Exhibition highlights New Year's paintings tradition
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New Year paintings feature in the latest exhibition at Shanghai History Museum.
Chen Huizhi / SHINE -
Chen Huizhi / SHINE -
Chen Huizhi / SHINE -
Chen Huizhi / SHINE -
Visitors can leave auspicious wishes at the conclusion section of the exhibition.
Chen Huizhi / SHINE -
A painting with the motif of the Dragon Lantern Festival from the period of the Republic of China on color printing
Chen Huizhi / SHINE -
A Taohuawu-style painting of the Chinese word "Blessing" from Qing Dynasty
Chen Huizhi / SHINE -
A painting from Qing Dynasty showing 10 women playing "football" with a balloon with English letters on it
Shanghai History Museum -
A painting from Qing Dynasty showing the performances of a foreign circus in Shanghai in 1889
Shanghai History Museum -
A painting from the period of the Republic of China showing the "welcoming of the God of Fortune" in urban Tianjin, which represents a change of motifs for the famed Yangliuqing New Year Painting
Shanghai History Museum -
New Year Paintings of the motif of Mulan is very popular during the period of the anti-Japanese war to mobilize patriotism among Chinese people.
Shanghai History Museum -
A painting from the 1950s which shows the celebration of new born children and lambs in Qinghai, with Tibetan characters above the painting
Chen Huizhi / SHINE
An exhibition of New Year's paintings, a traditional Chinese folk art form, opened at Shanghai History Museum on Friday.
The 87 paintings track the evolution of both technique and motifs of the folk art.
In China, the tradition of hanging a New Year's painting at Chinese New Year dates back over 1,000 years.
In ancient times, the most popular motifs included the peach, gourd, bat, pomegranate, lotus seeds, daffodils, peony and other auspicious animals and totems as well as folk gods, and the paintings were typically sketched on paper and cut out on woodblocks before the woodblocks were colored and the paintings printed.
In more recent times, with the introduction of offset printing, New Year's paintings became more sophisticated. Little was known that the term for this kind of painting was associated with printed calendars first found in Shanghai in the 1880s, and before that, such paintings had various other names.
Elegant ladies later became a popular motif of urban New Year's paintings, but they also reflected a combination of traditional and modern, such as one presenting people in Tianjin “welcoming the God of Fortune” during the Chinese New Year against the backdrop of modern urban buildings.
The exhibition also features paintings from the period of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45) and the first years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
The exhibition presents works of some of the most important schools of painting, such as Tianjin Yangliuqing and Suzhou Taohuawu. So far, 18 regional styles of painting have been recognized as national intangible cultural heritage.
Shanghai History Museum is hosting the exhibition with Chongqing China Three Gorges Museum, a museum known for its collections of New Year's paintings.
The exhibition in the special exhibition hall of the museum's east building will open until March 1. Admission is free.
