Liangping New Year woodblock prints are a kind of folk painting seen across Liangping County, Chongqing. With a 300-year history, they are of profound cultural, historical, and artistic value. These woodblock prints are often made by the locals for their Chinese New Year celebration and are mainly used in different kinds of decorated paper, decals and door paintings. Their content falls into three categories: door gods, myths, and opera-stories. In technique, Liangping New Year woodblock prints draw on the manufacturing process of traditional Chinese watermark woodcut prints, the woodcarving skills of the Sichuan school of woodblock printing, as well as the sequential coloring technique of the Anhui school and Jinling school. They adopt the focus perspective typical of Western paintings and leverage chiaroscuro with ingenuity, achieving a clear-cut layout, and finally producing a compelling visual effect. In style, Liangping New Year woodblock prints feature simple but rich composition. The human figures on them, exaggerated and out-of-shape, are printed in starkly-contrasting colors and pose well balanced between activity and inertia, looking austere and crude. All of this makes the prints impressive.
In May 2006, the State Council of the P.R.C. approved listing Liangping New Year woodblock prints among the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage.
Municipal-level representative inheritors: Xu Jiahui, Duan Yanju & Mo Shaoping