Landscape painting has multiple motives and opportunities for the transformation of modern society, and the expression of the natural landscape of modern society or the expression of modern humanistic images in the natural landscape is greatly different from the traditional literati landscape painting. The widespread establishment of modern vision, dominated by machine vision, may be the reason for the deepest penetration of this modernity change. Xu Beihong's "Spring Rain on the Li River" and Gao Jianfu's "Rain in the Fishing Port" are all ink landscape sketches, forming an early style of visual transformation of modernity in landscape painting. From this kind of landscape painting to the landscape painting with a sense of visual form nominated for this exhibition, the visual transformation of the modernity of landscape painting has gone through two major processes and formed two basic characteristics.
The first is to dissolve the brush and ink program through sketching to form a landscape painting with public aesthetics. The aesthetic characteristics of modernity have been transformed from the "artistic conception" of the literati's pastoral ideal to the "true realm" of the new appearance of the motherland. In the fifties and sixties of the 20th century, the sketching revolution represented by Li Keran was a successful case of the visual transformation of modernity in landscape painting. The second is to draw on the exploration of the inner formal structure of the landscape by drawing on the modern formal language of the West, which is far away from the reproduction of the real landscape, and through the visual form and structure of the landscape painting, another visual subjective will. In the first decade of the 20th century, with the influx of Western modernist artistic thought, it triggered a change from visual forms to media materials, and some of the landscape paintings in this nominated exhibition are the products of this concept of formal transformation.
In fact, the modernity of landscape painting in the past hundred years can be called the conscious and unconscious transformation of modernity vision, whether it is a realistic scene sketch or an abstract structure, the visualization of landscape painting is the basic direction of its transformation. The problem lies in the fact that traditional literati painting is not completely visualized, not only because the brushwork program has a transcendental nature, but also because the essence of Chinese culture comes from the exploration of people's inner perception system. If the modernity of landscape painting moves all the way to visualization - the object and self deviate, will it not produce an irreconcilable contradiction with its traditional aesthetic core, and thus lose the development space of its own existence?
In the modernization of landscape painting, people have always believed that what landscape painting should get rid of is its brush and ink program, and that this is a stumbling block that hinders the evolution of the modernity of landscape painting. However, when these landscape paintings have a super-real perceptual experience and a super-strong visual form, we also feel that their inner cultural life is declining or disappearing. Do we ignore or downplay the positive value of pen and ink programs in our understanding of pen and ink? Once this "program" is dismantled and gradually approached by the real or abstract form of visual perception, we will also stay away from the essence of landscape painting.
The visual transformation of modernity in landscape painting is an irreversible process, and we are already deep in the era of controlled mechanical or electronic visual experience. However, the changes in landscape painting in the past century have also triggered another kind of vigilance for us, that is, how to reconstruct China's vipassana cultural system in the vision of modernity, so as to form the aesthetic connotation of modern landscape painting. We can use Western phenomenology to understand Wang Yangming's psychology, so as to resist the powerful intuitive ability of Zen in landscape painting. The importance of brush and ink is not only the importance of the language of Chinese painting, the importance of the pen in the center is not only the importance of the technique and method, but the brush and ink between the reality, reflecting on the inner spirit, and the tradition and history to establish a cultural road of human nature, in the not complete visual reality, people from the brush and ink landscape to obtain such a kind of elegant human knowledge, through the elegant, elegant, remote and reach the inner peace and tranquility. In short, the soul of the ancient landscape returns to the landscape language system full of creativity of the times, and the combination of "charming way" and "charming world" is the ideal contemporary landscape art.
(Wen Shanghui).
*: China Art Newspaper).
About the Art Critic
Shang Hui,He is currently the director of the China Artists Association, the director of the Art Theory Committee, the former president and editor-in-chief of the "Fine Arts" magazine of the China Artists Association, the vice chairman of the China Urban Sculptors Association, and the distinguished professor and doctoral supervisor of the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, the Academy of Fine Arts of Capital Normal University, the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts, and the School of Humanities and Arts of Macau University of Science and Technology.