Yellow River Fourteen Walks: A Field Research Report on Folk Arts in the Yellow River Basin during the 1980s

Author: Yang Yang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-04-01
Features: Yellow River Fourteen Walks is a comprehensive pictorial collection of folk art (visual arts) along the entire Yellow River, with the artist's cultural exploration notes as its guiding thread. Its significant contribution lies in the author's unprecedented efforts and achievements in leading teams to investigate Yellow River folk art 14 times during the 1980s. As time passes and society evolves, merely a few decades later, the vast amount of outstanding folk art forms that have been passed down for thousands of years along the Yellow River are now gone, with most renowned elderly artists having passed away, leaving their art forms behind. What we see in the book today is the final echo of a large number of outstanding traditional folk arts of the Chinese nation. Authors Yang Xianrang and Yang Yang are professors at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and Tsinghua University of Arts and Design. They believe that the Yellow River region can be considered a major area and cultural circle representative of the Chinese nation's cultural and artistic heritage. All folk art activities that arise here are inevitably closely connected, in terms of connotation and origin, to disciplines such as archaeology, philosophy, ancient history, folklore, ethnology, and art history. Investigating the folk art of the Yellow River region may likely provide a key to understanding and unlocking the folk art of other regions in China. The textual part of the book is compiled from the author's original field notes, which span hundreds of thousands of words. The book's framework is built upon summaries of the 14 research trips and over 100 stunning close-ups of traditional folk art. Nearly a thousand reversal slides permanently document the cultural treasures of the Chinese nation, coalescing into the most comprehensive book to date on traditional culture in the Yellow River region. Huang Yongyu, in reviewing the book, wrote: "This walk in the Yellow River Fourteen Walks is like the walks of Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin for traditional architecture, the walk of Luo Zhenyu for oracle bone script, and the walk of Ye Gongchuo for Longmen—each of which laid out a new vein in the cultural field, with immeasurable social and cultural value."