Folk fabric: Chinese villages where unsung artists dwell - Culture - folk arts in China - Brief Article

New Internationalist, April, 2002 by Wen Chihua, Zheng Zhengwen

A 350-metre-long patchwork quilt made of 1,000 cloth pieces is carrying an urgent cultural message to the Chinese. The quilt symbolizes the need to preserve the country's folk art, which is in danger of dying out. One thousand people from farming families living along the Yellow River contributed their talents to the quilt, named Qianjiaxiu, Chinese for '1,000 families embroidery'.

Guo Qingfeng, a folk-arts teacher from north-west China's Shaanxi province, spearheaded the project. 'Folk art is like the soil of our traditional culture,' he says.

In their mission to conserve folk art, Guo and five students set off from the origin of the Yellow River at Qinghai in north-west China, and travelled to its outlet at Shandong in the east. The idea of patching together 1,000 pieces came from an ancient ritual in the Yellow River Valley, in which local families praying for good harvest and fortune made a quilt out of 100 embroidered pieces to please the deities. The tradition has been dying out as more and more people have left their villages for towns and cities.

The pieces of this new quilt were dyed in five colours: blue, black, red, yellow and white. These represented the five natural elements in Chinese culture: wood, water, fire, earth and metal.

A particularly impressive piece of the quilt was contributed by Chang Zhenfang, a well-known folk artist from Ansai county. The 78-year-old grandmother drew a few lines on a piece of yellow cloth to contour two lovers standing side by side.

'The lines she drew can be compared to Picasso's paintings,' Guo says. He learned of Chang's heart-breaking story while watching her draw. She gave birth to 11 children, but only two survived. A local shaman told her that she must kill the elder or the younger would die. The illiterate Chang believed him and killed the child. After that, she went insane.

Art, however, has performed a miracle: Chang becomes calm once she starts paper-cutting or drawing pictures.

When Guo left, the ageing Chang seemed to hint at her impending death. 'Next time you come, I won't be here any more,' she told the teacher.

Such words give Guo a further sense of urgency. 'We cannot let folk artists like Cranny Chang go without leaving their art behind,' he said. 'So our Qianjiaxiu is to pray for the preservation of our cultural ecology to the general public.'

Guo says his work really began in 1989 when he spent a month in villages and towns along the Wuding, a Yellow River tributary. Over the following years, he toured around the Yellow River Valley, took extensive notes, interviewed more than 20 artists and collected well over 300 paper-cuttings.

'The fieldwork over the past 12 years deepened my feelings for the Yellow River,' Guo says. 'Sometimes I feel as if the river were staring at me sadly, urging me to quicken the pace of my work'.