The Chinese New Year Poster is a special type of art which enjoys a long history and far-reaching influence. Chinese New Year calls for a lot of activities and preparations. Folks start to clean their house, paint the walls and doors, pay off the debts, make new clothes, pay and even get a new hair cut. One of the prevailing customs in China is buying and pasting up Chinese New Year Poster to ring in the New Year. It is said that a Chinese New Year without red lanterns and Chinese New Year Poster is like a day without sunshine. Chinese New Year Poster is not just a display of pictures but also expresses good wishes for the coming year.
The Chinese New Year Poster emerged and came into the existence in the Ming dynasty century and became extremely popular at the beginning of the Qing. It is characterized by the unique local colorism. The poster is a wood engraving and watercolor block printing, which is dyed or colored finally by hand. The contents of the paintings covered all the facets of social life. From portraits of historical stories, door gods, fairy tales, folk stories and customs, lucky mascots of birds and flowers, scenes of production and labor, humorous scenes to current affairs, Chinese New Year Posters depicted almost everything. No wonder why Chinese New Year Posters are known as encyclopedias on folklore.
The most popular poster that the Chinese love to paste inside their rooms is called "having grain to spare for years coming". The poster features a lovely smiling boy sitting in front of some lotus flowers and holding a big carp in his little arms. In Chinese, the word for lotus is homonymic with the word for consecutive and fish symbolizes abundance. Hence, the picture is considered as a good omen for the coming year.
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