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Chinese Theater Collaborative

Cover of The Lute nianhua lianhuanhua

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New Year's Print of The Lute
《琵琶记》年画连环画 (1958)

Lianhuanhua (Narrative Comics)

INFORMATION

Title: Lianhuanhua New Year’s Print of The Lute 年画连环画琵琶记
Year: 1958
Art: Zheng Mukang 郑慕康 and Zhou Chujiang 周楚江
Textual adaptation: Zhi Guo 治国
Publisher: Shanghai Picture Press 上海画片出版社
Reprint: Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House 上海人民美术出版社 (2010)

INTRODUCTION

Nianhua 年画 or “New Year’s prints” are a genre of folk art associated with the Chinese New Year Holiday that flourished in the late imperial period (the Ming and Qing Dynasties that spanned the 14th to early 20th centuries). Originally, images of menshen 门神 or “door gods” were pasted onto entryways as protection deities and replaced annually during the holiday; these gods were soon joined by a larger repertoire of colorful and auspicious images, often drawn from folk religion and popular narrative. Such prints were pasted onto kang 炕 stove platforms and interior walls, imbuing the home with good luck and creating a festive, holiday atmosphere. Illustrations of iconic scenes of popular Chinese dramas (as well as novels) were one of the popular genres of nianhua.

Serial picture versions of theatrical nianhua have been produced at least since the Qing dynasty. Such “stagings” are comprised of a series of images that concisely illustrate the plot of an entire drama and were produced by workshops that specialized in producing popular culture at the local and regional level. During the 1950s, when the new communist government centralized art and literary production, such “residual forms,” were associated strongly with folk art and thus “the people.” Since the communist state valorized popular forms that the people “loved” xiwenlejian 喜闻乐见 (lit. “liked to hear and enjoyed seeing”), nianhua production was taken up by state presses. While new, revolutionary contents featured prominently, traditional dramas continued to be popular sources of material for nianhua.

This module considers a modern example of such a “nianhuan lianhuanhua” or “serial picture New Year’s Print,” the 1958 graphic adaptation of The Lute. The communist literary establishment had debated the revolutionary merits of the original play in 1956; since the story pitched the suffering of ordinary people against the comforts of the imperial ruling class, it passed muster. The Lute’s publication as a nianhua coincided with beginning of the Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961) that claimed tens of millions of lives. The starvation pictured in the prints was undoubtedly resonant and viscerally moving to a readership whose own circumstances might have been similarly harrowing.

The nianhua illustrated by Zheng Mukang 郑慕康 (1901-1982) and Zhou Chujiang 周楚江 (1921-). Zheng was the older artist and excelled in portraiture and figure drawing; if we assume a standard division of labor, it’s likely that he painted the figures, while the younger Zhou (who began his art studies in 1938 and worked in stage design in addition to painting) rendered each panel’s background. In the late 1950s, the Shanghai Picture Press 上海画片出版社 first published the print in 18 panels aligned in three vertical strips of paper; it was beautifully reissued as an exquisite hardcover booklet by Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House 上海人民美术出版社 in 2010. The illustrations and captions reproduced in this module are sourced from the 2010 booklet.

THEME: Reconciling Auspicious and Inauspicious Color Contrasts

Although a print of the 1958 nianhua lianhuanhua of The Lute is not readily available, consulting a similar adaptation of The Western Wing from 1958 can give us a sense of what the original looked like.

The Western Wing is rendered here in sixteen panels printed on four vertical strips; according to the 2010 reprint, The Lute’s 18 panels were originally printed on three strips. Captions to each panel would have appeared beneath the image.

The booklet’s introductory essay by Liu Yongsheng 刘永胜, author of The Illustrated History of New China’s Lianhuanhua, draws our attention to some of the key aesthetic choices that “dramatize” 戏剧化 this adaptation. While the figures are rendered realistically and perspective is maintained, Liu points out that the characters’ expressions and postures are exaggerated, “highlighting the theatrical effect of the original drama” 突出了原本戏的戏剧化的效果 (7). Furthermore, his essay indicates, white outlines that trace the edges of characters’ outfits add dimension, creating an effect of a performers on stage. Indeed, Liu’s analysis of the nianhua repeatedly uses the language of theater, praising, for example, the artists’ use of “props” to add historicity and characterization. Cai Yong’s erudition and scholarly success, for example, is evoked through landscape and flower paintings that hang behind him in panel 4, paintings that also allude to the “husk wife” 糟糠之妻 he has left behind but not forgotten.

