Bimo Painting
01 · Historical Records
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 · Core Techniques & Process
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.”
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 · Regional Records & Related Items
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.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
Bimo painting circulates among the Yi people in Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi, and is concentrated in the Da and Xiao Liangshan Yi inhabited areas of Sichuan; within the Liangshan region it is most widely found in Meigu, Zhaojue, and Butuo counties, of which Meigu County is recognized as the core transmission area and is celebrated as the “hometown of bimo culture.” Bimo painting embodies the aesthetic world and artistic character of the Yi ancestors, provides a historical reference for modern painting, and offers important material for the study of Yi history, religion, art, astronomy and calendrics, and physical geography; it is of positive significance for transmitting and developing Yi culture and art and for promoting regional and inter-ethnic cultural exchange. Jike Wusha (per the official archive of the associated inheritor): Male, Yi ethnicity, born in January 1965, a native of Meigu County, Sichuan Province. He is a lineal descendant of Asuraze, the founding patriarch of the ancient Yi bimo priesthood. To date he has presided over more than a thousand bimo cultural ceremonies of various kinds, of which thirty-eight were large-scale. He preserves three hundred volumes of Yi bimo documents handed down in his family, together with such ritual objects as the bimo sacred fan, sacred bell, divination tube, ritual net, ritual cap, scriptures, ceremonial dress, wild-boar tusks, and eagle talons. He has participated in collecting and organizing primary materials related to Yi bimo painting, bimo documents, and their oral traditions. He actively engages in teaching and training activities and has taken on more than fifty apprentices, spread across Ganluo, Meigu, Leibo, Zhaojue, Xide, Mianning, Yuexi, and other places. Representative inheritor of bimo painting, a national-level intangible cultural heritage project, fifth batch.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Jikewusha 05-2714
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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