Do you like dough sculpture to promote traditional culture?

The dough sculptures in Xinzhou Dough Statues and Jiangzhou are the best.

First, the connotation of dough sculpture

Shanxi New Year pictures are simple, rich, simple, elegant and clean, which is the comprehensive condensation of nature worship, religious thought, psychological consciousness and modeling language. General shapes are neat and general, with rich connotations, including geometric straight lines, suitable patterns inherited from Qin and Han dynasties, and specific figures, animals and plants with unique Han folk modeling styles. The fusion of different modeling consciousness constitutes the unique content of folk festivals and forms a special Han folk art form.

Qingming custom and cold food: the combination of Qingming and cold food was in the Tang Dynasty. As a symbol of ancient times, the customs and festivals at that time have increased the compound content of worshipping gods, ancestors and sages. Therefore; The wind of sweeping graves is particularly strong. If offering sacrifices to gods is a feature of the Spring Festival custom, then Qingming is mainly about offering sacrifices to ancestors and people. Confucius said, "The things in life are courtesy; When you die, you will be buried and sacrificed. " So we attach great importance to "death is like life". Ancestral temples and ancestral graves are the soul of nature and the root of home. In southern Shanxi and northern Shanxi, flour should be used as a tribute when sweeping. In the south of Shanxi, it is called snake dish, and some snakes are divided into one-headed snakes and two-headed snakes. Before ancestor worship, the younger generation eats the head of a snake, which means to kill the head of a poisonous snake and avoid disaster. This kind of snake dish is simple in shape and rarely carved, which seems to have a simple and clear legacy of Han and Tang dynasties.

Hundreds of cold swallow pasta widely produced by Han people to indicate the arrival of spring have also been renamed as "Ziyan noodles". In fact, according to Shanxi's natural geographical location and climate characteristics, the sky is the season when everything is born, so the smart women in Shanxi feel the natural changes and create fresh and flexible things with soft dough and skillful hands, which are full of vitality and show a wonderful and magical Han folk art world. Especially in Daixian County, Shanxi Province, all natural things, such as long aquatic soil, are all shapes in what you see in your eyes and think in your heart. These dough sculptures are exquisite and unique. Tigers, lions, horses, cows, cats, dragons, monkeys, sheep and other plastic animals.

Tomb-Sweeping Day is still a festival of hope, a blessing for the return of spring, and a hope for the prosperity of all things, although it is imbued with a deep and mysterious atmosphere because of the combination of cold food customs. The dough sculpture art naturally becomes the main means of this blessing and the spiritual expression of the world. Dough figurines make custom become rich culture, and custom provides soil and air for the occurrence and development of dough figurines, and finally makes folk art and folklore become a cultural whole.

July 15th and herding sheep: Every folk festival has its specific meaning, cultural orientation and expression.

Herding sheep, offering sacrifices to ancestors and giving gifts to relatives and friends on July 15 is a major feature of Shanxi folk customs. Traditionally, July 15 is called "Ghost Festival", which originated from the Buddhist legend that Mulian, a disciple of Buddha Sakyamuni, failed to do good deeds before his death, and his soul fell into the hungry ghost road after his death. The food mouth turned into a fire, and she endured all the hardships and looked at the Buddha. The Buddha told her to hold the Orchid Festival on July 15th and buy all kinds of fruits, relying on the kindness of all Buddhists and monks to turn her soul over. This theory is also integrated with the Taoist saying that "local officials are exempt from sin" in China, which deeply affects people's lives, thus forming the custom of steaming sheep to worship their ancestors on July 15 every year. In fact, the original intention of ancestor worship on July 15 is "Ghost Festival". This religious festival has developed to the point where there are no ghosts at all, and it has become a festival. A few days before the festival, three smart women from the countryside got together to make fine white flour. During their parents' short conversation, they twisted, cut, pressed, tied and picked beans. All creatures jumped out of their hands: rabbits, tigers, sheep, fish, lions, pigs, chickens and puppies. When the dishes are cooked and steamed in a hurry, they are all fat, tender, flexible and charming, and then painted and dressed neatly, which becomes the best gift for friends and relatives. The custom in northern Shanxi sends boys as sheep and sheep as auspicious penis. It is a way to conform to the order of yin and yang to send women as fish and fish as yin. The goat in the north of Shanxi is rich and full in shape and powerful in connotation. The contrast between the points and lines on its body makes it very Han and Wei style, which is related to the local historical culture and geographical environment. The animal steamed buns in the south of Shanxi are exquisite in shape, gloomy in expression and strong in color. The so-called face sheep is actually an agent. Birds and beasts actually have everything, as well as the combination of the zodiac, two sons playing peaches and five sons competing for food.

