It has been sixteen or seven years since the development of modern calligraphy. During this period, many artistic elites with modern calligraphy as the main means of expression emerged, and Mr. Gu Gan is undoubtedly the leader of the protracted modern art movement in China, which started from 1985 and grew up in the direction of local culture.
Le 66×99cm 1987
Things. Mr. Gu Gan's Modern Calligraphy Mr. Gu Gan's Modern Calligraphy can be said to be a synaesthesia language that transcends cultural barriers. Although Mr. Gu Gan's works always use China's Chinese characters as the carrier to express his feelings, because he always puts his creative activities in the ecological environment of modern culture, he can always look at the world from the perspective of modern people and feel the cultural pulse of this era with modern people's telepathy.
Bremen, a professor at Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts, said: Although I don't know Chinese characters and can't understand the words in his works, it seems that one of the characteristics of Gu Gan's calligraphy works is that I was not reading at first, but savoring its interest, which lies in taste of china's interest. Too single-minded will have no taste. (See "Gu Gan Trilogy", Hualing Publishing House, first edition 1996) In my opinion, this is the primary aesthetic value and significance of Gu Gan's works, that is, his works are mysterious media for visual intuition to communicate spiritually outside logical language.
Secondly, his works have a strong thrilling aesthetic form, and the synaesthesia caused by the formal beauty of his works can make people complete the baptism of concept change in aesthetic pleasure-this is a philosophical epiphany sublimation completed in artistic appreciation. For example, Shou by Mr. 1994, at first glance, is only a fancy renovation after the combination of China's calligraphy and the formal beauty of western abstract art, but in essence it can be considered as the product of language transition and integration on the basis of the ancient Yijing of China. The East has a long-standing view of the organic universe, and the West has the idea of realizing self-worth in the process of human life.
As early as the end of the 20th century and the beginning of 1980s, Mr. Gu Gan thought about China's ancient view of heaven in the Book of Changes, and applied his thoughts to artistic practice. China's ancient view of Yi-ology and Heaven originated from Huang Lao's theory that three generations in ancient China explored the harmony between man and nature and between man and society. It attaches great importance to the natural nature of human beings and holds that the pure mind of human beings is the most beautiful state of spiritual existence.
In Gu Gan's works, the expression of seeking the source of the original words shows a dreamy state full of jubilation on the one hand, and a simple vitality on the other. Therefore, it can be said that it is this return to the primitive spiritual world of mankind that makes Gu Gan's works not only find the thinking framework of China's ancient cosmic structure theory, but also complete the reconstruction of China's calligraphy value system through contemporary cultural images. In other words, he once again let China's calligraphy enter the passionate stream of life and the meaningful world of China culture, because his calligraphy art moved from humanism to writing.
The Trilogy of Modern Calligraphy In the Trilogy of Modern Calligraphy, Gu Gan said at the beginning that "calligraphers are mysterious geisha", which was the definition of calligraphy given by calligrapher Wang Xizhi in On Calligraphy 65,438+0,600 years ago. Mr. Gu Gan also explained: Lao Tzu said:' The mysterious is mysterious, and the wonderful door is important.' This is Wang Xizhi's so-called' mysterious foundation'. Mystery is also called profundity. Wonderful, magical craft is also called. From the Trilogy of Modern Calligraphy, we can see that Mr. Gu Gan's profound mystery and ingenious workmanship are essentially a philosophical category related to the above-mentioned view of heaven in Yi-ology.
This philosophical category should have three meanings: first, the unity of opposites of Yin and Yang is the general law and principle of the occurrence, development and change of world things, which restricts the change of world things and makes them unrepeatable and complex (Gu Gan called this? Quot outer universe). Therefore, metaphysics in China's calligraphy is the general language of cosmology and methodology, that is, to be consistent with all changes and to seek harmony in all changes. Second, man is the spirit of all things, and man and the external universe are isomorphic in behavior and mental and psychological activities. Therefore, Mr. Gu Gan has repeatedly stressed that when creating calligraphy, we should learn from others and regard life as a copybook (Trilogy of Modern Calligraphy, p. 124).
