Taohuawu New Year Pictures: Folk Customs Posted on Doors

Many people's impression of Taohuawu comes from Tang Bohu's famous poem "Peach Blossom Temple": Taohua Temple in Taohuawu, Taohuaxian under Taohua Temple. Peach Blossom Fairy planted peach trees and picked peach blossoms in exchange for wine money - Taohuawu is a romantic living in poetry and painting. The Taohuawu New Year paintings are folk art bred in Gusu City, the gathering place of talents and beauties. The elegance of literati paintings is expressed in the form of folk customs: "A Group of Harmony" and "Flowers Blooming Rich", which express blessings and welcome auspiciousness; "Shen Tu Yu Lei" and "Zhong Kui Catches Ghosts", which are fierce and avoid evil; "Beauty with Foreign Lanterns" and "Suzhou Train to Wusong", which talk about current affairs and customs; "Tianmen Array"...A New Year picture is a window to society, through which we can see the world.

Drawings: Wumen's Paintings in Gusu

Every craft in China must be entrusted to an ancestor, and Taohuawu New Year's paintings are no exception. Legend has it that the earliest Taohuawu New Year painting work is "Merry and Smooth" by Tang Bohu. Although this is suspected to be a big banner, it also shows the origin of the Taohuawu New Year paintings-Tang Bohu is one of the representatives of the Wumen School of Painting, while the Taohuawu New Year Pictures and the literati represented by the Wumen School of Painting Painting has deep roots.

The production of Taohuawu New Year pictures is divided into three steps: drawing, stereotyping, and printing. Drawings are the key to making New Year pictures. The theme and style to be expressed in the New Year pictures are set the tone at the time of the drawing. Painting is the patent of the literati. There was no copyright in the old days. The craftsmen who made Taohuawu New Year pictures saw popular paintings on the market and used them as templates for their own New Year pictures.

Tang Bohu, known as "the most romantic genius in the south of the Yangtze River", is not only famous among literati and elegant scholars, but also very popular among ordinary people. In addition, in his later years, Tang Bohu lived in seclusion in the Taohuawu area. Therefore, Tang Bohu's paintings bear the brunt and become an important "reference" object for the production of Taohuawu New Year pictures. The literati painting expresses the aesthetic orientation of the literati, which is different from the taste of the audience of the New Year pictures, the common people. So slowly, folk painters who specialize in painting for New Year pictures appeared in Taohuawu New Year Painting Workshop.

The 73-year-old Wang Zude is one of thousands of Taohuawu New Year painters. member. In 1958, 18-year-old Wang Zude was admitted to Suzhou Arts and Crafts College. At that time, the once prosperous Taohuawu New Year pictures had few artists engaged in the production, and there was a danger of being lost. This was a great touch to Wang Zude, because the Taohuawu New Year pictures brought him too many good memories: Father I once told him the story of Tang Bohu lighting Qiuxiang while drawing the sketch of "Three Smiles and Smoke"; when I woke up from a nightmare at night, I was terrified, and when I thought of the New Year's picture "Zhong Kui Catches Ghosts" on the door, I felt like I got a talisman; The New Year pictures of weddings, funerals, and marriages helped him understand traditional etiquette, and he said that the New Year pictures of folk play and games cultivated his sentiment and interest. The New Year pictures are to Wang Zude what four-frame comics are to today's teenagers, and they are the most important window to understand the society. , left him with too many childhood memories. When Tang Bohu painted peach blossoms, he used Wumen's style of "picking peach blossoms for wine money", while Wang Zude painted Taohuawu New Year pictures with Wumen's style of hand-painting Gusu memories.

"Painting for the New Year is not a painting made by an artist. It is a matter of faith. It must be coordinated with the next process. Lines should be uniform and thin. Taohuawu New Year Painting Museum, Wang Zude instructs a group of post-80s painting manuscripts. It is a cruel thing to make this group of post-80s with strong self-consciousness understand that they cannot be a painter, but can only become a process in arts and crafts. However, in order to make this traditional art form continue, Wang Zude could only know that there are tigers in the mountains and prefer to walk in the mountains.

