Intangible Cultural Heritage and We-Media: The Strategic Design of Chinese Shadow Puppetry Dissemination via Tik Tok

Shadow puppetry (Piyingxi), the artistic form of “shadow” and “light”, has more than two thousand years of history in China. However, due to the influence of popular culture and western art forms, shadow puppetry cannot meet modern audiences’ aesthetic and entertainment needs anymore. The carving and performance skills of shadow puppetry are time-consuming and laborious, fewer young apprentices are willing to learn it. The loss of audiences and inheritors makes this ancient art fall into a problematic inheritance and development situation. As the most downloaded short video mobile application (APP) in China, Tik Tok provides traditional culture an opportunity to re-express in a young and fashionable way. Motivated by the potential of Tik Tok as an effective media for the dissemination of shadow puppetry, this research used the data mining method to collect the 47 shadow puppetry creators’ public data on Tik Tok and selected highly ranked 60 videos tagged with “shadow puppetry” as research samples. Through data analysis, this research gains a better understanding of user behaviour and engagement about shadow puppetry. This research analysed: 1) the features of shadow puppetry short video creators; 2) the characteristics of popular shadow puppetry short videos; 3) the plight of shadow puppetry dissemination via Tik Tok. The findings from this research offer optimization strategies for disseminating shadow puppetry via Tik Tok, which fills up the existing research gaps. In the hope that this research could contribute to the revitalizing and sustaining the continuity of this ancient Chinese folk art.