Preserving Intangible Cultural Heritage Through Material Culture: Historical Artistic Codes of Yuxian Paper-Cutting in Modern Packaging
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63808/ha.v2i1.416Keywords:
Yuxian Paper-Cutting, Intangible cultural heritage, Commercial packaging, Unintentional archive, Layered completenessAbstract
This study examines how the visual codes of Yuxian paper-cutting are embedded in contemporary commercial packaging. Drawing on a historical baseline of thirty-two published patterns spanning three temporal strata and a purposively sampled corpus of twenty-five contemporary packaging designs, we apply a four-dimensional coding rubric (motif, chromatic system, composition, and craft trace) informed by Panofsky’s iconography and social-semiotic visual analysis. The results show that there is an asymmetry in fidelity where elements that can be visually encoded are subject to different degrees of preservation during their media transmission, whereby color is shown to be the most stable of these elements, and the craft trace, which exists only as a physical manifestation of intangible heritage, is always absent from the current archive. The study reinterprets commercial packaging as a distributed, unintentional visual archive and develops a tangible/intangible continuum and a layered completeness model of archival integrity.
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