Innovating the Auspicious: Mianzhu’s Door Deity Markets

The growth of various ritual industries in China since the 1980s has attracted

much scholarly attention as a litmus test for judging the extent to which traditional

practices have been lost, revived, or reinvented to suit the emerging social realities.

Anthropologist Helen Siu, for instance, has argued that ritual beliefs and practices at the

local level were so transformed and “diluted” by the pervasive effects of state policies

that they could only be understood as “cultural fragments recycled under new

circumstances.”56 Similarly, anthropologist Emily Chao uses the term “ritual bricolage”

to describe a fragmented and reinvented version of tradition that arose among the Naxi

people of Yunnan province.57 On the other end of the spectrum, scholars have pointed to

ritual practices that have survived the attacks on tradition during the Cultural Revolution,

55 Dali Yang, Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change Since the

Great Leap Famine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 157.

56 Helen Siu, “Recycled Rituals: Politics and Popular Culture in Contemporary Rural China,” in Unofficial

China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People’s Republic, ed. Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul

Pickowicz (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), 134.

57 Emily Chao “The Maoist Shaman and the Madman: Ritual Bricolage, Failed Ritual, and Failed Ritual

Theory,” Cultural Anthropology, 14, no.4 (1999): 504-43.

acting as sites of “cultural resistance” against state policies or even the incursions of

global capitalism.58

Recent studies have started to challenge this rather polarized view that splits the

ritual revival into continuities and discontinuities, where the “traditional practices” of the

present are inevitably pitted against the “singular, all-encompassing belief systems” of

life before the Maoist era.59 Anthropologist Adam Chau has warned against imposing a

rigid division of past and present ritual practices that would “assume that what existed

before Maoist suppression was a tradition that was more coherent and authentic.”60 Chau

goes on to emphasize how the “apparent coherence” of earlier traditions is equally a

result of “invented” and “recycled” practices:

The ‘feudal tradition’ that came to be suppressed or destroyed during the antitraditionalist

campaigns during the Maoist period and reinvented in what appears

to be a piecemeal or haphazard manner in the reform era is a complex, dynamic,

ever-changing cluster of institutions, practitioners, and consumers, knowledge and

practices fully amenable to innovations, inventions, and reinventions all the

time…It can also endure suppressions, lie dormant for a long time, go

underground, minimalize, and reemerge in new forms in response to new

historical conditions.61

Chau’s research begins to move away from a notion of revival that reifies this

past/present divide, and towards the concepts of “revitalization” and “innovation” as a

58 Influential studies on this issue of rural resistance, resilience, and agency in the post-Mao era include

Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, “Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place: Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual

Expenditure,” Current Anthropology 41, no. 4 (August/Oct 2000) and Edward Friedman, Paul Pickowicz,

and Mark Selden, Resistance, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, 2005).

59 Adam Yuet Chau, Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China, (Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 6.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

way of reframing the discussion. I will build on Chau’s approach to argue that the

contemporary nianhua industry is not simply a recuperation of a lost art, which is often

suggested by the notion of “revival.” Instead, notions of revitalization or resurgence are

more adequate here in acknowledging the evolving forms of nianhua production and

consumption. Mianzhu’s nianhua -producing families produced a diversity of works

during the print reforms of the 1950s and up until the Cultural Revolution, when the

industry went through a dormant phase. A handful of elder painters and printmakers

returned to work in the early 1980s, with at least seven families reasserting their place

within multi-generational lineages of printmakers. Three of these lineage-holding

workshops are active today, with many new workshops and self-fashioned “folk artists”

emerging on the scene. The ritual practices tied to nianhua consumption have also

continued to adapt and change according to the conditions of everyday life and livelihood.

In emphasizing Mianzhu’s living nianhua practices, I do not mean to suggest that

the practices have survived intact and unchanged by the many profound effects of the

state-led print reforms and the Cultural Revolution. It is undeniable that all aspects of

nianhua production and consumption in the region were transformed by the prolonged

periods of upheaval. The goal here is to acknowledge innovation and adaptation as an

inherent aspect of the nianhua industry. It is certainly possible to examine the evolution

of nianhua practices in people’s daily life without declaring its total demise at the hands

of state circumscription. In reviewing the historic development of Mianzhu’s early print

trade, it is also evident that the industry was never isolated from the official and elite

realms although scholars have characterized it as a rural folk tradition. Mianzhu’s early

print trade challenges the idealized image of naive rural artisans working in remote

isolation, as it was always profoundly shaped by the dialectical interactions of the

rural/urban and official/nonofficial realms.

