The Artistic Crystallization of Naxi Dongba Culture: Dongba Painting
This short intangible-cultural-heritage profile introduces Dongba painting (东巴画), an important visual-art form of Naxi culture found in Lijiang's Old Town district and Yulong Naxi Autonomous County, Yunnan. Its subjects are chiefly deities worshipped in Naxi folk religion, legendary ancestors, and animals, expressing the harmony between people and nature. It identifies four formats: illustrations within scripture (including pictographic script itself, cover art, frontispieces, and title illustrations), wooden tablet paintings (linked historically to the "human-face wooden tablets" of the ancient Qiang people of northwest China), paper-card paintings (either icons for worship or model sheets for training painters), and scroll paintings mounted with heaven-poles and earth-axles, mostly depicting worshipped deities. It notes that Dongba scroll painting absorbed Tibetan and Han techniques and Buddhist and Daoist elements alongside Ming-Qing Tibetan thangka influence, citing the description of Dongba painting as a "living fossil" of primitive pictorial art in the official Pictorial Guide to China's First National List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
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