Click to expand/collapse Translation Notes

Chinese Captions	CTC Translation
蔡邕闷闷不乐地回府之后，牛丞相派来的媒婆已经等在家中。	After Cai Yong sullenly returned to his residence, the matchmaker dispatched by Prime Minister Niu was already in the house.
蔡邕忍受不住媒婆的唠叨，大发雷霆，把媒婆赶出门外。	Cai Yong couldn’t stand the matchmaker’s prattling and he flew into a terrible rage, throwing her out the door.
媒婆背地抱怨蔡邕不识抬举。	As she left, the matchmaker complained to herself that Cai Yong couldn’t see a favor when it came his way.

Indeed, the somber gray tones of the landscape painting are a contrast to the rich hues used in panels that depict Cai Yong’s ordeals in the capital. Even in the fourth panel, in which the monochrome landscape painting is visually echoed in the gray rocks just outside Cai’s residence, the garden is framed with auspiciously red columns and fencing. Liu Yongsheng explains that the gloomy cool tones used in depicting Wuniang and Cai Yong’s parents reflect the poverty of ordinary people, while the bright, saturated colors used to illustrate Cai Yong in the capital display wealth and rank. The stark contrast between these two palettes, Liu writes, underscores the depths of the Cai family’s hardships and Wuniang’s unflinching determination in the face of such difficulties. The family’s dire situation visually overwhelms the nianhua with a tragic mood—one third of the panels explicitly feature the stark situation in the Cai family home. The sumptuous comforts of the warmly colored capital scenes are continuously deflated by Cai Yong’s weary demeanor. But nianhua are by definition festive images, intended to bring good luck and joyfully ornament homes for the New Year holiday. How can we reconcile this festive atmosphere with such an inauspicious color scheme and tragic story? Let us explore how colors work in the nianhua to both amplify contrast and serve as an emotional bridge that connects and eventually reconciles the two strands of narrative.

Click to expand/collapse Translation Notes

Chinese Captions	CTC Translation
蔡邕在京城遇到牛丞相逼婚，却不知家乡遇到灾年，家无余食	While Cai Yong was meeting with Prime Minister Niu’s forced marriage in the capital, he didn’t know that his hometown was meeting with a famine year and his family was without food;
父母二老每日望门而叹，后悔当初不该强迫蔡邕赶考，如今家中没有一个可以依靠的人。	The two old parents looked out from the door and sighed every day, regretting that they had earlier forced Cai Yong to go and take exams and that now the family had no one they could rely on.

Following on the heels of the matchmaker scene in the capital, the fifth panel returns us to the countryside. The green hues of Cai’s garden are replaced here with barren trees covered in snow. Cold permeates even the characters’ clothing. In panel 4, Cai Yong wears a warm, purple robe, a sign of his success in the imperial exams. In panel 5, his mother wears a cool, violet top. Similar in hue but differing in temperature, these two colors at once link and draw a distinction between the two family members. Parallelism in the text that accompanies the illustration (both Cai Yong and his family “meet with” yudao 遇到 disasters) also links the two branches of the family. The material disparity between the two homes is further amplified by the difference of seasons. It is clearly winter in panels 5-7, but when the story returns to Cai Yong in the capital in panel 8, the outdoor scene features blooming flowers. Wuniang, clad in a cool green throughout her ordeal caring for the Cai parents is chromatically and seasonally transformed when she goes off to the capital to search for and eventually reunite with her husband. She sets out when the trees are leafless but arrives in a verdant city. The pale yellow of her robe anticipates the play’s (somewhat) happy reunion.

Click to expand/collapse Translation Notes

Chinese Captions	CTC Translation
五娘与父母在家中艰难度日，蔡邕在京城却要与牛丞相之女完婚。	While Wuniang and his parents were living though such difficult times, in the capital, Cai Yong wanted to bring an end to the marriage with Prime Minister Niu’s daughter.
虽然蔡邕百般不愿，但也拗不过牛丞相。	Although he was unwilling in every way, Cai Yong couldn’t dissuade Prime Minister Niu.
洞房花烛之际，蔡邕长呼短叹，愁肠百结。	When it came time to “light candles in the wedding chamber,” Cai Yong sighed and sighed, his stomach twisted in knots of worry.