Mianzhu’s urban printmakers were often educated elites who jostled for influence

in the region and formed powerful trade guilds, including a printers’ guild known as the

Fuxi Association 􀚙􁳉􀟶, named after the guild’s patron deity Fuxi, a mythical emperor

credited for creating fishing, trapping, and writing.62 The guild regulated all aspects of

production, pricing, and trading, and convened regularly in the center of town, where

they built a meeting hall with a shrine to Fuxi at the Nanhua Palace 􀬲􀞿􀜅.63 In addition

to producing ritually efficacious works, these guilds actively competed for auspicious

sites such as temples and shrines to hold their markets and banquets. They also claimed

propitious dates of the traditional calendar to conduct their business and hired theater

troupes to perform at their gatherings. The practice of adopting a patron deity further

enhanced the unified identity and prestige of the print guild. These guilds were active up

to the mid-twentieth century and competed with those from Jiajiang and Liangping, print

centers that adopted their own patron deities. These activities speak to a strong

preoccupation with harnessing auspicious time and space as powerful sources of

symbolic capital to support livelihood and trade.

Mianzhu’s historic print trade produced three main categories of prints, including

door deities (menshen 􀫊􀴪), square prints (doufang 􀗶􀙚), and picture strips (huatiao 􀟂

62 As early as the Zhou dynasty (ca. 1050-221 BCE), Fuxi appears as an archetypal figure in the myths of

ancient sage kings. In these early writings, his reign is dated to the 3rd millennium BCE and he is credited

with establishing kingship and inventing many forms of human technology, including the calendar, the

fishing net, and written language. During the Han period (206 BCE -220 CE), Fuxi is often depicted with a

carpenter’s square and his female counterpart, the goddess Nuwa 􀭯􁞎. For an account of Fuxi’s early

mythology, see: Mark E. Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany: State University of New

York Press, 1999), 197-209.

63 Hou and Liu, “Introduction to Mianzhu’s Nianhua," 11-17.

􀹈). The door deities were by far produced in the largest quantities and in the greatest

variety. As a result, the local print trade was referred to as the “door deity trade” 􀫊􀴪􀏺

and the winter print markets were widely known “door deity markets” 􀫊􀴪􀵧, although a

variety of prints were sold there. At its height in the late Qing period, an estimated 300

print shops were based in Mianzhu, producing an estimated twelve million prints a year,

of which ten million were door deity prints. These were distributed for domestic

consumption as well as export to Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai, Xinjiang, Yunnan, Guizhou,

Hubei, and abroad to Burma, India, Hong Kong, Macau, Vietnam, and the countries of

Southeast Asia.64

As the most popular category of prints, Mianzhu’s door deities were sold as single

sheets or in pairs, for display on either single leaf or double leaf doors. They came in

three standardized sizes designed for different sized doors, designated as “large format”

􀕶􀪰, “medium format” 􀘽􀪰, and “small format” 􀳘􀪰􀀏 Larger works adorned the exterior

doorways of a home while smaller ones were reserved for the interior doors of the living

room, kitchen, pantry, or bedroom. A wide range of figures appeared as protective door

deities, with martial warrior types guarding the outer gates of a home and civil figures,

such as scholar-officials or baby boys, protecting the doors to interior spaces (fig. 11).

Individual workshops would develop their own repertoires of door deity prints and the

large print guilds were known to encourage innovation by holding banquets every year to

critique the emerging designs.

The second most popular category was the square prints, which were printed on

the smallest format papers. These depicted a wide range of auspicious images for ritual

64 Gao Wen 􀛚􀻓, Hou Shiwu 􀞥􀵗􀻳, and Ning Zhiqi􀭡􁆽􀰅, Mianzhu Nianhua 􀫥􁇰􀭍􀟂 [Mianzhu new

year pictures] (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1990), 3-8.

display, including a host of minor deities, beautiful maidens, and theatrical scenes geared

towards activating specific spaces in the home. For instance, fertility deities were

displayed in bedrooms while protective cat deities guarded the pantry from hungry

rodents (fig. 12).

The third and smallest category was printed scrolls, collectively known as picture

strips. While the door deities and square prints were designed as ephemeral and

inexpensive works for annual renewal during the Lunar New Year, the picture strips were

more expensive, labor-intensive works designed for permanent display in interior spaces.

They came in both vertical and horizontal formats and often depicted popular deities for

display above altars. They also depict action-packed scenes from mythology, history, and

theater, as well as genre painting themes such as scenes of everyday life, street

processions, or festivals. For instance, a late 19th century example of a picture strip from

Mianzhu depicts a scene from Journey to the West 􀼆􁂳􀠺, the famous vernacular novel

and drama from the Ming dynasty (fig. 13).

Mianzhu’s workshops sold all of these works in the periodic door deity markets,

which also included other types of ephemera such as spring couplets and lintel hangings.

