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The Transition of a Handful of Common Sense in Work
Academic lectures series on the working methods and creative methodology of Chinese contemporary artists The Little Theatre at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute January 2018
Zhu Wei, born in 1966, is the pioneer and representative of Chinese contemporary ink and wash. He is the most internationally influential contemporary ink and wash artist and the first artist to introduce meticulous painting techniques into the field of contemporary Chinese art. Since the early 1990s, his ink paintings have been exhibited in more than 300 large-scale exhibitions all over the world, and in different languages 30 retrospective albums of his works have been published. There are forty-three art museums at home and abroad who have collected more than 70 of his artworks.
Students in art academies usually face two questions: First, how to make a living with art in the future. Second, how to become an outstanding artist in the future. The first question is not within the scope of what I’m going to talk about today. After four years of study and four more years after graduation, you will understand it quite well. But for the second question, if we don’t lay the groundwork properly during our academic study, it’ll be nearly impossible to find a quiet time to figure it out when things such as work and life are overwhelming. An outstanding artist must be the one who has created outstanding works, or an outstanding work. So, how to create an outstanding painting?! It's very simple. First of all, we should convert a handful of common sense that we have mistakenly thought of into the correct and feasible knowledge. ? About contemporary art. Nowadays contemporary art has misled many students, who think that the best art is the ones in the name of contemporary. They have a heart that totally engages in contemporary art. Even if their professor spends a long time trying to explain the concept, they still don’t believe it, because it seems that we don’t have the right of interpretation. Contemporary art is the present continuous tense. All attempts made in the name of contemporary are in the experimental stage. The exploration has lasted for more than a hundred years in the West, and the successes can be counted, which is not many. Even so, there is still not yet a definitive conclusion on the coffin lid. Some people may ask, haven’t some contemporary works already collected by museums, and some museums are even named after contemporary? A museum is not a coffin, that those who go in will no longer come out. Each era has its own contemporary art form, which is different from other eras. These arts developed with the advancement of human technology and social civilization, and during the development, some works have been replaced, and some outstanding works of contemporary art have become classics. These classic works are the objects that art students should carefully study. It is only less than forty years since the Western contemporary art came to China. Although all the participants have their own interests and therefore make it look like bustling with noise and excitement, in essence, the contemporary art has just landed on China, just enough to allow us to know what the so-called contemporary art is. Until today we haven’t had an original work, that is to say, not even a Chinese-made contemporary art IP or chip has appeared, not mentioning becoming a classic. With the passage of time, many works and exhibitions that have fascinated you may be a farce, so, you still have opportunities. You are very important! Are there any specific standards for being classics? Yes. First, creativity. Second, techniques. Third, materials. These also are what we often say: what to paint, how to paint, and what to paint with. Any breakthrough in the three areas can be regarded as a classic. And creativity should conform to the three judgments of aesthetics: judgement of fact, judgment of taste, and judgment of value. Judgment of fact refers to the authenticity and rationality of the events described in the artwork; judgement of value refers to the meaning and value of the work from the perspectives of aesthetic, moral, and historical aspects, and whether an artwork reflects the ultimate ideal of mankind. In fact, when it comes to practice, the selection and judgment of contemporary subjects usually tend to be vague and lack of courage. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of New China, an opinion poll was jointly organized by People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency, State Council Information Office, and Beijing Daily, asking the public to select the most important event since the founding of the People’s Republic of China: the Cultural Revolution ranked first, and the "Great Chinese Famine" ranked second. According to the 1999 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, the famine in China in the late 1950s and early 1960s was one of the two biggest famines in the 20th century. By the way, 1960s is also the time that the contemporary art was booming in the West. Then, what did the Chinese artists do during the same period? When we search in our historical data and important works, there is no trace or information of the "Great Chinese Famine" at all. In 1959, Fu Baoshi and Guan Shanyue came up with a large-scale Chinese painting with the title The Land is So Rich in Beauty for the Great Hall of the People, and Mao Zedong inscribed “The Land is So Rich in Beauty” on the painting. The critics wrote, “The significance of The Land is So Rich in Beauty does not lie in its huge scale or special background that ordinary works do not have, nor in its typical combination of the revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism, but in its finding a theme that can be successful in a specific social environment, and can be inspiring for many later landscape painters.” Li Keran’s Red over the Mountains as if the Forests are Dyed and Pan Tianshou’s The Meaning of the Poem “Melody of Waves” by Maoz Zedong are also in this category. Regarding Li Keran’s Red over the Mountains as if the Forests are Dyed, the critics pointed out that “it indicates that he has fully matured in using his painting language to express Mao Zedong's poetry, and it also establishes his own landscape painting appearance." Few painters at that time did not paint Mao Zedong's poetic style, and Mao Zedong's poetic paintings were a way to make no mistakes. Artists from the Central Academy of Fine Arts had completed 138 murals, one of which is 300 square meters large. 