On January 30, in a studio filled with the faint, pleasant scent of fabric in Xiji County, Guyuan City, Ningxia, colorful scraps of cloth are transformed through a pair of skilled hands. Through cutting, piecing, and assembling, they become vivid characters, dynamic scenes, and deeply emotional rural landscapes. The owner of these skilled hands is Ma Shuhua, the representative inheritor of the autonomous region-level intangible cultural heritage project of fabric collage art.
For over 30 years, Ma Shuhua has deeply integrated her family's inherited folk craft with professional artistic concepts, allowing the ancient art of fabric collage to radiate unprecedented vitality through the interplay of needle and thread. Ma Shuhua's journey into fabric collage began with warm childhood memories under the kerosene lamp. As the fourth-generation inheritor in her family, her first teacher was her grandmother, who possessed exquisite embroidery and needlework skills.
"In that era of material scarcity, my grandmother could always cleverly turn holes in old clothes into lively autumn leaves or red apples," Ma Shuhua recalled. "That artistic seed, planted with needle and thread, took root and sprouted in my heart." Starting from creating works with fabric scraps for school exhibitions, where she repeatedly won accolades, fabric collage became an inseparable passion and obsession in her heart.
Driven by her pursuit of art, she successively studied at the Art Department of Ningxia University and Shaanxi Normal University, systematically learning oil painting, traditional Chinese painting, composition, and color theory. This professional training opened up a completely new artistic vision for her and prompted her to start thinking: how could she make the somewhat rigid figures and compositions in traditional fabric collage truly "come alive"?
She boldly innovated, integrating professional aesthetics into her fingertip craft. In her hands, Zhong Kui's beard becomes exaggerated and flowing, body proportions break conventional rules, full of dynamic tension; the braids of the girls in her paintings seem to dance in the wind, and still life is endowed with life. She is also adept at "using fabric as pigment," skillfully utilizing the inherent texture, feel, and color of different fabrics for matching.
Creating a fabric collage is far from simple cut-and-paste work. From experiencing life and conceptualizing themes, to sketching drafts and precise cutting, down to the most mentally taxing steps of color matching and pasting the pieces together, each stage requires meticulous refinement. Her works are always rooted in the land she deeply loves—farmers working in the fields, bustling markets, daily rural life.
While steadfastly adhering to local themes, she continuously expands the boundaries of her art. To welcome the Year of the Horse in 2026 and International Women's Day, she is diligently creating a red-themed series of long scrolls titled "Female Red Army Soldiers and Horses," recreating the grandeur and tenacity of the Long March through fabric collage. She has also innovatively started creating fabric collages on rollable fabric surfaces.
For more than three decades, she has insisted on teaching apprentices for free. Her disciples, ranging from children of eight or nine years old to seniors over sixty, now number nearly 30. In the intangible cultural heritage inheritance studio at the Mu Lan Academy in Jiqiang Town, enthusiasts come to learn every day. She always patiently imparts her decades of experience, from cutting techniques to color matching, holding nothing back.
"I hope this craft can be passed down continuously," Ma Shuhua said. "It is not an antique in a museum, but an art form capable of constant growth." She meticulously records every detail of her teaching and creative process, preserving valuable documentation for this skill. In her hands, those unremarkable fabric scraps not only piece together the myriad aspects of human life but also connect a traditional past with a vibrant future.
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