Spring couplets were produced by both amateur and professional calligraphers who

inscribed auspicious phrases on two vertical strips of paper to be displayed around

doorways and flanking the images of door deities. Paper cut artisans sold auspicious lintel

hangings, usually a string of five red paper-cut money designs to be hung from door

lintels.65

65 Jiang Jingchen 􀡻􀣣􀓦, “Jiefang qian Mianzhu chengguan gehangye shichang de fenbu gaikuang ” 􀢳􀙢􀰭

􀫥􁇰􀓬􀜱􀛲􀾛􁀼􀵧􀓆􀖥􀙳􀒃􀛀􀦃􀀁[Overview of Mianzhu’s pre-liberation urban industries], in Mianzhu

wenshi ziliao ji 􀫥􁇰􀻓􀵎􁈧􀨘􀠠􀀁14 [Anthology of Mianzhu's historical studies vol. 14], ed. Wang Peisheng

The competitive environment of the industry shaped Mianzhu’s unique carving,

printing, and painting methods, which were often guarded as precious trade secrets

passed down within a family line of printmakers. In the standard workflow procedure, a

print designer is responsible for composing and painting the original design of the print.

The print designer must be highly trained in brushwork and knowledgeable in the use of

iconography for a variety of ritual images. They are often educated individuals who paint

for a living all year-round, producing original print designs, scroll paintings, temple

murals, and painted coffins, fans, and screens. Once the print design is finalized, it is

passed to a carver, who recreates the lines of the drawing in a block of hard pear or

cherry wood by removing the negative spaces of the design. This labor-intensive phase

requires great precision to ensure smooth and fluid lines, capable of withstanding

multiple printings (fig. 14). Once the block is carved, the printer brushes the block evenly

with black ink and presses the paper against the block to produce a monochrome outline

of the image (fig.15). Finally, the printed outline is passed to a team of painters who

apply colors, facial features, and finishing details by hand (fig. 16). In a technique known

as “flower stamping” 􁂆􀞽, the painters also use many small stamps that are usually

coated in gold or silver leaf and stamped on the painted print as a finishing touch (fig.

17).

Mianzhu’s print shops ranged in size from large, year-round print factories that

employed skilled laborers in every aspect of print production, to small household cottage

industries that only worked on a seasonal basis. The print industry followed a rigorous

schedule punctuated by a seasonal round of periodic markets and temple fairs that rotated

􀺦􀮡􀴳 and Zhang Changlu 􁅦􀓄􀩢 (Mianzhu: Sichuan sheng mianzhu xian zhengxie xuexi wenshi ziliao

weiyuanhui, 1995): 120-134.

through Chengdu and the surrounding villages and townships. The winter off-season of

agricultural labor marked the high season of the print trade, when large quantities of

prints were in demand for the Lunar New Year festival, when virtually every household

took down the prints from the year past and posted new ones. At this time, the farming

community turned to the production of prints as a vital form of additional livelihood.

Rural households would often purchase original designs from a designer working in the

urban center then reproduce the print in their home workshops. If there were not enough

skilled family members, the household could bring in hired hands to complete the work

in time for the winter print markets.

In contrast to print centers that use multiple-block printing, Mianzhu’s

printmakers apply all the colors and details by hand, primarily with brushwork but also

with small patterned stamps and the application of gold leaf. Although the prints are

mass-produced, they bear the subtle variations of this final stage of production. The

technique of multiple-blocks is certainly not unknown to Mianzhu’s printmakers, since

nearby centers use the technique. Hand-finishing appears to be a conscious marketing

decision that was most likely regulated by the local print guilds. Bo Songnian has

commented on the unique emphasis on brushwork found in Mianzhu’s prints, which he

traces to the painting traditions brought by the traveling court painters who arrived in

large numbers during the Tang dynasty (618-907), when the An Lushan and Huang Chao

rebellions forced the Tang court to flee to Chengdu. Chengdu became an active painting

center that continued to flourish throughout the Song dynasty (960-1279), laying an

important foundation for the development of popular painting and printing in the

region.66 Bo’s study provides only a few examples from over the centuries to support this

claim, yet it is certainly an area that warrants greater research.

Today, Mianzhu’s printmakers continue to exploit brushwork as a way of

developing a competitive edge in the marketplace. This includes the use of “mandarin

duck brushwork” 􁃪􁀕􀐳 where a brush is loaded with just enough moisture at the base

and color at the tip to produce alternating shades of light and dark when pressure is

applied.67 Another characteristic technique is known as “bright displays” 􀫼􁅚􀫼􀜫,

which involves the use of white pigment to outline major brush strokes, making them pop

out of the picture plane with high contrast. These lines are often thickly applied and

physically raised off the surface of the paper, creating a custom embossed feel to the print

(fig. 18). These approaches and many others have continued to evolve, and they

distinguish Mianzhu’s prints from those of other print centers.

