Jikewusha

01 · Lineage & Regional School

From the age of four he studied the fundamentals of Bimo culture with his father, began learning Bimo painting at thirteen, and after the age of twenty became a great Bimo renowned for Bimo painting. Within the regional tradition and school record of Bimo Painting in Meigu, Sichuan: As a carrier of the continuity of ancient Yi civilization, bimo painting has two main schools — the Yanggushubu school and the Asuraze school — transmitted through master-apprentice succession within households or between family members. Bimo painting rose together with the scriptures transmitted by the bimo, the priests of the Yi people, and its origins can be traced back to the rock paintings, hanging pictures, and bronze-vessel ornaments of the Yi ancestors. After the Tang and Song dynasties, bimo scriptures circulated widely in Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi; the priests used images together with the texts to recount migrations, wars, and sacrificial rites, and the pictorial forms gradually became fixed. From the Ming and Qing dynasties onward, bimo in various places formed schools transmitted from master to apprentice, of which the Yanggushubu school and the Asuraze school in the Meigu area were especially influential, making bimo painting a “living fossil” of ancient Yi painting.

02 · Mastery & Signature Works

Male, Yi ethnicity, born in January 1965, a native of Meigu County, Sichuan Province. He is a hereditary descendant of Asu Laze, the founding ancestor of the Yi Bimo priesthood. To date he has presided over more than a thousand Bimo cultural rituals of various kinds, thirty-eight of them major ceremonies. He preserves three hundred volumes of ancestral Yi Bimo texts, together with such ritual objects as the Bimo sacred fan, sacred bell, divination cylinder, ritual net, ritual hat, scriptures, vestments, boar tusks and eagle claws. He has taken part in collecting and organising primary materials relating to Yi Bimo painting, Bimo texts and their oral traditions. He is active in transmitting the craft and has taken more than fifty disciples in succession, spread across Ganluo, Meigu, Leibo, Zhaojue, Xide, Mianning, Yuexi and other places. Within the documented technical tradition of Bimo Painting in Meigu, Sichuan: Bimo painting in Meigu County is mainly distributed among more than 200 villages in townships such as Bapu, Lamu Ajue, Yiguojue, and Heguluo. Bimo painting consists of scripture illustrations and diagrams painted by Yi bimo priests on paper or on such supports as animal hide, bark, bamboo slips, stone, and wooden boards. Through the interplay of image and text it narrates stories, shapes images, expresses emotion, reflects life, and conveys aspirations and wishes; it is a “living fossil” of the ancient painting art of the Yi people. Its main subjects include human figures, plants and animals, the sun, moon, and stars, wind, rain, clouds, mist, thunder, and lightning, the gods and spirits of otherworldly realms, tools of production and daily life, as well as scenes of war, astronomy and geography, and totemic symbols. It follows the principle of a “bone-drawing” method combining dots and lines, emphasizing a method of structural modeling that works from the surface to the interior, producing what is known as the structural painting method. Figure painting centers on the skeletal structure of the human body while paying particular attention to gender characteristics. Paintings of birds and beasts, by contrast, capture typical features to distinguish their subjects, emphasizing the use of line in the composition; artistic deformation, grotesquerie, emptiness, and distortion carry elegance within plainness, conveying a charm that is rustic yet refined, plain, and seemingly made by nature itself. Bimo painting is a distinctive category of art that to this day preserves the archaic, strange, plain, and dense forms of primitive painting. According to the Yi Yuanliu (Origins of the Yi), as far back as the Aibu era, “Aibu loved the female root; it passed to Loushiying... holding knowledge in hand, he wrote it on and on upon brocade; the brocade bloomed with flowers, the scrolls shone like the rising sun, and the pictures gleamed like the newborn moon.” The Supo Meiheikusu records: “Tangzhi (an ancient Yi leader) used the Yi scriptures and instituted rites of sacrifice. When Edi passed away, Hourong came to chant the scriptures.” Representative repertoire, works and technical entries recorded for the project include: "The skeletal and structural method": Its bone method joins point and line and works from the surface inward, treating the human figure as skeleton while marking sex distinctly. "The two schools": Two schools, the Yangushubu and the Asuraze, are transmitted master to pupil within households; Asuraze is held as the ancestor of the Bimo line. "Jigewusha and his three hundred volumes": As descendant of the founding Bimo, Jigewusha has presided over over a thousand ceremonies, thirty-eight of them great, and keeps three hundred inherited volumes and the ritual fan, bell, tube and net. "Distinguishing animals by line": Animals are distinguished by typical traits through the line alone, with deformation, grotesquerie and the spiritual mingling with the realistic.

03 · Transmission & Safeguarding Status

National representative bearer of Bimo Painting, a fifth-batch national intangible cultural heritage project.

04 · Associated Heritage Item Dossier

05 · Fellow National Bearers Lineage

National representative bearers recorded under the same item code, ordered from the first to the sixth batch. Batch order is not a teacher–student relationship.

06 · Archival Sources & Bibliography

1. Jikewusha · National Representative Bearer Archive