Chapter Five: Conclusion

To return to the central problem laid out in the introduction, a study of the

contemporary nianhua industry requires a different set of methodological approaches

than those used to analyze the nianhua held in protected archives. In each chapter, I have

thus taken up a different set of issues to both critique the existing modes of nianhua

research and to offer a way forward for addressing the living practices that currently

shape nianhua. In rethinking the issues around agency, narrativity, and heritage, I have

stressed the need to examine how these concepts are negotiated and performed in situated

contexts, especially in contested arenas where there is much as stake for all the players

involved. In doing so, this study challenges the idea that nianhua can serve as stable and

fixed sites of meaning, either as discrete entities imbued with agency or as narrative texts

to be decoded and “read” like a linear script. Instead, I have stressed the multivalent

nature of nianhua and the performative processes that activate certain meanings over

others in order to achieve specific aims.

In setting out to address a living archive, this study has examined diverse works

that are made to perform their status as nianhua, be it the ritual ephemera circulating in

seasonal markets and households or the folk art objects marketed in the heritage and

tourism industries. Instead of privileging any one set of practices over the other, I have

drawn attention to how the very notion of nianhua is contested and remade in these

different contexts. In particular, I have pointed to the dialectical interactions of official

nianhua archives and the temporary nianhua archives circulating in the seasonal markets,

revealing the unstable nature of both. These discussions have thus contextualized both

past and present nianhua in terms of the contemporary industry, as active sites of

negotiation.

In assessing the overall results of this study, I will stress two key points. Firstly, in

taking a performative view of nianhua practices, this study emphasizes change and

innovation as inherent aspects of the nianhua industry. The developments in Mianzhu

involve many emerging forms of nianhua that arise with the changing dynamics of the

marketplace. What holds these diverse works together is a preoccupation with pursuing

the auspicious in all its different forms, a concept that is highly contested and tied to the

reappropriation and reclamation of high profile works held in folk art archives.

Secondly, this study demystifies nianhua’s attributed function to “pursue to the

auspicious, repel the portentous” as a key site of negotiation in the growing nianhua

industry. Moving away from an approach that locates ritual efficacy in static forms of

visual representation, this study has focused more on the strategic presentation or

activation of nianhua’s efficacious potential within specific spatiotemporal

configurations, including temporary household displays, markets, workshops, and

heritage attractions. While existing studies have focused on the cosmological or familial

concerns tied to nianhua use in the home, this study underscores the pursuit of auspicious

time and space as a vital source of social status and livelihood in the marketplace.

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