23 painters from the Beijing Fine Art Academy had worked hard for five days and nights to complete five paintings and each is four meters wide. Painters in Jiangsu province also established a Chinese painting work group. They spent three months to travel more than 23,000 miles in Henan, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, Guangdong and other places to collectively create paintings like Eat for Free in the People's Communes, Mountain Village Leap Forward, and Bamboo Shoots after the Rain, on which it’s inscribed “People create frequently and make great innovations, like bamboo shoots grow up together after the spring rain.” Some artist puts it forward, “When thoughts changes, ink and brush cannot remain unchanged”. Artists painted almost all sacred places of revolution and the former residence of the leader, without a single trace of the “Great Famine”. The following is the chronicle of Chinese art during the "Great Chinese Famine": On March 24, 1959, Cai Ruohong, the Vice Chairman of the China Artists Association (CAA), and Wang Chaowen, the Executive Director of CAA, attended and gave a speech in the three-day conference "Plastic Arts in the Socialist Countries" in Moscow. On December 23, 1959, jointly organized by the China Artists Association and People's Fine Arts Publishing House, the "Ten Years of Propaganda Poster Exhibition" opened at Beijing Zhongshan Park. On January 20, 1960, organized by the China Artists Association, the "New Year Prints Exhibition" opened at Beijing Zhongshan Park, and a total of 179 works were exhibited. On March 2, 1960, the Anhui Branch of the China Artists Association was established. The association appointed Lai Shaoqi as its chairman, 28 people as its directors, and 5 as its executive directors. On March 16, 1960, Jiangsu province Chinese Painting Academy was established. Fu Baoshi was the appointed as dean and Qian Songyan was the deputy dean. On September 30, 1960, the fourth volume of Selected Works of Mao Zedong was published and distributed. Cai Ruohong, Liu Kaiqu, Wu Zuoren, Wang Chaowen, and Wu Jingting participated in its first study circle organized by the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. On December 29, 1960, an apprenticeship ceremony was held for workers and peasants college in the Shanghai Chinese Painting Academy. On January 18, 1961, the China Artists Association convened a board meeting and decided that the main task in the first half of the year was to create the tribute works for the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. On June 2, 1961, the "Forum of Historical Painting of China’s Revolutionary" was held in Beijing. On October 25, 1961, as the chairman of the Chinese Federation of Literary and Art Circles, Guo Moruo wrote to the French painter Picasso, congratulating him on his 80th birthday. ? About imitation. The process of student learning is a process of imitating. According to our standards of exams, those who imitate the best scores the highest, and those who have high scores are good students. But when it comes to practical stage, the standard is the other way around. The painting that looks like someone else’s is called plagiarism, and if the someone is bad tempered, the plagiarizer will be beaten and cried. There is one problem in imitation, that is, how to be similar, and the imitator cannot draw faster than the original creator. Otherwise there is nothing to imitate. Too much imitations will make us feel that our own things are useless. Sometimes even matured artists have imagined that there is an international language in contemporary art. As long as they imitate these languages, they can be in line with international standards, and they can be understood by people all over the world and become masters. There are many examples. Some people are successful, and they are not young artists, so it is not convenient to name them. In 2008, Richter held a solo exhibition at the National Art Museum of China. A reporter from the cultural column of "Southern Weekend" sent me a text message, telling me it’s strange that no one in art circle wanted to express their opinions on Richter’s exhibition. I dared not reply. Richter is the No. 1 in the contemporary art world today. He is the ancestor in the dreams of Chinese artists, and many have learned from him. So here I’m going to talk more about Richter. Richter's success lies in his breakthrough in painting techniques. The impact of photography on painting and the survival of painting have become a common tough problem faced by artists all over the world. Artists have made different attempts, including Picasso’s Cubism, Kandinsky’s Cubism, Chirico’s Surrealism and Ernst’s Dadaism. Picasso’s Cubism painting and Richter’s blurred soft abstract painting are successful and reasonable explorations. In 1962, when Li Keran created the series Red over the Mountains as if the Forests are Dyed based on Chairman Mao’s poem, Richter began to paint paintings based on photos. Each time he selected a few photos that he’s satisfied with from the nearly 1,000 photos to copy and enlarge. Richter believes that his paintings are not realist paintings like what people said. He divides abstract paintings into small abstraction, soft abstraction and large abstraction, and the blurred photo-based images he paints are soft abstraction. In this way, he makes his work less offensive, and creates a gray ambiguous zone between reality and ideals. He believes that blurry photo is the most perfect picture, with no restrictions, no style, no tendencies, and being both abstract and philosophical. Richter created blurred painting technique, so that he was able to express his themes with ease and would not be used by either left- or right-wing. He used this technique to create the Uncle Rudi in 1965, the Eight Student Nurses in 1966, and the representative October 18, 1977 series 1988. He tried to get close to reality, and somewhat challenged people’s inherent ideas. Richter fled from the East Germany to the West Germany with his family after World War II. It can be said that he has a dual perspective, which makes him more objective and comprehensive when he views their society. Richter’s father was an amiable former member of the National Socialist Party, a Nazi, and Richter and his family therefore carried a heavy burden in both the socialist camp and the capitalist camp. Because of this, his description of the Nazis became vivid and not superficial. For a long time after the end of World War II, both the Western camp led by Great Britain, the United States and Germany, and the socialist camp led by the Soviet Union, imposed strict sanctions on Nazi. The literary and artistic works at that time were similar to ours when we defeated the Gang of Four after the end of the Cultural Revolution. There were also a large number of