Stereotype: Boxing Dao Suishui carved pear wood

After the drawing was completed, it entered the most difficult part of making Taohuawu New Year pictures: stereotype.

After thousands of years of development, Chinese woodblock printing has developed to a very high level in the early Ming Dynasty. Gradually evolved into two varieties of engraving and depicting. At the beginning, the depiction was just a derivative of the depiction, and it was mainly used to carve illustrations for operas and novels. Because illustrations are more vivid and more acceptable to the people at the bottom, they gradually became independent and formed the art category of printmaking. The Taohuawu New Year picture is the most outstanding representative of Chinese printmaking, and is called the "Gusu version" because of its exquisite carving.

If the sketch is to use a brush to write on rice paper, then the stereotype is to use a boxing knife as a pen to paint on pear wood. On the surface, the stereotype is based on the pasted drawings, but although the fist knife is small, not everyone can dance. Drawings are basically composed of smooth lines, and in order to show the charm of the drawing vividly, the lines must be in place in one step. But in order to draw lines on the fine-grained pear wood, the boxing knife needs to be sharp, and the stereotype needs to have extraordinary concentration. Because if you are not careful, as long as you make a wrong carving, the entire plate will be lost.

In the old days, in order to ensure "specialization in the art industry", the Taohuawu New Year Pictures strictly divided the labor in each process. The knife worker was only responsible for the knife work, and the sharpening of the knife was a trade secret that was passed on inside and out. An apprentice was only allowed to practice for ten years. Knife on large prints. Nowadays, the Taohuawu New Year's pictures are not connected to each other, and the Taohuawu New Year's Picture Museum requires newcomers to become "all-round warriors" and learn a full set of New Year's picture skills. The old knife craftsmen also came up with their own skills of pressing the bottom of the box, and did everything possible to mobilize the enthusiasm of the apprentices, just to carry out the Taohuawu New Year pictures to the end in the contemporary era when the custom of pasting New Year pictures is no longer.

Overprinting: Jiangnan Ladies Applique Yellow

The overprinting process is a unique process that distinguishes Taohuawu New Year pictures from other New Year pictures. The New Year pictures printed from the stereotype are single black, just like a beauty without makeup. Filling the cover is the process of applying makeup to a plain beauty.

Each finished New Year picture is colorful, and a set of plates can only add one color to the New Year picture. Therefore, every time a New Year picture is printed, several sets of boards must be prepared. Generally, a simple New Year picture only needs 6 sets of boards, while the most complex sets of boards require 26 sets of boards. Take the printing of "Double Beauty Loves Flowers" as an example: the lady's face and lips are vermilion, so use a set plate to engrave the face and lips, then fix the color plate on the table, and use a brush to paint on the color plate Vermillion ink. Then cover the plate with the matching plastic film, so that the face and lips that have been painted in vermilion are exposed, and then paste the painting with the background color on it. When the vermilion ink is soaked in the rice paper, the face of the beautiful woman will be exposed. Apply "rouge" and put "lipstick" on the lips. In the same way, if you want to dye a lady's clothes yellow, you need to carve a pattern in the shape of the clothes; if you want to make the flowers behind the beauties beautiful, you have to carve a pattern for the flowers...

Each time the set is filled, even if only 3 sets are damaged. A New Year picture generally needs to be filled with 6 colors. After all the color plates are filled, 18 pictures will be broken. There are 26 kinds of peach-colored New Year pictures in the set, and the set is broken with 72 pictures. The Taohuawu New Year pictures are all printed on the best rice paper, so the production cost is staggering.

"Although the Taohuawu New Year pictures are complicated to make, it also makes them exquisite and elegant. If Yangliuqingqing pictures are rough northern men, then Taohuawu New Year pictures are exquisite Jiangnan beauties."