The winter print markets never ceased to take place in Mianzhu and are still timed

with the rhythms of the lunar calendar. As in the past, the greatest number of prints

circulating in these markets are door deities, spring couplets, and lintel hangings,

ephemeral works that come into large demand during the Lunar New Year when families

renew these works on the exterior of their household doors. However, the handmade

works are now far outnumbered by the flood of digitally printed nianhua entering these

markets. The widespread circulation of inexpensive ephemera, both digitally printed and

handmade, has catalyzed the rapid recovery of the nianhua industry in the region.

66 Bo Songnian 􀐊􀶾􀭍, “Fuyou xianming difang tese de Mianzhu nianhua 􀚶􁂵􀼷􀫼􀖹􀙚􀸫􀳤􀖥􀫥􁇰􀭍􀟂

[Mianzhu nianhua with strong local characteristics],” in Mianzhu nianhua jingpin ji 􀫥􁇰􀭍􀟂􀣚􀯖􀠢􀀁

􀀼Selected works of Mianzhu nianhua], ed. Hou Rong 􀞥􀲴 (Chengdu: Sichuan meishu chubanshe, 2005),

18-23.

67 The vivid reference to mandarin ducks may call up the contrast of their light and dark feathers and/or

their fluid movements through water.

Local and provincial officials also began taking actions in the early 1980s to

launch a folk art export industry based on the historic nianhua held in Mianzhu’s Cultural

Affairs Bureau and Cultural Relics Bureau. These works quickly attained a high profile

as the privileged representatives of traditional Mianzhu nianhua. During the Cultural

Revolution, two directors at the Cultural Affairs Bureau secretly hid some 200 historical

works that are roughly dated to the 18th and 19th centuries. First collected in 1960 by state

researchers Shi Weian 􀵎􀺻􀎽 and Fu Wenshu 􀚰􀻓􀵾, the works are poorly documented

and difficult to date although they are now considered the most complete and highquality

set of historic Mianzhu nianhua. 68 From 1978 to 1984, the works were exhibited

as folk art treasures in a series of touring exhibitions designed to market nianhua as a folk

art export commodity. 69 In the 1990s, the Mianzhu Nianhua Museum was built with

state funds to house the expanding state nianhua collection and to attract tourists to

Mianzhu (fig. 19). This folk art tourism grew, and in the early 2000s, state funds were

used to build an entire Nianhua Village with large painted murals of historic nianhua

adorning shops, restaurants, and residential neighborhoods (fig. 20). In contrast to the

seasonal markets that sold nianhua as inexpensive ritual ephemera, this state-led folk art

industry circulated nianhua as permanent collector’s items, souvenirs, and replicas.

The few scholarly writings addressing the recent rise of the nianhua industry have

taken a rather negative stance on these developments, especially with regard to the

introduction of digitally printed works. In a recent essay, Bo Songnian announced the

68 These clandestine activities are documented in a published interview with Hou Shiwu 􀞥􀵗􀻳, the former

director of Mianzhu’s Cultural Affairs in Shen Hong 􀴫􁚼, Mianzhu nianhua zhi lu 􀫥􁇰􀭍􀟂􁆭􀩪􀀁[Touring

Mianzhu nianhua􀀾􀀁(Beijing: Zhongguo huabao chubanshe, 2006), 64-70.

69 For a discussion of the early 1980s touring exhibitions of Mianzhu nianhua and the filming of the feature

documentary, Curiosities of Sichuan 􀶹􀔫􀰅􀱿􀩣, see Pan Peide 􀮌􀮡􀖣, “Sichuan Mianzhu nianhua huigu

uu zhanwang" 􀶹􀔫􀫥􁇰􀭍􀟂􀖥􀟭􀜤􁃐􁅚􀺬 [Reflections on Mianzhu nianhua's past and future], Meishu

Tongxun 􀫅􀶌􀹙􀿟 2 (1990): 12-14.

failure of official programs to revive traditional nianhua industry since the early 1980s.70

According to Bo, poorly implemented revival programs and the low quality of digitally

printed works made on commercial presses have damaged nianhua’s reputation as a

viable art form. Bo concludes that despite the many efforts to revive the industry,

nianhua has somehow failed to “keep up with the times.” Recounting his visit to

Mianzhu in the mid-1990s, art historian Lu Shengzong 􀩧􀴻􁇏 also lamented the

widespread display of “vulgar” digitally printed nianhua on household walls and called

for renewed efforts to salvage whatever was left of traditional woodblock prints, which

he claimed could only still be seen in rural areas and in the homes of the elderly.71

The problem with these assessments is that they impose a set of aesthetic

standards established by folk art discourses that align “tradition” with the specific

production methods and print designs found in historic nianhua archives. In doing so,

they dismiss the evolving forms of ritual print consumption that form a vital part of

nianhua tradition, including its ties to a broader array of ritual industries harmonized with

the lunar calendar. The digitally printed nianhua may appear vulgar to an urban scholar,

but that does not reveal much about the shifting perceptions, tastes, and needs of those

who actually buy and use nianhua in their lived spaces. Since much of the existing

scholarship has been focused on issues of production and representation in the nianhua

archive, the issue of nianhua consumption is an area that requires more critical inquiry,

especially for those inexpensive and ephemeral works that never make it into an archive.