stereotyping literary and artistic works. When Richter's Uncle Rudi appeared in a form of blurred historical photos, it blew everyone’s mind, from which people can see how objective and humane that artworks should be. This painting caused a huge sensation at that time. When Richter was 70 years old in 2002, an exhibition was held in MoMA in New York to ceremoniously introduce this type of painting to the world, titled "October 18, 1977". This series consists of 15 paintings, including four groups and five individual oil paintings. It depicts several moments before the suicide of some members of the Red Army Faction, the biggest terrorist organization in Europe at the time. The four members were Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins, and Ulrike Meinhof. These paintings aroused much controversy. The full name of the work is "October 18, 1977", commemorating the day when the bodies of Baader and Ensslin’s bodies were found in the tight cell of Stammheim Prison. And their comrades, the dying Jan-Carl Raspe and the injured Irmgard Moller, were also found at the same time. Stammheim Prison is close to Stuttgart, and they had been kept in this prison after their convictions for murder and other political incitements. Almost three years earlier (October 2, 1974), these prisoned extremists called for protest against prison conditions and held a hunger strike. Meins starved to death, and Meinhof hanged herself in her Stammheim cell (May 9, 1976), shortly after she and others were sentenced to life imprisonment. Her death was claimed as suicide. Similarly, the deaths of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe in the following year (October 18, 1977) were also claimed as suicides too, although it was generally suspected that the four of them were murdered by the government. When Richter depicts the major conflicts and contradictions in the real society, he depicts them basically in a bystander's perspective as well, by retelling events objectively. For his own standpoint, he has always appeared as an independent artist for many years, sometimes with a little bit of academicism. Richter has two famous sayings: "The best thing that could have happened to art was its divorce from government." "Everything made since Duchamp has been readymade, even when hand-painted." Objectively speaking, Richter did not innovate a new method of using painting materials. He basically used all the materials used by oil painters for hundreds of years, including the particularly handy scraper that he asked his excellent assistant and carpenter to make for him. Compared to Warhol, there is no big breakthrough in his creative ideas. Richter's success is that he created a brand-new painting technique. It is a major breakthrough in the history of oil painting technique, and brings people a new way of understanding the aesthetic approach. This is enough to make Richter a veritable and undisputed master in the history of contemporary painting. It requires talent, patience and conscientiousness to paint. For example, there are different methods and tastes in making pickles. Korean kimchi is a bit spicy, Japanese pickled radish is a bit sweet, and our pickled cabbage is a bit salty. Russian pickles are also good, while the only downside is that we don’t know what to eat with. There is also a kind of pickled grapes in Europe. It tastes like you accidentally dropped the rubber into the jar and pickled them. So far I have never eaten international pickles. In the 1980s, there was a language called Esperanto. The letters looked like a mixture of English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German. It sounds like a person ran into the Eight-Power Allied Forces in an afternoon. Esperanto was promoted by our Ministry of Education in the past, and all national key foreign language colleges and universities established Esperanto departments. Undergraduates could study four years Esperanto, and then chose it as their major of post graduate. And then the matter was dropped. Imitation doesn’t need a theory, which will lead to the loss of the right to speak. Over time, we will lose the ability of thinking, the capacity of discernment, and furthermore, the ability to innovate. Imitated things cannot be exported, or it's a summing-up report at most. Japan is an example. Japan is a very influential Eastern civilization in the world. It is the earliest country in the East to enter modern civilization, and the civilization is independent of China, South Korea, and India. In 1860, the Meiji Restoration led to comprehensive reforms in Japan’s political and economic systems and so on. It has been more than 150 years since then. However, when Japanese products are exported abroad, they still are substitute products. Except for the washbasin, slippers and children's toys that made in China, Japanese products are still the cheapest ones, like car, lawn mowers, snow blowers, refrigerators, color TV, printers, etc. These are substitute products. China does not have her own art form today. Including peasant painting, all painting forms except ink and wash are foreign. We must have more awe and respect for foreign things. Artists should show minimum characteristics of an educated person, obtaining consent before their borrowing, indicating the source and thanking the borrower afterwards. This is what people must do in a country who claim itself a civilization. In short, imitation is always inferior. Try to avoid it.
About reading. Compared with writing, painting is obviously physical labor. Even abstract paintings are only abstract in its form. At least they still need to be accomplished by colors, which cannot be said to be boring. But what a writer faces are paper and pen. Before the author write and the readers read, everything is abstract. With a few lines of text, the viewers feel an upsurge of emotion. I know some buddies from other industries, film directors, rock musicians, etc., who subscribe to literary journals and magazines all the year round, hoping to get some inspiration from them. The works of Post ’89 artists, called by Li Xianting as Cynical Realism, were all influenced by Wang Shuo’s novels, and these artworks can totally be used as illustrations of Wang’s stories. Wang Shuo’s novels accurately reflect the psychological changes of young people in the 1980s and 1990s, from hope to disappointment, to helpless. Reading varies from person to person. Most people study painting because they don’t like to read and have poor grades in cultural courses, which means they don’t have much culture, and they naturally reject reading. I don't like reading. Books are not very attractive to me. I have tried any method that could replace reading. Of course, this is related to the