(China.org.cn by Shao Da, May 7, 2005)
Saving Endangered Folk Art

Folk culture is like a long river of human history, flowing from
antiquity to the present, with shifts in direction, depth and speed
dictated by the land through which it passes.

China's breakneck modernization, however, is acting as a dam on river,
reducing the flow of the once-vibrant traditional culture to a mere trickle.

Local operas

Recently, the Chinese Academy of Art (CAA) released the results of its
nationwide survey on the current situation for local operas and troupes.
The number of traditional opera forms has shrunk rapidly in recent years.

The Records of Chinese Traditional Opera compiled in 1983 showed that in
north China's Shanxi Province, a total 49 forms of traditional opera
were practiced at that time.

However, the number has now declined to 28; in other words,
approximately one local opera form has died out every year during the
past two decades, according to a recent survey conducted by the CAA's
Traditional Opera Institute and Shanxi Traditional Opera Institute.

The city of Xiaoyi is famous for its shadow puppet plays.
Sixty-six-year-old Wu Haitang of Bidu Village is a seventh-generation
successor to the art and manages one of the nation's oldest shadow
puppet troupes.

But Wu's troupe exists in name only now. Performances are no longer
given, and even the city's shadow-puppet museum has fallen into
disrepair, according to Zhu Wen, the museum's curator. Xiaoyi shadow
puppetry, once a favorite popular performing art, is on the verge of
being lost.

A couple of years ago, southwest China's Sichuan Province began to
reform its cultural organizations, a process that forced many local
opera troupes to disband.

The repertoire of Gaoxian County's Sichuan opera troupe has included
nearly 300 different plays during the past three decades. It used to
average more than 200 performances each year.

"In 1972 we first rehearsed Duquanshan, which had a run of more than 40
performances within a month," recalled Li Qingnan, the troupe's last
deputy chief. "The play was later adapted as a 'model opera' with a new
name, Dujuanshan, and was extremely popular nationwide during the
Cultural Revolution (1966–1976)."

But Sichuan opera has gradually fallen out of favor, especially with the
younger generation. Things grew steadily worse for the troupe and it
finally broke up.

Distinguished playwright Wei Minglun has said that vastly changed
lifestyles and a wider variety of recreational activities are the cause
of the decline of local operas.

Folk art

For centuries, artisans in Shanxi's Changzhi City have been renowned for
their "three-dimensional" brocade pictures. The weaving of this brocade,
known as duijin or duihua, was first developed in the Sui (581–618) and
Tang (618–907) dynasties, and became world famous when a suite of duijin
screens made by Li Mo and his son Li Shizhong won the silver medal at
the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco,
California.

Despite the local government's efforts to revive it, the number of
people skilled in the technique of duijin is dwindling. If the situation
continues, only relics of a lost art's ancient past will remain.

The Shanghai Folk Culture Preservation Center, a nongovernmental
organization established in 2004, sponsored a yearlong investigation of
the living conditions of folk artists in the metropolitan area. It found
that most of them were elderly and unable to make ends meet.

In 2002, only about a dozen people in the city still practiced gu
embroidery, a technique handed down from the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644),
and no more than 20 were familiar with the 700-year-old art of lacquer
carving. There were very few successors to the world-renowned art of
Jiangding bamboo engraving.

"As the old craftsmen die off, traditional culture is disappearing at an
astonishing speed," said Professor Tian Qing of CAA. "Without timely
salvation and protection, without any successors, the deaths of these
brilliant artists is like the demolition of a Ming Dynasty memorial arch
or the excavation of a Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) garden."

Marketization

The Tibetan thangka is a painted or embroidered banner hung in a
monastery or near a family altar and carried by lamas in ceremonial
processions. In recent years, thangka have been successfully introduced
into Shanghai's art galleries. Despite their high prices, people vie to
acquire them.

Marketization has been proposed as a possible means of salvation for
beleaguered traditional folk arts. But many of the artists worry about
whether and how the market will accept their crafts, and also how they
will pass on their skills to the next generation.

Of paramount importance is maintaining the original flavor of their
crafts, many of them simple and rustic. The guardians of the arts are
concerned about being pressured to make flashy changes to satisfy market
whims.

But already many handicrafts that were once made only by hand are being
mass-produced.

"Nowadays they use a mold instead of scissors to make paper-cuts, and
use a master plate to reproduce numerous carvings," complained a staffer
at the Shanxi Folk Custom Museum. "Many so-called handicrafts flooding
the market are actually slipshod products."

"They are just blinded by greed, disregarding the long tradition and
folk customs behind the artifacts. By doing so, they are vulgarizing the
folk culture," a collector says.

Salvation

Two years ago China launched a folk culture preservation project. Since
then a number of proposals have been submitted to the annual sessions of
the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political
Consultative Conference.

In 2002 the Ministry of Culture drafted a law on folk culture
preservation. Lawmakers are getting close to finalizing the draft.

Meanwhile, local governments are putting in place policies to protect
folk art. During this year's Spring Festival, the Shanghai Municipal
Administration of Culture, Radio, Film and Television for the first time
granted an art subsidy of 30,000 yuan (US$3,600) each to 27 senior folk
artisans. The Sichuan Department of Culture also took steps to
revitalize the Sichuan opera.

As playwright Wei Minglun said, for any folk art there is a flexible
"transitional zone" between prosperity and extinction. We can either
prolong its life or cut it short.

Rather than destroying these endangered arts with our own hands, we are
duty-bound to preserve the rich cultural heritage passed on from our
ancestors, to benefit future generations.

http://service.china.org.cn/link/wcm/Show_Text?info_id=127886&p_qry=art

__________________

with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.fluktor.de

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