70 Bo Songnian, “The Rise, Fall, Preservation, and Loss of Nianhua Art,” 8-10.

71 Lu Shengzong 􀩧􀴻􁇏􀀍 “Hometown of Chinese New Year Pictures? A Museum? A Book?” in Mianzhu

Nianhua jingpin ji 􀫥􁇰􀭍􀟂􀣚􀯖􀠢􀀁[Selected works of Mianzhu nianhua], ed. Hou Rong 􀞥􀲴 (Chengdu:

Sichuan meishu chubanshe, 2005), 24-34.

The few studies that have addressed nianhua consumption focus primarily on the

role of nianhua in domestic rituals of the rural household. For instance, one of the only

studies to examine contemporary nianhua as they appear in their lived environments is a

study on Chinese vernacular architecture by cultural geographer Ronald Knapp. He

argues that the auspicious significance of nianhua can be understood as part of the “social

template” of the dwelling, where building practices, spatial arrangements, and the

strategic placement of ritual objects continually shape the social relations within the

home.72 As such, nianhua play a role in upholding a Confucian worldview based on

“harmonious hierarchy,” where the display of images and objects directly shapes the

relations “between parents and children, men and women within the living family, those

between dead forebears and their living descendants; and those between the family unit

and the world beyond the dwelling’s wall.” 73 For instance, door deities and spring

couplets mark out the social significance of the household doorway as a vulnerable

boundary between the inner sanctum of the family and the potentially dangerous elements

of the street. These works deter negative influences from entering the home while serving

as catalysts for auspicious or felicitous speech between family members and visitors.

In a short essay, art historian Ellen J. Laing describes a similar “persistence of

propriety” in urban apartments of the 1980s, where certain nineteenth-century practices

of arranging auspicious objects within the home continued to shape the domestic spaces,

including “the strict rows of furniture, the centralized symmetrical arrangement of the

centerpiece paintings along with their proper subject matter and representational style,

and the brightly colored, auspicious New Year’s pictures.” These visual displays point to

72 Ronald Knapp, China's Living Houses: Symbols and Household Ornamentation, (Honolulu: University

of Hawai’i Press), 1999, 7-14.

73 Ibid., 11.

the survival of certain moral values as maintained through “what is considered

appropriate and correct in the house and its decoration.”74 Laing also addresses how these

practices adapted to the changing conditions of life in the 1990s, including the new

limitations in space found in apartment buildings and the growing variety of old and new

images available in the marketplace.

These studies provide strong evidence for the resurgence of ritual print activities

in peoples’ everyday lives after the Cultural Revolution, in both rural and urban areas.

However, the danger in examining the role of nianhua within domestic spaces is that the

home is constructed as an insular or impenetrable space, where certain traditional

activities are safely preserved against the profound social upheavals and events

happening beyond its walls. The domestic realm of the rural household has long been

characterized by folk stereotypes, as an idealized haven for time-honored values and

practices or as a site of cultural backwardness trapped in the past. In either case, the

domestic sphere is constructed as static and resistant to outside influences, a powerful foil

to the space of the marketplace, which is often imagined as the dynamic site of exchange.

This study argues for the need to examine the flows of ideas, goods, and practices

that actually connect and blur the boundaries between home and marketplace, especially

to acknowledge the evolving nature of nianhua in contemporary China. In a recent booklength

study on the contemporary pasted-paper sculpture industry of Taiwan, co-authors

Ellen J. Laing and Helen Hui-ling Liu provide a useful model for examining the

74 Ellen J. Laing, “Persistence of Propriety in the 1980s” in Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought

in the People’s Republic, ed. Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz (Boulder: Westview Press,

1989), 160.

interconnected circuits of supply and demand that shape a ritual industry.75 Laing and Liu

draw important connections between the evolving materials, methods, and designs

produced in the paper sculpture workshops and the changing funerary practices of

burning of paper goods as offerings to the deceased. The authors point to the paper

sculpture industry’s quick response to the growing demand for new types of paper goods

that reflect contemporary life, where “air conditioners replace electric fans, which

replaced handheld fans; thus for his modern clients, the modern craftsman no longer

makes paper handheld fans or electric fans, but paper air conditioners.”76 Although

industrially mass-produced items are gradually replacing handmade sculptures in Taiwan,

this actually coincides with the growth rather than the decline of ritualized funerary

practices. In documenting these changes, the study concludes, “the making of paper

sculpture will survive by adapting and incorporating new elements and serving new needs

as it has historically done.”77 The trends studied here parallel the developments in

