Shao Qi, "The Poetry of Qian Kao Gong Jiangxing" (Sitongjing).
Throwing bricks and stones. More than 50 years ago, when Shao Qi was a playful teenager in Luoshe Town, Wuxi, he would not have imagined that the big brick for Xi calligraphy thrown by his uncle would lead his life to a path that is interdependent on traditional Chinese painting, making him a rare and effective art historian and painter who entered art practice as an art historian in the circle.
Qian Wenzhong, a professor at Fudan University, commented on his long-time friend: He has aesthetic theories in his head, aesthetic kung fu in his hands, and aesthetic expressions in his mouth. A copy of "The Context of Chinese Painting" has been reprinted and has become a desk book for many scholarsIn its eighth year, the "Huixin: Chinese Painting Nine Artists Exhibition" with eight friends has become an annual event in the maritime art worldHe has been teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts of Shanghai Normal University for many years, and has inherited the traditional context of landscape painting by teaching the theory of landscape painting.
This winter came late, it was already December, and Jiangnan was still full of autumn. Shao Qi went to the rooftop of Zhejiang to collect wind and see how the forests of Qiushan were dyed. In fact, he likes to go to the mountains all year round. The Chinese say, the mountain, the big thing. There are trees and flowers in the mountains, there are heavens and earth, but the most important thing is to be able to make people really see themselves. Shao Qi has a point of view: the biggest difference between landscape painting and landscape painting is that landscape painting focuses on the object, while landscape painting focuses on the human self. Therefore, only by becoming a better self can you become a better landscape painter.
I wish I could remain in this mountain. This mountain is the mountain of landscape painting, and it is also the high mountain of traditional Chinese painting.
Shao Qi's "Qujiang Water is Full of Flowers and Thousands of Trees".
Observing first and then acting, he wants to draw his own ideas about painting.
As for Shao Qi's original intention to enter the art world, Hang Jian, who was the vice president of the Academy of Fine Arts of Tsinghua University, had this speculation: "I think he may have studied the history of painting and painting theory before he started to paint something." Therefore, he should have a mature consideration of what to paint. ”
That's true. Since childhood, he has been accompanied by calligraphy and painting, but Shao Qi really packed up the mentality of playing tickets and took painting landscape painting as a serious thing to do, after he entered the Shanghai Painting and Calligraphy Publishing House - not only because it is a place where the dragon and the tiger are hidden, but colleagues are either good at painting or good at calligraphy;Moreover, because I have been in contact with theory for a long time, I deeply feel that if there is no practice, it is difficult to gain a deep understanding of ancient Chinese calligraphy and painting.
As the saying goes, first observe and then act. Therefore, Shao Qi's paintings never stand out from the crowd, but always follow orthodoxy, and every stroke has a source, including almost all the styles and schemas of Chinese literati painting since the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. Fan Kuan's raindrops, Dong Yuan's linen, and Wang Meng's cow hair are ......There are traces in his paintings, and they are meticulous and thoughtful. His painting Xi also has an ancient meaning: "I will take a book of Tang poems and Song lyrics, and keep turning through them to see how the ancients expressed that artistic conception in words." For example, now that I have run to the rooftop, of course I will have my own feelings, but I also want to find a soulmate in the poem, and find the sentence that can touch me, and the inspiration will be stimulated. Of course, this is partly because Shao Qi himself has a deep understanding of classical literature: when he studied Tang poetry and Song poetry as a child, he entered the Chinese department in college, and classical literature has become his spiritual memory. At the same time, Chinese painting has always had a tradition of integrating poetry and painting, and literature has opened up a new world for the artistic conception of calligraphy and painting. It also brought the painter into the position of culture.
Inspired by Tang and Song poetry – in a way, this is just like the name of his and his friends' nine-person exhibition "Huixin", one of the things he seeks is to have a meeting with the ancients. The reason why it is possible to know the heart is because there are many things in human nature that have not changed, just like "the leaves are pale, the white dew is frost, the so-called Yiren, on the water side", after a thousand years, it has entered the pop song, and it is still so moving. What Shao Qi wants to find and express in landscape painting is the kind of unchanging.
In the context of landscape painting, Shao Qi especially inherited the tradition of Yuan painting—in addition to pursuing the interest of brush and ink, he depicted mountains and rivers, but painted not the mountains and rivers in front of him, but the mountains and rivers in his heart. Zhao Nong, who used to be the director of the Department of History and Theory of Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts, commented on Shao Qi's paintings: most of them take dense pine forests as a close-up scene, depressed and coiled, luxuriant and thick, although there is no lack of reclining posture, there are also miscellaneous trees, especially like to use cinnabar dots to dye a few miscellaneous trees, both the changes in the dense and the brightness in the miscellaneous. But what is often eye-catching is the three or two upright **, no branches or vines, tall and tall, up and down, and leisurely and elegant, the posture is calm, it is really a portrayal of the state of mind.
Shao Qi loves Yuan painting alone, but in fact, he has gone through two stages. The first stage is to simply love the rich brushwork of the four Yuan families, hold an attitude of learning Xi, spend effort to ponder the characteristics of each family, and temper their own brushwork. For example, in the painting "Jun's Book House", the painting of distant mountains has the heavy brushwork of Huang Gongwang, and the painting of close-up scenes has the sparse silence of Ni Zhan. In fact, "imitation" and "imitation" are common techniques in traditional painting, and the ancient literati humbly called themselves "imitation of XX" and "imitation of XX" in their paintings, which is actually a kind of reconfirmation of the classics. It is in this affirmation that culture evolves.
