Du Fu described in "Recalling the Past" that "recalling the past was the heyday of Kaiyuan, and the small town still contained thousands of families. Rice is fat and white, and public and private warehouses are rich. " Therefore, there is the production of grain paintings quietly rising between the market squares, which symbolizes and celebrates the bumper harvest of grains, the country and the people.
The specific types of "five grains" are slightly different due to different circulation areas, but they are all the general names of grain. Moreover, its specific function is expounded in Mencius on Teng Wengong: "Tree art five grains, the five grains are ripe and the people are educated."
People rely on the "five grains", depending on the sky and the geographical location, and often human beings can't make their own decisions, especially in the era of agricultural civilization, so there are sacrificial activities from the court to the people: "In spring, farming in the east is borrowed from the fields, and poetry is cited first, then Shennong is also" ("Hanyi"); "altar in the field, to worship the first farmers." In the agricultural civilization with low productivity, sacrifice is often a ceremony for people to communicate with heaven and earth, and the sacrifices have changed in different periods and in different sacrifices. Under various conditions, "grain sacrifice" has become a sacrifice alongside "three sacrifices". However, grain always has the meaning of ancestors, and then gradually evolved into a work of art in its heyday, neither separated from the sacrifice itself, but also a sacrifice.
In the history of our country, the temple economy has always been a self-sufficient economic entity. In religious ceremonies, due to the doctrinal relationship, the status of "grain sacrifice" is extremely high, and the grain is regarded as the mascot to seize the essence of heaven and earth. After the sacrifice, it is more likely to make up the remaining grain into a painting.
For whatever reason, the origin of the art of painting five grains in Chongqing appeared in a story handed down in the Qing Dynasty: in the first year of the Qing Dynasty, namely 1736), there was a drought in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, and then it spread to more than half of the provinces in China. Liu Yong's father Liu Tongxun once painted what he saw as "A Thousand Miles of Hunger" and reported it to Qianlong, who ordered him to transport grain from Sichuan, a land of abundance, for emergency relief. Emperor Qianlong was very angry and sent an imperial envoy to investigate. The imperial envoy passed through Chongqing, Sichuan. When the people learned that the imperial envoy was here, they complained to the imperial envoy about how officials had withheld official grain and oppressed the people. When the imperial envoy heard this, he was furious, so he came up with a method to ask the common people to write a book of thousands of words, which he passed on to Emperor Qianlong. In order to reflect the value of grain and arouse the emperor's deep attention to the grain problem, the imperial envoy asked folk artists to make a book of thousands of words out of whole grains. After this special wanyan book was handed over to the emperor, he undertook corrupt officials, opened warehouses to help the people, and kept it properly.
This is a concrete story about the origin of the art of painting five grains in Chongqing. Since then, the five-grain painting has flourished in the southwest, especially in Chongqing, and gradually spread to all parts of the country, forming many schools.
The art of grain painting is always closely related to the background of the times. Until the 1960s and 1970s, a large number of "Cultural Revolution grain paintings" came into being one after another. Since then, the grain painting, which has been lost for a hundred years, has reappeared among the people, and the truly systematic inheritance has also started again.
Tang Shuqing and Tang Bangdong, the third and fourth generations of Chongqing's five-grain painting art, began to restore their ancestral businesses and continue to engage in the creation and research of five-grain painting. During his tenure as a representative of the National People's Congress, Mr. Tang Shuqing still directed and engaged in the creation of five-grain painting, and began to pay attention to summing up the creation methods and artistic rules of five-grain painting.
The new artistic start of Chongqing's five-grain painting art began with the fifth-generation inheritor Tang Dayan. The work "Five Grains Harvest" won the prize at the 10th Master of Arts and Crafts Expo in China, which indicated that the artistic creation of five-grain painting was re-affirmed and recognized by the industry.
"Five-grain culture" has a long history, and the art of five-grain painting is a microcosm of China's five-grain culture, which shows that in the long historical evolution, people's understanding of five-grain and value discrimination have been promoted to a height of artistic aesthetics.