-Comment on Wu Simiao's meticulous painting Laughing at the Sea
Text/Huang Zongxian
Jiang Tian is vast, people hold painting boats, heroes are everywhere, and beauties hide their faces. The bow of the boat was beating loudly, and the cabin was quiet ... Looking at the white waves at the stern and the red dust in the distance, the war was over and the struggle was drifting away. When the moon shines in my dream, I feel the breeze blowing in my face. Yan wine is near the river, Yan Bohaosen ...
This is a silent picture, but the song keeps ringing:
The sea laughs, the tides on both sides of the strait rise and fall, and the ups and downs follow the waves to remember the present. Laugh, there is tide in the world. Who wins and who loses knows. How much do you know when you laugh, smoke, rain and waves wash away the world of mortals ...
As early as that year, Li Bai was ordered to go out and sighed and said, "If we go out and laugh to the sky, we are Artemisia people!" His desire to join the WTO and his desire to make contributions can be generously felt. In Orfila's "Laughter of the Sea", we also heard heroic accompaniment, but this is not the lofty sentiments of those who entered the WTO, but the feelings after reading all the vicissitudes of life and observing all the world. This is a kind of relaxation to finally realize the meaning of life, a kind of lost joy. Tao Pengze once expressed this longing for homesickness. He wrote: "The boat is blowing clothes in the breeze, and the wind is fluttering. Ask the way of her ex-husband, hate dawn ... "
Entering WTO and being born are the classic themes of China's traditional culture. Wu Hao's painting Laughing at the Sea is an artistic interpretation of this theme. If there are traces to summarize the life philosophy of scholar-officials with "Confucianism and Taoism complement each other", then it is not groundless to describe the life trajectory of warriors and chivalrous men with "the unity of chivalry and immortals". In a temple, a scholar-bureaucrat can be a Confucian, but he can retire. He said: Warriors and chivalrous men wander the rivers and lakes, and then help their swords to retire, which will last forever. Therefore, advance can attack and retreat can defend-reaching is beneficial to the world, and poverty is immune to it. This is the universal wisdom of the East, regardless of whether it is up or down, whether it is civil or military. On the one hand, it is aggressive, on the other hand, it is detached from the world. However, optimism is the same, life is inconvenient ... even if you walk in the dark and run into the truth, you won't leave opportunities for world-weariness. You often use enlightenment to resolve despair, and retreat bravely instead of burning everything. Therefore, in China's classical aesthetics, there is almost no tragedy, and "artistic conception" is the most important category.
So much for Orfila's Laughing at the Sea. With the pure Chinese painting language, it created a pure artistic conception of China. This artistic conception is not only aesthetic, but also life-oriented, and it is a philosophical attitude that is deeply hidden and stable in it. This is a light reconciliation of dissatisfaction and conflict: it is broad-minded, quiet, gorgeous and simple ... Although it can be seen from the inscription in the painting that the painting was created from the theme song "The Sea is Laughing" written by James J.S.Wong for the Hong Kong film "the legendary swordsman", the painter successfully transformed it visually. Its significance is not explained in a straightforward way, but through the brand-new structure of Chinese painting language and visual artistic conception. Here, extroverted space and cohesive image, elegant modeling and light color, real scene and blank space, static and dynamic, panorama and detail, exquisiteness and sparseness constitute a tense visual relationship, showing a generation process of China's aesthetic artistic conception. When this process was sung with the theme of "Laughing at the Sea", we began to understand an oriental wisdom and artistic conception of life.
Wu Hao is an excellent meticulous painter. His paintings are three-dimensional in shape, rigorous in brushwork and meticulous in description. These characteristics are clearly reflected in this painting. This painting combines figure painting and boundary painting. The shapes, expressions and demeanor of figures, ships and boats, as well as the shapes, structures, textures and decorative details of boats, are tamed by a superb meticulous painting technique, and the descriptions are extremely delicate. But the rigorous details did not hinder the overall performance. This is because the painter is well versed in China's traditional painting, and always has a global awareness of the images in his works. Its composition is compact and dense; Its thread is continuous, and it is continuous when it is broken; Its color is very heavy, clear and transparent. We have reason to believe that although the painter painted with meticulous brushwork, he finished his work with freehand brushwork from beginning to end, which can be described as "putting pen to paper" or "putting pen to paper".
If this interpretation can add new meaning to Shen Kuo's thought of "making the big picture small", then this "laughter of the sea" itself can also give its theme a deeper symbolic meaning in the formal charm of the interaction between his works and words. Let's compare life to art-whether you live in a temple or stay away from rivers and lakes, if you join the WTO for work, then you are born for writing. Working without informality, writing without disorder, writing at work and writing at work are the true meaning of life. And this true meaning obeys the wisdom of philosophy and leads directly to the enlightenment of the unity of man and nature.
With the help of the harmonious relationship between form and content, we can understand that the painter does not intend to give us an answer about the fate of life between entry and exit, but only presents the natural state of life in China cultural tradition. Even the lyrics of James J.S.Wong's Genius, what matters is not the text content, but the visual state given by the painter. This is exquisite calligraphy combining the style of Chinese painting, which not only balances the composition, but also plucks the strings ... It crosses the open river and brings the song closer and closer like the wind:
..... The breeze laughs, which makes me feel lonely, and my heart shines late ... The sea laughs, and the tides on both sides of the strait rise and fall, floating with the waves to remember the present. Laugh, there is tide in the world. Who wins and who loses knows. Jiangshan laughs, misty rain is far away, and waves wash the world of mortals. People laugh, no longer lonely, and their lofty sentiments are still smiling. ...