Mianzhu’s nianhua industry, with new works emerging in the marketplace every year.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In recent years however, the disciplines of anthropology and art history both

reflect the growing influence of post-structuralist approaches and a “performative turn”

that moves away from “ritual systems” or “sign systems” to address the active and

agentive dimensions of both ritual practices and objects. The performative view of ritual

practice has been set forth in the theoretical and anthropological writings of Pierre

Bourdieu, Talal Asad, and Catherine Bell. Notably, Talal Asad has historicized the

concept of “ritual” in nineteenth-century European scholarship, when early

anthropologists approached ritual as a symbolic activity to be decoded for meaning. For

Asad, this modern definition of ritual should not be taken for granted as a universal

82 Irit Rogoff cited in Deborah Cherry, Art History: Visual: Culture, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005),

4.

framework but as a cultural construct that reflects Western assumptions about the self and

state. Building on the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, Asad

argued against “reading symbols” in ritual behavior and towards a performative view of

ritual practice as forms of direct action: “Ritual is therefore directed at the apt

performance of what is prescribed, something that depends on intellectual and practical

disciplines but does not itself require decoding.”83 Thus, Asad’s approach redirects

attention from abstracted values or beliefs towards embodied actions aimed at producing

a desired result.

In response to Asad’s argument, Catherine Bell contends that ritual practices

should be differentiated from other practices by processes of ritualization, which she

defines as “a way of acting that distinguishes itself from other ways of acting in the very

way it does what it does; moreover, it makes this distinction for specific purposes.”84 In

staking out the key methodological implications of such a definition, Bell argued that a

practice-oriented approach to ritual should address “how a particular community or

culture ritualizes” and “when and why ritualization is deemed the effective thing to do.”85

Significantly, Bell’s model stresses an inclusive view of ritual in its lived contexts, as

reflecting “the full spectrum of ways of acting within any given culture, not as some a

priori category of action totally independent of other forms of action.”86 An

understanding of how and why people choose to ritualize certain activities requires an

acknowledgment of the field of options that are available in the first place. Instead of

approaching rituals as “clear and autonomous rites,” Bell points to a more dynamic

83 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam,

(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 62.

84 Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 81.

85 Ibid., 82.

86 Ibid., 83.

conception of ritual activity as unfolding processes, as “methods, traditions and strategies

of ‘ritualization.’”87

Recent studies in Chinese popular religion have also taken up this performative

view of ritual practice, including Adam Chau’s study of contemporary popular religion in

Shaanbei. Chau argues for a “person-centered” approach that focuses on what he calls

“doing popular religion,” a phrase that captures the active and conscious dimension of

religious practices. Moving away from the “anthropological search for meanings behind

symbols and symbolic behavior,” Chau engages in “a search for the cultural basis

(cultural logic) of social intercourse and cultural performance.”88 In doing so, Chau

critiques the many tensions between ideas and practices as they are played out in social

life. Similarly, in a study that addresses the inexpensive prints of the stove deity 􁄱􀴪,

popular religion scholar Richard Chard reveals the discrepancies between the actual

practices of the stove deity cult and the written scriptures that contain ritual instructions

for worshipping the deity. In particular, the widespread practice of making offerings to

the image and renewing it during the Lunar New Year period is not mentioned in the

majority of the written texts. 89 Chard’s study is a powerful reminder that the repertoire

of embodied practices can often push for a rethinking or reinterpretation of the archive.

With a renewed focus on human agency and diversity in ritual practices however,

these studies tend to downplay or gloss over the specific features and powerful roles of

efficacious sites/objects in activating ritual practices just as they are being shaped by

them. At the other end of the spectrum, a debate has been launched between

87 Ibid., 82.

88 Chau, Miraculous Response, 126.

89 Richard Chard, “Rituals and Scriptures of the Stove Cult,” in Rituals and Scriptures in Chinese Popular

Religion, ed. David Johnson (Berkeley: Chinese Popular Culture Project, 1995), 3-54.

anthropologists and art historians concerning “object agency,” a notion that foregrounds

the active and performative role of objects in shaping social relations.90 An influential

theory of object agency was set forth in 1998 by anthropologist Alfred Gell, who

challenged Saussure’s linguistic models that treat cultural objects as “sign-vehicles,” or

“texts” to be decoded for meaning.91 Rejecting aesthetic analysis, Gell states: “In place of

symbolic communication, I place all the emphasis on agency, intention, causation, result,

and transformation. I view art as a system of action, intended to change the world rather

than encode symbolic propositions about it.”92 Further, Gell rejects the notion of art as a

distinctly separate “visual” language and argues for an analysis of “‘things’ as social

agents” with the capacity to initiate causal events. This action-oriented interpretation of

objects displaces the privileged position of the visual and sets the stage for examining the

different “states of mind” or “intentions” an object may facilitate in certain social settings.

