"Harvesting Flax" by Bi Wengui

Chinese folk paintings celebrate ordinary life in extraordinary style

　　By Vanessa Mulquiney

　　Menial tasks like washing bed linens, erecting a new house or picking mushrooms hardly seem subjects that could start an artistic movement, but for Chinese farmers in the 1950s, that's exactly what they were.

　　Chinese folk paintings - also known as farmer or peasant paintings - are instantly recognizable by their bold, exaggerated forms and eccentric use of color. The amateur artists make full use of the canvas - every inch is vibrantly filled with scenes from daily rural life. In folk paintings, a normally tedious task is transformed into a celebration of life. A scene of mushroom picking in the forest gets a cheerful touch of red polka dot trees and butterflies. A funeral procession becomes a joyful picture of song and dance. The artists' liberal use of bright, unnatural colors - think aqua blue goats under a yellow sky and red moon - gives the pictures their distinct, almost child-like quality.

　　"I was instantly seduced by [folk paintings'] vibrant colors and strong sense of design, as well as their sense of humor," says Marie Worth, a U.K.-based art collector and folk painting expert. "These naive paintings delighted me with their air of optimism. You can't look at them without smiling."

　　Though traditional Chinese folk art (such as paper cuts) has long existed in rural areas, the distinct style of modern folk painting is relatively new. It found its start in the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), a nationwide push to rapidly match Western nations' industrial capacity. During this period, countryside workers were requested by the government to mass-produce propaganda artwork to help motivate the masses.

　　Many of these pieces depicted the workers' dreams for greatness, with scenes offering promise of the bountiful rewards that would come from hard work and cooperation. Imagination and exaggeration took center stage - in these paintings, subjects such as livestock and harvests tended to be larger than life.

　　"The artists were asked to paint scenes of working class struggles," says Liao Kaiming, former director of the Folk Art department at the China National Museum of Fine Arts. "They were very willing to paint. They were eager to have a voice in politics."