1. Prologue: Oriental freehand brushwork using copper spoon as pen and sugar liquid as ink
The order of years changes, and the chapter is renewed day by day.
On the eve of the Spring Festival in 2026, the Year of the Horse in the Lunar Calendar, in Zhengzhou City, Henan Province, there is a small sugar painting shop in a corner of the Guomao 360 shopping mall, where a warm dialogue between traditional skills and modern life is taking place.
The owner of the shop, named Wang Qiyang, is a "Generation Z" young man who came to the world in 2002. He holds a copper spoon in his hand, his expression is focused and his breath is calm.
The warm sugar liquid pours down from the spoon. It is on a marble slab and undergoes thousands of changes in an instant. As the lines kept flowing, a horse with all its muscles and muscles showing, raising its head high and neighing, suddenly seemed to be jumping out. Under its hooves, a swift and light swallow flew past quickly.
This is the sugar painting he carefully created for the New Year of the Horse - "Horse Treading on Flying Swallows" .
This dynamic aesthetic, solidified in an instant, not only carries the people’s beautiful wishes for “taking the lead” in the New Year, but also opens the door for us to explore the contemporary inheritance path of intangible cultural heritage with its unique art form of “using spoon as pen and sugar as ink”.
2. Continuous genealogy: from "guerrilla fighting" in the market to "protecting artists" in culture
Wang Qiyang's skills are not water without a source or a tree without roots.
What his family inherits is the Northern style sugar painting rooted in the land of the Central Plains.
This style of style is distinguished by its rough lines, smooth and natural texture, and is particularly adaptable to the dry climate conditions there. Its production is not prone to softening due to moisture.
Since childhood, he has been the "little assistant" to his father who ran a stall in the ancient city of Shangqiu. When he was a teenager, he traveled with his family to temple fairs in Henan, Hebei, border areas and Inner Mongolia, starting a "guerrilla" life. Wang Qiyang's growth process itself is a unique and story-telling history of the migration of folk artists presented in miniature.
There is such a fluid thing called folk culture space. Although it is full of hardships, it allows him to absorb the customs and customs from all directions, thus laying the groundwork for his future breakthroughs in skills.
At the temple fair, there was a saying, "If you don't go to school well, you will set up a stall and paint sugar paintings like him in the future." These words once felt like a thorn in the back, but they also turned into an inner driving force. This driving force prompted him to think about how to make this skill called "sweet career" win the social dignity and cultural status it deserves.
3. Keeping integrity and innovating: revitalization of intangible cultural heritage empowered by material science
After settling in Zhengzhou, Wang Qiyang initiated systematic technological innovation .
He was not satisfied with simply reproducing traditional patterns, but started from the origin of the material and launched an experimental exploration.
In order to solve the problems of traditional sugar paintings such as sweet taste and easy irritation, he concentrated on research and development. He used corn maltose dilute and high-quality sucrose to scientifically mix to ensure that in the dry environment of the north, the drawn silk would still be smooth.
He also launched a sugar-free formula for special consumer groups, so that patients with diabetes can also taste the "taste of the New Year", demonstrating the humanistic care in intangible cultural heritage.
However, what attracted the most attention from academic circles was his attempt to combine sugar painting with modern materials and techniques.
First, Wang Qiyang sealed the completed work with epoxy resin. Through this, he successfully solved a pain point that has existed for thousands of years, that is, sugar paintings are easy to melt and are easily eroded by insects and ants, making it difficult to preserve sugar paintings for a long time.
There is a new thing called "collectible sugar paintings". From a theoretical level, it can extend the existence called "life" of sugar paintings to a hundred years or more in some way.
The charm of the sugar liquid as it circulates has been sealed for a long time, isolating air and water vapor, and achieving a morphological leap from "momentary art" to "eternal memory".
4. Searching for the roots of aesthetics: reconstructing the charm of the East between freehand brushwork and realism
In the process of exploring the boundaries of art , Wang Qiyang once fell into a misunderstanding.
He tried to improve his modeling ability by studying Western sketches. However, his works were criticized by his father as having lost the "soul of sugar painting" because they pursued perspective and anatomical accuracy too much.
This setback prompted him to engage in deep reflection, and he finally realized that the core aesthetic of sugar painting lies in the expression of imagery with the characteristics of Eastern aesthetics.
The traditional themes of Kirin, Pixiu, dragon and phoenix are not about resemblance in form, but charm, not realism, but freehand brushwork.
Wanting to rediscover this cultural root, he visited famous ancient temples many times to observe murals and sculptures and "seek inspiration from the patterns of his ancestors."
This self-conscious cultural root-seeking behavior prompted him to re-fix the essence of sugar painting in the traditional Chinese aesthetic system. No matter how the style it presents moves back and forth between realism and freehand brushwork, its ever-present soul is always "telling Chinese stories well".
5. The road to inheritance: from “supporting the family” to “cultural confidence”
Faced with the impact of the traffic economy, Wang Qiyang showed a rare sobriety.
In 2023, there was a live broadcast that brought 5 million online views. However, after experiencing a brief period of loss, he decisively chose to stop broadcasting for five months to concentrate on honing his skills and recalibrating the relationship between craftsmen and craftsmanship, and also recalibrating the relationship between craftsmen and audiences.
He firmly believes that "use is the best inheritance."
As a result, the stall he set up has always maintained a price close to the people. The price of ordinary sugar paintings has not increased significantly for more than ten years. When the price was the lowest, it only sold for one yuan, thus making this craft truly "enter the homes of ordinary people."
At the same time, he recruited many disciples, and currently there are seven or eight students studying under him.
When more and more parents pointed at their children and said, "From now on, you can follow this guy and learn how to paint sugar paintings." Under such circumstances, he experienced the change in the social evaluation of this craft.
He smiled and claimed that this is the so-called "cultural self-confidence", a kind of identification and pride for one's own culture that originates from the people and comes from the bottom of the heart.
He kneaded the hollow state of paper-cutting, the agile qualities of shadow puppets, and the elegant feeling of calligraphy into sugar. He also integrated modern elements such as strawberry bears and monkeys offering peaches into the traditional framework, so that the sugar paintings can maintain the same frequency and resonance with the times while maintaining the "ancient taste".
The night falls and the lanterns come on.
Wang Qiyang holds the old tools passed down from his father's generation and adheres to the "ancient recipe" that has not changed for decades. The purpose is to enable children thirty years later to still "taste that unique taste"!
The sugar painting he holds in his hand is no longer the "bitter" business of the past. It has now become a so-called "sweet career" with dignity and prospects.
At the street corner of the ancient city of Shangqiu, on the stage of CCTV's "Young in the Spring Festival Gala", and at the square stall in the shopping mall, he wrote an ingenious answer to the "post-00s" with a spoonful of hot sugar liquid.
This answer sheet is closely related to inheritance. It is also related to innovation. Moreover, it is related to the grand proposition of how an ancient nation can protect and continue its cultural genes in the process of modernization.
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