- •Abstract
- •Involved in recognizing nianhua as a living entity.
- •Innovating the Auspicious: Mianzhu’s Door Deity Markets….………..………………… 25
- •List of figures
- •Glossary
- •Acknowledgements
- •In Sichuan, I am ever grateful to my mentor Liu Zhumei, an accomplished artist
- •Is far more complicated than a restaging of traditional practices.7
- •Variety of works appears on doorways as door deities and spring couplets, including
- •3,250,000 In 1736 and to an impressive 21,400,000 recorded in the 1812 state census.34
- •In Mianzhu reached a high level of development, with over one hundred large workshops
- •53 Anthropologist Stefan Landesberger has studied how printed images tied to the “Mao cult” of the
- •Nianhua as a Living Archive?
- •In recent years however, the disciplines of anthropology and art history both
- •In response to Asad’s argument, Catherine Bell contends that ritual practices
- •Visual symbolism of nianhua, the central issue of its ephemerality has largely gone
- •Involvement of state agencies in collecting, exhibiting, and commodifying nianhua has
- •Performing Engaged Research
- •Chapter Breakdown
- •Including the ritual significance of many historic nianhua.
- •Harnessing the Seasonal Nianhua Market
- •Variety of printed works (fig. 21). A curious crowd is gathered around the stand to
- •Instead of focusing on objects or practices in isolation, the notion of an agentic
- •Reunion and Regeneration: Nianhua and the Lunar New Year
- •In Mianzhu, I observed a less structured approach to celebrating the Lunar New
- •Images of Chairman Mao and communist soldiers were circulated and consumed during
- •Variety to choose from and the images are not expensive. They also get more
- •Lineage-making Strategies for Reclaiming Authority in the Nianhua Marketplace
- •Imposition of European concepts of “descent,” especially in the concept of zongwhich
- •Wang Family Lineage
- •It is significant that Wang chose to share his lineage documents before taking out
- •In contrast to the carvers, printers, and those trained in the final stages of coloring
- •In the other hand, a blessed citron fruit known as a Buddha’s hand . All three figures
- •In examining Wang’s sketches and lineage documents alongside his finished
- •The Northern School of Mianzhu Nianhua
- •Industry as apprentices and hired hands. While year-round designers such as the Wang
- •Various kinship terms of zu and zong used by Wang Xingru in reference to his position in
- •The Southern School of Mianzhu Nianhua
- •Conclusion
- •Including art historian Catherine Pagani’s study of Chinese popular prints based on the
- •The Medicine King: Performative Gestures and the Art of Storytelling
- •I will begin with a critique of a storytelling session that vividly captures how an
- •In her hair. It got stuck in the crevice between his teeth. [Bares his teeth and
- •2006 With Han Gang, we met with Chen Xingcai’s eldest grandson Chen Gang, who was
- •In the oral culture of nianhua. For instance, Wang Shucun has commented on orally
- •Transformations Between Theater and Print
- •Recovering Narrative Density in Greeting Spring
- •Conclusion
- •Mianzhu Nianhua Museum: Putting the Past in its Place
- •In summary form by the leading researcher Shi Weian. According to Shi, the team
- •In framing the historical context of nianhua, the museum displays directly reflect
- •Contesting Heritage: Nianhua Makers Stake Their Claims
- •Mianzhu’s Nianhua Village and the Rise of Intangible Heritage Tourism
- •In its murals. On the other hand, it presents nianhua’s intangible heritage as a temporal
- •Village and its murals. Reflecting the propagandistic messages of “social harmony”
- •Is also the character for “earth” (tu ), a rather derogatory word often used to describe an
- •Racing for the Intangible: the Nianhua Festival as Performative Statecraft
- •Is carefully depicted to reflect age, class status, and/or a clearly defined role in the
- •The High-end Heritage Industry: Replicas and Remakes
- •In contrast to the painting term linmo, which allows for a degree of interpretation
- •Conclusion
- •Chapter Five: Conclusion
- •An Industry Based on Innovation
- •In Chapter Two, I stressed this point by examining the innovative practices
- •In this study, I selected interview excerpts that best demonstrated the performative
- •Vested interests in keeping the tangible and intangible aspects of nianhua distinct. Instead
- •Interests.
- •Demystifying the Auspicious
- •Impossible to tease out the continuities and changes of the nianhua industry. Indeed both
- •Future Directions and Post-Earthquake Reconstruction
- •Figures
- •Bibliography
- •Xisu ji qi xiandai kaifa” [The modern
Chapter Five: Conclusion
To return to the central problem laid out in the introduction, a study of the
contemporary nianhua industry requires a different set of methodological approaches
than those used to analyze the nianhua held in protected archives. In each chapter, I have
thus taken up a different set of issues to both critique the existing modes of nianhua
research and to offer a way forward for addressing the living practices that currently
shape nianhua. In rethinking the issues around agency, narrativity, and heritage, I have
stressed the need to examine how these concepts are negotiated and performed in situated
contexts, especially in contested arenas where there is much as stake for all the players
involved. In doing so, this study challenges the idea that nianhua can serve as stable and
fixed sites of meaning, either as discrete entities imbued with agency or as narrative texts
to be decoded and “read” like a linear script. Instead, I have stressed the multivalent
nature of nianhua and the performative processes that activate certain meanings over
others in order to achieve specific aims.
In setting out to address a living archive, this study has examined diverse works
that are made to perform their status as nianhua, be it the ritual ephemera circulating in
seasonal markets and households or the folk art objects marketed in the heritage and
tourism industries. Instead of privileging any one set of practices over the other, I have
drawn attention to how the very notion of nianhua is contested and remade in these
different contexts. In particular, I have pointed to the dialectical interactions of official
nianhua archives and the temporary nianhua archives circulating in the seasonal markets,
revealing the unstable nature of both. These discussions have thus contextualized both
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past and present nianhua in terms of the contemporary industry, as active sites of
negotiation.
In assessing the overall results of this study, I will stress two key points. Firstly, in
taking a performative view of nianhua practices, this study emphasizes change and
innovation as inherent aspects of the nianhua industry. The developments in Mianzhu
involve many emerging forms of nianhua that arise with the changing dynamics of the
marketplace. What holds these diverse works together is a preoccupation with pursuing
the auspicious in all its different forms, a concept that is highly contested and tied to the
reappropriation and reclamation of high profile works held in folk art archives.
Secondly, this study demystifies nianhua’s attributed function to “pursue to the
auspicious, repel the portentous” as a key site of negotiation in the growing nianhua
industry. Moving away from an approach that locates ritual efficacy in static forms of
visual representation, this study has focused more on the strategic presentation or
activation of nianhua’s efficacious potential within specific spatiotemporal
configurations, including temporary household displays, markets, workshops, and
heritage attractions. While existing studies have focused on the cosmological or familial
concerns tied to nianhua use in the home, this study underscores the pursuit of auspicious
time and space as a vital source of social status and livelihood in the marketplace.