Set of panels Printing was high-tech in ancient times. Compared with Tianjin Yangliuqingqing Painting, it only used engraving to outline the base map, and all the coloring was done manually. The Taohuawu New Year's painting was much less time-consuming and labor-intensive. In its heyday during the Qianlong reign of the Qing Dynasty, Taohuawu sold millions of copies every year, making it the most influential New Year painting variety in China. Not only sold nationwide, but also exported to Japan, affecting the development of Japanese Ukiyo-e.

Painting: a never-fading comic book on the door

Wang Zude still remembers the scene when his father sold New Year pictures when he was a child: At that time, New Year pictures were a must-have item for every household when they were "selling New Year's goods". Every twelfth lunar month, my father would walk the village and alley with a load of goods. Newsboys chanted "outside the number" when selling newspapers, while the salesman hummed "New Year Pictures Song" and sang the content of the New Year pictures with lyrics to attract customers.

Chinese people pay attention to face, and the door is the face of a family, so it is not allowed to be careless. During New Years and festivals, the door paintings, the central hall and the strip screens must be replaced with new ones. "With the sound of firecrackers, the old will be eliminated, and the peach talisman will be renewed for thousands of households." Military generals are posted on the gate, civil servants are posted on the second gate, beautiful women are posted in the east wing and west wing; chickens are posted on the east gate, and the golden rooster announces the dawn; , expressing traditional culture. Each New Year picture is a year. In the old days, ordinary people didn’t read books, they just told the history to the children based on the opera stories on the New Year pictures; they instilled patriarchal etiquette according to the portraits; if something significant happened in this year The event, then this event will be shown in the next year's New Year's picture, so the New Year's picture is to some extent a history pasted on the door.

Exploration: Where will the New Year's Picture Era Go After

Qianlong Period of Qing Dynasty was the peak period of Taohuawu New Year's picture. At that time, Taohuawu New Year pictures were not only sold nationwide, but also exported to Southeast Asia and Japan, and were regarded as the origin of Japanese Faust paintings. Helpless, during the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom period, the Taiping army besieged Suzhou and set fire to the city. Taohuawu Street, where Taohuawu New Year painting workshops gathered, burned for seven days and seven nights, and a large number of precious paintings were burnt to the ground. Taohuawu New Year pictures have since withered.

Nowadays, even the Taohuawu New Year Pictures Museum has not collected a few old editions. In the Taohuawu New Year Pictures Reference Room, Wang Zude showed us an old edition that he treasured: a cracking "Flowers Blooming Rich". In the 1960s, Wang Zude found a Qing Dynasty wooden board in the pigsty of a farmer whose ancestors made New Year paintings during a research trip to Nantong. The reverse side has been cut into a groove with a knife, and below it is the exquisitely carved "Flowers Blooming Rich" - the huge Taohuawu New Year Painting Museum, the only remaining print from the Qing Dynasty, actually leaning on the chopping board used to cut pig feed. An identity is preserved.

Taohuawu New Year pictures, because they are art for ordinary people, are not collected much. For various reasons, most of the more than 100 old paintings in existence are kept in Japanese museums. What Wang Zude is doing now is to lead a group of post-80s apprentices to restore these prints. Although the old painting plates are not in China, but with these new painting plates, Taohuawu New Year pictures can be spread out. As a Taohuawu printmaker, he hopes that Suzhou can retain the roots of Taohuawu New Year pictures.

On the other hand, in view of the fact that the custom of pasting New Year pictures has gradually disappeared, Taohuawu New Year pictures people began to find a new way for New Year pictures: put New Year pictures on Suzhou folding fans and make them into cultural shirts, making them a cultural label of Suzhou ...Although I haven't seen the effect for a while, but at least through the process of "searching up and down", I can make the Taohuawu New Year paintings come alive clearly.

Text/Leihu Tu/Ruan Chuanju Taohuawu New Year Painting Museum