A photographer's fantastical portrait of rural China during Lunar New Year
Editor's Note: A version of this article was first published on February 10, 2024.
In photographer Zhang Xiao's images of the Shehuo festival, an ancient celebration still observed in parts of northern China during the Lunar New Year, rural life comes alive with something altogether more fantastical.
Villagers dressed as cranes, roosters and mythical lions pose for portraits standing amid crops or in fallow farmland. Costumed performers parade past brick houses against hazy backdrops, the eyes of their masks seemingly lost in thought. In a harvested wheat field, a group of almost a dozen men line up to hold aloft a colorful dragon puppet.
In his book 'Community Fire,' Zhang said he wanted to capture the surreal 'disconnect' between people's everyday lives and the mythical personas they assumed.
'Their characters seemed to come from the sky itself, and … formed a huge theatrical stage that transcended the confines of reality, transporting a collective of sleepwalkers to a dreamworld,' he wrote. 'I wandered among them and photographed them quietly, because I did not want to wake them up.'
Rooted in millennia-old agricultural practices of worshipping fire and the land, the folk rituals of Shehuo (often translated as 'earth and fire') traditionally entailed praying for good fortune and bounteous harvests, or to drive away demons. Festivities vary between regions but now typically see various performers, from stilt walkers to opera singers, parading through the streets or staging shows.
Today, celebrations coincide with the Lunar New Year, which starts Wednesday. As such, they have come to encompass many of the traditions — such as temple fairs and lion dances — practiced around China during this period. (Lunar New Year celebrations usually last more than two weeks, with Shehuo festival taking place on the season's 15th and final day.)
Shehuo celebrations have been recognized by the Chinese government in its UNESCO-style list of 'intangible cultural heritage.' But the festival's place in a rapidly urbanizing country remains under threat, said Zhang, adding that most of the performers he encountered had migrated to cities and only returned to their villages for the holiday.
'The significance of traditional customs can no longer meet the needs of modern lives,' the photographer told CNN via email. 'Today's young people are more concerned about the internet and games. They are not even willing to try and understand traditional cultures. I think that's sad.'
Hoping to document the festival's disappearing traditions — and the costumes and props associated with them — Zhang spent over a decade photographing Shehuo events at villages in Shaanxi and Henan provinces. A selection of the images, which were shot between 2007 and 2019, also went on show in the US at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology (and over 100 of them were published in 'Community Fire').
As well as capturing rites, rituals and folklore, the photos speak to the proliferation of mass-produced paraphernalia that has transformed the festival since the turn of the 21st century. One image depicts a stack of expressionless plastic masks; a set of 12 eerie pictures shows smiling prop heads hanging from trees in flimsy carrier bags.
Several pages of Zhang's book are dedicated to screengrabs of Alibaba-owned shopping platform, Taobao, where Shehuo items can be purchased at bargain prices. They range from an elaborate two-person lion dance costume, offered for just 360 yuan ($50), to a selection of headdresses priced under 17 yuan ($2.40).
The rise of cheap goods and e-commerce has been a mixed blessing for these villages. Some of them — including Huozhuang, in Henan province, which features heavily in Zhang's project — have taken advantage of the opportunity. The photographer visited and documented several small family workshops that buy semi-complete products in large quantities online before hand-finishing them and selling them on platforms like Taobao for profit.
'In some villages, virtually the entire population has been mobilized to produce and sell Shehuo props,' the photographer writes in his book.
But with economic opportunity comes a loss of traditional skills and customs. Materials like paper and bamboo have been replaced by cheap wire frames, plastic and synthetic fabrics, said Zhang, who grew up in a rural area of China's Shandong province but is now based in Chengdu, one of the country's largest metropolises in the southwest.
A third-generation prop maker told Zhang that, in the photographer's words, that he 'lamented the gradual disappearance of traditional crafts.' But most of the villagers the photographer encountered were indifferent to the loss of cultural heritage, he claimed.
And while Zhang, as a documentarian, assumed the role of a 'quiet spectator' while on assignment, he nonetheless expressed regret at the festival's rapid commercialization.
'People are not focused on how to improve product quality and craftsmanship,' said the photographer, who is currently working on a documentary about life in rural China.
'Instead, they are obsessed with how to manufacture these products as quickly as possible, and at the lowest cost, so as to gain an advantage against the competition. This has led to a gradual decline in product quality, and the entire industry has fallen into a vicious cycle of price wars.'
