Cork Carving Painting

Cork carving painting, also called 'wood painting,' took shape in the early twentieth century around Xiyuan village in Fuzhou's eastern outskirts. Made from the bark of imported cork oak, it is a craft original to Fuzhou and, with bodiless lacquerware and Shoushan carving, one of the city's 'three treasures.'

Artisans slice the soft cork into thin sheets and carve pavilions, towers, plants and trees, then layer these scenes within a picture frame to build up a three-dimensional landscape with foreground and distance.

Renowned for rendering fine detail and 'shrinking a dragon into an inch,' it condenses garden landscapes into a small frame, and was inscribed on the second national ICH list in 2008 (item VII-90).

Its cradle and center of transmission is the Xiyuan area east of Fuzhou, and its works are often shown in the city's craft galleries and the Fujian Museum.