background of our generation. At that time, the slogan "united, nervous, serious, lively" was everywhere, and later the slogan "read for the rise of China" was added. I never understand how a person can be united and nervous and serious and lively at the same time? It is too difficult. And who the hell has the right to require others like this? This is a condescending requirement, an adult's requirement to a child, and a requirement that lacks basic common sense. Now it’s different. There are more books with common sense and more people with common sense. I also grow fond of reading. It is a pity that I didn't practiced much as a child, so my reading speed is slower than normal people, and it’s hard to change. The advantage is that it’s not easy to forget what I’ve read. I have several series of works whose titles are directly derived from the titles of a book. For example, the ink painting Pictures of the Strikingly Bizarre created in the 1990s, and the prints New Pictures of the Strikingly Bizarre which was cooperated with Singapore Taylor Print Institute in 2004, are based on the novels written by Ling Mengchu in the late Ming Dynasty. The painting Beside the Girls created in 1996 took the title from the second volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (its earliest Chinese translation is Beside the Girls, rather than In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower). For my recent works, the Curtain series of 2010 got the title from a collection of essays by Milan Kundera, and the Hills beyond A River of 2012 is an art history book of Yuan Dynasty’s painting written by James Cahill. The content of these books fits well with my mood of creation at the time. Reading can examine creative ideas. A book is like a house. The author starts from the foundation, builds the structure, adds bricks and tiles, and builds a glass curtain wall, until the final completion. These are actually the products of the author. The quality of a book is related to the author’s idea, his knowledge, and the expression. Whether it is fiction or non-fiction, any book is actually an assumption, a dream, and a lie of the author. The connection between a book and the reality is not as close as its connection with the author. My reading depends largely on how much a book reflects the reality, and whether there are new things in it. For example, about what the world is like, the Look at the World with a Cold Eye: The Revelations of the Ups and Downs Over a Hundred Years, authored by Zi Zhongyun in 1990', is more objective and fair among the many books written by Chinese scholars. Written by Wu Xiaobo, the Storming 30 Years: Chinese Enterprises 1978-2008 interprets history of merchants from a new perspective, elevating them from the bottom of the traditional hierarchy "scholar, farmer, artisan, and merchant". Not like those popular books that teach us how to be successful, this tells us a serious history. Ray Huang's 1587, a Year of No Significance takes the fifteenth year of Wanli as a microcosm of China's thousands of years of history, and draws a conclusion that being lack of "sensible mathematics" is the reason of China's less-developed. This is more like another way to say that China is a society that of rule of men rather than rule of law. With an American-style positivism spirit, this book gives us an impression that change is just around the corner if they want to. And Zhang Yihe's The Final Nobles brings the shadow of the past to life. These are all interesting books. Of course, most of what I read is related to art. I won’t bother you with more examples. Besides that, I’ll also see whether a book is relevant to my interests. If there is a book on fern research in Madagascar, it has a new point of view, and it tells the truth, generally speaking, I still can’t read it. Read books as early as possible. This is not to encourage a three-year-old child to recite the Standards for being a Good Pupil and Child, or to showoff at a dinner table. It means that before a person is thirty years old, books can still be influential on him. After thirty years old, even the best books will slowly become less weighted like footnotes and tidbits. But footnotes and tidbits are also very important, such as James Cahill's several art history books that have been translated into Chinese. I think they are very reliable. The accurate and powerful footnotes can help readers to improve accuracy in judgment and interpretation. I seldom rely on books to relax myself, but occasionally there are exceptions. Biographical books are useful in this aspect, and autobiographies are even better. Sometime an author of a biography makes up plots to attract readers, so you can find sentence like "at that time he was thinking...". How the hell could the author know what the protagonist was thinking? Maybe the protagonist himself didn't know. Best-selling author Stephen King and several of his writer friends formed a rock band in the 1990s. They often talked about their works, but never asked each other where their writing inspiration came from, because "we know we don't know". I read biographies just like little Laizi said in the movie Farewell to My Concubine: "How could they become big roles? How many times were they beaten for this?" To read a biographical book is to see how many times they were beaten. The film Back to 1942, which is adapted from the documentary novel by the winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize Liu Zhenyun, failed at the box office. The director Feng Xiaogang accepted an interview with PEOPLE magazine at the beginning of this year, saying that he is pessimistic, because many vicious things in people’s hearts have been magnified today, and he felt he had nothing to talk about with the world. Similarly, New York University held a conversation between director Zhang Yimou and Ang Lee. As the conversation came to an end, Zhang Yimou could not help but leaned forward to ask Ang Lee, “How do you make the Western audiences understand your movie?" One was angry at being left by the times, and the other was worried about being left by the world. Coincidentally, the two directors showed the loneliness as a creator in a different way. At the times of Lu Xun, "when they saw short sleeves, they immediately thought of white arms, of nakedness, of genitals, of intercourse, and of bastards." Now it’s different. Many young audiences have seen "full nudity", including "full nudity" from abroad. It's difficult to be excited at the sight of short sleeves. They can understand Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, and Yasujiro Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon. They know the position of an aspiring movie in the world of movies. After that, we