1 Chinese painting teaching
Abandoned line teaching
Zhao Liping: Contemporary China paintings and calligraphy, except Li Jin and other painters classified as contemporary ink and wash, still have a certain appeal internationally. Many top domestic players are not accepted abroad. Why is this happening?
Liu Sifen: In fact, many painters who paint Chinese paintings have held exhibitions abroad before, hoping to expand the foreign market, but the effect is not satisfactory. Some people may say that this is because Chinese and western aesthetics are different, and foreigners can't understand the art of oriental ink painting, but I think the key is that China's contemporary painting and calligraphy have lost our original essence. What is drawn in this way loses the original unique charm of Chinese painting. Why do foreigners buy such paintings?
Of course, the country's economic strength determines the right to speak of culture. With the decline of China after the Opium War 100 years, China people's cultural inferiority complex became more and more serious, and they went to the west blindly. At the same time, China's cultural market is also shrinking sharply. These two situations together caused the absence of China's modern calligraphy and painting in the world market.
Now that China's economy is strong, the purchasing power of our artworks is constantly setting a new world record (9. 12, 0.83, 10.05438+0%). With such a record, foreigners will naturally come to study you, but there is a process of gradual cognition.
Zhao Liping: You just said that contemporary paintings and calligraphy in China have lost our original unique charm. How do you say this?
Liu Sifen: Over the past hundred years, Chinese painting has been giving up its strengths and using its weaknesses from teaching to creation, forgetting the advantages of our Chinese painting. First, the tool of Chinese painting is a writing brush, which is not available outside the cultural circle of China. This kind of line drawn with conical brush strokes is also not available in other pens. Its line expression is the first in the world and unique in the world. A simple line can show a person's personality, temperament, mood and even gender.
But in the past hundred years, we have given up this kind of line drawing teaching and calligraphy teaching, and turned to the decent teaching in the west. Body and face exist objectively, while lines actually exist only in subjective imagination, which is closely related to people's subjective feelings. Therefore, it is impossible for other kinds of painting to express lines in a superb and incisive way like Chinese painting. Giving up or weakening line expression and strengthening decent expression is the first kind of giving up the length and taking the short.
Second, the tradition of Chinese painting is to control complexity with simplicity and express complexity with simplicity. Xu Wei and Badashan people are both typical examples of this expression to the extreme. But simple but not empty, nothing can be created. Appreciating this kind of painting needs to fully mobilize the appreciation ability of the appreciator, supplemented by his own imagination. For example, if you draw an arm, westerners will draw it vividly, while orientals will draw two lines. You can add your own imagination. So some westerners don't understand and ask why there are so many blanks in Chinese painting. All blanks should be counted as money.
In my opinion, the appreciation of art can't cram everything into readers, but leave room for readers to increase their imagination, stimulate their enthusiasm for appreciation and finish this work together. Only Chinese painting can control complexity with simplicity. Unfortunately, we abandoned this thing again.
Third, the tradition of Chinese painting is freehand brushwork rather than realism. Our freehand brushwork means more than reality, and it doesn't have to be true. As early as the Song Dynasty, the paintings at that time had been realistic as far as possible, and even painted light and dark sides. However, it turns out that realism is not the strength of Chinese painting, and freehand brushwork is better. But our modern art education places great emphasis on realism. However, Chinese painting with paper, pen and ink can never reach the fineness and depth of western painting.
Copying the western art education model is out of date
Zhao Liping: The integration of Chinese and Western painting was explored as early as Xu Beihong and Jiang's time. At that time, the teaching mode of western painting must have been popularized, right?
Liu Sifen: This has profound historical reasons. After the Opium War, the weak and the poor in China wanted to change and learn from the outside world. This is not only the complete westernization of politics, economy and military affairs, but also learning from the West. In this learning process, art is also a very important part, so they copied the early western university education.
We must admit that Xu Beihong and Jiang are both outstanding painters in China, and they have had a great influence on modern art education in China. They all chose a way of combining Chinese and western to transform China's art. Facing the problem of how to treat and improve China's traditional art and establish China's modern art education system, they all insisted on the way of combining Chinese and western, and introduced western theories such as chromatics, anatomy and perspective. Lingnan also has a compromise between China and the West.
