Research on the Cultural Innovation and Educational Role of the Art Village Construction Practice in Ancient Weir Painting Village

Abstract

Taking the Ancient Weir Painting Village in Lishui, Zhejiang, China, as an example, we examine how the construction of an artistic countryside can be transformed into a sustainable educational process through cultural activities from the perspective of cultural innovation and the educational role. This study aims to identify the resource system and operating model of cultural innovation in Ancient Weir Painting Village, reveal the key mechanisms by which cultural activities are transformed into learning processes, and establish a traceable evidence chain to demonstrate the educational and heritage effects. A qualitative case study method was adopted, integrating participant observation, semi-structured interviews and the analysis of text and media materials, to reveal the resource system of cultural innovation in Ancient Weir Painting Village and the generation mechanism and evidence chain of the educational process. The results of the research show that the cultural innovation in Ancient Weir Painting Village is a systematic collaboration and coupling between activity systems, spatial nodes, and participation structures. In developing cultural activities, the learning process is organised through situation creation, community interaction, narrative construction, and feedback evaluation. This promotes the transformation of local experiences into on-site aesthetic educational practices. Its educational function can be identified in four dimensions: cognition, emotion, value, and action. Among these, action transformation is particularly dependent on the guarantee of channels and institutional support for continuous participation, showing higher sensitivity to these factors. To ensure the continued stable fulfilment of the educational function of art villages, it is necessary to encourage cultural innovation organisations to engage in extensive learning and promotion activities within society. The conclusion highlights that, to stabilise the effectiveness of real estate in producing people, the construction of artistic countryside must transform cultural innovation into a sustainable, socialised learning device; organise activity tasks and evaluations with curriculum logic; enhance community subjectivity with community logic; and form an extended path of action transformation through school-site collaboration, residency mechanisms, and achievement implementation. Future work could also involve gradually developing a systematic evaluation index system based on qualitative research, combining it with mixed research methods to improve the comparability of evidence and the effectiveness of extrapolating conclusions.