need to look back, to examine the value of a work in the special context of China, and to see whether this value has equivalent energy in painting. Here are some of my reading experience: To Live, a novel by Yu Hua. ?This novel should have been read by many people, but it is worth mentioning again. Through a pair of sympathetic eyes, this novel was written in a tone of absurd. The son of a rich landlord who had been tainted with bad habits of frequenting brothels, gambling and drinking, once lost all his family's property in a gamble. It caused his father's death and his family’s falling to the bottom of the society. However, because of the same reason, he saved his life in the later revolution. The story itself seems absurd, but it is extremely realistic. A prodigal son has been there since ancient times, and if he accidentally caught up the special era, it makes a profound story. Not only the materials are good, so does the language. The language shows Yu Hua's consistent style, refined and enthusiastic. An obviously miserable tragedy was written in a style of festive and even carnival. Using comedic language to write a tragedy is an ancient method. All Men Are Brothers (a novel in Ming Dynasty) and The Scholars (a novel in Qing Dynasty) both applied it, and Yu Hua takes it to the extreme. (V.S. Naipaul also used it in his Miguel Street, which is a collection of short stories.) The best comedies are actually tragedies, and the best tragedies are comedies. It’s a pity that the judges of the Nobel Prize for Literature do not know much about Chinese, and probably do not know much about China. Yu Hua is a pure writer who can neither curry favor with someone important, nor find suitable people to translate his works. The novel The Stranger by Camus has a very strange narrative technique. The narration before the end of the story is always numb, as if the protagonist does not have feelings like ordinary human beings do. But when it’s approaching the end, all the oppressed things suddenly burst out, showing that kind of sound humanity and full personality, giving people a great shock. We were surprised that what the protagonist did was reasonable, and when looking back at his previous actions, we suddenly realized that the protagonist lived a life stripped of all illusions and beautification effects. Because others do not live their lives like this, the protagonist becomes a real stranger. Naipaul's Miguel Street is also a typical example of writing tragedy with a joyful tone. Although the characters in the book are far away in Trinidad, they seem to live on the street where we grew up. Poverty, isolation, numbness, and ignorance are normal for these people, but occasionally, there are also golden moments. These moments have existed and then disappeared, which makes it even more sentimental. One Hundred Years of Solitude，by Garcia Márquez. I have not much to say about it. It has become a representative of Latin America. Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage During China's Revolution and Reform, a biography by Ying Ruocheng. Ying Ruocheng was the former Deputy Minister of Culture. His grandfather Ying Lianzhi was the founder of Ta Kung Pao and Fu Jen Catholic University in Beijing, and his father Ying Qianli was the founder of Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan. He came from a well-educated intellectual family. The history of this family is enough to write a book. Ying Ruocheng played many roles, including the hated Liu Mazi and Little Liu Mazi in the drama Teahouse, Liu Siye in the movie Camel Xiangzi, Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, the warden in the movie The Last Emperor, and Lama Norbu in the movie Little Buddha. His career is enough to write a book. However, Ying Ruocheng's autobiography Voices Carry began with his prison life in 1968, because it was the most bizarre thing that happened in his life. "This period of time in prison has allowed me to learn more about the situation in China than what I had learned in my whole life, which is gratifying." The author has an optimistic spirit. About the passages of the author’s experience in prison, it will be interesting to compare this part with Yan Geling's best work so far, Inmate Lu Yanshi. Wang Shuo’s Wild Beast, Die Satisfied, I’m Your Father, and Master of Mischief are good. They were subversive when they were just published back then. Duan Chengshi’s Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang is a collection of legendary stories of the Tang dynasty. It's vigorous, showing the spirit of Tang. Ar Cheng’s The King of Chess. This fiction is unusual because it described the life of the Sent-down youth in an unusual gallant and ancient style. Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment. If you can tolerate Dostoevsky's neuroticism, this book is quite profound. George Orwell 1984. Modern horror prophetic fiction. Sigmund Freud A Young Girl's Diary. An introduction to psychology. Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism. As the title of the book. Ruth Benedict The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. It is said to be the best book to understand our neighbor. Akira koshizawa Manchuria Capital Planning. As can be seen in the book, even the number of sewer manhole covers, the licensed prostitutes, and the unlicensed prostitutes were all clearly counted by Japanese rulers in Manchukuo. Dominic Streatfeild The Secret History of Mind Control. An introduction to psychology. Reading can solve the loneliness in creation. For example, painters seem to be powerless on describing hunger. So far, I only remember Jiang Zhaohe's The Homeless People, in which the starving people are waiting in line desperately with an empty bowl in their hands. Later an oil painting depicting a farmer-like old man holding a bowl also appeared. Both paintings were nationally noticed at that time. Compared with painters, it seems much easier for writers to write about hunger. Lu Wei, the screenwriter of the movie To Live, used to write about a painter friend who lived at Old Summer Palace: his main task everyday was not to conceive painting, but to contemplate how to eat the next meal for free. In order to have a meal he made a set of complicated plans, such as whose home he should eat in today, whose home he should eat in tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and two days after tomorrow, and how to eat without causing any embarrassment to each other, and so on. In those days everyone must have food coupons to purchase food, and the coupons were limited in quantity, so if you went to somebody's home for a meal, it was just a one-time trip, otherwise the people you visited wouldn't have enough food for themselves in