The Spring Festival is the most important traditional festival of the Chinese nation. During the Spring Festival putting up New Year’s pictures is a folk tradition for thousands of years, which expresses the good wishes and aesthetic appeal of the people. New Year’s paintings are very rich in content, which can be door gods and door paintings, historical tales and legends, operas, ladies’ dolls, folk life, paper dolls for ritual use in the shape of people or animals and so on. Among them, the Door God may be the content of the earliest New Year’s paintings. The image of the Martial Door God (wumenshen) is fierce and mighty, frightening and warding off the evil spirits to defend the whole family from harm; the Civil Door God (wenmenshen) blesses good fortune, wishing for promotion and wealth.
On February 3, 2024, an art exhibition featuring Our Festival: Chinese New Year with the subtitle Defense and Blessing—Chinese Door God Painting was held at Tianjin Memories Museum, co-sponsored by Tianjin Wangshucun Folk Art Research Centre and Tianjin Society for the Study of Folk Literature and Art, under the guidance of the Bureau of Culture and Tourism in Binhai New District (sub-provincial district of Tianjin) and the Literature and History Committee of the CPPCC of Binhai New District. The exhibition lasts for one month.
The works of the Door God paintings on display in this exhibition comes from all over the country, including Tianjin, Beijing, Hebei, Shandong, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan, Jiangsu, Fujian, Guangdong and other provinces and cities, and the vast majority of them are more than 20 sets of the antique New Year’s Paintings collected by Tianjin Wangshucun Folk Art Research Centre. At the same time, the documentation and the original objects of the engraved printing plates related to the Door God paintings are on display.
More than 70 people, of whom there are scholars, artists, citizens and volunteers from different places of Tianjin attend the event, which is hosted by Santiago Qi(Qi Huimin), the curator of Tianjin Memories Museum.
At the beginning of the event, the curator Qi Huimin and his wife, the deputy curator Hu Jianmin read aloud the excerpts from Folk New Year Paintings and Wang Shucun by Mr. Bi Keguan, former director of the Fine Arts Research Institute of the China Academy of Art, and Folk Art of the Henan Region in the Song Dynasty: An Introduction by Professor Bo Songnian of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, which enables the audiences to gain a preliminary understanding of the origins and classification of New Year Paintings as well as Mr. Wang Shucun’s remarkable contribution to the preservation of New Year paintings art.
Mr. Jiang Yanwen, Associate Professor of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts and Director of Tianjin Wangshucun Folk Art Research Centre is invited to be present in the Tianjin Memories Culture Lecture (Issue No. 59 in total) to give a lecture on the theme of Door Gods Are Shaped by the Land Around Them---A Brief Discussion on Chinese Door God Paintings.
The lecture is divided into four parts. In the introduction, Mr. Jiang Yanwen talks about the appearance of New Year’s Paintings in literary works of different historical periods and the studies of foreign scholars on Chinese New Year’s Paintings, starting from Wang Anshi’s At Chinese Lunar New Year (Yuanri), The Bamboo Song in Dumen (Dumen Zhuzhici) written by Yang Miren in the Qing Dynasty in the last year of the Qianlong reign (1795), and the interlude of the opera The White-haired Girl (Baimaonv) (1945).
In the first part of History and Image, Mr. Jiang introduces the earliest Door Gods Shēn Shū and Yù Lǜ through the content of The Classic of Mountains and Rivers quoted by Wang Chong of Han Dynasty in his On Balance—Correction of Ghosts (Lunheng—Dinggui) and the records and images of Shēn Shū and Yù Lǜ in The Records of the Years and Seasons of Jing and Chu (Jingchu Suishi Ji) and The Complete Drawing Collection of the Origins of the Three Religions of the Souls (Huitu Sanjiao Yunaliu Soushen Daquan); and he also presents the development of carving and overprinting techniques in the production of historical New Year paintings and appreciates the paintings of the Martial Door God (wumenshen) and the Civil Door God (wenmenshen) in the works of the Southern Song Dynasty, such as The Yearly Morning Picture (Suizhaotu), said to be drawn by Li Song.
Mr. Jiang Yanwen gives a colourful account of the legend of Qin Qiong and Yuchi Gong being used as Door God figures and how to distinguish Qin Qiong and Yuchi Gong from a pair of Door Gods. Apart from Qin Qiong and Yuchi Gong, there are many other door god images, such as Guan Yu, Zhao Yun, Fang Bi and Fang Xiang, the latter two of whom are the guardian generals of the King Zhou of the Shang Dynasty in the local legends of Fengxiang in Shaanxi Province. (It seems that if you want to pass the audition to become a Martial Door God, you have to be good at martial arts in the first place!) In addition to the Martial and Civil Door Gods, there are many other forms of door paintings on many subjects, such as qilin (a mythical Chinese animal) delivering its son, theatre, and the treasure bowl.
In the second part Origins and Styles, Mr. Jiang introduces the distribution of Chinese New Year paintings throughout the country, and through a large number of Door God paintings, he respectively introduces the various styles of Chinese New Year paintings according to the different origins, such as Tianjin Yangliuqing, Beijing, Henan, Shanxi, Shandong, Shaanxi, Jiangsu, Sichuan, Chongqing, Anhui, Hubei, Fujian, and Taiwan, etc.
In his summary, Mr. Jiang concludes that the common mission of different styles of Door God paintings is always Defense and Blessing; Door God
paintings in different regions have their own different forms of
expression, so it can be said that door gods are shaped by the land
around them.
Mr. He Zhihua
A writer, Mr. Li Zhibang, as the Party Secretary of Tianjin Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Association explains the origins of the New Year’s paintings—Nuo (exorcising demons) and the formation of Tianjin local folklore with people from all sorts of places, as well as the love of the Communist Party of China of Tianjin local folklore. Mr. Li Zhibang asks why there are so many cities in the north of China, but no city devotes particular care to folklore compared with Tianjin. The reason is that in 1860 Tianjin was opened as a port for trade with a population of less than 400,000, and with the development into an international metropolis, the present population reaches nearly 15 million. Most people in Tianjin are from other places in China, and they need to stay true to their homesickness here and guard the inner nostalgia.
Mr. He Zhihua and Mr. Bai Guoyou share their collection of Chinese New Year paintings.
Mr. Zhang Fuyou gives an impromptu performance of his allegro.
According to Mr. Guo Wenjie, the New Year paintings without figures in Mr. He Zhihua’s collection probably originate from Gandaying (a migration flow in wartime) during which the Tianjin merchants provide supplies for Zuo Zongtang’s recovery of Xinjiang (1876-1878).
Calligraphers Tang Yunlai, Hao Jun, Li Yanchun, Han Tianhong, Zhang Shidong, Zhao Yuanqing, Zhang Junbiao and Xu Jie wield their writing brushes to write Spring Festival couplets and lucky characters (Fu), sending the audiences the New Year’s blessings for the year of 2024!
Mr. Tang Yunlai
Mr. Li Yanchun
Mr.Han Tianhong
Mr. Han Tianhong
Mr. Zhang Shidong
Mr. Xu Jie
Mr. Jiang Yanwen and Qi Huimin
Mr. Jiang Yanwen and Mrs.Hu Jianmin
Mrs.Ma Yan and Mrs.Lan Shan
Mr. Zhang Shuzhen
Mr. Fan Shugang
Mr.Li Shusen and Mrs.Wang Nan
【Selected Works】
