A funeral in a poor village on the northern China plain south of Beijing, 1995. More than twenty men have been summoned away from their work in the fields to perform ritual music in the dusty courtyard of the deceased person’s single-story house. Some of the members of this amateur association are nearly eighty years old, others barely twenty.
The members of the ritual association perform seated on benches around long tables before the coffin, and later on in a...