'Community Fire,' published by Aperture and Peabody Museum Press, is available now.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
19 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Terry Moran launches Substack to continue doing ‘important work' following ABC News ouster
A day after ABC News parted ways with longtime correspondent Terry Moran following his 'world-class hater' tweets about Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, Moran announced that he was joining the growing chorus of former TV anchors and hosts who have launched their own Substacks. 'For almost 28 years, I was a reporter and anchor for ABC News, and as you may have heard, I'm not there anymore,' he said in a video posted to social media and his own personal Substack account. In the post titled 'Independence Day,' the former Nightline anchor suggested that he would be going the independent route for the time being, following in the footsteps of other veteran broadcasters and reporters who have recently found themselves sidelined by mainstream news networks and legacy press outlets. 'I'm here, with you, on Substack, this amazing space. And I can't wait to get at it, to get at the important work that we all have to do in this time of such trouble for our country,' he stated. 'I'm gonna be reporting and interviewing and just sharing from you, and hoping to hear from you as well.' Moran did let his followers know that it could be a while before he actually starts producing content on a regular basis. 'So, it'll be a few days, maybe a little bit longer, got to get some stuff sorted out, but can't wait to see you,' he concluded. The now-former ABC News anchor and correspondent is adding his name to the expanding list of prominent names who have turned to Substack and similar subscriber-based platforms as television news networks and media conglomerates continue to slash costs amid dwindling ad revenues. Jim Acosta, the former CNN anchor who left the cable news giant earlier this year rather than accept a move to the dreaded midnight shift, encouraged Moran to follow in his footsteps and join Substack earlier this week. 'Come on in, Terry. The water is warm,' he told Vanity Fair. With other TV news vets such as Joy Reid, Don Lemon, Chuck Todd and Chris Matthews all creating their own online programs – not to mention one-time MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan starting up his own Substack-based media company Zeteo – Vanity Fair spoke to some who have recently taken the dive into independent journalism. 'My advice to Terry or any other legacy media person who goes independent is this: You have spent your whole life as a buyer. People came to you with information, job offers, etc. Now you are a seller,' former CNN analyst Chris Cillizza said, adding, 'My view is that as an independent news creator, you have to be in a lot of places at once.' Moran's Substack announcement also came shortly after anti-Trump digital media empire MeidasTouch – which just hired Katie Phang after MSNBC canceled her show – publicly pitched him to join the network. 'There's a seat at the table for you, Terry,' MeidasTouch founder Ben Meisalas declared in a video posted to social media. 'Help lead the next era of journalism—one that doesn't flinch when democracy is under threat.' The journey from broadcast television to Substacking has been quick for Moran, who was suspended by ABC News on Sunday after he sent out a late-night screed savaging Trump and his deputy chief of staff Miller. 'Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred,' Moran wrote in the since-deleted tweet. 'He's a world-class hater. You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.' He added: 'The thing about Stephen Miller is not that he is the brains behind Trumpism. It's not brains. It's bile.' With the administration demanding that the network take action against Moran and MAGA media calling for him to be fired, ABC News announced on Sunday morning that he was 'suspended pending further evaluation' as his post 'does not reflect the views of ABC News and violated our standards.' Moran, who had just sat down with Trump for a newsmaking and high-profile interview six weeks earlier, found himself fired two days later. Progressives and liberals savaged the move and accused the network of once again capitulating to the president, specifically noting that the network had paid Trump $15 million late last year to settle a defamation lawsuit involving anchor George Stephanopoulos. In the end, though, the decision to cut Moran may have had as much to do with economics as it did with criticism over his tweets, which also reportedly resonated within the halls of the ABC newsroom. 'The fact that Moran was at the end of a contract cycle — his deal was set to expire on Friday, according to a person briefed on the matter — made it easier for ABC to take swift action,' CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter reported on Tuesday.


