An Industry Based on Innovation

The rise of Mianzhu nianhua over the past thirty years reflects a range of

competing discourses shaping the industry rather than any overarching system of shared

beliefs or ideals. The messy and unpredictable interactions of official agencies,

entrepreneurs, scholars, workshops, buyers, and tourists reveal a lack of consensus

concerning what constitutes a work of nianhua. While the folk art literature defines

nianhua as the products of the historic print trade, this study has demonstrated how the

term has come to include a range of commercially printed ephemera as well as scroll

paintings, souvenirs, replicas, murals, and even mixed media works on canvas. Instead of

relegating nianhua to the past, I have argued for the need to acknowledge its present-day

developments as a living archive that responds to new trends and technologies in the

marketplace, just as it has always done in the past.

In Chapter Two, I stressed this point by examining the innovative practices

shaping the seasonal nianhua markets in Mianzhu. I argued for a performative view of

the ritual practices involved in both nianhua production and consumption. For nianhua

users, it is possible to see how nianhua are strategically selected and displayed in diverse

configurations to suit the immediate needs of the household. These displays reflect the

changing trends in the marketplace as well as the changing architectural forms in the city

and the countryside. They also show a strong preoccupation with the proper timing and

placement of nianhua rather than a strict adherence to an iconographic program.

Similarly, a performative approach is evident on the production end, where emerging

workshops compete to produce the most ritually efficacious nianhua to boost their

workshop identities and to attract customers. On one hand, Wang Xingru presented the

ritually efficacy of his works in terms of the genealogical mark, a living trace that

establishes both a spatial and temporal link to his ancestral line. On the other hand, the

competing Li and Chen workshops linked the ritual efficacy of their works to their

territorial claims involving the northern or southern sites of historic printmaking in

Mianzhu.

These examples advance the argument that nianhua’s ritual agency is not simply

represented or mediated by a fixed object but continually negotiated and performed in

different social contexts, giving rise to new processes of ritualization in both production

and consumption. The ephemeral nature of nianhua in the seasonal markets points to a

highly unstable object that merges seamlessly with its lifecycle of renewal and decay.

Notions of auspicious time and space appear to be a central concern in the seasonal

exchange of nianhua, especially during the Lunar New Year when nianhua are closely

integrated with a host of ritual activities tied to the renewal of time, space, and social

relations.

Building on this, Chapter Three takes a performative view of narrativity, where

the auspicious significance of nianhua may be presented through the immediacy of touch,

sound, gesture, and movement in a storytelling session or an exchange of auspicious

speech. Challenging interpretations that identify core narratives in nianhua, I have argued

that narrative density plays a prominent role in both past and present nianhua, as layers of

visual, mnemonic, and aural cues to be activated by knowledgeable viewers, depending

on the immediate needs of the situation. The interview sessions and examples discussed

in this chapter show that nianhua do not necessarily convey narratives in a linear or

structured fashion comparable to written or verbal texts but are much more fluid and

dynamic in terms of their narrative potential. In other words, I have stressed a creative

and agentive view of narrativity that may engage any work of nianhua, and not only

those categorized in folk art typologies as narrative illustrations or “theater-based

nianhua. ”

In these chapters, the interviews have played an important role in demonstrating

the performative nature of nianhua interactions. The highly situated and co-creative

nature of an oral history interview or storytelling session sheds light on nianhua as active

sites of meaning making in the present. They reveal the dialectical interactions between

nianhua and their immediate social contexts, blurring the boundaries between the archive

versus the repertoire, or the mental versus the material realms. As eloquently set forth by

Diana Taylor, the material “archive” can never be isolated from its attendant “repertoire”

of embodied practices.334 Similarly, the repertoire is not reducible to archival documents,

which at best offer representational traces of the actual event. The inseparable and

dialectical nature of the archive and the repertoire challenges the archive’s status as a

stable and timeless entity, and firmly plants it in relation to the present.

Yet one of the drawbacks in conducting and documenting the interview sessions

is that one is inevitably caught in the act of reducing the repertoire to the archive. On one

hand, I have argued that nianhua are continually shaping and shaped by its lived

environments and immediate social interactions. I have thus stressed the importance of

embodied knowledge, orality, gesture, and touch. Yet on the other hand, in the very act of

incorporating these cultural performances into written research, I am carrying out the

very archival activities I set out to critique: the processes of selecting, translating, and

regimenting the embodied repertoire into academic text. This contradiction points to the

problematic nature of academic research, where the valued currency is not the repertoire

but the fixed archival record: “Our currency is not so much pictures as text - those written

words we inherit in the archival record, which is still primarily textual, and those words

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

Duke University Press, 2003).

we create by our placing our manuscripts and records under archival responsibility.”335

I have responded to this problem by pointing to what Paul Zumthor calls the

“impossible closure of the oral text” that can never be fully replicated in the archive or

reduced to a singular interpretation.336 I have also drawn attention to those embodied

aspects of an interview session that often get lost in textual translation, including the

shifts and rhythms in tone of voice, gestures, and eye contact. These critical strategies

may shed light on the process of translation by pointing to what is no longer visible, but

they do not constitute adequate solutions for overcoming the privileged status of the

textual archive in academic research. This is an area that requires much more work in

rethinking the way research is conducted and represented, especially in regards to the

“multimedialization of discourse” where language is understood as just one among many

forms of media used in discourse.337

In this study, I selected interview excerpts that best demonstrated the performative

dimensions of nianhua as well as the high stakes involved in presenting a living

repertoire of oral and ritual practices. I have thus highlighted the conversations with

nianhua producers who creatively deploy these practices to rebuild a lost source of

livelihood and to continually reposition their workshops in a competitive marketplace.

