Keeping Watch on Intangible Cultural Heritage: Live Transmission and Sustainable Development of Chinese Lacquer Art

Abstract

Countries all over the world have been constantly exploring ways to rescue and protect intangible cultural heritage. While learning from other countries’ protection measures, the Chinese government is also constantly exploring ways that conform to China’s national conditions. As China’s first batch of intangible cultural heritage, lacquer art boasts a brilliant history, but many people are not familiar with it today. Moreover, in the process of modernization, the lacquer art transmission is declining day by day, and it is facing unprecedented major crises such as loss and division of history into periods. Hence, it is essential to verify and reveal the challenges and dilemmas in the lacquer art transmission, and come up with corresponding protection measures around these problems. First of all, this research, through literature review, “horizontally” explores the current research status and the universal problems of lacquer art transmission from the macro level. With a view to make up for the deficiencies of the existing research and further supplement the empirical evidence, the current research, with the transmission of “Chengdu lacquer art” as an example and through in-depth interviews, tracks and investigates the whole process of transmission of Chengdu Lacquer Art Training Institute, and “vertically” analyzes the survival situation of lacquer art transmission and the core problems affecting transmission behaviors from the micro level. In the final conclusion, the research comes up with corresponding countermeasures and suggestions for the identified key problems, which is of significant reference value for facilitating the live transmission and sustainable development of Chinese lacquer art.