that month. You had to make a precise calculation on it. There were so much tears of hardship and hunger that cannot be explained in a word. In my mind, Yu Hua, the writer in China who deserves the Nobel Prize the most, always shows a special preference to describing hunger. In his novel Why There Is No Music, he depicted an unusual man Ma Er: Ma Er can hold a whole shrimp in his mouth to eat the shrimp meat and spit out an intact shrimp shell using his tongue only. Ma Er eats quickly, attentively, never raising his head before he finishes. In Yu Hua's another novel Classical Love he described a more cruel and bloody picture of hunger. The Classical Love subverts the pattern of the traditional love story, which was always describing how a young, poor, and talented scholar fell in love with a rich, beautiful girl in her backyard garden, and then the poor young scholar became the no.1 scholar in the highest imperial examination. During the famine period, the gifted young scholar didn't become the imperial no.1 scholar, and the rich girl's home was destroyed. When the young man met the young girl again in a small restaurant, the young girl had become food in a “food person” market. The description in this story is much more vivid than the Fantasy Tales by Ji Xiaolan (a writer in the Qing Dynasty). A "food person" is a human being whose flesh is going to be made into a dish on table. In famine years the flesh of human beings was eatable. In Ar Cheng's The King of Chess, the writer wrote about the king of chess Wang Yisheng: "When he heard the clinking of aluminum lunch boxes made by people who ate ahead, he closed his eyes, with mouth tightly shut, as if he felt sick. After he got his meal, he started to eat it immediately and quickly. His Adam's apple bobbed in his throat. His face was full of tension. He stopped his eating constantly and suddenly, by using his whole index finger, to wipe a grain of cooked rice or a touch of oil or soup caught on his lips or chin into his mouth. If a grain of cooked rice fell on his clothes, he would press his finger on it right away, and transfer it into his mouth. If the transferring wasn't successful and the rice fell on the ground, he would stop moving his feet at once, and then turn himself around to look for it. At this moment if he happened to meet my eyes, he would slow down the process. After he finished eating, he carefully sucked his chopsticks until they were totally cleaned, filled up his lunch box with water, sipped the thin oil slick first, and then with an expression of reaching the other shore safely, sipped the remained water." This is the sequela of hunger. In Cao Naiqian's novel collection There Is Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night there is a story called “Dan Wa”. In the beginning of the story Lao Zhuzhu's family had built a cave room and was going to install the door and windows. Traditionally, in an event like this, every household in the village should send a laborer to help, and when the job is done, each laborer should have a fried rice cake to enjoy. Dan Wa came home early that day, because it wouldn’t cost him any work points if he did so. Thus when Lao Zhuzhu went to the collective fields to call for labor, Dan Wa was not there. The fried rice cake was so rare that villagers usually could only eat it once a year during the Spring Festival. Groundlessly missing the opportunity to eat the fried rice cake, Dan Wa was very unhappy. However, he was embarrassed to tell people the truth, so from morning till night, he made trouble everywhere for a whole day. It's a story about gluttonousness which is developed from hunger. Looking at the 3700 years of Chinese history, famines were recorded in every dynasty. Accumulated from generation to generation, every Chinese has a large area in his head dedicated to storing memories of hunger. No matter how much money we have, it's still difficult to get rid of the fear of hunger and the consequent insecurity. We have been fighting hard unremittingly around the bottom line of survival. A Taiwanese scholar has pointed out that Chinese culture is still a primitive culture, but packaged with benevolence, righteousness, courtesy, wisdom and faithfulness. A primitive culture is a culture of survival, whose main feature is that all labor and the judgments of values are aimed at maintaining survival and rejecting spiritual values. Therefore, the Chinese nation has never had faith, because we have never had spared time to believe in anything. The foundation of humanity and historical context in China is different from those of the West. I hope you can understand this. ? About ink painting, like everyone here, I have always been worried that I’m going to become a so-called artist, who can paint anything alike, finish a painting including stamping and inscribing in a minute, and paint more than 2,000 paintings in a year. It’s particularly easy for an ink painter to become someone like that. There are such people but it does not represent all, because ink painting is still a form of art so far. The history of ink painting can be said to be the history of Chinese painting. Oil painting has entered China in the recent one hundred years. In the history of oil painting, no technique, genre, or creative tendency was born in China. So from a historical perspective, the development of contemporary ink and wash is important. What I am looking forward to now is that there won’t be any chasm. In many Asian countries, local painting has almost disappeared due to the impact of Western culture. There are no teachers who teach local painting in universities in these countries. We still have Chinese painting departments in art colleges, and by the namely order of importance they are Chinese painting, oil painting print, and sculpture, but actually in the minds of students, Chinese painting is the last in the row. They are embarrassed to say hello to others when they enter the Department of Chinese Painting. In Chinese painting it is hypocritical and non-artistic to use the principles of perspective to deal with the problem of space. Chinese painting has more than one focal point on the object, and the angle of sight is not fixed, so a painter will apply different perspectives and angles to figures and objects in the same painting. According to the Song Dynasty painter Guo Xi’s ideas on printing principle, “In landscape paintings, the height of mountains is a full zhang (a unit of length (= 3/3 meters)), the trees a full foot, the horses a full inch, and the figures a full of tenths of an inch.” This means that when you draw parallel lines, the lines will always be parallel. Ink and wash painting is a kind of painting dominated by lines. The colors and shapes are matched