Painters help lift county out of poverty
Beijing: Huang Guigui held two brushes – one with pigment and the other with water – in her right hand as she painted a peony flower in the Chinese realist style known as gongbi.
But her hands did not look like those of a painter, and for good reason.
Only two years ago she was a farmer.
She quit working in the fields and sublet her contracted land to become a professional painter working for the Luxi art academy in Juye county, Shandong province.
“The earnings from farmland are no more than 10,000 yuan (RM5,981) a year, just a tenth of what I can earn from painting,” she said.
“More importantly, painting is a more decent job, and I love it.”
Huang, in her 30s, had worked part-time for the academy from 2011 before deciding to make it her full-time career.
There are many farmer-painters in Juye, which is famous for its paintings of peony flowers.
According to official data, more than 15,000 farmers practise gongbi in more than 50 villages in Juye.
The market for their art has been growing rapidly, and last year their paintings sold for 500 million yuan (RM299mil).
It all started in the 1970s, when many artists flocked to the city of Heze to paint peonies, which are viewed in China as representing elegance and nobility.
People in Juye, part of Heze, saw how paintings could be turned into an income.
In 1974, a workshop was established to produce items such as Easter eggs decorated with handpainted animal or scenic patterns for export.
By the time it closed in 1978, the workshop had trained hundreds of people as painters.
The closure of the workshop drove most of the painters back to their farms, but some founded a privately owned cooperative that produced paintings for sale in cities such as Xi’an and Beijing, where there are large numbers of tourists.
The cooperative’s brisk business gradually encouraged a lot of farmers to become part-time painters, and Juye county is now home to about 50 art academies, each one usually based in a single village.
Luxi art academy, in Liuguantun village, has more than 600 farmer artists who paint outside the farming season, according to Xu Fengqiu, the academy’s founder.
They mostly produce paintings of peonies. To improve their skills, the academy invites professional painters to train the farmers.
The village art academies have won support from the county government, which considers them “a good way to lift farmers out of poverty”, according to He Xizhen, director of the county’s poverty alleviation office.
County authorities hold free painting classes for farmers and organise promotional events to help the academies expand their markets, He said.
Paintings created by Juye farmers have been sold to more than 10 countries and regions, according to official statistics, and He said some of their peony paintings have been chosen as national gifts for foreign dignitaries.
A recent magnum opus from Juye’s farmer artists was a giant painting of peonies for the venue of the 18th Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Qingdao, Shandong, in June that has been called China’s largest gongbi painting.
Standing 15.5m tall and 4.2m wide, it depicts 218 peony flowers and took five artists 77 days to complete. — China Daily/Asia News Network