What is the value of clay sculpture, an ancient folk art, today?

Fengxiang clay sculpture, as an ancient and traditional Han folk handicraft, gained unprecedented glory when it was put on the stamps of the zodiac. However, this glory is like a meteor, falling from the sky of Liu Ying Village so fast that people don't even have time to react.

Fengxiang colored sculpture is a kind of Han folk art in Fengxiang County, Baoji City, Shaanxi Province. Locals usually call it clay products. Fengxiang County is located in the west of Guanzhong Plain. Clay figurines were buried in the tombs of the Spring and Autumn Period, the Warring States Period and the Han and Tang Dynasties, which shows that its clay sculpture technology has a long history. Local villagers buy clay sculptures and put them at home to pray for their children, protect students, ward off evil spirits, restrain themselves and collect happiness. The bodiless painted clay figurine in Liu Ying Village is famous all over the world and passed down from generation to generation. It has become a wonderful flower in China folk art and enjoys a high reputation at home and abroad. Fengxiang clay sculpture absorbs the decorative patterns in ancient stone carvings, New Year pictures, paper-cutting and embroidery, with exaggerated shapes and bright colors, which are deeply loved by people. In the past, at festivals or temple fairs, local people took clay sculptures as gifts, and their children were given a full moon, and their elders sent them to sit down. Shaanxi Fengxiang painted clay sculpture is refined by drafting, molding, turning over, bonding and molding, and then polishing, painting, coloring and polishing. Its modeling is realistic, rough and exaggerated, concise and summarized, with bright red, green or sketch. Its main types are sitting tiger, hanging tiger, ruling poison, lying cow, zodiac, peas drum, golden melon, auspicious tiger, deer sheep, parrot and other toys, as well as myths and folk customs such as the Eight Immortals, Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West.

Fengxiang colored sculptures are mainly distributed in Liu Ying Village of Chengguan Town and its surrounding areas. It is said that during the Ming Dynasty, soldiers from the Sixth Battalion of the First Division of Zhu Yuanzhang's army were stationed here, and this village was named "Sixth Battalion". These soldiers from Jiangxi province have the skill of making pottery. When they are free, they mix with mud, knead out various forms of masons as toys and paint them for people to see. After the sergeants became local residents, some people returned to their pottery-making skills before joining the army, using local clay and mud to knead clay figurines, making molds and painted dolls, and then selling them at major temples. Local villagers buy clay sculptures and put them at home to pray for their children, protect students, ward off evil spirits, restrain themselves and collect happiness.

Liu Ying Village's bodiless painted clay dolls are famous and passed down from generation to generation. They have become a unique boutique in China folk art and enjoy a high reputation at home and abroad.

Fengxiang has three kinds of colored sculptures. One is clay toys, mainly plastic figures of animals and the zodiac. The second is to hang paintings, including facial makeup, tiger head, ox head, lion head, Kirin sending children, Eight Immortals crossing the sea and so on. The third is to establish people, mainly to shape the statues of characters in Han folklore and historical stories.

Fengxiang clay sculpture * * * has 170 varieties of colors, including giant crouching tigers and hanging tigers half a person's height, as well as rabbits and lions as small as square inches; Black clay, white powder, leather glue, etc. They are all used for making, the molds are qualitative, the modeling is refined and exaggerated, the decoration is gorgeous and festive, and the modeling is naive and lovely, which is unique among many folk clay sculptures in China.

The technological process of Fengxiang clay sculpture is mold making, paper reinforcement, mud entry, bodiless, powder hanging, line hooking, painting and painting. Fengxiang clay sculpture is easy to make, vivid in shape and unique in color. It has few colors, mainly red, green and yellow. It is drawn with black ink lines and simple brushwork, which makes people fondle it.

In the course of hundreds of years, clay sculptures have been continuously inherited and developed, and many excellent traditional clay sculptures have been handed down, especially the image of the tiger.

The clay sculptures of the zodiac are very distinctive. In the Lunar Year of the Horse, the Zodiac stamps are issued with Fengxiang clay horse as the picture. Hu Xinmin, the creator of clay sculpture horse, is Shen Hu's nephew. Under the influence of his ancestral clay sculpture skills, he worked hard and boldly, and completed his creation in March 1982. As a folk art in the Qin and Han dynasties, the horse's frontal pattern is the double badger pattern in the Qin and Han dynasties, indicating childhood friends; Five ink dots indicate that Wu Zixu won the championship; The design on the saddle is a common angular pattern of yin and yang on bronzes, which symbolizes life and health; The twelve lines on the ponytail represent heavenly stems and earthly branches, indicating that the cycle of life and death will never stop; There are seven points behind the horse, representing the Big Dipper, indicating that the old horse knows the way and the lucky (seven) stars are shining high.

Fengxiang clay sculpture has strong local flavor and high research value of folk culture, folk art and aesthetics, which has attracted the attention of relevant experts.

However, under the influence of the commercial environment, Fengxiang clay sculpture artists often cater to the market demand by selling, which makes many traditional products almost extinct, and also makes Fengxiang clay sculpture skills gradually lose their original cultural connotation and constantly mutate. Before 1960s, there were more than 300 farmers making clay sculptures in Liu Ying village and its surrounding villages. At present, only artists such as Shen Hu, Hu Xinmin, Hu Yongxing, Han Suocun and Du Yin are engaged in the creation and production of clay sculptures in their spare time.

Now Fengxiang clay sculpture has been exported to overseas countries, such as the United States, Germany, France, Japan and so on. At the same time, there are a large number of tourists every year, and the annual flow of people in the village can reach100000 person-times. Liu Ying Village was also rated as a demonstration base of cultural industry in Shaanxi Province.

Clay sculpture is the protection of intangible cultural heritage that our country attaches great importance to. On May 20th, 2006, this heritage was approved by the State Council to be included in the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage list. On June 5th, 2007, the Ministry of Culture confirmed Shen Hu, Fengxiang County, Shaanxi Province as the representative inheritor of this cultural heritage project and included it in the list of 226 representative inheritors of the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage projects.