Page 50 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

component of the style. Marginal as they certainly were in the traditional hierarchy of

Chinese painting, such "export paintings" were nonetheless a highly significant development.
For the first but not the last time, Chinese painters were looking at themselves from a point
outside the bounds of their own traditional culture.

DAOGUANG TO GUANGXU (1821-1911)

At the elite level, the major artistic achievements of the last ninety years of the Qing
dynasty engaged, or avoided, two central issues: the validity of traditional culture, and

China's place within a context of global modernity. Before turning to those questions,
however, this is a convenient point to address, briefly, art of a quite different type. The
nineteenth century is the earliest period from which folk art has survived on a large scale,
though we know it to have existed throughout the Ming and Qing periods. It was, in fact, to
some degree an archaic survival, for it tapped a level of religious belief deeper than any of

the organized religions, which one might loosely describe as a form of animism. In this
respect, folk art has a distant connection with the apotropaic images of Tang imperial tombs
and, more remotely, with Shang bronze decoration. Its imagery, tied to the cycle of the lunar

calendar and the geography of the house, was rigorously functional. Above all, it protected
the house against the powers of malevolence, and invoked the aid of well-disposed gods to
bring about the family's success. For all its ancient roots, however, folk art as we see it in the
nineteenth century was very much a Qing dynasty development. Its major form was the color
woodblock prints known as New Year's prints because so many were used during that

month-long festival. After its invention in the early seventeenth century, color woodblock
printing had a quite restricted history at the elite level: in folk art, on the other hand, the
technique became widespread, though the need to keep costs low ensured a very limited

range of colors. Other Qing dynasty developments were the proliferation of gods of wealth,
which now found their way even into the images of quite different gods, and the emergence
of 'luxury' New Year's prints, produced in Tianjin and Suzhou.
The most fundamental images of the New Year's festival were, and are, those of the
stove god and door gods. The stove god icon was pasted on the wall above the stove, and

thus occupied a place at the very center of the house (564). He watched over the house all
year, noting bad deeds and good, and at the end of the year made his report to the Supreme
Deity. On the twenty-third day of the twelfth month, the first day of the New Year's festival,

the previous year's image was taken down and ceremonially burnt, fire being the means by
which the god passed from this world to Heaven. He is usually shown twice, once at the
center in his impassive role as judge of the house's affairs, and a second time up above riding