Each year around Spring Festival, people discuss the issue of whether the “flavor” of New Year is fading away. In terms of New Year’s flavor, rich and variegated are the memories of people. The flavor of Spring Festival lies in the New Year’s food products, festive couplets, New Year’s Eve dinner, lucky money, and family visits.

The 74-year-old Wuyi painter Zhu Zhiqiang has created “New Year Flavor,” a series of about 30 folk custom paintings. Stroke by stroke, his paintings show the strong flavor of Spring Festival, including festive celebrations, visits, dragon lanterns, and local operas. These are memories from his childhood and are also the Jinhua folk customs of New Year’s celebrations.

In 2018, Zhu held a solo exhibition titled “Memory of the Ancient City in Wuyi.” Among the works on display, the most eye-catching was the 3.5-meter-long and 1.5-meter-wide “Scene of Wuyi County in Republican China.” The work was completed over the course of three years. But, as Zhu commented, “The painting is filled with figures from old times, but they’re rather small, and being quite limited in space, the overall appearance seems incomplete. People found it to be a little unsatisfactory and suggested that I should paint the lives of people individually.” Zhu then began to paint folk paintings, including a series about traditional children’s games and another about New Year’s flavor.

In Zhu’s memory, many folk customs of the Spring Festival have long been fixed in time, such as the time-honored tradition of butchering a pig; despite not being done anymore, it is something that many people remember. In the past, many people would raise a pig and butcher it for the New Year. Butchering a pig, stewing a whole pot of braised pork, and eating it with the reunited family, as well as the fragrance of the meat pervading the house, are the authentic flavors of Spring Festival.

During Spring Festival locals used to make dry rice cakes, but most young people no longer know what these are. Zhu Zhiqiang wrote a doggerel called “Making Dry Rice Cakes” for the Spring Festival flavor paintings, putting in verse the whole process of making these cakes:

The big family is reunited during the last month of the lunar year to make dry rice cakes:

Mix rice flour with syrup, pour it into the steamer divided into squares

Sprinkle sesame seeds and bake them golden, upside down

Cakes come out dry, sweet, and crispy—delicious with tea.

The Lantern Festival is around the corner, and Zhu Zhiqiang has just completed a number of new works for the occasion. He believes that the folk customs of Spring Festival are quite rich and he has only recorded a very small part so far.

Wu Liqin, a former village leader of the Wuyi County Party Committee School, praised Zhu’s works because they help the younger generations know more about their own traditions and the older ones to recall their past.

A teacher from Yunnan Province, who collected Zhu’s works and uses them as didactic materials, commented: “Mr. Zhu’s paintings are true and realistic, and vividly show the life of Chinese people.”

Others commented that Zhu’s works are simple and concise, which impressed Zhu himself. He is aware that the flavor of New Year is about human touch: from a deep point of view, the paintings express the affection between people. He thinks that as living conditions are improving, cultural elements of life should keep up. Therefore, in reflecting and drawing, Zhu knows that a person may live a better life, but should also pursue spiritual elements. In such pursuits, an excellent tradition plays a vital role. He incorporated this idea into his paintings and passed it on to everyone. (By Xu Jiannan, translated by Marco Lovisetto, edited by Kendra Fiddler)

Preparing New Year’s Products