CNN
20 minutes ago
- CNN
This painting survived the Beirut explosion. Here's how conservators restored it
After a long-forgotten painting of Hercules and Omphale was punctured by glass and coated in debris during the 2020 explosion in Beirut, the monumental oil-on-canvas, painstakingly restored over more than three years, has gone on view at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. In the wake of the tragedy, the painting, dated to the 1630s, was finally properly attributed to the great Artemisia Gentileschi, the 17th-century Italian Baroque painter who has become one of the few female artists of her era to be recognized today. Having passed only between three private collections over four centuries, the 'Artemisia's Strong Women: Rescuing a Masterpiece'exhibition marks the first time the painting has ever been on public display. The canvas depicts the Greek mythological hero Hercules, who was enslaved by the Queen of Lydia, Omphale, and made to do tasks traditionally associated with women, such as weaving — in Gentileschi's composition he raises a spindle of wool — before they fall in love. Gentileschi often gave her mythological and Biblical female figures a striking sense of agency, such as her most widely known scene of the widow Judith violently beheading Assyrian general Holofernes. In the newly attributed painting, she toys with subverted gender roles as her lovelorn protagonists close the gap between them, their pearlescent skin adorned in sumptuous draped fabrics. For decades, 'Hercules and Omphale' hung in the Sursock Palace, a private and opulent mid-19th century townhouse owned by Beirut's Sursock family for five generations. The explosion in the Lebanese capital, which killed more than 200 people and injured thousands, caused devastation to the building and its owners, with the matriarch of the family, 98-year-old Yvonne Sursock Cochrane, eventually succumbing to her injuries. A receipt from the family showed that the painting entered the Sursock collection from an art dealer in Naples, where Gentileschi lived the later years of her life. At the time of the explosion, the artist's then-unknown masterpiece was hanging in front of a window, according to the Getty, which exploded through the canvas. The broken glass riddled it with holes and a wide, L-shaped tear through Hercules' knee. 'It was really severe. It's probably the worst damage I've ever seen,' said Ulrich Birkmaier, the Getty Museum's senior conservator of painting, in a phone call with CNN. Beyond the sudden violence to the painting and its frame, the artwork had already suffered flaking paint, cracks and cupping from humid conditions, Birkmaier said He added that Gentileschi's vision had been further marred by discolored varnish and overpainting from a previous restoration attempt centuries earlier. When Birkmaier saw it for the first time in Beirut, one year after the explosion, he gathered debris that had collected behind its surface in case the miniscule paint fragments clinging to the glass could be puzzled back together in Los Angeles. Though mended, cleaned, and carefully restored with analysis from X-rays and XRF mapping, the painting has been rehabilitated into its luminous and poetic intent, though, in Birkamaier's view, it will never look quite as it did. 'You'll always see some scars of the damage,' he said. If not for the explosion, 'Hercules and Omphale' may have continued to be an unidentified work, only considered a Gentileschi painting by a Lebanese art historian who had seen it decades earlier. In the early 1990s, Gregory Buchakjian was a graduate student at Sorbonne University in Paris and writing his thesis the Sursock collection. It was then that he made the connection between 'Hercules and Omphale' and another painting, 'Penitent Magdalene,' to Gentileschi, but he didn't pursue publishing his research more widely, according to the arts publication Hyperallergic. In an article for Apollo magazine in September 2020, Buchakjian attributed both paintings to the Italian artist, leading to wider acknowledgement of his research and consensus over her authorship. Over the course of her career, Gentileschi, the daughter of the Mannerist painter Orazio Gentileschi, was commissioned by top artistic patrons — the Medici family in Italy as well as monarchs Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England — before being lost to history following her death in 1653. Some 60 paintings or more exist today, though a few have been contested as copies or collaborations. 'She was very, very famous during her day, but all but forgotten in the centuries after, which is true for many Baroque painters, but for women, of course, particularly,' Birkmaier said. Rediscovered in the 20th century and amplified by the 1970s feminist movement, Gentileschi's resurgence helped pave the way for researching and foregrounding female artists of the past. Still, there are too few technical studies of her work, according to Davide Gasparotto, senior curator of paintings at the Getty Museum, compared to her male counterparts. The Getty's report provides insight into her techniques and materials and how she revised the composition over time, such as altering the position of Hercules' head and gaze to strengthen the emotional charge, which is 'very much Artemisia,' Gasparotto said. 'We are gradually building better knowledge of her way of painting, but I think we need more, especially because she's a painter that changes quite a lot in terms of stylistic development over the course of her career,' he explained. 'She's an artist who looks a lot at what is going on around her, and she absorbs (it).' Gentileschi trained with her father, but was also influenced by her Baroque peers and predecessors, such as Caravaggio and Guercino. She traveled widely in Europe, trained in Venetian techniques and adopted other skills from Naples, where she took up residency later in life and set up a workshop. Her time in Naples in the 1630s has been considered 'less interesting' by scholars, Gasparotto said, but he disagrees — and can now cite 'Hercules and Omphale' as further proof. 