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Asia's flying masterpieces

By Derek Lee
STAFF REPORTER
Sunday, Feb 04, 2001, Page 17

With the arrival of warm weather, take a walk down to Taipei's Riverside Park (河濱公園) to see one of Asia's oldest pastimes -- kite flying. On gusty days at the park, the sky is virtually filled with kites of both Asian and Western design.

One version of history says Italian traveler Marco Polo brought a three-dimensional kite from China back to Europe in the 13th century, and from that point the kite followed two distinct paths of development.

Divorced from the constraints of the pastime's Asian traditions, the kite in the West underwent major transformations over the centuries and has even evolved into the extreme sports of paragliding and hand gliding.

Western kites tend to apply modern materials, such as nylon fabric and carbon-fiber tubes for both the flat and three-dimensional varieties of kite. In contrast, kites in Asia have emphasized a traditional appearance, while exploring the convergence of art and modern technology in the design. Asian kite designers have largely avoided hectic sport incarnations of kite flying, for fear that it detracts from the human aspect of this family-oriented pastime. Furthermore, making a kite by hand is an enjoyable modern family leisure time activity.

The Japanese Ukiyoe style of kite depicts scenes from the country's folklore. PHOTO COURTESY OF BUTEO HUANG

Younger generations, however, have tended to favor the more intense experience of flying Western kites.

Asian kite makers for hundreds of years have mostly used the favored regional building material, bamboo, to assemble kites. The reasons are obvious. Bamboo is widely used in the construction of buildings and other structures and can be found almost anywhere in the countryside.

The renowned Korean wind-hole, or yeon, kite flies nearly perpendicularly to the ground. PHOTO COURTESY OF BUTEO HUANG

More importantly, bamboo is highly flexible and extremely strong, which makes it ideal for creating practically any shape.

The shape and design of artistic kites vary between countries in Asia, but all retain a human touch, as opposed to mass-produced high-tech products that predominate in the West. Asian kites also typically feature pictures of animals or humans, whereas geometric patterns dominate in Western kites.

Moon Kites are popular in Southeast Asia. This Indonesian Kite has a small star at the bottom. PHOTO: COURTESY OF BUTEO HUANG

Kite designs throughout Asia have typically been hand-drawn. The Japanese, for example, apply bright Ukiyoe (浮世繪), or "floating world," paintings on a square or rectangular tetra kite. Other designs, such as black sparrows or red-crested cranes (丹頂鶴) are widely favored as well.

Some prominent Japanese kite makers favor redwood, instead of bamboo, for their hand-made kite frames and may produce only one or two kinds of kites with exactly the same hand-painted design (never in printed versions) in their lives. Kite makers would keep their trade secrets within the family, passing their skills down to subsequent generations.

The revised form of the Philippine moon kite is designed to look like a crab. PHOTO COURTESY OF BUTEO HUANG

Kite flying in Japan is often a team effort with large groups flying a huge kite. There are also kite-flying contests in which employees from a business form a team.

China has long been recognized as the kite's place of origin. Designs have included domestic animals and legendary monsters such as gigantic centipedes, dragons and phoenixes. Records for the length of kites are broken almost every year at the international kite festival in Beijing.

The Indian moon kite is derived from the Chinese fat sparrow kite. PHOTO COURTESY OF BUTEO HUANG

The kite making tradition is so dear to the Chinese that one family, called the Ha Family (哈氏), which has been in the trade for centuries in Beijing, has been forbidden by the Chinese government to sell or teach their trade to foreigners. For the most part, the kites sold to tourists in China can't fly and are only good as decoration.

Chinese kite makers also made extensive use of silk, instead of cotton paper, in their kites. Consequently, the kite's often unsightly frame came into full view once in the air.

More recently, Chinese kite makers have turned their attention to improving the appearance of their kites by painting more varieties of pictures and using themes from widely-known Chinese idioms. Scant attention has been paid, however, to producing kites with unconventional shapes or improving the structure of kites. As a result, traditional Chinese kites lack the diversity of modern kites.

The best kite-designers in China are mostly in their old age and have not passed on their trade. The situation is somewhat similar in Taiwan where young people prefer to purchase mass-produced "junk kite" -- the simple and cheap triangle-shaped (三角翼) ones of French design. The ancient pastime seems to be falling by the wayside amid the fast pace of modern life and children's crippling workload at school.

One kite maker who is keeping the tradition of artistic kites alive in Taiwan is Buteo Huang (黃景楨). In his early 40s, Huang is a leader in the field of kite-design and has received abundant praise for his unique and beautiful works. Through Huang and a few others like him, kites in Taiwan are evolving into a new, more technical realm of structural design while maintaining a traditional appearance.

One of the most unique designs of kites in Asia is the traditional Korean rectangular wind-hole kite or yeon (風穴風箏). The design of the yeon kite allows it to fly almost perpendicularly to the ground, in contrast to most kites which fly parallel to the ground.

In Southeast Asia, an ancient and popular and design is called the moon kite (月箏), which developed from the original Chinese skinny-sparrow (瘦燕) and fat-sparrow (肥燕) kites. Thailand and Malaysia each have several traditional kites. Thailand's owl- and cobra-shaped kites are highly regarded by the international kite-flying community, while Malaysian kites are often equipped with humming instruments (弓鳴器) and contain paintings of local flowers and grass. Malaysian Airlines uses the traditional moon kite as its company logo and Singapore's Changi International Airport used kites for decoration when its new terminal opened in 1990.

Kite designers in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia also make extensive use of wax paper for kite fabric and use wax-dying techniques to beautify their kites.
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