The integration of Chinese and western art has really improved the expression means of ink figure painting and animal painting. Our traditional Chinese painting has not understood the human body so deeply for a long time, so it is difficult to grasp it when painting the human body. After receiving western art education, there is no doubt that our ability to draw human bodies has been greatly enhanced.
However, due to copying western art education, China people's own aesthetics and skills of painting characters have gradually lost. Behind closed doors, our practical ability seems to be very strong, but when we go abroad, foreigners don't value that you are made of rice paper and brush. They just look at pictures. This is their good sketch. However, the tools used by foreigners to sketch are different from ours, which determines that their sketches can be drawn deeply and delicately, which we can't express with a brush. So in their eyes, you are my student or an unqualified student. How can they trust you?
Zhou Guocheng: The western art education model we copied is out of date. Western art education has not been this teaching model for a long time, but we still use it. When we learn from the west, we just lose our essence. Chinese painting has its own unique side. It is aesthetic, moderate and inclusive. At this point, the gap between Chinese and western cultures is here.
Liu Sifen: At present, there are too many elements of * * * in China's paintings, all of which are taught by a set of patterns. There are not many things with individuality, but the value of art lies in individuality. Someone once said it was ironic. There is a collective art exhibition. A foreigner looked at it and said, "It's amazing that one person has painted so many pictures."
In fact, when we look at art history, we can find that people who really support art history are all geniuses. These geniuses can't appear at any time, and they can't be cultivated. Their talent is given by God. We can create an atmosphere of respecting talents and art, but when we become masters depends on God. In the long river of art, many painters are just passers-by, which is not their choice. Look at the representative painters of the past dynasties, and there are only a few people who can count.
We should advocate the return of culture and maintain the traditional aesthetic ideal.
Zhao Liping: What does China's contemporary painting and calligraphy rely on to talk to the world?
Liu Sifen: Take movies as an example. Ang Lee, whose films Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain and Fantasy Drifting of Pi won three Oscars. I think he won the prize abroad because he has always adhered to China's unique aesthetic ideal, the core of which is tolerance and concealment. You see, foreign action movies are all bloody, but Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon puts the fighting scene in a bamboo forest, which is so beautiful that it is completely different from the western concept. Brokeback Mountain tells the story of gay men. If it is taken by foreigners, it may be ugly, but what Ang Lee took was so warm and subtle. Last year's Fantasy Drifting of Juvenile pi was originally a killing at sea, but Ang Lee used some symbolic animals to make a killing warm. These are the essence of China culture, which embodies the highest aesthetic ideal: reserved, restrained and unobtrusive. These foreigners can't shoot it, and they are convinced of Ang Lee, so he won three yuan in a row.
Zhou Guocheng: That's true. We always talk about connecting with the world. Are we connected with it by sketching? Therefore, I think only by adhering to the essence of traditional poetry, calligraphy and painting and the core part of China culture can we show our true value, which is beyond the reach of the West. Only by adhering to these things, coupled with the increasing economic strength of China and the strong purchasing power of China collectors, slowly, when auction houses all over the world are paying attention to and photographing China's paintings and calligraphy, foreigners have to take the initiative to study China's paintings and calligraphy. Only by understanding it can we know that it is not easy for the two shrimps described by Qi Baishi to reach that level.
Liu Sifen: Yes, we just want to advocate cultural return. The most important thing is to keep our aesthetic ideal. China's tradition is reserved, gentle, complaining without anger, mourning without injury. Therefore, whether it is oil painting or sculpture creation, China should find a completely different road from foreigners, find the uniqueness they admire and conquer the world with China characteristics.