with the lines. The lines are very flexible. For images dominated by lines, the colors will become secondary. If we want to paint it as realistic as oil painting, the lines will be weak. But Chinese painting emphasizes the lines. A well-painted meticulous painting is a white line drawing, and the white line drawing shows the skill of an artist most. For thousands of years, ink painting has been quite impressive, and it was still part of the mainstream culture of this nation until the end of Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China. According to Western art historian Sullivan, Chinese art led to at least two orientalization movements in Europe. The former appeared in the 17th century and the latter in the 18th century. Over thousands of years, ink and wash painting has developed smoothly with few sufferings, and it has only suffered two great calamities in recent decades. One is the May Fourth Movement took place in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, during which serious controversies over this kind of painting occurred. Indeed, the so called “controversies” were nothing but the negation. The other calamity was the Traditional Chinese Painting Revolution after 1949. In other words, it was to take the life of the traditional Chinese paintings. By mixing the Western elements such as sketch and perspective principles with ink and wash painting, it made the ink and wash painting fall between two stools. Even foreign missionaries like Matteo Ricci, and artists like Giuseppe Castiglione and Jean Denis Attiret were embarrassed to do so in China at that time. Cultural wars are different from military wars. There is no such thing like working in collusion - one from within and the other from without - in the art world. It depends entirely on internal acceptance and finally self-disintegration to win. Strictly speaking, this last revolution was initiated from the inside, so it was the most devastating and fatal to ink painting. For thousands of years, ink painting has never been discussed at every turn like it is now. Just like the Westerners prefer Western food and Chinese prefer Chinese food, it’s a habit, not a mistake. But now we are discussing whether we can still have Chinese food like usual. Are we too unconfident? Or are there other hidden reasons? When did you hear Europeans held conferences constantly to discuss the issue of the dead end of oil painting? If they can't make up their minds, hesitating, as if their future hung in the balance, can our Chinese painters swarm to learn from them like now? When we discuss something, there are two different motivations: one is to fix it and see if it can be used in the future; the other is to throw it away. Which one is our tendency? Over the past one hundred years, after several generations of continuous efforts and self-denial, it would be good enough if the quality of ink painting was at the same level as that of the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China. What kind of ink works, do you think, can be taken by future generations to understand our era? Is it the work without the willingness to take any risks? Is it the work that evade reality and doesn’t have the slightest intention of exploration? Is it the things that are full of triteness whose purpose is decoration? The literati in ancient times could paint this kind of painting better. Even the feudal emperors could paint better flowers and birds or still life paintings than today’s people, and they also wrote good calligraphy that modern people cannot surpass. In October 2016, the National Art Museum of China held the largest international tour exhibition of Chinese oil paintings to celebrate their return to China. Oil painter Jin Shangyi said at the exhibition’s large-scale seminar, "If we really want to have cultural exchange with the West, it’s not a good idea to bring our oil paintings. They won’t give a thought. It can only be the traditional Chinese painting." ? About myself. I learned ink painting very early, but it was not until the mid-1980s that I decided to study ink painting. I chose to study ink painting because my family was poor and oil painting materials were expensive. The first painting I painted was the Derivative from Bada’s Landscape Brush Style in 1987. It was a pure landscape without a single figure. It structurized Bada’s landscape, with mountains, water, and calligraphy, which was kind of decorative. Later I painted some splash ink paintings, but many failed, and only one was left. And then I started to paint figure painting. In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, my ink paintings were basically about daily life, a bit like the traditional Chinese novels of manners in the Ming and Qing dynasties, such as the Story of Beijing series. They basically included all things in the world, even so I still felt that there were many things left behind. It was not because I just left college and wanted to paint everything, but because the aura at that time made it easy for me to paint it. The motivation was there, and everyone around me had the similar aura, so I documented it, so that I wouldn’t forget it later. I started to cooperate with foreign galleries in 1993. At that time I only recognized the gallery I worked with. I rode a bike to the Yuanmingyuan nearby without communicating with anyone. It was rather unique. I also set a rule for the gallery that I wouldn’t participate in any joint exhibitions, just solo exhibitions. I felt that ink paintings would look weak if hanging beside oil paintings. Most of my paintings at the time were larger than 3 meters, but I still felt embarrassed as if I was competing with others through a colorful sketch (粉本). In fact, even the best oil paintings easily give people the feeling of craftsmanship, as Zhou Yigui said, which is a failure if I think about it now. From the Comrade Captain in 1993, I started to pay more attention to the individual, and none of my previous paintings seemed to paint a person's inner world. During that period, I painted a lot of Mao Zedong in order to emphasize the sense of the times. If I painted other people or my relatives, nobody knew him, so I painted public figures. On the one hand, it’s to echo the trend of introspection at the time, on the other hand, it’s also to create a path of contemporary fine-brushwork painting. Painting the inner world is because I was relatively mature in grasping the spirit of characters. Before that, I might not be able to reach it. I used to feel that ink painting was very weak, so if it were not painted into a narrative situation or a novel, the painting would not stand up. Therefore I used to depend on human figures and landscapes to describe an event or a scene. As a