Xiang Yunju*

The Dimensions and Perceptual Meaning of Chinese New Year Painting as a Form of Visual Encirclement

Xiang Yunju*

As mankind was one kind of aesthetic species, the visual study of Marxist philosophy has profound enlightenment in understanding the New Year paintings’visual meaning, form, development, cultivation, and features etc. In essence, Chinese folk New Year paintings is a visual expression, its nature of being pasted at home makes it a visual encirclement for the Chinese people, this vision encirclement in the home space gradually expands, constitutes a spiritual home with different cultural space, living environment, image schema, and secular and religious faith scope, in this visual encirclement, people’s home life achieves the satisfaction, peace and self–comfort in diversity. The“childrenization”of New Year paintings reveals a close relationship between the immature of folk art and the original art as human childhood, and from the both aspects of form and content reflects the visual encirclement is actually a kind of siege with cultural significance, this siege has multiple levels in value ideas, historical tradition, ethical order and life knowledge, aesthetic taste and so on, makes us have a new aesthetic anthropology on the New Year paintings.

New Year paintings; visual encirclement; perceptual meaning

1. Inspiration from Marxist Philosophy–based Visual Studies

As a form of visual expression, Chinese New Year painting is popular among the Chinese people. It shapes the Chinese people’s aesthetic vision. As a type of human sense, visual perception is a key source, carrier and form of exuberant human emotions. The essence of human beings lies in the factthat they know how to appreciate music with their ears and visual beauty with their eyes. As Carl Marx pointed out, “It is obvious that the human’s eye enjoys things in a way different from the crude, non–human’s eye; the human’s ear different from the crude’s ear, etc.”[1]Based on this, Marx concluded, “The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.”[1]Marx’s argument concerning perception, sense and consciousness can be summarized in the following points.

Chinese New Year painting

First, man is affirmed in the objective world with all his senses. The character of each sensual organ embodies its specific essence and uniqueness. Those sensual organs form profound one–sidedness and one–sided profoundness of mankind’s essential power and combine to form a resultant force. Marx also held that, “To the eye an object comes to be other than it is different to the ear, and the object of the eye is another object rather than the object of the ear. The specific character of each essential power is precisely its specific essence, and therefore also the specific mode of its objectification, of its objectively actual, living being. Thus man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, but with all his senses.”[1]

Second, human senses have social nature, and therefore are associated with their social activities. They even transform the society into their organ, i.e. social organ. Through sense organs, human beings create self–enjoyment unique to themselves. Therefore, human beings exist in the real world both as awareness of “social existence”and as a totality of human manifestation of life.Regarding this, Marx held, “Each of his human relations to the world–seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving–in short, all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, are in their objective orientation, or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of the object, the appropriation of human reality. Their orientation to the object is the manifestation of human reality; it is human activity and human suffering, for suffering, humanly considered, is a kind of self–enjoyment of man.”[1]

Last, the richness of human beings’ essential power is closely associated with the richness of their perception, sense and consciousness. The latter three are “human sense,” or the “human nature of the senses.” And the forming of the five senses is the result of the entire history of the world down to the present. On the one hand, human beings are part of nature. On the other hand, nature creates human beings’ body. According to Marx, “Only through the objectively unfolded richness of human being’s nature is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty–in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being. For not only the five senses but also the so–called mental senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense, the human nature of the senses, comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanized nature.”[1]

Therefore, it is of great academic significance to explore Chinese New Year painting’s humanistic nature, aesthetic nature, as well as its ethnic and aesthetic characteristics of the Chinese nation. And the analysis of this Chinese form of visual fork arts covers its visual significance, form, cultivation, development and characteristics.

2. Visual Encirclement and Dimensions of Chinese New Year Painting

This paper attempts to further extend Marxist philosophy’s understanding of perceptual significance and five senses. The forming of the five senses is not just the result of the entire history of the world down to the present. This process goes on and shapes the five senses’ preference, interests, individuality, style and characteristics. For different ethnicities, nationalities and groups, their preferences for music and beauty are bound to be different. Such preferences further enhance the diversity, abundance and complexity of human sensibility, enrich human culture, and enable the boundless development of world history.

Looking back, Chinese New Year painting had experienced a long waiting before reaching its heyday in the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty. Due to the extensive prevalence of the Chinese New Year celebration custom, some 100 production regions of Chinese New Year paintings have come into being in over ten provinces across Central China, Northwest China, South–Central China, Southeast China and Southwest China. Their paintings are sold nationwide, becoming a cultural product of all Chinese people. In those production regions, Chinese New Year painting has almost become a household technique; furthermore, “With the coming of the new year, on a sunny day, tens of thousands of families are busy replacing the old Chinese New Year paintings with new ones.” It is fair to say that for a rather long period; Chinese New Year painting has remained a household folk ritual in China.

