ChineseJinshan Peasant Paintings'

ChineseJinshan Peasant Paintings' Background

Jinshan Peasant Paintings are created by Chinese peasants working in Jinshan County near Shanghai, China. During the late 1970s, the Chinese painter Wu Tongzhang began teaching painting techniques to the farmers in Jinshan. Most of these first painters were older women skilled in various folk arts that had been passed down through generations. These traditional folk arts, such as embroidery, paper cutting, paper folding, and weaving, heavily influenced the style of painting that developed.
Style
Jinshan Peasant Paintings are both natural and unnatural. They are natural, for they show a love of ordinary life--love of children, love of festivals, love of animals, and love of work and chores. But they are also unnatural, in that these ordinary life-events are shown according to the painters’ imaginations. The painters use a wide range of bright colors--colors that are often unnatural--and spread them throughout the paintings. Spatial reality and perspective are unimportant in these paintings. Figures and objects are usually drawn in a way that looks child-like. Taken together, these elements give the paintings a charming, primitive style. The paintings that result are not traditional Chinese and not Western, but are universal celebrations of life.
Artists at the Jinshan Peasant Painting Academy use tempera paint mixed with chalk, and paint on xuan (rice) paper. The paintings are then attached to heavier paper.

Original Paintings
The artists who create these paintings work together at the Academy of Jinshan Peasant Painting. All our paintings are original paintings created by these artists, and contain a "chop" and an "authentication sticker" from the Academy of Jinshan Peasant Painting. Other artists (not at the Academy) often copy the originals (most of the paintings for sale at tourist sights such as Guangzhou's Shamian Island are these copies), but when you buy our paintings you can be sure that the artist who created the design has painted it.

After designing a painting, the artist at the Academy of Jinshan Peasant Painting paints it many times. Each painting is "original", however, for it was done by the original artist; furthermore, since slight variations inevitably exist each time the artist paints the painting, each painting is unique.