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On May 8, “Spot on China” Chinese Folk Culture Week was opened in Dallas USA. During my visit, I was privileged to inspect the exhibition where I felt vividly the culture’s function of bridge and bond. Exquisite craftsmanship, simple and interesting works are always blessed with the power of touching hearts, and as expression and creation from folk art, spontaneously convey a national message of culture with touching sense. As we all know, USA is the country that initially puts forward Theory of Soft Power of Culture, most actively develops Copyright Industry, and spares no efforts to build up and promote American image and American dreams through films, TV and other cultural communications. However, the enthusiastic response to Chinese Folk Culture Week from both government sponsors and experts to ordinary people has raised a lot of questions for us to think about in a more profound way.
First of all, we need to realize the value of Chinese life style. In other words, in the process of international exchange, people of different cultural backgrounds will focus their attention on Chinese folk arts from the essential angle of life style rather than simply artistic skills and form of art itself.
Secondly, in the course of folk art development, we must establish cultural confidence. Only when we intentionally and confidently explore and realize the value of our folk art and fulfill inheritance and development in a more creative way can our cultural ecology achieve a sound and vigorous development and then the value of folk art can be realized in our labor and life.
Last but not least, I expect to restore and reproduce our cultural creativity through folk arts, in which the cultural identity could be summarized and national wisdom be discovered. It is also a contemporary cultural mission to make today’s “Made in China” and “Designed in China” as abundant and colorful as our traditional folk arts.
(The author is Vice President of China Folk Literary and Art Association and President of Shandong Federation of Literary and Art Circles)