Art historians and visual culture scholars have responded to Gell’s approach with

varied critiques. In a recent volume, Robin Osborne and Jeremy Tanner have been quick

to point out that other scholars have already addressed the issues raised by Gell, if only

not in the language of anthropology.93 The authors cite Norman Bryson and Mieke Bal as

scholars working in the realm of art history and visual culture studies who do not adopt

the same analogies of art and language used by structuralist anthropologists. They point

to Bryson’s bold challenges to the uncritical adaptation of the “Saussurean sign” for art

historical interpretation, which leaves the scholar in danger of “a perspective in which the

90 Janet Hoskins, “Agency, Biography, and Objects,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher

Tilley et al. (London Sage, 2006: 74-84); Robert Layton, “Art and Agency: A Reassessment,” Journal of

the Royal Anthropological Institute 9, no. 3 (2003); Maruska Svasek, Anthropology, Art, and Cultural

Production (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007).

91 Alfred, Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

92 Ibid., 6.

93 Robin Osborne and Jeremy Tanner, introduction to Arts Agency and Art History, ed. Robin Osborne and

Jeremy Tanner (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 1-27.

meaning of the sign is defined entirely by formal means, as the product of oppositions

among signs within an enclosed system.”94 Like Gell, Bryson is concerned with situating

the work within its immediate social domain and on its own terms: “having relocated

painting within the social domain, inherently and not only as a result of the instrumental

placing there by some other agency, it becomes possible to think of the image as

discursive work which returns into society.”95

Osborne and Tanner also note that despite his critical stance towards symbolic

analysis, Gell is not completely distanced from issues of aesthetics and symbolic

communication in his supporting case studies. For instance, they point to his analysis of

apotropaic patterns, such as Celtic knotwork and labyrinths, which lend themselves to

protecting thresholds, buildings, or bodies by virtue of their cognitive indecipherability or

“enchanting” technologies. Gell describes how these complex patterns are used to attract

demons, who in their fascination, ending up getting “stuck” like insects on a sticky

surface and thus diverted from acts of malevolence. Osborne and Tanner critique this as

an ahistorical and universalist understanding of cognitive processes. They argue that

Gell’s alternative to symbolic analysis is to replace it with “some kind of transcendental

aesthetics” or a “universal perceptual-cognitive basis for visual response” that explains

the ability of certain objects to mediate agency.96

Historians of Chinese art appear divided on the issue, with some scholars

defending aesthetic and symbolic analysis and others adopting certain aspects of Gell’s

theory of object agency. Art historian Jessica Rawson, for instance, has critiqued Gell for

94 Norman Bryson quoted in Osborne and Tanner, Arts Agency, 5 (from Bryson’s Vision and Painting: The

Logic of the Gaze, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983 ).

95 Ibid.

96 Osborne and Tanner, Arts Agency, 7.

failing to acknowledge how different cultures might variously construct the notion of

agency as it relates to objects, reflecting different values, beliefs, and worldviews. In her

study of ritual portraits made for the Chinese court under the Ming emperor Shenzong

(1573-1620), Rawson maintains that the ritual power of these imperial objects exists in

multiple social spheres, including the relationship between the emperor and his court, and

between the emperor and the spirit realm. While arguing for a more nuanced view of

agency in these different social spheres, Rawson defends the use of aesthetic and

symbolic analysis as strategies that can be situated and qualified within a cultural context:

“what is missing in Gell’s approach is an understanding that systems of symbols or

iconography, and even traditional methods of painting and carving, are not isolated

systems. They are integrated with, and are maintained in use by, complex and, usually

unquestioned, quite other systems of both practice and belief.”97

In defending the structuralist models that situate Chinese art within shared

systems of belief and iconography, Rawson’s approach reifies the assumption that

meaning can be fixed in the objects themselves. More critically, it is an approach that

places the focus on the representation of auspicious meaning rather than its multivalent

modes of meaning in presentation. Other scholars have used the debate around object

agency to raise new questions and issues concerning the study of Chinese art. Art

historian Craig Clunas, who has criticized approaches that focus solely on aesthetic or

symbolic issues in Chinese art, begins his study of the “visual and material cultures” of

the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) with a chapter on “Time, Space, and Agency in Ming

97 Jessica Rawson, “The Agency of, and the Agency for, the Wanli Emperor, ” in Arts Agency and Art

History, ed. Robin Osborne and Jeremy Tanner (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 111.

