A New Year picture amazes the time, and a woodblock tenderens the time.

The Spring Festival of the Year of the Rooster has just passed, but no matter before or after the new year, people around me always lament that the flavor of the year is getting weaker and weaker. In fact, they don’t know that there is a flavor of the year that is fermenting over time. Time The longer it goes, the stronger the flavor of the new year becomes. It is the Fengxiang woodblock New Year picture, the New Year's wish that is hung up.

I will tell you about the past and present life of Fengxiang woodblock New Year paintings, and tell the story of its 21st generation descendant, Wang Yixuan.

The Past and Present of Fengxiang Woodblock New Year Pictures

We know that as the Spring Festival approaches, every household will put a door god on the door, a kitchen god on the stove, a stove god on the granary, window grilles on the windows, and kang Various story paintings are posted on it, and this is how New Year pictures were born. Fengxiang woodblock New Year paintings "began in the Tang and Song Dynasties and flourished in the Ming and Qing Dynasties." Nanxiaoli Village, located in the east of the county, is the center of Fengxiang New Year paintings. The Tai family, which has been farming here for generations, has been engaged in woodblock New Year paintings since the Hongwu period of the Ming Dynasty. Wang Yixuan's skills happen to be the 21st generation.

What are the characteristics of Fengxiang woodblock New Year pictures?

Fengxiang woodblock New Year pictures were grown in the northwest and have a strong northwest flavor. Especially compared with the four major Chinese New Year paintings, the shape is rough (such as door god paintings, the proportion of the character's head often accounts for one-third), the color contrast is more intense, and it exudes a strong local flavor. , simple and unsophisticated, these characteristics enable it to become a genre of Han folk New Year paintings.

How is it made?

The production process of Fengxiang woodblock New Year pictures is actually quite complex. Each work has several color plates and is carved from several plates. These plates only use pear wood that has been cut down and dried in the shade for more than three years. The entire process It’s quite sophisticated, so let’s take you through it step by step.

When printing, only one color can be printed at a time. We mix the colors first, apply the colors evenly on the engraved plate, and then print on the rice paper.

First print the ink line drawing, measure the size on the paper, and set the position before printing. After the ink line is printed and dried, it is printed with color. Each color, including the ink line version, needs to be printed two to three times. Only after several passes can it be fully colored, showing the effect of the New Year pictures we see now. When printing, you must wait for the previous color to dry before printing the next color.

The whole process takes more than a month, and each printed work will also have subtle changes, because humans are not machines after all, and the amount of paint and the weight of the force will produce some accidental changes each time. The effect is so great that you can’t imagine the final look of the picture until the last moment when you lift it off. This is also the charm of the woodblock New Year pictures themselves.

From catastrophe to restoration

Fengxiang woodblock New Year paintings experienced a catastrophe during the Kuomintang Revolution. 17 house searches resulted in the loss of almost one of the hundreds of New Year paintings accumulated over several generations. As the most important printing tool for New Year pictures, the disappearance of stereotypes is fatal to the producers of New Year pictures.

After the Chinese Revolution, in order to save the New Year paintings, my father Tai Liping immediately started the restoration work of stereotypes. Many stereotypes have disappeared, how can they be restored? Fortunately, in the past, some of the old stereotype-printed New Year pictures were collected by museums and some by private collections. Looking for these clues, my father would restore the stereotypes whenever he found them.

It was a very difficult period. My father worked for six or seven years, sometimes working up to 21 hours a day. In three of these years, he completed more than 170 copies of more than 1,000 old stereotypes, equivalent to the amount of stereotypes accumulated by two generations. "I did the work of two generations in three years." Later, I slowed down because my body couldn't bear it.

To date, Fengxiang woodblock New Year paintings have restored more than 400 works of different shapes and specifications, and have been restored to a relatively complete system, including door god paintings, home god paintings, ten beauties paintings, and custom paintings , traditional drama paintings and other categories.

The inheritance of the new generation

The development of the times always seems to challenge the survival of traditional handicrafts.

The large-scale production of offset-printed New Year pictures once eliminated wood-block New Year pictures. My father then set his sights on the collection market and tried printing on rice paper. With the help of many experts and scholars, he redesigned all the New Year pictures and produced finely processed, artistic-oriented products. New Year pictures allow this ancient folk art to be passed down.

Although Fengxiang woodblock New Year pictures have now been selected as a national intangible cultural heritage, I think that the inheritance of woodblock New Year pictures needs to be known, liked and collected by more people. So I chose to study at the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts in college because I was determined to stand with my father and continue our family's precious skills.

Folk crafts turned into collections

In recent years, my father has taken Fengxiang woodblock New Year paintings to many different countries to participate in exhibitions. The New Year paintings have gone global, and we are all very proud. In 1994, my father went to Australia and Hong Kong to hold the "Collection Exhibition of Chinese Folk New Year Paintings". The New Year paintings were included or collected by 156 art academies and art units at home and abroad. In 1999, my father went to Paris, France with the "Chinese Art Delegation" to participate in the "99 Paris-China Culture Week" to exhibit and demonstrate Fengxiang woodblock New Year paintings. Around the UNESCO building in Paris, there are 17 Fengxiang woodblock New Year paintings printed with Qin Qiong riding a horse. , Jingde's banners are hung around and in the central hall as iconic works of traditional Chinese folk art. "Selected Fengxiang Woodblock New Year Pictures" is collected by the Sinology Research Laboratory of the Collège de France and New Year picture enthusiasts.

Fengxiang woodblock New Year pictures, an ancient folk art, have had a strong appeal and shock abroad. At home, I also hope that more and more people will know and fall in love with woodblock New Year pictures.

As the 21st generation inheritor of Fengxiang woodblock New Year paintings, I shoulder even greater responsibilities. While following my father in restoring old-age paintings, we also need to spread them. New Year paintings grew up with the previous generation, but by now Many people of our generation basically don’t know what New Year pictures are, so I hope that New Year pictures can return to daily life and let more people understand the charm of New Year pictures.