Popular images from China. Archiving the Ephemeral

In "Images populaires de Chine. Archiver l'éphémère [Popular images from China. Archiving the Ephemeral], Michela Bussotti (director of studies at the EFEO) and Sybille Ngo (master's student at the EHESS and temporary assistant at the EFEO archives) present a number of contemporary Chinese popular images that were purchased before 2006, the date on which many popular print production sites were included in the lists of the intangible cultural heritage of the People's Republic of China (PRC). They are part of a collection of works, which also includes popular books from the 19th and early 20th centuries, assembled by Alain Arrault and Michela Bussotti and donated to the EFEO in 2020.
These images are polychrome xylographs, some of which come from Tantou, a village in the Hunan region: on sale in the workshops of local craftsmen, they offer a snapshot of this production at a precise time and place. The corpus of images has a variety of themes: New Year images, representations of deities, household gods and calendars, paper money to be burned at funerals, paper deities for the creation of temporary altars, etc.
Classified into six sub-fonds, to which is added a small collection of woodcut printing plates, the inventory of this donation has just been put on line on the EFEO's archives site.