A photographer’s fantastical portrait of rural China during Lunar New Year

In documenting northern China’s Shehuo festival, Zhang Xiao shines a light on disappearing rural traditions and the threat e-commerce poses to traditional crafts.

In photographer Zhang Xiao’s images of the Shehuo festival, an ancient celebration still observed in parts of northern China during the Lunar New Year, rural life comes alive with something altogether more fantastical. Villagers dressed as cranes, roosters and mythical lions pose for portraits standing amid crops or in fallow farmland. Costumed performers parade past brick houses against hazy backdrops, the eyes of their masks seemingly lost in thought. In a harvested wheat field, a group of almost a dozen men line up to hold aloft a colorful dragon puppet. In his new book “Community Fire,” Zhang said he wanted to capture the surreal “disconnect” between people’s everyday lives and the mythical personas they assumed. “Their characters seemed to come from the sky itself, and … formed a huge theatrical stage that transcended the confines of reality, transporting a collective of sleepwalkers to a dreamworld,” he wrote. “I wandered among them and photographed them quietly, because I did not want to wake them up.” Rooted in millennia-old agricultural practices of worshipping fire and the land, the folk rituals of Shehuo (often translated as “earth and fire”) traditionally entailed praying for good fortune and bounteous harvests, or to drive away demons. Festivities vary between regions but now typically see various performers, from stilt walkers to opera singers, parading through the streets or staging shows. Today, celebrations coincide with the Lunar New Year, which started on Saturday. As such, they have come to encompass many of the traditions — such as temple fairs and lion dances — practiced around China during this period. (Lunar New Year celebrations usually last more than two weeks, with Shehuo festival taking place on the season’s 15th and final day.)