'Her paintings grow in size. They are monumental paintings, ambitious compositions, multi-figure compositions,' Gasparotto said. He believes Hercules in this work is her most accomplished male figure — 'especially for a painter who couldn't study male nudes after a living model, because being a woman, she wasn't allowed to do that.' When the glass tore through Gentileschi's painting, it missed many of the painting's focal points, though part of Hercules' nose and eye suffered damage. That was the trickiest area to reconstruct, Birkmaier said, but he was able to see Gentileschi's earlier draft of Hercules' head in the X-ray to aid in reconstruction. He called in help from a friend: Federico Castelluccio, the Italian American actor best known for his role as Furio in 'The Sopranos,' who is also a painter and collector of Baroque art (and who once discovered a $10 million Guercino painting). (The TV series aired on HBO, which shares Warner Bros. Discovery as a parent company with CNN.) 'He assisted me with another conservation treatment years ago. And so he painted the head of Hercules for me and suggested what the eye that was missing there should look like,' Birkmaier recalled. 'And so I based my reconstruction on that, and it was very helpful.' Restoring an old work doesn't mean making it like new, but maintaining the 'decay from time' that occurs with a 400-year-old painting, Birkmaier said. As he and other specialists gradually worked on the painting, it began to reveal itself. 'You have this painting in pieces, and all you see is the damage and the discolored varnish and the old restoration and the big holes, and then little by little, as you work on it… the image emerges again,' he recalled. 'It's a really interesting process of discovery. I wanted to do her justice.' Some of the identifying features of Gentileschi's work seen in 'Hercules and Omphale' include her renderings of fabrics and jewelry and the subtle gestures she repeats across canvases. 'It's very poetic the way she turns, she turns (Omphale's) head, this upright gaze,' Birkmaier said, explaining that many of her female figures mimic that tilt. 'In the other paintings that we have on loan from her, it's the same exact (position).' It can be seen, too, in 'Susanna and the Elders,' from 1638-40, another recent discovery of Gentileschi's that is in the UK's Royal Collection Trust, painted during her time at the court of Charles I with her father. In 2023, it was identified after a century in storage, deteriorating and misattributed to the 'French School,' according to Artnet. Another rediscovered Gentileschi work, a portrait of David with the head of Goliath, will headline a Sotheby's auction in July. 'There's definitely a lot of room for discovery,' Gasparotto said, though he cautioned that attribution is not always clear-cut considering her workshop is still not fully understood, and she tended to work in conjunction with landscape artists later in life. 'I don't know how many will emerge from museum storages,' he said. 'But within the market, within private collections, there might be other paintings by her that will emerge in the upcoming years.'
Yahoo
21 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Dazu Rock Carvings: The Last Monument of World Grotto Art
CHONGQING, China, June 12, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Located in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, the Dazu Rock Carvings have held UNESCO World Heritage status since 1999. Sprawled across 75 recognized cultural relics protection zones, the site shelters over 50,000 breathtaking statues. As one of the eight great grottoes of the world, Dazu Rock Carvings epitomize the pinnacle of world grotto art dating from the 9th to the mid-13th century from different aspects. Celebrated as "the last monument of world grotto art," Dazu, together with Mogao, Yungang, Longmen and other grottoes, constitute the complete history of Chinese grotto art. Recent initiatives have rejuvenated Dazu's cultural presence. In an 8K dome theater, the Thousand‑Armed Guanyin's benevolent gaze fills the screen, inviting viewers into a celestial embrace. The dance‑drama Tian Xia Dazu (For an Eternal Homeland — Dazu Rock Carvers' Legacy) animates the carvers' epic tale with immersive stagecraft. Even video games now feature Dazu's statues, their contours and stories woven into virtual adventures. This thousand‑year‑old sanctuary is stepping firmly into the present. The 8k full-dome film Dazu Rock Carvings awakens all 50,000 statues in layered streams of live footage and CG animation, transforming the physical space into a digital world. Reclined within the dome, audiences look up through a canopy of digital stars, accompanied by haunting Buddhist chants and soulful light interplay. Time‑weathered halos reform around sculpted robes — reborn in pixels yet rooted in antiquity. In Black Myth: Wukong, the Monkey King cleaves through primordial chaos with his magical staff, the thousand-armed Guanyin of Dazu Rock Carvings smiles serenely amid dimensional rifts — holding a flower between her fingers. In the digital Buddhist world, gamers traverse a meticulously rendered Dazu, encountering Buddhist iconography amid mythic quests — an interactive bridge to Eastern philosophy. Meanwhile, CCTV's China in Intangible Cultural Heritage devoted its Chongqing episode to Dazu, describing the site's living legacy as "like stars falling all over mountains and rivers in Chongqing," rekindling collective memory through the screen. On stage, dancers echo the chiseling rhythms of bygone artisans. Silk‑flowing costumes swirl as performers burst from stone walls, transforming history into kinetic art. This isn't a static reenactment — it's a cultural translation, transmitting the carvers' spirit through flesh, motion, and emotion. The Dazu Rock Carvings are being revitalized through digital technology and cultural innovation. Digital projection breathes new life into carvings in the virtual spaces, enabling dialogues across time and space; Stage arts, meanwhile, imbue them with contemporary vitality. Technology extends their reach, while culture revitalizes their essence. Through this symbiosis, this millennium-old treasure resonates with the modern era, radiating timeless splendor. Photo - - - View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Dazu Rock Carvings