The word “home” refers to a place where family members was born, grow, and die. It is a place where people live, eat, drink and sleep; a place where people raise children, maintain a marriageand accompany family members until the end of their life journey; and a place where people open and close their eyes. The forging of a home and family atmosphere has been a core value of the time–honored Chinese civilization. And for this core value, Chinese New Year painting is an important manifestation, which inherits and embodies the Chinese people’s family awareness and becomes a form of visual encirclement. Such visual encirclement falls into the following dimensions.

The first dimension is door–god painting. The primary role of a door–god is to protect a family, ensure its happiness and peace, and prevent it from any possible harassment or violation by “ghosts” or “evil spirits.” The popularization of door–god painting originates from the concept of animism. According to animism, apart from tangible risks such as evil persons and beasts, there are intangible threats like ghosts, evil spirits and witches capable of breaking into people’s homes. Walls and locks may guard against “man–made” attacks, but not evil spirits’ intangible attacks, which can only be tackled through witchcraft. For this reason, a range of totem symbols are “employed” by the Chinese people as door–gods to protect their spiritual home. Among those symbols are hideous evil–exorcising beasts, ferocious ligers, upright warriors, valiant generals, and other nation–safeguarding figures. As time goesby, more secular figures from different backgrounds are added to this “door–god” team, serving other auspicious purposes like bringing in wealth and treasure. Subsequently, the door–gods’ “service scope” has been extended from the initial evilness exorcising to both evilness exorcising and fortune impetrating. This evolution reflects the improvement of living environment and society’s historical transformation from pure struggle against nature to a better situation with increasing prosperity, peace and safety.

Door–God Painting

The second dimension is god–portrait painting. A typical Chinese house features a memorial tablet of ancestors in the hall, along with a variety of god–themed Chinese New Year paintings passed down through generations. In the living room, kitchen and other rooms hang paintings of Baby–sending Avalokiteshvara (baby maker), “Gods of Happiness, Affluence, Longevity and Joy,” Confucian and Taoist sages, Buddhas, as well as various gods from folklore. Their very presence in a family creates a god–worshiping world. Such a world is supposed to magically protect and bless its family members in the aspects of longevity, life, production and child–birth. At the same time, it also inherits and carries forward the traditions of a family, an ethnic group and the Chinese nation. While highlighting its family lineage, belief and custom, such a world also defines and specifies psychic order, hierarchy of beliefs and belief–related obligations. By extensively associating a family with a given society, history, life and ethnic group, god–portrait painting confirms the fact that a family’s sense of security is built through the efforts of its “big family,” i.e. an ethnic group, society and history; as well as the efforts of its family members.

God–Portrait Painting

The third dimension is life–themed painting. This dimension covers a wide range of topics, from seasonal calendars, farming, folk festivals, historical allusions, lovely babies and beauties, political change and reform, auspicious wishes, evilness exorcising and fortune impetrating, to morality and ethics. This dimension enables people to appreciate the beauty of ordinary life and observe its norms. By integrating family life with production, it enhances the interdependence of the two aspects, and highlights the mutual promotion of happy family life and hard work. It aims to strike a balance between life and work. People work hard to create a better life for their family and family happiness relies on hard work. There is much more for one to see and experience apart from family life. It is labor production that ensures a comfortable family life. And human life is not just about family. Life–themed painting expands the space of family life and enriches its connotation. It shows family members how to deal with life, engage in life and create a better life.

The fourth dimension is entertainment–themed painting. With the development of the Chinese civilization, new forms of culture and art keep emerging, which significantly enrich people’s cultural life and inner world. Under suchcircumstances, the themes of Chinese New Year paintings have been substantially diversified. During the Song Dynasty and the Yuan Dynasty, Chinese drama enjoyed unprecedented prosperity, becoming the most impressive form of folk art. Consequently, dramatic scenes were added to Chinese New Year paintings and quickly formed a new dimension, i.e. entertainment–themed painting, which is of more entertaining and appreciation value than traditional dimensions. The entertainment–themed painting, represented by drama–themed painting, is artistically pleasing and entertaining and has significantly raised Chinese New Year painting’s aesthetic profile. Entertainment–themed painting brings “joy” and “comfort” to ordinary households and enhances harmony in family life. While implanting a sense of right and wrong in the mind of the public, it also satisfies people’s aesthetic needs of drama appreciation. In such a delightful family atmosphere, Chinese aesthetic taste is manifested everywhere. Therefore, entertainment–themed painting’s role in improving the quality of life is self–evident. In a way, the development of Chinese New Year painting is the evolution of Chinese folk arts in microcosm. Throughout history, Chinese folk arts have kept enriching and improving themselves.

