Couplets 门联儿

Beijingers love to hang couplets on their hutong doors. 600 years ago, as history might have it, these began as lucky charms written by learned people, typically a poet or artist. People would stick them outside the main doors on important festivals such as Chinese New Year or the Spring festival to ward away evil and welcome peace, good fortune, wealth, harmony and happiness for the entire family for the coming year. But during the Ming Dynasty, it started to become to be a common practice, recognized as a form of literature. Down the centuries to modern times, people have maintained it as a customary tradition. Always red in color, couplets are left on the doorway all year round, until a new one is put up. There's three parts to it - the left, right and horizontal, and is read from the right, left, then top. The sides are usually 5 words or longer and the top is typically 4 words long.

Liu Li Chang 琉璃厂 is an artist's paradise Beijing. It's a street which houses all sorts of local artists' handiwork like Chinese paintings, porcelain, works of clay, wooden artifacts and even ancient antiques including snuff bottles. I stumbled upon a store there which houses artists from all over China who make live presentations of their painting specialties daily for free so I took some pictures while chatting with the artists.

Chinese paintings can generally be divided into two types - meticulous 工笔画 'gong bi hua' and freehand 写意画 'xie yi hua'. Paintings where only black ink (made from pine soot) is applied is called 'Shui mo' 水墨, (where only one brush is used) and colored painting are called 'Cai hua' 彩画 (where typically two bushes are used simultaneously). For colored paintings, one brush is used for the application of color while the other is for water to dilute the color creating shades. Though much more subtle than oil color. ddditional application of layers is employed to create dimension. The different types of bristles used for the bushes and the sizes of the brush determines the coarseness or softness of the artwork that is applied onto the Xuan rice paper 宣纸. And there's are two types of rice paper 生宣纸 'sheng xuan zhi' which absorbs water, (commonly used for black ink paintings) and 熟宣纸 'shu xuan zhi' which doesn't absorb water as easily (commonly used for meticulous fine brush painting).

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