Weifang

It felt like I had discovered Narnia as I stepped into Mr. Zhang’s kite workshop. It was alive with animals in the form of bamboo wireframes, large pencil outline drawings and beautifully painted silk. As he showed me his current experiments in moving crab claws and dragon head antennaes, I too wanted to become a kitemaker!  What a contrast to the production-shop I had visited the day before. They too had made kites, but in a human mass-production line producing simplified versions of designs copied from workshops such as Mr. Zhang’s. In the production-shop, the kitemaking process had been divided into small tasks to enable maximum efficiency and thus output. The ladies at that production-shop were clearly skilled at the craft, but obviously bored. You could sense their lack of enthusium in the kites before you even met them.

Mr. Zhang’s daughter, who helps her father make kites, says that to enable them to keep doing new creative projects, they keep the workshop small and do not produce large quantities of any one kite. If you go into the production-shops next year or in a few years time they will still be making and selling the same kites, there is no progress.

It seems that for kite-making, and perhaps many of the crafts still alive in China, it is not a question of whether the skill will survive, but if it will develop. It seems that production-workshops are training a great number of workers to become very competent technically, but not inspiring them to understand the science or joys behind the craft which would give them the passion to create something new.