by paper-cutting on folk lanterns, and often copied one or two with a ladle, winning the applause of adults. After entering school, Yao Chen became obsessed with paper-cutting. He often gives up playing with children of his own age and cuts in line for hours at a time. He cut window grilles and snuff many times to participate in small school art exhibitions. One summer vacation, he stayed at home and cut many kinds of gadgets, or asked artists to give directions or gave them to his classmates for appreciation. Among them, the works such as Crab, Bat and Butterfly, Eight Immortals Fighting for Peach, and Carp yue longmen were recommended by the school to participate in the county exhibition, winning back five awards and more than a dozen children's books. At that time, Yao Chen became a famous news figure in the whole town, and was known as a "child prodigy in the Woods". Yao Chen works with his class during the day. When the lights are dim, he is intoxicated with the art of paper-cutting. The dormitory is so dark and noisy that I can't even find a stool, let alone a table. He sat on the bed with a pillow on his leg as a "table". The most wrong thing is to wave an axe in the butcher's hand during the day and then play with small scissors. It needs the artist's delicacy, which is difficult to adapt to for a long time, but he persevered with perseverance ...1In the autumn of 984, Yao Chen's first large-scale paper-cut work, Beautiful Water, was published in Nantong Daily, watching the painstaking efforts printed in the newspaper.

Beautiful Watercolor is a turning point in the maturity and perfection of Yao Chen's paper-cutting skills. He spent two months on this painting, using nearly 10 sketches. In order to truly show the landscape of the water painting garden, all the pavilions, clouds, water waves, reflections of leaves and other nuances are carefully carved with embroidery needles. After the work was finished, Yao Chen was almost blind due to extreme eye fatigue and viral herpes on the pupil. 1in the summer of 997, the factory in Yao Chen gradually recovered its vitality. He and hundreds of laid-off workers proudly walked into the factory. Shortly after going to work, in order to solve the product quality problem, Yao Chen was ordered to go to Anhui on business. When the van was driving to a bridge in Wuhu, Anhui Province, it accidentally fell into a ravine more than seven meters deep. In an instant, the van was submerged by the raging river. Yao Chen blacked out at the moment and lost consciousness ... After all the efforts of the masses, Yao Chen, who was dying, was taken to Wuhu Hospital. After three days and nights of rescue, although Yao Chen broke free from the death line, his legs were disabled for life, accompanied by various complications.

Yao Chen, who woke up from a coma, was lying in a hospital bed in a different place, stroking his wooden legs with his hands and crying. Suddenly, he found his hands intact, which means that he can still cut paper, and there is a masturbation expression on his painful face. Life is sometimes too fragile to be worth a blade of grass. Recalling that purgatory experience, Yao Chen has always been able to feel at ease. He said that because of his sensitive constitution, he felt pain several times that of ordinary people. Anesthetics can't achieve the expected effect in the left leg skin grafting operation. When peeling, it was almost "live skin", and his screams could be heard in every corner of the hospital building. Yao Chen's works not only absorbed the advantages of simplicity, boldness and roughness of the northern painting school, but also had the advantages of neatness, exquisiteness, beauty and gentleness of the southern painting school, and combined with some abstract techniques, forming a unique style of inheriting the tradition without sticking to it. His flowers, fish and flowers are lifelike in shape, exquisite in knife work and natural and smooth in point, line and surface. Peking Opera Mask, Twelve Women in Jinling and Olympic Athletes pay attention to the integration of appearance and inner beauty. Realism and exaggeration can be freely combined, and simplicity and complexity are just right, thus setting off different personalities and styles. In recent years, dozens of works by Yao Chen have won prizes in China, and more than 65,438+0,800 works have been collected by foreign museums and friends. Therefore, he won the honors of "China Folk Paper-cut Artist" and "China Folk Artist". Central, provincial and municipal TV stations filmed nearly 20 feature films for him, and many folk artists in the circle called him "China's magic knife". Wandering around the metropolis with scissors.

On the New Year's Eve of 200 1, Yao Chen boarded the bus to Nanjing with a pair of scissors and crutches, and an entrepreneurial storm of saving himself, developing paper-cutting art and realizing self-worth began in the metropolis. Nanjing is the ancient capital of the Six Dynasties, with outstanding people and profound Chinese traditional culture. Nanjing citizens have a high level of appreciation of art, which laid the foundation for "Yao Chen Paper-cut" to settle in Nanjing. When Yao Chen first came to Nanjing as a stranger, he bought a map of Nanjing and stayed in a low-end hotel. In the evening, he burns the midnight oil, "cuts" flowers, and wonderful paper-cuts leap from the paper; During the day, he walked into schools, shopping malls, communities, art galleries and tourist attractions step by step against the biting cold wind and recommended his works. In just half a year, Yao Chen let more than 20,000 paper-cut works enter thousands of households, and "Yao Chen paper-cut" became popular in Nanjing. In March, 200 1 year, Yao Chen rented an 8-square-meter booth in Nanjing Dianyaju to try out paper-cut products. During the opening period, hundreds of people patronize paper-cut works every day. Three months later, he expanded the scale and made "Yao Chen Paper-cut" appear in the craft boutique square of Jinsheng Department Store. Yao Chen was hired as a paper-cutting instructor by Nanjing University, Nanjing Art Institute, Nanjing Institute of Technology, Nanjing College of Medicine, Nanjing Normal University and affiliated middle schools, and he gladly went there. After some high-quality paper-cuts have boarded the elegant halls of hotels, teahouses, hotels, shopping malls and entertainment places, many people have commented that they have high artistic appreciation value, giving people a feeling of simplicity, freshness, relaxation and pleasure; In case of wedding, birthday, housewarming, enrollment and other happy events, some citizens choose paper-cut works with auspicious, festive and lively colors to celebrate, so as to set off the atmosphere and achieve the icing on the cake effect. A piece of red paper, cut twice and cut three times in a blink of an eye, has become a beautiful handicraft, which makes many "foreigners" feast for the eyes. Some businessmen and tourists from the United States, Japanese, Egyptian, Malaysian and Singaporean compare "Yao Chen paper-cut" to "soft gold" and collect it in large quantities.