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.
(China.org.cn by Shao Da, May 7, 2005)