Dingxiang's "noodle sheep" is famous at home and abroad for its plump and beautiful shape. The shape is as big as three to five pounds of white flour and as small as three to five inches, depending on the gift recipient. In modeling style, the characteristics of randomness are accurately grasped. In the simple overall modeling, points and lines are pressed out with combs, awls and other objects, or delicate patterns are made with surfaces, forming a strong strength contrast, much like the use of line carving in stone carving in Korea and Huo Qubing. Grasp the appropriate limits in the production skills, make a shape but not enough, leaving the natural hair and steam on the surface to complete the work, so as to give full play to the characteristics of the surface, reflect the texture of the surface, natural, simple and kind, and make people fondle it. In particular, there is a kind of modeling called "unclear", in which several chubby dolls are intertwined to play, so that you can't tell whose arm is whose leg, and only see a group of exquisite modeling and exquisite creativity, which is amazing.

Second, life etiquette and custom and dough modeling

Face-dressing people play an important role in collective custom activities (seasonal customs of Chinese New Year) and play an irreplaceable role in all ceremonies that show the meaning of life.

The full moon was the first grand ceremony when people came to this world, and the dough sculptures at that time were also quite exquisite. In Huoxian area, grandma wants to make a straight food called "Kun Kun", which contains fine Chinese zodiac animals. If a child belongs to something, just click a red dot on the animal sign. This red dot is called "Diannao". A beautiful dragon and phoenix or tiger head is placed in the middle of "completed", which is called dragon and phoenix becoming auspicious or tiger exorcising evil spirits. Give it to children, to relatives and friends who come to visit and celebrate, in order to avoid disaster. People in northern Shanxi often make flower steamed buns called "peaches", which are shaped like breasts and have red nipples. The steamed stuffed bun is decorated with various flowers and auspicious patterns. Peach was originally an exorcism in ancient customs, meaning "escape" and avoiding disaster. It is a metaphor of maternal characteristics in rural folk customs to make it breast-shaped to show maturity. When a child is one year old, he should also make a similar big flower bun or the zodiac. Modeling is clumsy or clever, elegant or vulgar, which varies from place to place.

The custom of wedding has always been a very grand life ceremony. As the saying goes, "it is better to get into a primary school than to get married." This is a custom in northern Shanxi. The bride and groom each eat a pair of "happy fish and lucky rabbits" on the morning of the party. A pair of face rabbits connected by red lines are placed at the top of the cave door to symbolize the Phnom Penh of the jade rabbit. In fact, the original intention of rabbit is tiger, and it is the protector of Han folk towns and houses to exorcise evil spirits. Wedding dough modeling must mention the "court food" in Xinzhou, Dingxiang, Yuanping and Daixian. Generally, three or five kilograms of white flour should be made into a pair. Most of the models are jade rabbits carrying peaches and goldfish carrying pomegranates. The above shapes are carefully carved with the Chinese zodiac, vivid and interesting, colorful, lively, line and surface, dot and block, plastic and painting, clumsy and clever.

It is a custom for the younger generation to celebrate their birthdays for people in their 60s. Congratulations on steaming beautiful big birthday peaches, wishing the old people a long and healthy life and expressing filial piety.

Religious teachings tell people that when everyone rushes through the road of life that they can perceive, the human soul will be immortal and sublimated to another world. Therefore, people make all kinds of funeral procedures extraordinarily grand and complicated. This is a kind of praise and affirmation of the meaning of life. The main pasta products in this activity are divided into "big products" and "small products" according to the distance. The big offerings made by direct descendants are also called steamed bread. The round ones are decorated with bright and simple petals and inserted with jujube flowers, which originated from the ancient custom of three sacrifices, while other relatives and friends worship small offerings similar to snake plates. In the area around Hongdao in Dingxiang, there are a series of dough figurines such as drama figures, gods and local officials. , will be molded and then decorated with colored paper. The difference is that the colors used in the description of the five senses are strange, and the eyes are not the finishing touch. Obviously, there is a difference in aesthetic structure between the sense of proportion and the enjoyment of human beings, which makes people feel a cold sadness in richness.

Face-dressing people generally appear in life ceremonies in the form of food, but they are endowed with cultural and religious significance, which makes them have compound value, thus becoming a material that can not be ignored in the study of Han folk culture.