Paintings of White Yi by Dai Jie
Dai Jie 1 , professor at the Art Institute of Yunnan Normal University 2 , has been visiting the White Yi 3 of Xundian county 4 for more than ten years. The paintings below are nearly two metres high. 5
- Dai Jie 戴杰 Dai4 Jie2 Da Jie graduated from the Yunnan Arts University in 1995
- Yunnan Normal University 云南师范大学 Yun2 nan2 shi1 fan4 da4 xue2 The Art Institute has an impressively nasty web page here [in Chinese].
- White Yi 白彝 bai2 yi2 Overview at answers.com. White means commoners (the Black Yi were the nobility). The Yi of Xundian county are known by outsiders for their bull fighting festival, known by the Chinese transliteration “Bugenan” festival (布葛南 bu4 ge2 nan2 ).
- Xundian county 寻甸县 Xun2 dian4 xian4 Today under the administration of the municipality of Kunming, the first records of the name Xundian are from the Nanzhao kingdom (during the Tang dynasty), though it was part of the Dian Kingdom in the Spring and Autumn period (777 to 476 BC). Of the population of approximately half a million people, less than ten percent are Yi, another ten percent are Hui and the rest are Han Chinese, yet it was designated a Hui and Yi Peoples Autonomous County in 1979 (the largest population of Hui in the province, as far as I can gather). It is a plateau region filled with karst mountains and prone to earthquakes. In the late 90s (97?) the average rural income per capita was RMB 1,020, and there are various international NGO projects in the region, including Habitat for Humanity.
- Sources in Chinese: 1, 2, 3. Dai Jie actually spends most of his time in Xundian’s Banqiao town (板桥镇 ban3 qiao2 zhen4 “Wooden Bridge” Town)
