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FJILA Reclaims the Highest Chinese Folk Arts Award— the “Shan Hua Award”

It was learned (by reporter Sun Yufang) yesterday by our report station that the “Series of Cultural Heritage Archives of the Imperial Heavenly Queen Temple in Tianjin” won the twelfth Chinese folk arts award named the "Shan Hua Award”. The series, authored by teachers and students of the Feng Jicai Institute of Literature and Art (FJILA) under the leadership of Director Feng, has ten volumes. It is the second time the institute has obtained the highest reward, following the “Series of Chinese Spring Festival Woodcuts Inheritors’ Oral History”.

The Imperial Heavenly Queen Temple in Tianjin is a national cultural heritage. It can be traced back to the early Qing Dynasty. There were more than one thousand various pilgrim organizations in its golden age. However, with social changes through time and the impact of modernization through the recent three decades, there are now less than one hundred organizations left. Therefore, “it brooks no delay” to investigate, arrange, study, record and protect these organizations with positive academic support. For this reason, the FJILA applied for a national artistic project named “Research of Imperial Heavenly Queen Temple in Tianjin during the Social Transformation Period”, and obtained permission.

During this period, multidisciplinary information from anthropology, folklore, history, and folk arts, were absorbed, and various methods of oral history, interviewing, writing, and video and radio recordings were used. Many historical and rare contents of more than ten old and important organizations were put into archives one by one through arranging and recording textual research of historical data. Those contents included the historical revolution, important figures, technical characteristics, musical notes, instrumental types, as well as historical document survived, organizational rules and transmission spectrum. Eventually, the book named “Series of Cultural Heritage Archives of the Imperial Heavenly Queen Temple in Tianjin” was finished after three years of hard work.

Folk culture has usually been researched through collecting its achievements in history, merely through gestalt research and field records from multidisciplinary perspectives, and methods like oral research and audio and video recordings. This is an academic way created by Director Feng and his team, which was used in the inch-by-inch preservation in the field of Chinese historical creation during the social transformation period. We can, on the one hand, have a clear knowledge about our heritage with necessary documentary evidence; and on the other hand, those heritage would not disappear and become extinct, because we still have their records. The series is not only an important cultural piece, utilizing the creative academic way of protecting heritage, but a historic contribution of FJILA to the urban culture in Tianjin.

Teaching and research personnel and postgraduates included in this project were Shi Jing, Guo Ping, Pu Jiao, Tang Na, Zhang Limin, Wang Tuo, Guan Shuzhen, Lu Hao and Zhang Zhang.

The award ceremony will be hold in early December this year in Hai Ning, Zhejiang Province.