Color works ambivalently even in the wedding scene featured in panel 8. The wedding is easily the most saturated of the nianhua’s panels, including deep reds that signify joyful nuptials, and thus accords most strongly with the festive aesthetics of the nianhua form. Yet the couple, clad in red, is arranged on opposite sides of the panel. The ornately dressed bride sits on the bed at the left edge of the frame, suggesting an anticipated consummation. However, Cai Yong, also decked out in rich, red robes, looks out the window on the far right side of the composition. The caption indicates that “his stomach is tied in knots of worry” chouchangbaijie 愁肠百结. This is hardly a picture of conjugal bliss! A picture of a couple dressed in much less sumptuously saturated clothing hangs on the wall between the two newlyweds, perhaps recalling the humbler joy of Cai’s first marriage in his hometown. Cai’s gaze is, after all, directed past the edge of the frame, suggesting that his thoughts are far away, with that bride. And indeed if we follow his eyeline, using it as a graphic connection between panels, we are met with an image of the family that he left behind. Cai might not be able to literally see what is happening as his wife eats rice husks to save food for her in-laws, but the lianhuanhua binds his colorful world to the pallid one of his hometown. The movement between Cai in the capital and the Cais in the countryside even acquires a certain narrative and chromatic rhythm. As in the transition between panels 4 and 5, panels 8 and 9 are composed with visual momentum emanating from Cai, dressed in richly colored robes, gesturing (panel 4) or looking (panel 8) toward the right and thus inaugurating a narrative shift to his hometown where tragic and washed-out scenes unfold in three panels before returning to Cai Yong’s life in the capital.

Click to expand/collapse Translation Notes

Chinese Captions	CTC Translation
二老在家中先后去世，蔡邕在京城也是如坐针毯。	After the two elders died in succession at home, Cai Yong was also feeling as if he was laying on a bed of nails in the capital.
这一日，蔡邕烦闷，就取出焦尾琴，在荷花池边弹琴起来，	On this day, Cai Yong was gloomy, and so he took out his “Scorched Tail Zither” and plucked at it by the lotus pond.
不成想心事都从琴声中传出，被牛小姐听去。	He didn’t think that all the things on his mind would be disseminated through zither’s tune and then discerned by Miss Niu.

The next time we return to Cai, in panel 12, he is once again melancholic, now playing the zither next to a lotus pond in his garden to give vent to his frustrated feelings. He is dressed in a pale violet robe, echoing the cooler tones of his mother’s clothing in previous panels. Even the table on which his lute rests, though red, is relatively less saturated, better matching the somber tone of his zither. His new bride is is eavesdropping on the far side of the panel, once again far removed from her spouse. Hiding behind a tree and guessing at her husband’s woes from afar implies that despite the passage of time, the couple has not grown emotionally close. They may live together in a grand mansion, but they remain distant from each other. Nevertheless, despite Cai’s gloomy mood and its “dissemination” through the tune he plays, the garden’s atmosphere is quite lovely. Blooming lotus flowers line the bottom right of the scene and other flowers bloom throughout the garden. Cai is accompanied by a servant who fans him, ensuring he stays cool and comfortable. Again, then, while the nianhua accords here with the colorful aesthetic appropriate to the festive form, what should be an unambiguously joyful scene of garden frolic is deflated by the emotional weight of the story’s melodramatic plot.

Click to expand/collapse Translation Notes

Chinese Captions	CTC Translation
却说五娘来到京城，正遇弥陀寺大法会，便往寺中慕华求食，就将公婆真容供于佛前。	We left off with Wuniang going to the capital, there she encountered a large Buddhist gathering in the Mituo Temple. She thus went in to beg for alms and offered the portrait of her in laws in front of the Buddha.
恰好遇到蔡邕也来寺中烧香，他见到父母遗像就问庙中和尚画像来源，和尚说是一个女子挂在庙中的。	It just so happened that Cai Yong also came to the temple to burn incense. He saw his parents’ (death) portrait and asked a monk at the temple where it came from. The monk said that a woman had hung it in the temple.

