On June 2, 2026, Suzhou Museum opened the fourth installment of its “Jiangnan Zao” craft exhibition series: the Cai Nianqun Tuan Shan Art Exhibition. Running through September 3, the show presents 54 round-fan works by Cai Nianqun and her team, tracing the full scope of Jiangnan tuan shan craft — from frame shaping and lacquer coating to kesi weaving and gemstone inlay.
The “Jiangnan Zao” series, launched in 2023, has previously spotlighted kesi, purple-sand teapots, and embroidery. Round fans mark the series’ first foray into a craft category that sits at the intersection of utility and fine art — an object you can hold in your hand and hang on your wall.
What Is a Tuan Shan?
Tuan shan, also known as gong shan (palace fan) or wan shan (silk fan), is one of the oldest Chinese fan forms. Its history stretches back to the Shang dynasty, when early fans were made from colorful pheasant feathers and served as ritual symbols of authority rather than cooling devices. By the Han dynasty, silk-mounted round fans had appeared; by the Song, painted fans became a literary genre in their own right — poets and painters treated the fan surface as a portable canvas for landscapes, birds, and calligraphy.
A tuan shan has four structural components: a circular (or oval, hexagonal, or leaf-shaped) frame, a short handle, a silk or gauze face mounted over the frame, and a tassel suspended from the handle’s end. Jiangnan tuan shan, centered on Suzhou, privileges the surface: artisans decorate the fan face using kesi, embroidery, painting, lacquer, or gemstone setting, each technique demanding weeks or months of focused labor.
Kesi on a Fan Face: Weaving an Image Thread by Thread
The most technically demanding variant is the kesi tuan shan. Kesi — literally “carved silk” — uses a “warp-through, weft-break” method: the weaver passes colored weft threads across the warp only where the design requires that hue, cutting (or rather, not connecting) each color zone so that the pattern appears “carved” into the silk surface. A single kesi fan face may take 30 to 90 days to complete, depending on complexity. The technique was classified as a national intangible cultural heritage item in 2006 and added to UNESCO’s Representative List in 2009.
Cai Nianqun’s exhibition includes several kesi-mounted fans that demonstrate this weave-discontinuity principle: peony clusters where each petal is a separate color zone, landscape compositions with gradated mountain tones, and figural scenes where a single figure’s robe might involve seven or eight weft colors in sequence. Under magnification, the tiny gaps between color zones — the defining visual feature of kesi — are visible, confirming handwork rather than printed imitation.
Cai Nianqun: From Collector to Maker
Cai Nianqun, born in Suzhou in 1967 and nicknamed “Tuan Shan Cai” by collectors, began as a fan collector before turning to restoration and then independent making in 2006. Her production process spans more than 20 steps — selecting bamboo or wood for the frame, bending it into shape, mounting the face fabric, applying lacquer or paint, adding decorative elements, and finishing with a tassel.
Her signature approach is “old materials, new making”: she sources antique fan frames, century-old silk fragments, and traditional lacquer ingredients, then recombines them into contemporary compositions. The exhibition catalogue lists fan faces in kesi, gauze, silk, embroidery, grass weave, bamboo weave, gemstone inlay, lacquer, and porcelain — a material range that exceeds any single historical period’s typical output, reflecting Cai’s willingness to cross genre boundaries.
Exhibition Highlights: Six Categories Across 54 Works
The 54 exhibited fans divide roughly into six categories:
- Gong shan (palace fans): Large-diameter fans with lacquered or gold-painted frames, typically mounted with kesi or embroidered silk faces featuring court-style motifs — phoenixes, peonies, cloud scrolls.
- Tuan shan (round fans): The standard circular form, medium diameter, with faces ranging from Song-style ink landscapes to modern abstract color blocks.
- Zhe shan (folding fans): A smaller selection of folding fans with paper or silk faces, showing how the folding-fan tradition interacts with the round-fan lineage in Suzhou craft.
- Kesi-mounted fans: The technical centerpiece of the show — four fans whose faces were woven, not painted or embroidered, demonstrating the warp-through/weft-break method at fan-scale.
- Lacquer fans: Frames and faces treated with multi-layer lacquer in red, black, or gold, some carved with low-relief patterns inspired by Song and Ming lacquerware.
- Contemporary experiments: A handful of fans with minimalist geometric faces, monochrome fields, or deconstructed frames — Cai’s attempt to test whether tuan shan logic can survive without traditional ornament.
The Tuan Shan Market and Hanfu
The tuan shan has not always been a thriving craft. For much of the 20th century, round fans were treated as souvenirs or seasonal commodities — mass-produced, cheaply made, and culturally weightless. That began to change around 2015, when two forces converged: the hanfu revival movement and the guochao (national trend) fashion wave.
Hanfu enthusiasts adopted the tuan shan as a natural accessory — a fan to hold in one hand while wearing a Song-style beizi or Tang-style ruqun, completing a period-appropriate look that photographs well. Costume dramas on streaming platforms reinforced this pairing: a heroine carrying a painted round fan became a recurring visual shorthand for classical femininity. The domestic tuan shan market, estimated at roughly 430 million yuan in 2015, has since multiplied several times and continues to expand, according to a 2026 industry survey.
Graduation photo sessions, fashion-week styling, and wedding-day props have also absorbed tuan shan as a prop with cultural cachet — not just a cooling tool but a signifier of aesthetic intention. Suzhou Museum’s exhibition, by presenting 54 works that span from strict traditionalism to near-abstraction, implicitly asks visitors to see the tuan shan not as a static heritage relic but as a living format still capable of generating new visual ideas.
The Cai Nianqun Tuan Shan Art Exhibition runs at Suzhou Museum from June 2 through September 3, 2026. The museum is located at 204 Dongbei Street, Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China. Admission is free; advance reservation via the museum’s official WeChat account or website is recommended during weekends and summer holidays. A craft-process demonstration area with a resident artisan is open on Saturdays and Sundays from 10:00 to 16:00, allowing visitors to observe fan-mounting, lacquering, and tassel-making in real time.