Note: This post contains painting produced in the last fifty years by an artist who is presumably still alive. I do not have copyright in any way over this artist’s work. I’m reproducing it here because (a) these images are of ethnographic interest, (b) I’d hope that shining more light on contemporary mural and scroll painters will ultimately be good for their trade, and (c) frankly, these people seem unlikely to sue me. To that last point: It’s possible to commission these scrolls very easily in the villages around Mount Wutai. If you’re interested, email me and I’d be happy to give you the contact information of several painters we met.
Structure Type: Village temples 村廟 and opera stages 戲台.
Location: Fu Village, Dai County, Shanxi Province 山西省代縣富村. This post is a composite of multiple small sets of drawings from various parts of the village. The village was originally a conurbation of at least two walled forts; reconstructing where all of these were is now difficult.
Period: Early 20th century, on style. See below for details.
Artist: Unknown.
Mural Contents: Will go through this structure by structure, in no order other than that in which I visited them.
A split center opera-stage 穿心戲樓 has performers’ graffiti going back into the 19th century.
A small shrine by the side of the road has a recent Grandfathers’ House 爺爺家 – style painting. I’m actually not sure what deity this is; it’s either the God of the Earth 土地神 or the God of the Five Ways 五道廟. The iconography is quite funny; note the small lemur-like creatures.
The Temple to Wenchang 文昌廟 was built in 1906. The stele recording this doesn’t mention an opera stage, but it seems hard to believe the stage here was constructed much after. Up on the rafters, the stage has these wonderful little sketches of Westerners. They’re tiny and set very high up, making them very difficult to photograph; these pictures are necessarily blurry and low-resolution. Nevertheless, it’s a wonderful example of the association of Western exotica, opera culture, and folk religion in 18th through 20th century rural China.
The Dragon King Temple 龍王廟 seems to be older than the Wenchang Temple; unfortunately when I visited the place was under renovation and the steles were under a pile of logs. The murals were all gone from within the temple, but the wood plaques over the door still have these wonderful scenes of architectural exotica in gray and orange. This one seems specifically Islamic-inspired – note the minarets on the buildings.
Finally, the western end of the town has a small Temple of the Goddesses 娘娘廟. Parts of the murals survive here, showing trompe l’œil images of hanging scrolls 懸掛捲軸 and screens 屏風.
While none of these pieces are outstanding on their own, as a whole Fu Village is a great example of late-19th and early 20th-century village art – cheerful eclecticism, outward-looking interest, and fascination with decorative exotica like foreign scenes and trompe-l’œil.
Full Gallery
