In this study, I selected interview excerpts that best demonstrated the performative

dimensions of nianhua as well as the high stakes involved in presenting a living

repertoire of oral and ritual practices. I have thus highlighted the conversations with

nianhua producers who creatively deploy these practices to rebuild a lost source of

livelihood and to continually reposition their workshops in a competitive marketplace.

This should not be confused with an effort to reinstate authorial intention as a basis for

nianhua interpretation, as it is a critical move to situate Mianzhu’s nianhua producers

within the broader politics of the competitive nianhua marketplace and the ongoing

335 Nancy Ruth Bartlett, “Past Imperfect (l’imparfait): Mediating Meaning in Archives of Art” in Archives,

Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, ed. Francis X. Blouin

Jr. and William G. Rosenberg (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2007), 121.

336 Paul Zumthor, “The Impossible Closure of the Oral Text,” trans. Jean McGarry, Yale French Studies 67

(l984): 25-42.

337 Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, Looking In: The Art of Viewing, (Amsterdam: G & B Arts International,

2001), 164.

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negotiations of meaning shaped by officials, scholars, entrepreneurs, and buyers alike. In

doing so, the idea is to move away from a prescriptive view of the nianhua industry and

highlight the inherently unstable, innovative, and adaptive practices that continually

shape it.

Throughout the chapters, I have thus pointed to the dialectical interactions

between the seasonal nianhua marketplace and the officially sponsored print campaigns

of both the past and present. Chapter Four dealt with the rise of the heritage industry as

yet another round of official activities that spark local contestations of meaning around

the value and significance of Mianzhu’s nianhua industry. Most significantly, the official

adoption of UNESCO’s “intangible cultural heritage” discourses reveals the state’s

Vested interests in keeping the tangible and intangible aspects of nianhua distinct. Instead

of acknowledging the inseparable ties between nianhua and the living repertoire of ritual

practices in the community, officials used the notion of intangible heritage to legitimize a

host of officially staged cultural performances such as the annual Nianhua Festival.

Despite the lack of recognition, local nianhua producers and consumers have

continued on with their seasonal round of activities, responding to the heritage industry

when it is necessary and relevant to their everyday lives. The redesign and recirculation

of historic nianhua as inexpensive ritual ephemera can be understood as a critical site of

resistance to heritage revival activities that stubbornly situate these practices in the past

rather than the present. The appropriation of historic nianhua as folk art replicas or as

innovative forms of contemporary art also poses a challenge to revival activities that

attempt to characterize nianhua as a distinctly rural activity limited to traditional

woodblock printing methods. Although the nianhua revival insists on reproducing a static

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and consumable past, the marketplace itself speaks to the changing role of nianhua in the

present.

In tracing these contestations of meaning, it is evident that the survival of historic

nianhua archives in state collections play a central role in legitimizing a wide range of

state-led campaigns, including the traveling exhibitions of the early 1980s, the building of

the Mianzhu Nianhua Museum to house the works, and eventually the construction of

large folk art heritage attractions such as the Nianhua Village or annual Nianhua Festival.

The presence of these historic works gave local and provincial authorities a great

advantage in lobbying for state funds and resources to launch a folk art industry in

Mianzhu. Over the years, state officials have repeatedly mined the historic works for new

meaning, strategically repackaging the past in ways that best suit their institutional