Nianhua as a Living Archive?

The great diversity of painted, printed, and industrially mass-produced works that

now fall under the rubric of nianhua call for a rethinking of the term, which has long

been synonymous with the historic woodblock prints preserved in nianhua archives. I

will thus propose using an alternate lens that conceives of nianhua as a “living archive,” a

concept that underscores both the changing nature of the works themselves and how they

75 Ellen J. Laing and Helen Hui-ling Liu, Up in Flames: The Ephemeral Art of Pasted-Paper Sculpture in

Taiwan, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

76 Ibid., 165.

77 Ibid., 167.

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are embedded within a range of practices geared towards “pursuing the auspicious,

repelling the portentous.” The notion of a living archive underscores the inseparable

relationships between objects and practices, and seeks to acknowledge the different ways

in which nianhua are presented as ritual ephemera, folk art, national heritage, kitsch, or

tourist souvenir. Instead of privileging one discourse over the other, the idea is to recast

nianhua as a contested terrain that involves an ongoing negotiation of meaning.

In recasting nianhua as a living archive, I will argue that meaning is not only

represented but also presented in different modes of production and consumption. I will

draw on the work of cultural theorist Diana Taylor, who has argued for the urgent need to

reconceptualize the relationship of “the archive and the repertoire.” While the archive is

valued as the tangible evidence of knowledge, it is often constructed as a stable and

unchanging collection of documents and objects. In contrast, the repertoire is often

“banished to the past” because it refers to embodied activities, the “performances,

gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing–in short, all those acts usually thought of as

ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge.”78 Taylor challenges the privileging of the

archive at the expense of the repertoire by pointing to the continual interactions between

the two. For Taylor, this requires new methodological strategies that acknowledge the

value of the repertoire without simply reducing it to the archive:

Instead of focusing on patterns of cultural expression in terms of texts and

narratives, we might think about them as scenarios that do not reduce gestures and

embodied practices to narrative description. This shift necessarily alters what

academic disciplines regard as appropriate canons, and might extend the

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

N.C.: Duke University Press Books, 2003), 20.

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traditional disciplinary boundaries to include practices previously outside the

purview.79

Along similar lines, the critical interventions advanced by visual culture scholars

over the past twenty years have reshaped the field of art history by challenging the

perceived authority and stability of the material archive. Launched as an interdisciplinary

movement or “de-disciplinary exercise,” visual culture scholars have been questioning art

history’s role in shaping and disseminating artistic canons by imposing Eurocentric

standards of value on diverse forms of cultural production around the world.80 Visual

culture theory has substantially reshaped the field of art history, as many visual culture

scholars and art historians alike have shifted away from formal, object-oriented

methodologies and towards a critical analysis of visuality itself. Situated firmly in

postmodern scholarship and its debates around the “death of the author,” visual culture

writings have drawn attention to the circulation and consumption of cultural products as

critical sites of meaning-making, where visuality may be shaped by diverse “practices of

looking” or “scopic regimes.”81 According to art historian Deborah Cherry, the

significant implications for the field are that:

Visual culture questions art history’s conventional procedures, its connoisseurship

and enthusiasm for “a good eye,” offering instead “an understanding of embodied

knowledge, of disputed meanings, of the formation of scholastic discourses of

79 Ibid., 17.

80 In his seminal writings on the study of visual culture, Nicolas Mirzeoff sets forth its aims to move

beyond academic disciplines as a “postdisciplinary” endeavor and “fluid interpretive structure” that is

“centred on understanding the response to visual media of both individuals and groups.” Nicolas Mirzeoff,

An Introduction to Visual Culture, (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 4.

81 Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2001): 1-10.

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material value, of viewing subject positions within culture, and of the role of

vision in the formation of structures of desire.82

A key point of tension I wish to explore here is the uneasy relationship between

object and practice that arises in these discussions, especially in terms of the disciplinary

divides that shape modern scholarship. Chinese nianhua have been examined in different

fields of study, especially anthropology and art history, with each discipline bringing a

different contribution and focal point. While scholars in anthropology tend to privilege

the role of human activities as the site of agency and knowledge formation, nianhua are

often passively situated as the facilitating objects of popular religion or ritual practices.

On the other hand, the art historical approach has focused on decoding and objectifying

nianhua as a visual or historical text, with less attention given to its broad repertoires of

ritual activity. In short, these disciplinary divides still reflect what Taylor has identified

as the seemingly unsurmountable boundary between the archive and the repertoire.