Rizhao Fenghuangzhuang woodblock prints are a kind of folk prints circulated in Fenghuangzhuang, Nanhu Town, Donggang District, Rizhao City, which is famous for its strong local atmosphere and simple and distinctive artistic style. Fenghuangzhuang woodblock prints have gradually developed and improved in accordance with the peasants' ideological requirements, customs and beliefs, aesthetic views, and life needs, forming a simple and elegant, concise and bright style.
It is understood that the first generation of inheritors of the Woodblock Prints of Rizhao Phoenix Zhuang is Xue Yuyan, a native of Fenghuangzhuang Village, Nanhu Town, Donggang District. At the age of 17, Xue Yuyan often copied and painted, and also wrote couplets and painting door gods for neighbors. In 1955, he designed the first woodblock new year painting, a woodblock new year painting based on the traffic construction of new China. In the following years, he took traditional woodblock new year paintings from Weifang, adjusted and composed according to the local aesthetics of Rizhao, and designed more than a dozen woodblock new year paintings such as "Daji Dali" and "Good New Year". During the Cultural Revolution, the Fenghuangzhuang woodblock prints were devastated. In 1988, Xue Yuyan re-purchased tools, engraved and printed woodblock prints, and taught this craft to his eldest daughter Xue Guixiang, and most of the printed plates that are preserved now are from that moment. In 2013, folk artist Lin Ping followed Xue Guixiang to learn the engraving and printing of woodblock prints, and in 2018, she was announced by the Rizhao Municipal Bureau of Culture and Guangzhou as the fourth batch of municipal representative inheritors of Rizhao City.
With the development of industrialization, most of the New Year paintings sold in the market are machine prints, and it is difficult to find the Hand-drawn New Year paintings. But in a studio in Rizhao, Lin Ping, the representative inheritor of the Phoenix Zhuang woodblock new year painting at the municipal level, is still using her knife and wood and paper to brush and print the past and present lives of the Rizhao woodblock new year painting.
(Dazhong Newspaper, Dazhong Daily client reporter Ding Zhaoxia, correspondent Tao Hao, reported design Li Yang Yu seafarer)