Chapter Breakdown

This study is organized thematically into three chapters with each one

illuminating a different aspect of the nianhua industry in Mianzhu today. Each chapter

provides a set of theoretical strategies for unpacking the living archive, especially in

response to the question of how to bridge the divide between the archive and repertoire.

Organized in a loose chronological order, the chapters build on each other to reveal the

ongoing contestations of meaning that occur in the industry, especially around nianhua’s

attributed function “to pursue the auspicious, repel the portentous.”

Chapter Two, “The Power of Ephemera: Ritual Praxis and the Contested Rise of

the Nianhua Marketplace,” lays the foundation for this discussion by rethinking

nianhua’s ritual agency in everyday life and livelihood. In responding to the

interdisciplinary debates around object agency launched by Alfred Gell, I will argue for a

view of agency that does not blindly privilege human agency in a universalist or objective

framework but rather acknowledges the culturally constructed and contested nature of

agency itself as it is shaped by different performative practices. Drawing on recent

theories of distributed agency as set forth by cultural theorists such as Jane Bennett and

Deleuze and Guattari, I will argue that agency is negotiated within specific spatiotemporal

configurations of objects and practices, such as a winter street market, a

nianhua workshop, or a household nianhua display. In taking up the cyclic movements of

nianhua through these interconnected spaces, I will argue that nianhua’s ritual efficacy is

not simply fixed in the object or “mediated” by it because the object is always changing

and ephemeral. Instead, it is the timed processes by which nianhua are circulated,

destroyed, and recast that perform their social significance. As attention is shifted away

from fixed representation and towards the lifecycles of nianhua, it is possible to see how

nianhua activate auspicious time and space in ways that fulfill the everyday needs of its

makers and users alike.

Building on a performative view of ritual practice, Chapter Three, “The Picture

Must Have Theater”: Performing Narrativity in Mianzhu Nianhua,” raises questions

around narrativity and the oral transmissions of nianhua knowledge. I will examine the

performative roles of nianhua storytelling within local printshops and of auspicious

speech in people’s everyday interactions with nianhua. The chapter challenges existing

methodologies that categorize nianhua archives according to narrative content, as images

based on narratives drawn from theater, historical episodes, or legends and myths.

Drawing on recent scholarship by art historians such as Julia Murray and Efrat Biberman,

this chapter exposes the problems around imposing a “core narrative” upon nianhua that

actually call up multiple narratives depending on the viewer(s).107 I will argue that many

nianhua, including those that are not usually examined as narrative illustrations, serve as

sites of “narrative density”: packed with layers of mnemonic, and aural cues that give rise

to a range of narrative possibilities for knowledgeable viewers to deploy according to

their immediate aims.

In doing so, I will also point to some of the parallels between Sichuan’s ritual

theater traditions and the nianhua industry that have been concealed by folk art

typologies. For instance, the notion of narrative density pushes for an alternate

107Julia Murray, Mirror of Morality: Chinese Narrative Illustration and Confucian Ideology, (Honolulu:

University of Hawai'i Press, 2007), 10.

interpretation of a high profile nianhua “treasure,” a set of late Qing dynasty scroll

paintings titled Greeting Spring 􁂒􀔽􀹭 that depicts a “Welcoming Spring” Lunar New

Year procession in Mianzhu, where the country magistrate appears with a ritual street

theater troop. While existing studies impose a linear narrative based on the thricerepeating

figure of the magistrate, I will argue that the prevalent use of rebus imagery

suggests that the painting was designed and used as a ritually efficacious image to

activate auspicious speech. Historical documents also provide evidence that the painting

was given as a New Year gift between business associates, an occasion that would have

been greatly enhanced by the sharing of auspicious wishes for the year to come. The key

goal here is to recover the role of narrativity within nianhua’s different ritual contexts,

including the ritual significance of many historic nianhua.

Chapter Four, “To Build a Museum and a Village: the Race for Mianzhu’s

Nianhua Heritage” situates ritual practices within the bigger picture of the state-led

heritage industry from the mid-1990s and onward. As local and provincial authorities

turn towards staging nianhua’s “intangible cultural heritage” (ICH), state agencies move

beyond merely collecting and exhibiting historic nianhua to building nianhua tourist

attractions. To critique these developments, I respond to heritage studies that move away

from theorizing heritage as a set of tangible assets (such as objects, sites, and

monuments) and towards evaluating it as a “cultural process.” This includes Laurajane

Smith’s declaration that “heritage is not a thing” and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s

assertion that heritage is “metacultural production.”108 I will argue that this shift towards

interpreting heritage as a cultural process often relegates objects and sites to a passive

108 Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge, 2006) and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,

“Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production,” Museum International 56, no. 1-2 (May 2004): 52-65.

role, where meaning is simply projected or imposed upon them by human activities.

While I agree that the notion of heritage is indeed a cultural construct, the contested

objects taken up in heritage discourses need to be kept in mind and examined within the

specific cultural discourses and forms of livelihood that depend on them. The danger in

dematerializing the notion of heritage is that it risks losing sight of the dialectical

interactions between objects and practices that undergird and legitimize both the state’s

institutional claim to heritage as well as the counter claims that arise in response.

In the concluding chapter, I draw together these discussions to assess the

advantages and disadvantages of approaching nianhua as a living archive. In particular, I

comment on its implications for nuancing and demystifying nianhua’s attributed function

to “pursue the auspicious, repel the portentous” in everyday life. I also stress the key

contributions of this project to both the field of Chinese art history and to the ongoing

urbanization of Mianzhu and other rural townships with strong claims to “cultural

heritage” 􀻓􀟄􁁌􀓁.

Finally, I will reflect on the significance of this study in light of the Great Sichuan

Earthquake that occurred on May 12, 2008, a year after I completed my field research.

Located on a major faultline just 86 kilometers from the epicenter in Wenchuan, Mianzhu

was severely damaged by the earthquake that measured 8.0 on the Richter scale and left

an estimated 69,000 dead. This study therefore offers the most complete documentation

of Mianzhu’s nianhua industry just before the devastating effects of the earthquake. In

light of these developments, I will address the important implications of this study for the

ongoing efforts to rebuild Mianzhu and its centuries old nianhua industry.

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