New Year paintings are wood engraving pictures that people use during the Spring Festival to ring out the old, ring in the new, seek good luck and ward off evil spirits. The elegant painting and engraving are well worth appreciating. There are a wide variety of New Year paintings among which Xichu New Year paintings exhibit the richest contents. Passing down traditional culture from generation to generation with characters, plots and painting, Xichu New Year paintings are, so to speak, the most informative and aesthetic New Year paintings. Because operas were played by piece in the past, New Year paintings of dramatic genre were called Xichu New Year paintings where Xi means opera and Chu means piece.
Xichu New Year paintings of various forms are stuck on to walls, doors, panes, kang (a heatable brick bed) sides and lamp surfaces, and become part of interior decoration. They are there for people to enjoy and explain history and culture to their children, so they also constitute an important part of little tradition education in folk China.
Xichu New Year paintings became popular with the prosperity and development of Chinese operas since the Qianlong period of the Qing dynasty. During this course, because of the differences in play, character, posture, facial type, costume, setting and tool in various local operas, the differences in engraving skill, color process and manufacturing method in different regions, and the differences in external factors like economic conditions, Xichu New Year paintings developed into various regional styles with distinctive characteristics.
A Xichu New Year painting is engraved after repetitive adjustments to the manuscript of the touching plots and graceful expressions and postures from a well-chosen drama played by a renowned actor/actress, which is completed by a consummate painter at the scene. The painting not only tells the essential plots of the drama, but also vividly depicts the characters, costumes, appearances, postures, formula, scenes and stage properties. It converts the cream of drama, which is a kind of temporal art, to the composition, colors and lines of a New Year painting, which is a kind of spatial art. In the creating process, the painter would usually add their unique ideas to make their work the crystal of engraving art and drama.
