Woodcarving (Tongshan woodcarving), a traditional art of Tongshan County, Hubei Province, is one of the national intangible cultural heritages. Tongshan woodcarving is mainly spread in Tongshan County and its surrounding areas in southeastern Hubei. According to historical records, Tongshan woodcarving appeared before the establishment of the county in the Northern Song Dynasty. It uses high-quality wood in the territory as raw materials, and has various carving forms, including shallow relief, deep relief, openwork, round carving, solid carving, hollow carving, negative carving, and positive carving, most of which are relief. Tongshan woodcarving is an important part of Tongshan folk art. Its themes are mostly life customs and mythological stories. The themes it expresses not only meet people's material needs, but also meet people's spiritual needs. It has the characteristics of unity of practicality and beauty. The specific origin of Tongshan woodcarving cannot be verified, but according to historical records, before the establishment of the county in the Northern Song Dynasty, there were craftsmen who made woodcarving their profession in Tongshan. From the Wei and Jin Dynasties to the Song and Yuan Dynasties, due to the introduction of Taoism and Buddhist culture, the creation of Tongshan woodcarving mainly focused on Buddha statues and gods. The Ming and Qing Dynasties were the glorious period of Tongshan woodcarving. The Han opera and tea-picking opera, which were quite active in Tongshan, promoted the development of Tongshan woodcarving. Drama stories and characters were presented in woodcarving works as themes and applied to wooden houses, ancestral halls, stages and furniture decorations. There were works with deep relief and multi-level hollowing techniques. The "Three Purifications, Huguang and Nine Washings of Sichuan" incident during the Hongwu period of the Ming Dynasty caused many Tongshan natives to move to southern Hunan, Zhuang Township and Jiangxi. Tongshan woodcarving artists also brought woodcarving skills to the local area. The woodcarving style preserved in Hunan and Jiangxi has always been marked by Tongshan woodcarving. Modeling characteristics Most of Tongshan woodcarvings use concrete expression techniques, and the modeling is bold and exaggerated, especially those characters with big heads and small bodies, and the background of big people and small houses, but the exaggeration is restrained and the changes are moderate. Tongshan woodcarvings do not focus on carving facial features, nor do they stick to the length and shortness ratios of various parts of the human body. Instead, they focus on vividly expressing the dynamics of the characters, highlighting the naivety, simplicity, refinement, and brightness of the shapes. Abstract elements are injected into the concrete forms, and the active, exaggerated, and humorous movements make the images full of life, so that the audience no longer pays attention to the accuracy of the human body structure and proportions when appreciating, but focuses on the overall image. Composition characteristics In terms of composition, Tongshan woodcarvings often combine different scenes and characters, or several plots of a play or a story in one picture, with patterns and patterns, paying attention to the primary and secondary, line division, and layered rhythm, pursuing the rigor and change of the picture structure. Carving techniques The traditional techniques of Tongshan woodcarving mainly include bottom carving and bottomless carving. Bottom carving, that is, the wood board carved into furniture is not hollowed out, including line carving, negative carving, and relief carving, which is one of the main decorative techniques of ancient furniture. Bottomless carving is divided into openwork carving, hollow carving, round carving, and hollow double-sided carving. Drawing on the scattered point-composition, it is mainly based on relief, and is matched with techniques such as line carving, negative carving, relief carving, openwork carving, hollow carving, round carving and hollow double-sided carving. It adopts a high-level processing method that combines lines and surfaces, appropriately retains the plane, leaves small pieces of land, and stacks layer by layer to highlight the texture and stripes of the wood. Creation method Tongshan wood carving can freely choose the creation theme on a certain specification of board, use a lot of cutting and carving to achieve the final artistic effect, or listen to people chanting while quickly drawing from memory, and then carving. In 2010, Tongshan wood carving was included in the third batch of Hubei Province's intangible cultural heritage protection list. On November 11, 2014, wood carving (Tongshan wood carving) was approved by the State Council of the People's Republic of China to be included in the fourth batch of national intangible cultural heritage list, heritage number: -58.