Du Fu described in "Reminiscence of Time Past" that "Reminiscence of Time Past is the heyday of Kaiyuan, and the small town still accommodates thousands of families. Rice is fat and white, and public and private warehouses are rich. " Therefore, the production of grain paintings quietly rose between the market squares, symbolizing and celebrating the bumper harvest of the grain, 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 Teng Wengong: "Tree art five grains, and the five grains are ripe to educate people."
People depend on the "five grains", depending on the sky and geographical location, and often people can't make their own decisions, especially in the era of agricultural civilization, so there are sacrificial activities from the imperial court to the people: "Spring ploughing borrows fields from the east, first quoting poems, then Shennong" ("Hanyi"); "The altar is in the field, used to worship the first farmer." In the agricultural civilization with low productivity, sacrifice is often a ceremony for people to communicate with heaven and earth. In different periods and sacrifices, sacrifice has changed. Under various conditions, the "five-grain sacrifice" became a sacrifice alongside the "three sacrifices". But the grain always has the meaning of ancestors, and later it gradually evolved into a work of art in its heyday, which was neither divorced from the sacrifice itself nor a sacrifice.
In the history of our country, temple economy has always been a self-sufficient economic entity. In religious ceremonies, due to the doctrinal relationship, the "grain sacrifice" has a very high status, 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 lines in the painting.
Whatever the reason, the origin of the five-grain painting art in Chongqing appeared in a story handed down in the Qing Dynasty: in the first year of the Qing Dynasty (A.D. 1736), there was a drought in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and then it spread to more than half provinces in China. Liu Yong's father, Liu Tongxun, once painted what he saw as a picture of a thousand miles of hunger and reported it to Qianlong, who ordered him to transport food from Sichuan, a land of abundance, for emergency. Emperor Qianlong was very angry and sent an imperial envoy to investigate. The imperial envoy passed through Chongqing, Sichuan. When people knew that the imperial envoy was here, they complained to the imperial envoy about how officials had withheld official food and oppressed the people. Hearing this, the imperial envoy was furious and came up with a way to let the people write a book of thousands of words and pass it on to Emperor Qianlong. In order to reflect the value of grain and arouse the emperor's deep concern about the grain problem, the imperial envoy asked folk artists to make a thousand-word book out of whole grains. After this special Wan Yan book was handed over to the emperor, he swept all corrupt officials, opened a warehouse to help the people and kept it properly.
This is a concrete story about the artistic origin of the five-grain painting in Chongqing. Since then, the five-grain painting has flourished in southwest China, 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. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that a large number of "Cultural Revolution food paintings" came into being. Since then, the grain paintings that have been lost for a hundred years have reappeared among the people, and the real systematic inheritance has also begun again.
Tang Shuqing and Tang, the third and fourth generations of Chongqing Wuwen painting art, began to restore their ancestral businesses and continue to engage in the creation and research of Wuwen painting. During his tenure as a deputy to the National People's Congress, Mr. Tang Shuqing still directed and engaged in the creation of five-line paintings, and began to pay attention to summarizing the creative methods and artistic laws of five-line paintings.
The new artistic starting point of Chongqing five-grain painting art began with the fifth generation inheritor Tang Dayan. The work "Harvest of Five Grains" won the prize at the 10th Master of Arts and Crafts Expo in China, which indicates that the artistic creation of five-grain painting has been 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 and value analysis of five-grain has been promoted to an artistic aesthetic level.