XINBIN MANCHU ANCESTRAL WORSHIP CEREMONY: SYMBOLIC STRUCTURE, EMBODIED PRACTICE, AND THEIR TRANSFORMATION INTO CONTEMPORARY EASEL PAINTING

The ancestral worship of the Xinbin Manchu is a sophisticated ritual system that preserves cultural memory, social order, and ancestral identity through symbolic frameworks, embodied practices, and ceremonial sequences. This ongoing ritual tradition encounters issues of discontinuity and symbolic erosion with modernization, urbanization, and generational change. Although current scholarship has explored Manchu ancestral worship mainly through folkloric, anthropological, and historical lenses, there has been no focus on the systematic transformation of its ritual logic via contemporary artistic practices. This study used a practice-based research methodology to investigate the translation of the symbolic structures and embodied practices of Xinbin Manchu ancestral worship into contemporary easel painting as a means of cultural knowledge formation. This research, based on qualitative fieldwork in Xinbin Manchu Autonomous County, including in-depth interviews, participant observation, and archival analysis, examines ritual significance across three interconnected dimensions: symbolic organization (space, material objects, and color), embodied enactment (gesture, posture, and sensory engagement), and temporal structure (ritual sequence and process). These analytical discoveries are then converted into artistic language through a systematic process of experimentation and reflective study. The results indicate that modern easel painting serves as a non-representational medium for cultural memory, reinterpreting ritual logic through abstraction, materiality, and rhythmic composition instead of visual reproduction. By positioning artistic creation as an analytical and generative process, this study contributes an interdisciplinary framework that bridges ritual studies, semiotics, and contemporary art practice, offering a sustainable pathway for the dynamic inheritance of intangible cultural heritage.