In panel 16, Cai finally “encounters” the parents he has been fretting over when he is stunned to find their ancestral portrait hanging on a red pillar in a grand temple near the capital. The deeply saturated color of the pillar dramatically offsets the muted tones of the parents’ portrait. Cai points to the image and shock registers on his face. Painted by Wuniang, the image shows a pair of haggard old people—so worn down that in other versions of the story Cai is not able recognize them as his own parents. In the panel, Cai is once again wearing ornate purple robes that denote his high rank, and he is accompanied by likewise well-dressed servants. Their outfits are as saturated as the colors of the temple, chromatically linking them to this rich locale. The parents, however, belong to a different chromatic register, the grayish tones of their famine-stricken hometown. They are quite out of place in the capital city.

Click to expand/collapse Translation Notes

Chinese Captions	CTC Translation
蔡邕夫妻重逢之后，蔡邕立即上书皇上回家安葬双亲。	After the married couple reunited, Cai Yong immediately sent a memorial to the emperor asking to go home and properly bury his parents.
皇上恩准，蔡邕夫妇归家之后，一是重新安葬双亲，二是拜谢张太公。	The emperor benevolently allowed it. After returning home, the couple’s first order of business was the parents’ reburial and the second was thanking Elder Zhang.
不久，皇上降旨，施表蔡邕一家孝义，自此蔡邕一家美名传天下。	Not long after, the emperor issued an edict declaring Cai Yong’s family as a paragon of filial piety. From then on, the Cai family’s good name was made known to all.

The nianhua’s final panel reconciles the graphic mismatch between the richly colored capital and the washed-out hinterland that we saw in panel 16. Cai Yong returns to his hometown accompanied by Wuniang to pay his respects to his dead parents and to thank Elder Zhang for his support of Cai’s family while he was away. Cai is dressed in his purple robes, but pictured on his knees in front of the parents’ tomb. Elder Zhang, though clad in more humble attire, towers over Cai, pointing an accusatory finger at the prodigal son. Echoing the composition of panel 16, the final panel suggests that Cai is as surprising in this landscape as his parents had been in the capital. Not only do both panels feature an emotionally overwrought character pointing to someone who is out of place, but two servants and an altar with red candles reappears as well. A sort of equilibrium is reached between Cai’s life as an official in the capital and the situation in his hometown. While there are no blooming flowers in this nature scene, the grave is located in a green forest, not the barren wasteland that Wuniang and Cai’s parents inhabited in the years of famine. The abandoned wife, pictured in the panel next to Cai Yong, is wearing richer robes than she had been throughout the story. Although in the drama, Cai’s second wife also travels to their hometown, here she has been absented, likely to conform to contemporary marriage reform messaging that rejected family arrangements with multiple wives in favor of “modern monogamous marriages.”

This final panel thus works to overcome the nianhua’s two layers of inauspicious mood. The Cai family’s literally gray life in their hometown is redeemed in the verdant landscape and Wuniang’s return to her (significantly wealthier) husband. Cai’s dark moods and inability to settle into the colorful capital due to his obligations at home are also resolved: his beloved wife is back with him and his family, though deceased, has been honored as a model of filial piety by the emperor. In this adaptation, Cai Yong seems to have done little in the way of filial devotion beyond going to the capital to take exams and it is Wuniang’s filial actions that drive the development of the plot. Yet if we read the contrast between the sumptuous capital and poverty-stricken hinterland as a visual amplification of Wuniang’s desperation, we can also appreciate that while surrounded by colorful splendor, Cai Yong is haunted by the muted hues of his hometown.

WORKS CONSULTED: CLICK TO EXPAND/COLLAPSE

Flath, James. The Cult of Happiness: Nianhua, Art, and History in Rural North China. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004.

Liu, Yongsheng 刘永胜. "Zhongzhen xiaoyi Zhao Wuniang: chongdu lianhuanhua Pipaji" 忠贞孝义赵五娘：重读连环画《琵琶记》(Loyal and Steadfast, Filial and Righteous Zhao Wuniang: Rereading The Lute Lianhuanhua). Pipaji nianhua lianhuanhua 琵琶记年画连环画 (Serial New Year’s Print of The Lute), 5-9. Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Press, 2010.

Zhou, Chujiang 周楚江. "Shanghai meishu zhuanke xuexiao koushu shi zhi er" 上海美术专科学校口述史之二 (Shanghai University Fine Arts College Oral History, No. 2) Shanghai dansan 上海档案 (Shanghai Archives). Accessed June 12, 2023. https://www.archives.sh.cn/datd/slyj/ksls/202209/t20220923_66721.html

AUTHOR

Julia Keblinska