Pasted on the doors and walls of numerous family homes, Chinese New Year paintings add vigor and vitality to the “cold” architectural structures and brighten the atmosphere. These paintings, by virtue of their specific posted positions and diversified themes, form a spiritual home unique to each family. Inside this spiritual home, there are various cultural spaces, living environment, image schemata and folk beliefs. Surrounded by those paintings, Chinese people can enjoy a domestic life characterized by multi–dimensional satisfaction, vivid serenity and diversified self–consistency. The visual images of these paintings alleviate family members’ tension and fear; forge a sense of the sublime, awe and serenity; generate satisfaction, fulfillment and happiness; and create comfort, joy and beauty.

3. The Perceptual Meaning of Chinese New Year Painting

Chinese New Year painting’s perceptual, sensory and conscious encirclement of the most special species in the universe, i.e. human beings, is based on the room’s encirclement of the human body (physical space) and also on their spiritual comfort and sedation encirclement of the human mind (cultural space). In fact, such double visual encirclement (both our physical and spiritual homes) covers the entire human life, from birth, growth, through adulthood and the declining years, to death.

According to American aesthetician Rudolf Arnheim, sensory organs are not merely cognitive tools for understanding, but also biological tissues evolved for survival; right from the very beginning, these organs have aimed at, or focused on surrounding aspects that can make life better; and visual perception is an active sense.[2]25With visual image being its defining nature, Chinese New Year painting is the most representative form of the Chinese fine folk arts. The visual encirclement is reflected in its form and content.

Regarding the form, it is understood that Chinese New Year painting’s visual impact, subsumption and regulatory power pervade the entire human life, from infancy, through childhood, to adulthood. Through years of nurture, repetition, enhancement, upgrading, internalization and consolidation, the artistic form of Chinese New Year painting can bring about a series of pleasant, harmonious and comfortable visual experiences to viewers. Presented in pairs, the painting patterns, such as door–gods, tigers, ladies, babies, auspicious flowers, birds and beasts, create a visual effect of strict symmetry,good balance, proper proportion, even distribution and excellent stability. Different colors in multiple layers, which are warm, exuberant and contrastive, deliver an eye–catching impact and a bright and delightful tone. The purpose of color appreciation is to acquire a certain visual form, to acquire some new application of the body, and to enrich and reorganize body schema.[3]Those naive babies, beautiful ladies, amiable gods, gracious god of longevity, lovely animals, as well as auspicious lotus and fish cater to people’s visual intuition, preference and choice. There is a classic animal experiment in physical anthropology. During this experiment, experimenters took a newly born gorilla away from its mother. Then, they made the baby gorilla choose between a milk bottle and a gorilla–like robot, only to find the baby gorilla giving the robot a big hug, instead of fetching the milk bottle it needed most. This experiment indicates that visual familiarity and pleasantness outweighs the fundamental need of survival and that visual selection is even more crucial than basic instinct and life itself.[4]In this sense, there is a “being child” trend in Chinese New Year paintings regarding the form, color and shape. The persons, animals and gods in the paintings are designed in a childish comic fashion. Moreover, there are many playful children–oriented themes, such as the story ofLiuhai and Jinchan,Mice’s WeddingandWish Your Kids a Promising Future. Those paintings seamlessly combine folk arts’originality and simplicity with children’s idolized and visualized cognition. In all ages, the primaryfunction of pictures is for viewing, particularly for children. Immersed in this environment, people can keep their childhood visual preference to adulthood. Also, that “childish” feature can be found in adult–oriented drama–themed paintings. With their character portraying, design, composition and coloring drawing inspiration from “adult” elements of drama performance (drama figures, costumes, props, movements, poses and scenes), these drama–themed paintings keep the same “childish” features as other Chinese New Year paintings. This to some extent verifies one major phenomenon or law of arts held by some art historians: Folk arts, though with several thousand years of evolution, directly inherit and retain their ancient “childish” features. Primitive arts are widely considered to be arts from human beings’ “childhood”. The reason why folk arts, represented by Chinese New Year painting, stubbornly retain the childish features of primitive arts lies in the style of Chinese New Year painting. Previously, such a “childish” feature was attributed to superficial factors like folk artists’ lack of art consciousness and professionalism. In fact, there has been no shortage of professional and talented folk artists. Their so–called “immature” painting skill is not immature. Quite the opposite, it demonstrates their true maturity. In fact, true elegance lies in a secular society. Their being “childish” is deliberate and reflects a profound collective unconsciousness of human beings.

