In the early 1980s, the Yongping Cultural Center in Yanchuan County, Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, set out to collect folk handicrafts from farmers.
The center's idea kicked off a range of group and individual efforts that have helped a vibrant, unique folk-art tradition thrive in the county to this day.
One of the "Homes of Modern Folk Art" as designated by the Ministry of Culture, the county - situated in the Yellow River Valley in the northern part of Shaanxi Province - boasts a long history of folk art. Many farmers there engage in paper-cutting during their spare time.
The leaders of the local cultural center planned to put together a collection back in the 1980s. They reasoned a show would help inspire people's interest in making handiworks, which were almost snuffed out during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76). They thought it would help preserve the county's tradition of folk art, Feng Shanyun, then a clerk at the cultural center, recalled.
Feng focused his collecting on paper-cuts at first.
Then by accident he noticed the patches on local people's often worn-out clothes. Many patches were shaped like animals and plants.
Besides their practical use, the patches also added an artistic touch to everyday work clothes.
Later Feng discovered that such patches can be found not only on clothes, but also on the door curtains of the farmers' cave dwellings, on shoes, pillow covers and on many other daily-use items made of cloth.
And such "patch pictures" could be found in almost every household.
Among the handicrafts ultimately collected, as many as 70 per cent were such patch works.
Feng, who also came from a farming family in Yanchuan, soon realized that the patches might be a unique and precious folk-art genre.
In 1982, more than 100 pieces of patch works were exhibited in Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi Province in Northwest China, and the show got favorable comments from both art-circle insiders and ordinary people.
The Xi'an success inspired Feng and his colleagues at the cultural center to set out to preserve and spread the folk-art form.
Twenty years have passed and Feng Shanyun is still busy with the folk-art patches.
Between 1982 and 1994, Feng and his colleagues organized dozens of classes to teach local women farmers how to develop their home-spun skill for sewing beautiful patches into making "patch works."
A number of the farming women have risen to prominence in the county.
Artists of the older generation are represented by Gao Fenglian, Liu Honglan and Wang Zhilan, aged between 68 and 74, who concentrate on themes that reflect traditional culture and folk tales, such as the Door God, the Dragon King, the Unicorn delivering a son, the scarecrow guarding fields in autumn, and the Kitchen God. Gao Fenglian is also recognized as a famous folk paper-cut artist in China.
The younger generation is represented by Liu Jieqiong, aged 38, and Gao Liping, in her early 50s, who take their subjects and themes mostly from real life.
Earlier this year, the Beijing-based Foreign Language Press, a publishing firm devoting itself to introducing Chinese culture to foreigners, published an English-language album of patch works.
The album, entitled "The Patch-Work Art of Shaanxi Province," was edited by Feng Shanyun and Lan Peijin.
The book consists of nearly 100 pieces of patch works by Yanchuan farmers, including Feng Shanyun himself.
These works are the cream of the crop among Yanchuan patch works and provide a general look at the folk-art genre.
Origins
According to Feng Shanyun, patch works originated in the distant past with the emergence of cotton cloth.
The cloth was the product of the farming society on the rugged Loess Plateau, where the young married women quickly became nimble-fingered from sewing patches on the torn clothes of their husbands and children.
Over time, they developed ways to shape suitable patches into pictures of animals and plants.
All the raw materials for patch-work pictures are made by farmers themselves: The cotton is planted by them, the cloth is woven by them, and the colors dyed piece by piece by them on their kitchen ranges.
"The Yellow River, forging its turbulent way through the Loess Plateau, one of the cradles of Chinese civilization, has for centuries been a source of inspiration for patch works," said Feng.
Farmers use patch-work pictures to reflect life on the land. The coarse, thick texture and bright and rich colors of the homespun cloth embody the simple, honest, kind and open-hearted character of the Loess people.
The northern part of Shaanxi Province is the home of folk paper-cuts, which are the basis of the shapes of patch work pictures.
However, due to the different materials used, the shapes of patch work pictures are more condensed and active than those of paper-cuts, and their outlines are simple and powerful like the stone frescoes of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220 AD) unearthed in the northern part of Shaanxi.
The colors used in patch-work art are based on those used in folk embroideries, but they are much more distinctive.
Because the pictures are made up of layers upon layers of cloth - up to more than 10 layers in some cases - the relief and plastic effects created by the thickness are incomparably greater than the one-dimensional visuals of paper-cuts.
Promotion
Besides spreading and popularizing the folk-art form, Feng "paints" patch work pictures.
Born and brought up in a village on the Loess Plateau, Feng insists that he is a farmer. His works are closely related to the land in which he was born.
"Some artists came to the grass-root level to 'experience the life.' But I do not need to do so, because I myself am a farmer," said Feng.
The folk artist said he values the response from his fellow villagers much more than those from art critics.
Once he showed his patch-work picture, "The Burning Sun," to an old farmer, who became very excited while looking at the picture.
"That is really like when I was working in the burning sun," said the old man, pointing at the picture, which depicted a gray-bearded man squatting in the field for a rest.
Another work in which Feng takes pride is "The Yellow River." It is a huge patch-work picture, and was purchased by the National Art Museum a few years ago.
On the left of the picture is the mystical taiji symbol of yin and yang (the cosmic opposites), which Feng said symbolizes the source of the Yellow River, the "mother river" of China.
Standing upright in the middle of the picture is the figure of a mother calling to her sons and daughters. She is also the goddess of protection and propagation according to Yellow River folk culture.
A father squatting like a mountain close to the mother, with one eye open and the other closed, is seeking a livelihood. A family sitting around an ox in the lower left corner of the patch work are descendants of the land.
There are also people laboring, donkeys trotting, oxen pulling plows, boatmen defying tempestuous storms, rampant male lions and soaring dragons and birds.
Feng said he tries to reflect his understanding of the land over a long period of time through the patch work, which is an artistic image condensed and distilled from the strong feelings of life.
The patch work, is "an attempt to express the spirit of the Yellow River through the primitive culture and philosophy of its people," said Feng.
(China Daily September 27, 2002)
