The heritage hidden in shadows

Besides exhibitions and performances at home and abroad, Wang's Shadow has tried many other ways to present and promote shadow puppetry, including crossover cooperation with artists and directors, and launching cultural, innovative and customized products with brands.

One of Dang's plans is to redecorate their shadow puppet themed hotel in Beijing at the end of the year. It reopened in July after the pandemic and is usually fully booked. "We have shows on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and we also teach our guests to make puppets," he says. "It used to be more of a traditional hotel, but we are integrating traditional culture into the modern lifestyle."

He says that the hotel will turn its public space into a museum of shadow puppetry, exhibiting many of his family's shadow puppets that haven't had an opportunity to be presented.

Innovation and inheritance are happening simultaneously, and for the last four years Dang has been collecting information and material about shadow puppetry.

"I used the taxonomy I learned at college to collect the materials and separate them into different categories like performance and manufacturing skills," he says.

He also collects sketches of shadow puppet figures and scripts, some of which date back to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

Dang spends an hour or two each day with his mother and grandfather asking them about shadow puppetry and taking notes, and has noticed that the clothes the old shadow puppets wear are records of the time they were made.

"We record this information as practitioners in the field. In the future, I want to collaborate with research institutions so that they can collect materials in a more professional way, and help them systematically archive the history of Chinese shadow puppetry," Dang says.

His aspiration is to go beyond simply promoting shadow puppetry. He also wants to find more effective ways of promoting all of China's intangible cultural heritage.

"There's a plant called Arabidopsis thaliana, which is internationally recognized as a model organism in plant research, a kind of lab rat for plant scientists. For intangible cultural heritage, shadow puppetry serves as an excellent model; it is like the Arabidopsis thaliana of intangible heritage.

"I channel all my ideas for revitalizing traditional intangible cultural heritage into shadow puppetry. Following the success of shadow puppetry, we can share this model with other relevant educators, to revitalize more aspects of our heritage," he says.