From Preservation to Cultivation: Bridging Artistic Boundaries through the Living Heritage of Kunqu

Presentation abstract

Abstract

Living heritage is often discussed in terms of preservation, transmission and safeguarding. While these approaches play an essential role in protecting cultural traditions, they can also encourage heritage to be understood primarily as a collection of knowledge and performance forms to be conserved. This paper argues that Kunqu, one of China’s oldest forms of classical theatre and a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage tradition, offers a different understanding of intangible cultural heritage: not primarily as something to preserve, but as an ongoing process of embodied cultivation.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, embodied practice and participatory workshops, the paper explores Kunqu dance as part of a broader ecology of Chinese aesthetic and embodied traditions, including poetry, calligraphy, painting and martial arts. Rather than being connected through shared techniques or stylistic similarities, these practices are linked by common principles of cultivation that shape perception, attention, movement and relationships with the surrounding world. What is transmitted across generations is therefore not only a repertoire of performance, but also cultivated ways of perceiving, moving and inhabiting the world.

This perspective invites us to reconsider the boundaries that often separate artistic disciplines, as well as the distinction between heritage as a cultural object and heritage as lived practice. If heritage continues through the cultivation of ways of perceiving, moving and relating, rather than simply through the reproduction of codified forms, then research must likewise engage with these living processes through embodied participation alongside documentation and interpretation. In this sense, the paper also contributes to ongoing discussions on decolonising heritage research by questioning approaches that privilege classification and preservation over lived cultural practice.

The presentation includes a short interactive demonstration, inviting participants to experience how a simple movement principle can illuminate heritage as a living way of inhabiting the world rather than an object of preservation.