Chinese New Year, a Time for... Exorcism?

Today people are celebrating the end of a year and the start of another.  With fireworks they scare away the monster called Nian (year).  They eat mooncakes and perform lion dances, and in one part of China, it's time for an exorcism.

This exorcism takes the form of an opera.

In the region called Gui Zhou (贵州), people put on masks; they dance and perform a ritual to banish devils, illness, and poor luck.

The ritual is called Nuo Xi (儺戲).  It is performed in various regions at various times of year; now, at Gui Zhou, the performance takes place with the accompaniment of a single gong and a single drum.  It is performed upon a single tract of land.

Nuo masks are fascinating and famous.  Some are designed simply to scare away the devils, but others represent characters out of religious literature, like Sun Wukong (Monkey).  The perfomances can last ten or twelve days, and often incorporate stories from classical Chinese texts, like The Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West.

Some more photos of the Gui Zhou Nuo Xi:

And finally, a video:

Chinese Ghost Stories

Just in time for Halloween, I've published a spooky, fun, and informative article about Chinese ghost stories.

You HAVEN'T seen this before.

http://www.squidoo.com/chinese-ghost-stories

Chánchú (蟾蜍)

A chánchú (蟾蜍) -- a three-legged toad that brings riches.  People devise elaborate strategies to attract them.

Moonlight (殭屍魅影) -- hopping vampires in 2011?

Moonlight (殭屍魅影) is a 2011 movie from Hong Kong.  I was interested in it because it was supposed to be an updated version of the hopping vampire movie, a Chinese film genre from the 1980s, which I love without reservation or apology.

Moonlight was supposed to be a hopping vampire movie with a detective story mixed in. An article in a Chinese magazine said the filmmakers had been reading detective novels nonstop. Half an hour into the movie, I realized WHICH detective novels they were reading: Natsuhiko Kyogoku's.

My favorite film genre, combined with an author who amazes me.  This should rock, shouldn't it? WRONG.

But there’s something to learn from the epic fail of this film.  Something about creativity.  To understand what I mean, let's take a look at the two things Moonlight tried to combine.

At their best, hopping vampire movies are high-energy supernatural fun, dazzling and quirky, with ghosts and goblins around every corner.

The Kyogokudo novels are somber, moving, hypnotic, frustrating, and profound, and they mostly consist of characters standing around talking.

The Dàoshi is the hero of the hopping vampire flick; he burns paper talismans, imprisons ghosts in earthenware jugs, and slays fox spirits with a peachwood sword.

The hero of the Kyogokudo is a Shinto exorcist who doesn't believe in magic -- which is okay, because in that world, magic isn't real. He solves crimes by performing an exorcism he doesn't believe in, and the exorcism reveals the truth while unlocking the emotional conflicts of all the characters involved in the mystery. It's brilliant, really. But not at all compatible with the hopping vampire movie.

It may look similar because they both feature Asian exorcists, but fundamentally, like a fraction, they do not reduce. Oil and water.  Magic is real, or it isn't. The exorcist has power, or he doesn't. You can't combine these two elements; one will override the other.

What we're left with, in this case, is a Kyogokudo-style story. Without the brilliance that inspired Mouryo no Hako or Summer of the Ubume, Moonlight is closer to Scooby-Doo.  

And we're also left with a lesson on creativity.  On intersections, and why, sometimes, they fail.

The Sōu Shān Tú (搜山图)

I've never made a study of Chinese art.  There's too much else, the lore and language, clothes and customs, literature, history, music, and religion of dozens of different ethnic groups with the regional diversity you'd expect on a land-mass the size of the US and its outlying territories, except with five thousand years of history.

Have you noticed, by the way, that I like monsters?  Always have.  I don't want to conceptualize "the nature of the monstrous" or any other abstractosity before really looking at what's in front of me, but I like monsters.  I have an interest in them.  So imagine my delight when I discovered an entire genre of Chinese art dedicated to a particular monster encounter?

A group of human women are sitting in the wilderness with anthropomorphic animals.  The women and animals are apparently lovers.  But demons attack!  And across these long painted scrolls, a battle takes place, demons vs. animals, with some human women caught in the fracas and crossfire.

I want to do some more research in Chinese texts before speculating more about the meaning and nature of these wonderful painted scrolls.  So for now, I leave you with a rather silly write-up from California.

According to Annual Report University of California & Berkeley Art Museum,

Sou-shan T’u starts with a drunken party scene, where Chinese women offer up copious alcohol and the peaches of immortality to large monkeys, serpents, and oxen. The overblown curves of the women and the flowing scarves and robes they wear represent Tang dynasty (618–907 ce) figure style and tastes, but the faceted rocks and the trees dotted with lichen that form the background landscape are clearly a Ming invention. The partygoers come under attack from a horde of demons wearing armor and carrying the latest in bladed weaponry, and the animals and women are rounded up and led off in chains. The captured women fight with passion to protect their animal children, and some even begin to sprout animal characteristics (monkey hands, a reptilian tail) as they are carried off.

The narrative climaxes with a breathtaking scene of a rearing dragon tamed by the fetters demons are placing on its limbs and tail in the midst of an olive-dark sea. Narrative handscrolls have their own flow that depends on how quickly a viewer unrolls and rerolls it to follow the story—some sections we hurry through to find out what happens next, others invite us to linger over details or puzzle out clues to the story—and this scene always stops us in our tracks, exactly as the unknown artist planned.

The final segment shows a misty landscape that becomes peopled with a galaxy of varied and slightly comical demons (a particularly hairy one seems to be channeling Cousin Itt from the Addams Family cartoons), many drawn from folk sources and unlike the serious warriors of earlier scenes. They crowd meekly around a relaxed Chinese gentleman seated on a camp chair and clearly in charge of the proceedings. The scroll ends with a colophon, an added section of paper with a calligraphed text, which was written by a scholar at a much later date in an attempt to explain the pictured events. He calls it a battle of demons and animals, but doesn’t say—and clearly doesn’t know—why they fight.

Even without a good sense of what’s happening (are the demons the bad guys or not?) we get caught up in the impetus of the storytelling here, and also become aware of the visual strategies that create this quickening rhythm—the landscape features that open up and close in to frame the characters, subsidiary figures that lead the eye from scene to scene—and other aspects that occasionally slow the eye down, such as beautifully detailed renderings of sea creatures or humorous asides like the scrawny demon burdened by a hefty and upside-down female captive.

Hún Dūn (渾敦)

Hún Dūn (渾敦). Described in the Shān Hǎi Jīng as having the shape of a pill, the color of fire, six legs, and four wings.

Zhīzhū jīng (蜘蛛精)

Zhīzhū jīng (蜘蛛精). Spiders that have grown old and powerful. They can change their shape.