Appreciation of facial makeup art in Peking Opera.

Appreciation of Facial Mask Art —— The Formation and Function of Peking Opera Facial Mask

Among all kinds of operas in China, Peking Opera is relatively young, with a history of more than 200 years. It was in the fifty-fifth year of Qing Qianlong (1790) that four Huizhou classes (Sanqing, Sixi, Chuntai and Hechun) came to Beijing one after another to form and develop, and Peking Opera masks gradually improved with the formation and development of Peking Opera.

Peking Opera masks have absorbed the advantages of Kunqu Opera, Yi Opera, Bangzi Opera and Huiban Pihuang Opera. It has gone through the process from simple to complex, continuous innovation, development and gradual improvement, and has become a more systematic and standardized facial makeup art on the stage of Peking Opera. It can be said that Peking Opera facial makeup is a branch of China traditional opera facial makeup, and it is an inherent part of all the stage arts of traditional Peking Opera.

The stage masks of Beijing Opera have their own characteristics. Without a stage, the specific characters and masks to be shown will lose their fundamental significance. The stage mask of Peking Opera is an art written on the face. It is a variety of maps drawn by actors with exaggerated techniques and changes in colors and lines. In China's traditional Peking Opera repertoire, clean and ugly historical figures, a few students and actors have relatively standardized masks, which are used to show the status, personality and appearance of the characters in the play, enhance the artistic appeal, and help to increase the performance effect, enrich the stage and beautify the stage.

Peking Opera Mask or Stage Art Skills? As soon as the audience looks at Facebook, they can have a general understanding of the role, and they can concentrate on enjoying the actors' performances without spending a lot of time exploring the plot. This is a very clever artistic skill, which is not found in other artistic categories except China Opera. For example, Sima Yi in Empty City has a white face. As soon as he came out, the audience knew that he would definitely fall into Zhuge Liang's trap and dare not lead the troops into the empty city. The audience will naturally concentrate on enjoying the actor's singing performance. For another example, the white Weichi Gong and Wei Chibaolin in the play are both black faces, and the audience can tell at a glance that they are related by blood, while the red-faced Liu Guojia and Wei Chibaolin are not related by blood.

Since the 1920s, there have been great differences on the understanding of Facebook. Some people who don't know and are not familiar with Facebook put forward a view that Facebook is too far away from the faces of real people and that Facebook should not appear on the stage. In recent years, this view has become very popular. I think China opera has been developing and enriching from Facebook to Facebook. China's operas have always been empty, not real. What Guan Yu and Jiang Gan look like is only described in novels or folk oral literature. It is a kind of progress and improvement for traditional opera to sublimate these intangible images into image art. If the actors don't sketch Facebook to perform on stage, the clean and ugly lines will die first, and then the aria that constitutes the program will be removed. I'm afraid China opera will be lost, and it will return to the form of the entrance song of the masked warrior Lan Ling.

Nowadays, many friends often ask how many masks there are in Peking Opera. This question is really difficult to answer. From the perspective of Peking Opera repertoire alone, there are thousands of traditional repertoires recorded, covering almost thousands of years of history in China from the legendary Pangu to the Qing Dynasty. It is difficult to count how many historical figures are involved in the traditional repertoire of Peking Opera. If we classify them according to certain rules, this problem may be solved.