Zhou Guocheng: In the art market in China, it seems that meticulous painting is more popular than freehand painting. However, when many modern meticulous paintings in China entered the international market, foreigners were dismissive because they were good at it, and they always felt that our products were not in place. If you really want to go to the world, you can only stick to your own freehand brushwork. In fact, China's traditional paintings and calligraphy are not out of date at all. For example, in the Ming Dynasty, when realism was still emphasized in the west, our art had entered the stage of freehand brushwork, which was hundreds of years earlier than impressionism and abstraction in the west. Impressionism initiated by Monet and others, in which the image expression is actually very similar to China's freehand brushwork.
Liu Sifen: It's a pity that China's culture was not confident before, and all its advantages were gone.
Picasso admired Qi Baishi.
Zhou Guocheng: Picasso is probably the most famous artist in the world. In China, six out of ten people may know Picasso; But you said Qi Baishi in the western countries, maybe none of the ten people knew.
But when Zhang Daqian visited Picasso, Picasso admired Qi Baishi. Picasso said, "I dare not go to your China, because there is a Qi Baishi in China." "Qi Baishi is our beloved master and a great painter in the East!"
Picasso not only said so, but also moved out a big bag of paintings for Zhang Daqian to appreciate carefully one by one. To Zhang Daqian's amazement, none of these paintings are Picasso's own, but all of them are Qi Baishi's paintings copied by Picasso. Picasso went on to say, "Qi Baishi is really a great painter of the East! What a great painter in China! The fish in Mr. Qi's ink paintings are not colored, but people can see the long river and the fish swimming around. I can't draw ink bamboo orchids. " He often said, "When it comes to art, first of all, your art, your art in China! What I don't understand most is why do you China people come to Paris to study art? "
Liu Sifen: I think the development trend of world culture is that personality is more and more liberated. The west used to be scholastic theology, which strictly controlled people's thoughts and even opposed painting. Later, it was discovered that painting could express religion, which enabled her to develop. It was not until the Renaissance that humanism was introduced that people's emotions could be put into the gods, and Impressionism gradually appeared. When impressionism first appeared, of course, it was resolutely opposed and rejected by tradition, but the historical wave of personality liberation is impossible to turn back.
Since ancient times, Chinese painting has not been dominated by such strict theological things, and scholars have a large space of thought, so things with more personality appeared earlier. Therefore, there is absolutely no need for us to sell ourselves short now. Actually, China left earlier.
Subvert China's traditional aesthetics with money?
Zhao Liping: In the current art market in China, meticulous painting is better than freehand painting. If a single painter considers it, Wu Guanzhong's recognition in the west may be higher than Qi Baishi's, because Wu Guanzhong's paintings can be understood by foreigners. His art is also regarded as the epitome of China modern art seeking self-transformation and overall transformation under the pressure of cultural conflict, multiple values, form change and inheritance. However, Wu Guanzhong's artistic concept of "pen and ink equals zero" in his later years seems to be quite different from the cultural return advocated by You Er.
Zhou Guocheng: At that time, Wu Guanzhong's declaration that "pen and ink are equal to zero" caused shock and reflection in the China art world, and also triggered a huge theoretical debate. Many artists, theorists and art historians have given different explanations from many different angles. But I think, if it was in front of his teacher Pan Tianshou, would Wu Guanzhong dare to say "pen and ink equals zero"? I don't think he dares, because Wu Guanzhong painted oil paintings himself, not Chinese paintings. As for why he has such a high market price, I don't think it is ruled out that someone is speculating. Many people have analyzed before that if the West wants to subvert China's traditional aesthetic values, it can naturally play a role as long as it uses money to speculate on things that represent their values. Just like why so many people pursue contemporary art now, it is nothing more than subverting people's understanding of tradition with money.
Liu Sifen: Wu Guanzhong said that "pen and ink equals zero". I think this artistic opinion should also have his reasons. Pen and ink is just a skill. If only skill is emphasized, this painting is really equal to zero. Let's not talk about the historical position of Wu Guanzhong. His paintings emphasize his own personality and show his passion. He didn't put pen and ink technology in a very important position. When pen and ink technology failed to show his passion, he created a new set of things himself. This is the genius of Wu Guanzhong. It really doesn't make much sense to turn pen and ink into a technology.