China.”98 Moving away from issues of symbolic representation and towards issues of

circulation and use, Clunas examines how the timed circulation of many commodities

reinforced imperial time, seasonal time or family time.

In revealing how different notions of time, history, and space could be “handled

and seen” in everyday objects, Clunas situates his discussion of object agency within

their spatio-temporal contexts of circulation and consumption.99 This may include coins

and bowls marked with reign dates that move through different social spheres to enforce

imperial time or auspicious paintings designed for seasonal display during lunar calendar

festivals. In doing so, Clunas stresses the need to keep in mind both the “visual” and

“material” aspects of Ming culture, a strategic move to challenge “a too easy acceptance

of a material past and visual contemporary.”100 In keeping these two “unstable and

perhaps ultimately unsatisfactory categories” in the foreground, Clunas’ research

maintains a critical edge at the interdisciplinary intersection of art history and material

culture studies without reducing all forms of cultural production to the visual and

aesthetic domains.

Clunas’ study brings an important interdisciplinary perspective to the study of

Chinese art history that maps a way forward for addressing the archive and the repertoire

without privileging one over the other. In a separate study on the Ming dynasty painter

Wen Zhengming, Clunas explicitly states his commitment to this task:

I am writing from a conviction that the relations between agents, relations in

which the work is embedded, illuminate the object, but that equally the object

enacts those social relations. In this dialectical engagement neither enjoys

98 Craig Clunas, Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China (Honolulu:

University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 21-52.

99 Ibid., 32.

100 Ibid., 14.

unquestioned primacy. This is Appadurai’s point that methodologically we must

pay close attention to the social life of the actual individual object, even as we

accept that is multiple meanings are not inherent from the time of creation but are

reinscribed on it by its movement through time and between social actors.101

Taking a cue from Clunas, my study advances the notion of a living archive to

emphasize the dialectical engagement between objects and the social practices in which

they are embedded. Many objects are only recognizable as nianhua through their specific

modes of display and use. This includes everyday objects, ads, and posters that are

regularly appropriated for ritual use as nianhua as well as the state collections of nianhua

that continually adopt new prints and paintings under the category of nianhua. A living

archive therefore draws attention to the repertoire of practices that continually shape our

understanding of nianhua. In taking this view, it is possible to critique nianhua as an

unstable category shaped by competing discourses instead of imposing a single

disciplinary lens such as “folk art,” “popular religion,” or “visual culture.”

The notion of a living archive comes with its own risks however. As an openended

and highly suggestive term, it may be argued that virtually any form of cultural

production may be understood as a living archive. What then sets nianhua apart from

other forms of printing or painting? Why is it critically necessary to examine nianhua in

particular, as a living archive? In this study, I am not only deploying this term to avoid

the use of disciplinary lenses and fixed definitions. I will argue that the notion of a living

archive actually allows for a more nuanced understanding of two defining features that

set nianhua apart from other media. The first is nianhua’s attributed power to “pursue the

101 Craig Clunas, Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming, (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i

Press, 2003), 13.

auspicious, repel the portentous,” a unifying feature that sets nianhua apart from many

other forms of printing and painting. As mentioned earlier, this concept has largely been

studied in terms of visual representation rather than in terms of presentation, circulation,

and ritual use. As a living archive, I will argue that nianhua’s auspicious or portentous

associations are no longer limited to the picture plane; they can be analyzed in time and

space.

A second important characteristic of nianhua is its widespread status as an

ephemeral ritual object. Since existing studies have focused primarily on decoding the

visual symbolism of nianhua, the central issue of its ephemerality has largely gone

untheorized. The notion of a living archive draws attention back to this critical aspect of

nianhua production and use, which is intimately linked to the seasonal cycles of the lunar

calendar and periodic rites of renewal that activate the auspicious power of nianhua

through proper timing and placement in the home or business. The social significance of

nianhua is therefore inseparable from their cyclic movement through time and space, as

highly transitory entities rather than stable objects.

The notion of a living archive therefore serves as an important departure point for

delving into that which makes nianhua a unique realm of cultural activity in

contemporary China. In addition to this, I am underscoring this concept in direct response

to specific developments in the folk art revival movement that has spread across China

and gained momentum since the early 1980s. As this study will show, the increasing

involvement of state agencies in collecting, exhibiting, and commodifying nianhua has

played a powerful role in relegating nianhua to a remote and rural past. In rethinking

nianhua as a living entity, as an archive without walls, the goal is to critique these state50

led revival activities and to reveal nianhua’s continued resistance to being kept under

“house arrest,” to borrow from Jacques Derrida’s description of the modern archive.102 I

will argue that these issues carry high stakes for Mianzhu’s growing nianhua industry

and all those who depend on it for a living.

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