An Industry Based on Innovation

The rise of Mianzhu nianhua over the past thirty years reflects a range of

competing discourses shaping the industry rather than any overarching system of shared

beliefs or ideals. The messy and unpredictable interactions of official agencies,

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entrepreneurs, scholars, workshops, buyers, and tourists reveal a lack of consensus

concerning what constitutes a work of nianhua. While the folk art literature defines

nianhua as the products of the historic print trade, this study has demonstrated how the

term has come to include a range of commercially printed ephemera as well as scroll

paintings, souvenirs, replicas, murals, and even mixed media works on canvas. Instead of

relegating nianhua to the past, I have argued for the need to acknowledge its present-day

developments as a living archive that responds to new trends and technologies in the

marketplace, just as it has always done in the past.

In Chapter Two, I stressed this point by examining the innovative practices

shaping the seasonal nianhua markets in Mianzhu. I argued for a performative view of

the ritual practices involved in both nianhua production and consumption. For nianhua

users, it is possible to see how nianhua are strategically selected and displayed in diverse

configurations to suit the immediate needs of the household. These displays reflect the

changing trends in the marketplace as well as the changing architectural forms in the city

and the countryside. They also show a strong preoccupation with the proper timing and

placement of nianhua rather than a strict adherence to an iconographic program.

Similarly, a performative approach is evident on the production end, where emerging

workshops compete to produce the most ritually efficacious nianhua to boost their

workshop identities and to attract customers. On one hand, Wang Xingru presented the

ritually efficacy of his works in terms of the genealogical mark, a living trace that

establishes both a spatial and temporal link to his ancestral line. On the other hand, the

competing Li and Chen workshops linked the ritual efficacy of their works to their

territorial claims involving the northern or southern sites of historic printmaking in

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Mianzhu.

These examples advance the argument that nianhua’s ritual agency is not simply

represented or mediated by a fixed object but continually negotiated and performed in

different social contexts, giving rise to new processes of ritualization in both production

and consumption. The ephemeral nature of nianhua in the seasonal markets points to a

highly unstable object that merges seamlessly with its lifecycle of renewal and decay.

Notions of auspicious time and space appear to be a central concern in the seasonal

exchange of nianhua, especially during the Lunar New Year when nianhua are closely

integrated with a host of ritual activities tied to the renewal of time, space, and social

relations.

Building on this, Chapter Three takes a performative view of narrativity, where

the auspicious significance of nianhua may be presented through the immediacy of touch,

sound, gesture, and movement in a storytelling session or an exchange of auspicious

speech. Challenging interpretations that identify core narratives in nianhua, I have argued

that narrative density plays a prominent role in both past and present nianhua, as layers of

visual, mnemonic, and aural cues to be activated by knowledgeable viewers, depending

on the immediate needs of the situation. The interview sessions and examples discussed

in this chapter show that nianhua do not necessarily convey narratives in a linear or

structured fashion comparable to written or verbal texts but are much more fluid and

dynamic in terms of their narrative potential. In other words, I have stressed a creative

and agentive view of narrativity that may engage any work of nianhua, and not only

those categorized in folk art typologies as narrative illustrations or “theater-based

nianhua.”

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In these chapters, the interviews have played an important role in demonstrating

the performative nature of nianhua interactions. The highly situated and co-creative

nature of an oral history interview or storytelling session sheds light on nianhua as active

sites of meaning making in the present. They reveal the dialectical interactions between

nianhua and their immediate social contexts, blurring the boundaries between the archive

versus the repertoire, or the mental versus the material realms. As eloquently set forth by

Diana Taylor, the material “archive” can never be isolated from its attendant “repertoire”

of embodied practices.334 Similarly, the repertoire is not reducible to archival documents,

which at best offer representational traces of the actual event. The inseparable and

dialectical nature of the archive and the repertoire challenges the archive’s status as a

stable and timeless entity, and firmly plants it in relation to the present.

Yet one of the drawbacks in conducting and documenting the interview sessions

is that one is inevitably caught in the act of reducing the repertoire to the archive. On one

hand, I have argued that nianhua are continually shaping and shaped by its lived

environments and immediate social interactions. I have thus stressed the importance of

embodied knowledge, orality, gesture, and touch. Yet on the other hand, in the very act of

incorporating these cultural performances into written research, I am carrying out the

very archival activities I set out to critique: the processes of selecting, translating, and

regimenting the embodied repertoire into academic text. This contradiction points to the

problematic nature of academic research, where the valued currency is not the repertoire

but the fixed archival record: “Our currency is not so much pictures as text - those written

words we inherit in the archival record, which is still primarily textual, and those words

334 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham:

Duke University Press, 2003).

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we create by our placing our manuscripts and records under archival responsibility.”335

I have responded to this problem by pointing to what Paul Zumthor calls the

“impossible closure of the oral text” that can never be fully replicated in the archive or

reduced to a singular interpretation.336 I have also drawn attention to those embodied

aspects of an interview session that often get lost in textual translation, including the

shifts and rhythms in tone of voice, gestures, and eye contact. These critical strategies

may shed light on the process of translation by pointing to what is no longer visible, but

they do not constitute adequate solutions for overcoming the privileged status of the

textual archive in academic research. This is an area that requires much more work in

rethinking the way research is conducted and represented, especially in regards to the

“multimedialization of discourse” where language is understood as just one among many

forms of media used in discourse.337