matter of fact, the traditional oil painting was also faced with the same problem, so they turned it into a scene called multi-character situational conversation. When I came to this painting, I basically grasped how contemporary ink figures should be painted. As of today, there is no second one except me that paints figure heads like three to five meters tall. I created more than a dozen of such paintings. My creation in the past 30 years can be divided into two parts. In the first ten years I was telling stories like traditional Chinese novels, in the last ten years I was focusing on concepts, and in the middle ten years, I was busy making money and fulfilling the tasks of the gallery. The Utopia series can be said to be successful. The scenes are concise, and the elements from ancient paintings were added, which I am quite satisfied with. A question that I keep thinking these years is how ink painting can reflect our two-thousand-year tradition. If we just move forward without looking back, that is not ink painting. The Utopia series is unremarkable from the picture itself. From a realistic point of view, people turn a blind eye to it. The Utopia actually expresses the dialectical materialism, the godless materialistic reality of modern Chinese people. It’s a scene of everyone sitting there, concentrating and wasting time seriously. There were a total of 19 series of my paintings, and each series has changed a lot between the beginning and the end. I don't like to create something like a symbol that is appreciated by the business and the market, although it will be easier for them to hype it. Many people have told me not to change, so that people can recognize me. But I think I’m just going forward like this step by step, and I’m happy to move forward without a backpack. In this way, due to the frequency of exhibitions, only a little change can be seen every time. The exhibition came again before I had time to change. The real change is the series of Ink and Wash Research Lectures, that’s a conceptual series after a pause of five years in 2012. The Ink and Wash Research Lectures series is not the final effect, so I call it "research". It is not the ink painting that I want ultimately. I always think that ink painting is a subject. This subject is like this to me: "Artists should not escape from political issues, nor lineage issues, and not to have the problem of people saying that you create for the moment." It’s said by Richter. I just feel the same. That's why I often question contemporary art, and feel that today’s artists should ponder such issues. There is another problem that the Ink and Wash Research Lectures series aims to solve. From ancient times to the present, there were portrait ink paintings in each dynasty, but in the socialist period there is none, nothing focusing on the current characters. Those figure paintings in the 1950s and 1960s were government propagandas, which should not be called creation. That will be seen over time. When entering a relatively free creative environment, everyone is busy making money and has no time. I want to make up for the lack of necessary works at this stage. Of course, it may be a failure, but it is always a try. These are some of the methods in my career over the years. Thank you very much for your time. Goodbye.
link：Sichuan Fine Arts Institute | Poster
工作中一些简单常识的转换
中国当代艺术家的工作方式与创作方法论系列学术讲座 四川美院小剧场 2018年1月
朱伟，1966年生，中国当代水墨的先行者和代表人物，是最具国际影响力的当代水墨艺术家，也是第一位将工笔画手法引进中国当代艺术领域的艺术家。自上世纪九十年代初开始以水墨画在国际大型展览亮相，在世界各地举办超过300多次大型展览，先后出版三十部不同文字的绘画专集、回顾专集。国内外有四十三家美术馆、博物馆收藏了其超过七十余件作品。
大家好! 各位都是在校学生，是中国当代艺术的未来，所以咱们今天捞干的，说具体情况，不玩社会上那套以免误人子弟。 艺术院校的学生一般面临两个问题：一，将来如何拿艺术混饭。二，今后如何成为优秀的艺术家。第一个问题不在我讲的范围之内，在这混四年出门再混四年就明白了。但是第二个问题在学习期间不打好底儿，以后工作生活具体等等事情一压上来再想找个清静的时间弄明白点什么基本不可能。 关于当代艺术。现在而今眼目下当代艺术误导了不少孩子，他们以为大凡冠以当代艺术之名的就是最好的。所以张嘴闭嘴要搞当代艺术，老师费半天劲给孩子们掰扯清楚了，又因为当代艺术我们不具备解释的合法性，孩子们还是投去半信半疑的目光。 说归说其实具体做起来对当代题材的选择判断往往会变得模糊和缺乏勇气。 新中国成立五十年之际《人民日报》、新华社、国务院新闻办和《北京日报》联合举办了一次民意调查，请民众评选出建国以来最重要的事件：文革名列第一，“三年自然灾害”名列第二。据一九九九年版的《大英百科全书》称，中国五十年代末六十年代初的饥荒为二十世纪人类两次最大的饥荒之一。 关于模仿。学生学习的过程本身就是一个模仿的的过程，以考学的标准谁模仿的像谁的分数就高，谁的分数高谁就是好学生。但是到了创作阶段这个标准正好反过来，画的像别人那叫剽窃，碰到脾气不好的弄不好还得挨顿揍，哭都不知道从哪儿起头。 模仿不需要有自己的理论，不会有话语权，久而久之会丧失思考和辨识能力，进而阉割掉创新的能力。 关于读书。与写作相比画画显然是具象体力劳动，即使是抽象画也只是形式上的抽象，最起码来有颜色陪着，不能说枯燥的不得了。但是作家面对的是白纸黑字，在作者和读者写作和阅读之前一切都是抽象的，愣凭几行文字，让看的人心潮澎湃要死要活。我认识的一些其他行业哥们儿，电影导演，摇滚乐手等等都常年订阅文学期刊杂志，总希望从里面抖点素材灵感出来。后八九被老栗称为泼皮玩世现实主义这拨儿艺术家的作品受王朔小说的影响，作品完全可以作为王小说的插图，王朔的小说准确反映了上世纪八九十年代年轻人希望失望到无奈的心理变化。 读书因人而异，大凡学画画的差不多都是因为不爱读书文化课成绩不好，也就是说没啥文化，对看书天然排斥。 读书可以验证创作思路。书就像一栋房子。写书的人从地基打起，做结构，添砖加瓦，弄一层玻璃幕墙，直到最后完工，这些其实都是写书人的产品。书的好坏跟写书的人的观念、知识的渊博程度、深入浅出的通透程度有关。不管是虚构还是非虚构，任何书其实都是作者的一个假设，一场梦，一个谎言。它本身和现实的关系不如和作者的关系来得密切。 读书要趁早。这话不是鼓励三岁的孩子背弟子规，或者揣着本名人格言在饭桌上逮谁跟谁来。而是说一个人在三十岁之前，书对他还是有影响力的，过了三十岁，再好的书也会慢慢退化为注脚和花絮了。 我读书心得如下： 读书可以解决创作时的孤独。例如，对饥饿的描绘绘画显得力不从心，到目前为止我只记得蒋兆和的《流民图》，绝望的饥民们排着队手里拿着碗，后来还出现过一农民模样的老人手里也拿着碗的油画，这两张画都引起了当时整个社会的关注。 关于水墨画。和在座的各位一样，我也一直担心最后混成一画啥像啥，一棵烟的功夫就能画完一张画，打嗝放屁瞬间盖章落款齐活儿，一年画两千张以上的所谓艺术家，水墨画特别容易出这方面的人才。这样的人有但是不代表全部，因为这样水墨画至今好歹还算是一门艺术形式。 水墨的历史可以说就是中国的绘画史，油画进入中国是最近一百年来的事，油画的历史上没有一种技法、流派、创作倾向是在中国诞生和出现的。那么当代水墨的发展从历史的角度来看就显得至为重要了。我现在期盼的是最好不要出现断层，很多亚洲国家由于西方文化的冲击，本土绘画几乎绝迹，大学里都找不到教本土绘画的老师，我们现在美术院校里好歹还有国画系或国画专业或者国画班，排序是国油版雕，但在孩子们心目中国画排最后，考上国画系出门都不好意思和人打招呼。 中国人看来，用几何学透视原理来处理空间的问题是虚伪的，非艺术化的，中国画对物的视点不止一个，而是几个，视线角度是不固定的，所以画家在同一幅画中写人和写物表现出不同的视点和角度。依照宋人郭熙定的作画原则：“山水画中画山盈丈，树木盈尺，马盈寸，人物盈十分之一寸。”意思就是说，画平行线，就一直不折不扣地平行下去，才中。水墨画是一个以线为主导的画种，颜色、造型都是配合线，线是很有弹性的，以线为主的造型，颜色就会变成辅助的，要是想把它画成一个全因素的，像油画那样的，那么线就弱了，可是中国画是强调线的，画得好的工笔画就是白描，白描最见一个人的功力。 几千年来水墨画一直相当牛逼，直到清末民初仍然是这个民族主流文化的一部分。按照西方艺术史学者苏利文所说，在欧洲中国艺术至少导致了两次东方化运动，前者出现在十七世纪，后者在十八世纪。 几千年来水墨画一直比较顺畅，没受过什么受摯，只是到了最近才遭受到了两次大规模的劫难：一是清末民初五四运动，水墨画饱受争议，说争议还算是好听的，其实就是要否定；另外一次就是四九年后的国画革命，说白了其实就是革国画的命，素描带进水墨画，透视带进水墨画，使水墨画变得非驴非马人不人鬼不鬼，这些像利玛窦这样的外国传教士，郎世宁王致诚这样的艺术家在中国更本不可能也不好意思去做的。文化战争和军事战争不同，没里应外合这一说法，完全得靠内部自我接受最后自我瓦解取得胜利，严格的说这后一次的折腾是从内部发起的，所以它对水墨画的摧残最重，是致命的。 几千年来水墨画从没像现在动不动就拿出来讨论。就像西餐中餐，一直都这么吃下来的，并不误事儿，可我们偏偏要讨论还能不能这样吃，是不是太不自信了呢？还是有什么其它不可告人的原因？什么时候听说欧洲人动不动开会广泛讨论油画穷途末路的问题？如果他们一天到晚拿不定主意，犹犹豫豫，一副前途未卜的德性，我们中国的画家能像现在这样一窝蜂地去学人家吗？一东西拿出来讨论无非是想得出来两个结果：一个是想修理一下看还能不能接着用；一个是想扔了。这么多年我们讨论的目的更倾向于哪一个呢？这一百年来，经过几代人的不断努力和自我否定，如今水墨画的水准和清末民初能找齐就不错了。 大家觉得后人看到什么样的水墨作品才能了解你我现在活着的这个时代，是那些当时不愿冒任何风险，回避现实又无丝毫探索意识的东西吗？是那些匠气十足闲情逸致的东西吗？这些古代的文人雅士画的更好，甚至封建帝王才子佳人业余时间画的花鸟静物都比现在的人画得好的多，还捎带写一手现代人都无法超越的好字。 2016年10月，中国美术馆举办了迄今为止最大规模的中国油画艺术国际巡回归国汇报展，油画家靳尚谊在展览的大型研讨会上说“真的要和西方交流文化，拿我们的油画不行，人家更本看不上，只能是国画。” 谈我自己。我接触水墨画的时间很早，但决定专门学习水墨画是在上世纪80年代中期。当时选择学水墨画是因为家里穷，油画材料贵。我画的第一张创作是1987年的《八大的山水》，纯山水，一个人物都没有，把八大的山水给结构化了，有山、有水、有文字，很装饰画，后来也画点儿泼墨，但很多都失败了，只留下了一张，再后来就开始画人物，80年代末和整个90年代，我的水墨画基本都是在嗑瓜子，唠家常，有点像明清绣像章回小说。比如《北京故事》系列，基本上快把人间万象全包括进去了，就这样当时我还觉得有好些事还拉下了。啰哩啰嗦的并不是因为当时刚出校门，才开始创作啥都想画，而是当时的气场很容易让你提笔就来。因为动机有了，身边的每个人都有和你相同的气息，抓紧记录下来，免得以后忘了。 啰啰嗦嗦把多年来工作中的一些方法和大家汇报研究到这，耽误大家的时间了，谢谢，再见。 link：川美公众号 |
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