PREFACE. Chinese nianhua, or “New Year Pictures,” refers to a broad category of popular

ABSTRACT

Chinese nianhua, or “New Year Pictures,” refers to a broad category of popular

prints and paintings displayed during the Lunar New Year but also throughout the year to

mark seasonal festivals, life cycle rituals, and popular religious practices. Despite the

widespread circulation of nianhua today, the scholarly literature has largely characterized

it as a thing of the past, as that which died out with the state circumscription of the

woodblock printing industry during the 1950s print reforms and the ban on nianhua

during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Although the industry has since rebounded,

the scholarship continues to relegate nianhua to the past, as a prescriptive tradition

represented by historic works rather those emerging in the marketplace.

Drawing on historic archives, interviews, and firsthand observations, I will

critique the recent rise of nianhua in Mianzhu, Sichuan. The primary goal is to rethink

nianhua as a “living archive,” an evolving body of works firmly embedded in its

immediate contexts of production and use. Mianzhu is a powerful case study because its

historic woodblock printing industry never completely died out during the upheavals of

the 20th century. In the early 1980s, the industry was catalyzed by a resurgence of ritual

practices and a state-led folk art revival, two competing and often conflicting discourses

that have fought for prominence in the marketplace. These developments push for a

performative view of nianhua, where meaning is not fixed in representation but

continually innovated upon, appropriated, and activated in situ to meet specific ends.

Building on the “performative turn” in art history and ritual studies, this study

challenges methodological approaches that treat nianhua as discrete visual texts or folk

art objects belonging to a shared system of auspicious signs and symbols. Each chapter

deploys a different strategy for rethinking nianhua’s attributed function to “pursue the

auspicious, repel the portentous” as an open-ended site of contestation tied to ritual

agency, lineage identity, and symbolic capital in the marketplace. Moving away from

decoding symbols and towards analyzing practices, this study reveals the high stakes

involved in recognizing nianhua as a living entity.

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PREFACE

This study was conducted with the approval of the Behavioural Research Ethics

Board (BREB) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The

certificate number is H06-03704.

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