The Motifs Of Chinese Folk Art

Woodblock prints have a long history in China. They were produced in largenumbers from the invention of printing in the6thcentury AD, uninterruptedly to themiddle of the20thcentury. After1,500years, woodblock printing lost its position asthe only method of producing picture prints. China’s fast and radical modernization inthe past thirty years has brought a big shock to the ancient traditions. At the beginningof the twenty-first century, the China Folk Art and Literature Association launched alarge scale cultural preservation project. Woodblock prints were chosen as the firstfocus of the project’s preservation work. Under the lead of Feng Jicai, scholars andvolunteers were dispatched, and conducted research in local villages. Millions ofprints were collected during the time of this project.This paper examines the motifs of Chinese folk art and, based on the ChineseWoodblock Prints Collection, assesses the achievements of the China Folk Art andLiterature Association’s cultural preservation project. The article uses door prints asthe study object because they have the longest history and largest scale of productionamongst the various kinds of woodblock prints. The thesis comprises of an exordium,six chapters and a conclusion.Firstly, the exordium discusses the customs in people’s daily lives in China’sagricultural society. Secondly, it talks about the close relationship between thecreative ideas of folk art and the customs of daily life in agricultural society. Then itconsiders whether the autonomous actions of the people and artists of thesecommunities have had a big impact on the creation of folk art. Thirdly, there is afocus on how the idea of bringing luckiness and avoiding bad luck dominates thepatterns and designs of folk art. The thesis uses the images of door prints fromdifferent regions as examples to prove that recurring motifs are a highly significantcharacteristic of this kind of art.The first chapter, talks about the history and the historical development of doorpaintings. The article compares images of door guards on ancient tomb stones andbricks from the Han dynasty, with modern-day figures of door prints to find thesimilarities between the designs of the figures. The second chapter discusses how thebeliefs around door gods relate to the ideas people have about their families.Following on from the second chapter, the third chapter mainly talks about customssurrounding the display of door prints. The fourth chapter focuses on the variousfunctions of the figures of door god prints as idols, bringers of good fortune androle-models. The fifth chapter uses the shapes of the figures and the colors of theimages as examples to analyze and understand the aesthetic rules governing thedesign of door paintings. The sixth chapter discusses regional diversity in doorpaintings.In conclusion, the paper employs theoretical ideas and examples of door prints toprove that this style of folk art has central motifs that recur throughout history.Particular designs, patterns, colors and figures have developed as motifs since folk artstarted over two thousand years ago. This form of folk art has been adopted anddeveloped by the communities of Chinese agricultural society.