Liuhai and Jinchan

The visual meaning of Chinese New Year painting is fully expressed in its content. As it has been proved by child psychological studies, at the age of three or four, children already develop quite mature perception and gain many adult–level capabilities of conceptual recognition. They can recognize a range of objects, human facial expressions and even some abstract geometric shapes. Furthermore, they may be very sensitive to some subtle details. Some children, if not most, may have very good (sometimes even highly accurate) acoustic and visual memories, for which they can better identify minor changes than adults (and therefore are more likely to be disturbed by such minor changes). By contrast, adults are far less sensitive to subtle details.[5]Further research indicates that on average, a 3–year child is already capable of identifying many objects portrayed in pictures and distinguishing them from real objects. He or she tends to be attracted by picture–related stories. The ability to understand and interpret pictures as representations of real objects means progress in mental development. Children’s picture interpretation demonstrates their increasing capability of understanding representations and distinguishing drawings from real objects. In other words, an integration of the perception system with the symbolic system (graphic representation system) is achieved.[5]

In a family, the appreciation and interpretation of Chinese New Year paintings are inevitably interrelated. There is a special “question raising”and “story listening” phase in childhood (language acquisition period). Childhood is just like a piece of white paper waiting for the painters’ brush. For children, everything around them is unknown, fresh and mysterious. That is why they have tens of thousands of “whys.” Once a question is asked, theycannot wait to get an answer, particularly an answer in the form of a story. As a domestic decoration that can be seen almost everywhere, Chinese New Year painting naturally becomes a key item that arouses their curiosity and generates a variety of questions. Their parents and other seniors at home then have the obligation to explain the meanings, including the implied and symbolic parts to the children. That is how many Chinese New Year painting related stories and tales came into being. Almost all gods, figures, beasts, birds, fish, insects, gods and flowers in these paintings are suitable to be made into stories. More importantly, those images are loaded with rich rhetorical functions, such as symbolism, metaphor, harmonic tone and visual pun, for which they can take children into the profound world of cultural symbols.

Dramatic Stories

Hence it can be seen that Chinese New Year painting’s visual encirclement is a type of cultural encirclement, which consists of multiple aspects. The first aspect concerns values. There are paintings conveying and advocating traditional Chinese values such as honesty, diligence, frugality, integrity, righteousness, courtesy, wisdom, filial piety and fraternal duty. The second aspect is based on history. There are paintings depicting ancient myths, historical figures and historical events. The third aspect concerns ethical order. There are paintings promoting “24 stories of filial piety,”“respecting heaven, earth, monarchs, parents and teachers,” “worshipping gods or Buddha,” “pledging loyalty to the emperor” and “respecting the old andcherishing the young.” The fourth aspect is about life knowledge, including production skills, common sense, beliefs, and interpersonal relationships. The fifth aspect focuses on aesthetic taste. Such paintings unfold scenes of recreation, dramatic stories, festival celebrations and instrumental performances. Due to the multi–dimensional encirclement of these Chinese New Year paintings, we keep enhancing the sensitivity, directionality and selectivity of our vision. In the meantime, such multi–dimensional encirclement also helps to mobilize our senses of touch, taste, smell and hearing; and our capacities for association, feeling, imagination, perception and intuition. These visual images are supposed to reflect concrete objects and transform them into symbols, perceptions and even abstract ideas, so as to forge a mature thinking mode. As Carl Marx put it, “The eye becomes a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object–an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly theoreticians in their practice.”[1]According to Max Weber, culture is like a web. And this point of view is shared by Clifford Geertz, an American anthropologist and founder of interpretive anthropology, who stated, “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.itake culture to be those webs.”[6]In this sense, we can conclude that Chinese New Year painting’s visual encirclement is in nature a type of cultural encirclement. Through visual form and content, culture penetrates through our system of perception, sense and consciousness to the essence of human beings, forming a new physical mechanism and instinct, and endowing us with aesthetic judgment.

Only by further exploring the evolution of human organs and the enrichment of human perception can we identify ourselves as a culture–equipped species independent from the animal world. This argument is a new understanding of the Chinese people’s cultural property, which is an aesthetic anthropological understanding derived by perceiving the Chinese New Year painting as a form of visual encirclement.

(Translator: Wu Lingwei; Editor: Jia Fengrong )

This paper has been translated and reprinted with the permission ofThe Central Plains Culture Research, No.1, 2017.

REFERENCES

[1] Carl Marx. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 [M]. Liu Pikun trans., Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1979.

[2] Rudolf Arnheim. Visual Thinking [M]. Teng Shouyao trans., Chengdu: Sichuan People’s Publishing House, 1998.

[3] Maurice Merleau–Ponty. Phénoménologie de la Perception [M]. Jiang Zhihui trans., Beijing: The Commercial Press, 2005.

[4] Wang Hailong. Visual Anthropology [M]. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2007.

[5] Harward Gardener. The Arts and Human Development [M]. Lan Jinren trans., Beijing: Guangming Daily Publishing House, 1988.

[6] Clifford Geertz. The Interpretation of Cultures [M]. Han Li trans., Beijing: Yilin Press, 2008.

*Xiang Yunju, president and senior editor of China Art and Vice Chairman of China Literature and Art Critics Association.