The 2026-27 school year has officially kicked off, and after one week of good weather, we are again back in the trenches that remind us of the unpredictability of Boston’s fall. To take us back to summer and the ‘hell’s front porch’ weather, today we’re going to talk about traditional folding fans and how they have become one of the most important art forms deeply embedded in East Asian cultural heritage.
Folding fans are composed of a frame and a fan face, so one can open and close it with the whisk of a hand. The frame can be made from a wide range of materials, most commonly bamboo. The fan face is usually made of silk or xuan paper and is pasted on both sides to create a balanced surface for the ease of drawing and writing.
There are two theories on the origin of the folding fan, with one group of scholars arguing it was invented in China during the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420–589 C.E.) and another advocating that its origin lies in Japan around 670 C.E. and was introduced to China during the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127 C.E.). The most popular idea is that China’s non-folding fans made their way to Japan, and Japanese craftsmen developed them into the foldable style.
In Japan, the foldable fan began as a convenient form of communication for aristocrats and samurai — since paper was so scarce — and then became the general public’s cooling device with the advent of affordable paper. The Japanese word ‘kawahori (蝙蝠)’ in ‘kawahori-sen (蝙蝠扇),’ the term associated with the foldable fan, literally means bat, as their open form resembles bat wings. The Japanese returned these foldable designs to China in the Northern Song Dynasty through trade and presented them as court gifts.
Though many prominent family-run workshops were established in Hangzhou during the Northern Song Dynasty, the folding fan prospered in China’s mid-Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 C.E.) Before this, the folding fan was seen as a common, low-status object for cooling down in the summer. Yet, Chinese intellectuals loved the idea of incorporating painting and calligraphy onto objects and thus folding fans became valuable collectables as many drafted poems and created pictures on them. These were heavily exchanged among literary communities as tokens of friendship. Some of them, attributed to the top calligraphers and painters, were collected by elite collectors, who carefully preserved and hardly used them. Due to this preservation, today we can see many perfectly maintained fan faces in galleries and museums across the world.
Other than art, the folding fan also became a representative element in dance and theater, especially in Japan. The term mai-ogi (舞扇) refers to special fans curated for dance performances that are made with 10 bamboo sticks and a lead weight at the bottom to help performers throw and spin them.
In Western theater, we see props used to achieve realism, and the mai-ougi is a perfect example that showcases the core difference between Western and Eastern art philosophy. The mai-ougi is multifunctional; performers can swirl it around to create a scene of cherry blossoms falling or clasp it to resemble an umbrella or sword. These fan performances rely heavily on abstraction and the artists’ ability to create imagery for the audience. This is on par with East Asian arts’ emphasis on atmospheric storytelling and capturing fleeting moments in the present.
Originally used for communication efficiency, the fan evolved into an art medium that extended artists’ creative minds and physical movement. Even now, people use them in many varying ways, from cooling down in scorching summer heat to giving them as precious tokens. Whatever ways people use fans in summer, these habits and cultural practices have evolved through the centuries and remain an important part of heritage. Similar to the fan’s momentous open and close, I hope this column can continue to provide fleeting moments of appreciation for East Asian art throughout this school year.