In the second stage, after he entered Shanghai Normal University to teach, he tried to copy Song paintings because of the needs of teaching. "Song painting is characterized by very realistic and very precise brushwork, but once you want to imitate it, you will find that it has a flaw, that is, its brush and ink are bound by the object depicted. In contrast, the painters of the Yuan Dynasty gained a kind of freedom to express their inner feelings because of the current situation. In Shao Qi's view, this is the core of Chinese painting. He explained the landscape painting in his mind like this: Do you think the peaks of Huangshan are good-looking, the mountainside of Huashan is handsome, and the foothills of Mount Tai are very goodYou said that I want to live at the foot of Mount Tai, but I also want to have the mountainside of Mount Hua and the peaks of Mount Huang, this is landscape painting. Landscape painting is an ideal situation, when we read thousands of books, travel thousands of miles, read what we see, think and think in our hearts like wine, and then use the brush to spread out, painting the peach blossom source in our minds.
Yes, Shao Qi paints to express his own ideas about painting. In his landscapes, he has his own theoretical pursuits.
Shao Qi's "Clear Light Winding Back".
Although it is insignificant, it is necessary to be a inheritor of Chinese culture.
In 2000, Shao Qi left the publishing house and first joined the China Academy of Art, and then transferred to Shanghai Normal University in 2004.
Leave one desk and stand on the three-foot podium.
A large part of the reason for making this choice is the environment. At that time, Shao Qi clearly felt that the cultural tastes of the whole society deviated and alienated from tradition, the magazines of the publishing house were suspended, many books could not be sold, and the academic community favored the West. "The more I researched, the more dissatisfied I became with the status quo. I know I can't change the world, but I can influence the next generation within what I can. Raise them well, and I believe they will be able to wait until a better era. ”
The cultural atmosphere at that time can be seen from one thing. In 2006, Shao Qi and his colleague Xiao Haichun opened a major in landscape painting, and were joked by friends from all over the world that he was the "reception team" of Chinese painting education and teaching. At that time, art education in China was flourishing in modern fashion, and Shao Qi, who had returned to the classics, seemed too outdated.
Shao Qi was unmoved. He has experienced the 85 New Wave and has his own feelings and understandings of Western modern and contemporary art. In his view, modernism is a very emotional thing, and emotionality is exactly what he thinks art should try to reject. Because the so-called cultural cultivation is a kind of restraint on emotions. Compared with emotions, emotions are constant, and the so-called immobility is a very important support for human beings to survive in this world as the essence of heaven and earth. Landscape painting contains human emotions.
In Shao Qi's classes, students are often asked to complete some bizarre assignments:
For example, go to the campus and find a tree and make friends with it. Spring, summer, autumn and winter, dusk drums and morning bells, wind, frost, rain and snow, we have to see it, see when it will grow its first sprout, when it will drop its first leaves, what kind of flowers it will bloom, what kind of fruit it will bear, and then draw it, which can be painted on paper or in the heart.
For example, in the spring, I followed Shao Qi to the river side of the school for a walk and chat, and then returned to the classroom, how do you feel about "those who are in the twilight of spring, the spring clothes are ready, the champions are five or six, the children are six or seven, bathing, the wind is dancing, and the song returns"?I felt it, and this lesson was not in vain.
For example, find a warm day, lie on the lawn and watch the clouds, it is best to watch for four hours and experience four words: clouds and clouds.
All these assignments do not need to be submitted to the teacher in the form of works. Shao Qi hopes that what students will learn from this is not to let go of every detail in life, so that they can learn to live well. "A person who observes the details of life like this will surely have a fulfilling life, right?He will always have a pure heart, always face every minute that life gives him like the first time, face everything he has experienced in life, and always be full of curiosity and want to find out. This is the love of life, this is the devotion to life, and then you will feel that the world is really beautiful. In Shao Qi's view, what landscape painting wants to convey is such a culture. The so-called cognitive painting, whether it is the person who paints or the person who looks at the painting, has a sense of awe for the creation of heaven and earth, feels the relationship between the season and the self, feels the process of the growth of all things, and feels that life is so real.
The so-called painting is like the person. No one can hide their true selves in landscape paintings. In the face of the autumn scene, some people's pen end is slaughtered, and some people's pen end is full of harvest enthusiasm;Faced with a dead tree in the snow, some people draw the withering and ending of life, and some people draw the accumulation and dormancy of life. No matter how you draw, you are right, but if you want to draw better, you must improve your cultivation.
In turn, landscape painting will continue to nourish a person. Shao Qi has always had a point of view: if Western painting has a kind of sublimity, which makes people worship and admire, then Chinese landscape painting has a kind of supportive nature, providing for everyone and allowing everyone to stand up. "From this point of view, is landscape painting the most people's?”
Today's Shao Qi still likes to walk among the mountains and rivers. Take creation as a teacher, and understand the creation of a deeper understanding of the meaning and vitality of the landscape, and then turn it into a book, teach it, and save it in a painting.
Although it is insignificant, it is necessary to be a inheritor of Chinese culture.
Shao Qi's "Mountains and Rivers from Far Away Origins".
Author: Ai October.
Text: Ai OctoberTu: Shao Qi's work Editor: Fan XinResponsible editor: Shao Ling.
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