New Year's Wood Block Paintings are a type of picture pasted on walls and doors during Spring Festival, the most important traditional Chinese festival. In the past, as the Spring Festival approached, every family would clean its rooms and courtyards and paste New Year's Wood Block Paintings on the windows, doors, walls and stoves and in the Buddha niches to add to the New Year atmosphere, and at the same time, to seek good luck in the coming year.
According to ancient records, there were once two brothers named Shen Tu and Yu Lei. They were supervisors of ghosts and monsters, and when they found a monster who wanted to harm people, they would tie him up to feed the tiger. Later the Yellow Emperor asked people to draw portraits of Shen Tu and Yu Lei on windows and doors to ward off the hosts. There is another story about the origin of New Year paintings. It is said that, in the Tang Dynasty, the emperor asked Wu Daozi to draw Zhong Kui and reproduce it to send to his officials to hang on the walls to repel evil. Wood block printing was invented in the Song Dynasty and made the production of New Year's Wood Block Paintings much easier. As this art form developed and became more and more popular among Chinese people, its content and functions also increased. It reached a peak in the Qing Dynasty: more subjects were added to express people's New Year wishes and blessings. The engravings also served to decorate the people's living environment. The content of New Year paintings were enriched later to depict Chinese farmers' life and Chinese folk stories and tales, which made Chinese peasants life more colorful and enhanced their knowledge.
Folk New Year wood engraving was basically an art of Chinese farmers. The natural and simple strokes frankly expressed their desires. Most of the New Year paintings are decorative, colorful and interesting as they have consecutive plots. They are appreciated by ordinary Chinese citizens and farmers and are very easy to produce. The painting draft is first engraved on wood and then printed, or the outline of the painting engraved and printed and then the blanks are filled with pens. It was the only method of producing pictures on a large scale before the invention of modern printing technology.
There are many types of New Year's Wood Block Paintings. The Gate Gods are pasted on doors
and, according to their roles, there are the main gate god, secondary gate god, back gate god and wing room gate god. There are also New Year's Wood Block Paintings of the God of Stove, the Village God and the God of Wealth. At Spring Festival time, New Year engravings of various types are put in every corner of the room and courtyard, imparting a strong festival atmosphere.
As time went on, the backward and superstitious content of New Year pictures gradually disappeared, but the style was preserved as a popular art form. Over the past five decades, Chinese folk artists have created some new wood engraving forms to portray reality. In the 1950s and 1960s, New Year's Wood Block Paintings became very popular among the people, and new printing technologies were adopted to speed printing and increase the number of copies. Until now, no other painting form has achieved a larger publishing volume than New Year's Wood Block Paintings.
Editor: Li Guixiang.