This should not be confused with an effort to reinstate authorial intention as a basis for

nianhua interpretation, as it is a critical move to situate Mianzhu’s nianhua producers

within the broader politics of the competitive nianhua marketplace and the ongoing

335 Nancy Ruth Bartlett, “Past Imperfect (l’imparfait): Mediating Meaning in Archives of Art” in Archives,

Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, ed. Francis X. Blouin

Jr. and William G. Rosenberg (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2007), 121.

336 Paul Zumthor, “The Impossible Closure of the Oral Text,” trans. Jean McGarry, Yale French Studies 67

(l984): 25-42.

337 Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, Looking In: The Art of Viewing, (Amsterdam: G & B Arts International,

2001), 164.

negotiations of meaning shaped by officials, scholars, entrepreneurs, and buyers alike. In

doing so, the idea is to move away from a prescriptive view of the nianhua industry and

highlight the inherently unstable, innovative, and adaptive practices that continually

shape it.

Throughout the chapters, I have thus pointed to the dialectical interactions

between the seasonal nianhua marketplace and the officially sponsored print campaigns

of both the past and present. Chapter Four dealt with the rise of the heritage industry as

yet another round of official activities that spark local contestations of meaning around

the value and significance of Mianzhu’s nianhua industry. Most significantly, the official

adoption of UNESCO’s “intangible cultural heritage” discourses reveals the state’s

vested interests in keeping the tangible and intangible aspects of nianhua distinct. Instead

of acknowledging the inseparable ties between nianhua and the living repertoire of ritual

practices in the community, officials used the notion of intangible heritage to legitimize a

host of officially staged cultural performances such as the annual Nianhua Festival.

Despite the lack of recognition, local nianhua producers and consumers have

continued on with their seasonal round of activities, responding to the heritage industry

when it is necessary and relevant to their everyday lives. The redesign and recirculation

of historic nianhua as inexpensive ritual ephemera can be understood as a critical site of

resistance to heritage revival activities that stubbornly situate these practices in the past

rather than the present. The appropriation of historic nianhua as folk art replicas or as

innovative forms of contemporary art also poses a challenge to revival activities that

attempt to characterize nianhua as a distinctly rural activity limited to traditional

woodblock printing methods. Although the nianhua revival insists on reproducing a static

and consumable past, the marketplace itself speaks to the changing role of nianhua in the

present.

In tracing these contestations of meaning, it is evident that the survival of historic

nianhua archives in state collections play a central role in legitimizing a wide range of

state-led campaigns, including the traveling exhibitions of the early 1980s, the building of

the Mianzhu Nianhua Museum to house the works, and eventually the construction of

large folk art heritage attractions such as the Nianhua Village or annual Nianhua Festival.

The presence of these historic works gave local and provincial authorities a great

advantage in lobbying for state funds and resources to launch a folk art industry in

Mianzhu. Over the years, state officials have repeatedly mined the historic works for new

meaning, strategically repackaging the past in ways that best suit their institutional

interests.

Clearly there are high stakes involved in privileging the state’s nianhua archive

while banishing the embodied repertoire of ritual practices to the past, a position long

supported by the folk art scholarship’s focus on archival research. In defining heritage as

the tangible assets of the past, state agencies have justified collection activities that

remove nianhua from local families and workshops under the rubric of protection and

preservation. However, in acknowledging the role of nianhua within embodied forms of

knowledge transmission, this study has critiqued the consequences of such actions and

challenged the state’s self-appointed role as the rightful custodians and narrators of

historic nianhua. In considering nianhua as a living archive, it is possible to critique the

constructed nature of both the permanent and ephemeral archives in circulation. This

unmasks the state’s continual efforts to maintain the privileged status of its archives, by

repackaging, reproducing, and recirculating the historic nianhua in their possession.

Theses official activities must struggle to keep up with the broader array of nianhua

activities developing in the community at large as the notion of the authentic or historic

original holds little ground in a seasonal nianhua industry based on the mass reproduction

of inexpensive ephemera.

It is important to note that the state revival activities I have analyzed here are not

an isolated phenomenon unique to Mianzhu. Since the early 1980s, very similar state-led

revival activities have been implemented in major nianhua centers across China,

including Yangliuqing, Wuqiang, and Weifang. At all three sites, nianhua museums

housing state collections have opened to the public along with the state-sponsored

construction of large-scale nianhua- themed tourist attractions. The debates addressed in

this dissertation are thus directly relevant to the broader trends occurring in China’s

growing nianhua industry.

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