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Chinese Huxian Lotus Folk Painting browse these categories for related items... All Items: Popular Collectibles:Cultural:Chinese: Pre 2000: item # 717657 Please refer to our stock # 03-61 when inquiring.
Silk Road Gallery PO Box 2175 Branford, Connecticut 06405, USA (203) 208-0771 Guest Book $280 |
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| A Chinese folk painting from a rural community in Shaanxi Province celebrates the beauty of pink lotus plants blooming in a pond. The lotus, emblem of purity and perfection, is highly regarded in China, where every part of the plant has a use--as food, medicine or cosmetics. Chinese artists often depicted the lotus along with ducks, as in this painting where the lotus plants are oversized in relation to the black ducks swimming in a stream through the stems. Two seals at the top left of the painting indicate its origin as Huxian County, China's first official peasant painting community, established in 1958. From Huxian, the peasant painting movement spread across China and by 1989 there were 51 such communities. (See "The Best in Modern Chinese Folk Painting," Foreign Language Press, Beijing, 1989.) We first visited Huxian in 1991 while on an exchange program in nearby Xian, and after meeting the painters and visiting their homes, we became intrigued by their paintings of rural life. Subsequently, we visited a number of other remote painting communities. Style, technique and quality varied widely among painter and regions but each offered an inside look at local life. Some of the communities and individuals benefited from the teaching of fine artists who were sent to live in rural communities during the Cultural Revolution. When their coaching was absorbed and merged with naive perspective, marvelous interpretations of country life were produced by some of the peasant painters. Unfortunately, after the paintings became more widely recognized, they were copied over and over for sale in tourist stores. Many of the original paintings such as this one, which we purchased from the artist in Huxian in 1991, had great folk appeal. It is matted and is in excellent condition. Dimensions including mat: height 38-1/2" (98 cm), width 27-1/2" (70 cm). Dimensions without mat: height 34-1/2" (88 cm), width 23-1/2" (60 cm). | ||||||||
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