Yuanshan 68×68cm 199 1 year
Thirdly, Mr. Gu Gan believes that the human mind itself is a comfortable universe (called the inner universe by Gu Gan), which can produce endless aesthetic changes ── this is essentially the premise for Mr. Gu Gan to integrate Chinese and Western cultures based on the concept of Yi-ology, and absorb the nihility theory in metaphysics in Wei and Jin Dynasties and the emptiness theory in Prajna in Wei and Jin Dynasties. When creating modern calligraphy, Mr. Gu Gan has studied the concept of heaven in Yi-ology, the theory of emptiness in metaphysics and the theory of emptiness in Prajna, especially the concept of harmony between man and nature in metaphysics, the theory of emptiness and the original concept of emptiness in Prajna.
In essence, the concept of harmony between man and nature, the theory of being born out of nothing and the theory of primitive emptiness are all the products of explaining China's Confucianism with the theory of Huang in the pre-Qin period. That is, it is the product of the combination of metaphysics in Wei and Jin Dynasties, the mainstream culture in pre-Qin Dynasty, and the Buddhist Nirvana Theory and Yin Ming Theory that have just been introduced into China. After the Eastern Jin Dynasty (3 17 ──420 BC), these theories penetrated into China's thinking of calligraphy, painting and literature, and from then on, the thinking paradigm of China's classical art creation was formed, which transcended the image, taught foreign teachers and taught teachers.
This thinking paradigm first requires artists to enter a state of ecstasy and meditation, and then recreate an idealized world of meaning in aesthetic psychological time and space with the help of image thinking. As we all know, the path of people's thinking in images is mainly through unconscious association, that is, in the way of thinking for thousands of years and the way of seeing through Wan Li, to awaken the feelings or emotions of past experiences, enhance prototype inspiration and complete creative inspiration thinking. So the so-called image thinking, that is, those so-called beyond the image, get its ring, foreign teachers, get its heart? Quot The influence of equal thinking paradigm on China people's artistic thinking lies in: firstly, it opens up a virtual space-time field for artists to carry out creative thinking; Secondly, it provides an empty and qualitative methodology for artists' creative thinking.
Generally speaking, China's calligraphy is a kind of performance art related to time and space, which is mainly related to people's life process. This was the case from the Eastern Jin Dynasty to the Sui and Tang Dynasties (AD 58 1-907). Therefore, as far as the essence of China's calligraphy is concerned, it is especially necessary for artists to realize the mutual response from mental psychology to behavioral operation with the help of spatial consciousness in the time flow.
In the Trilogy of Modernist Calligraphy, Mr. Gu Gan said: Today's information age has created 10,000 times better learning conditions than the ancients, and it is possible for us to integrate ancient and modern times and combine Chinese and Western cultures. Excellent artists should input the available knowledge at all times and in all countries into their own information base, and then make an all-round analysis from the aspects of philosophy, aesthetics, religion, psychology and historical development. Rearrange and combine their various information, and reconstruct a carrier consistent with our new concept-modern calligraphy.
He also believes that modern calligraphy, from the bottom analysis, broadens the field of calligraphy creation; From a high-level analysis, it should be a reflection of the national spirit. Xinghui from Gu Gan 1989, Jinnong Statue from 1990, Smelling Chicken Dancing from 1990, Step and Elysium from 1992, 65438+. In his works, he transcends cultural differences and logical language barriers, and encodes perceptual symbols with abstract visual images, so that people can interpret the symbols of his works and form the meaning that their symbols can be pronounced.
The symbol codes in Gu Gan's works are formally a cross-cultural composition that combines Chinese and Western arts and cultures, but in essence they are based on the visual realization of the linguistic turn of contemporary China cultural landscape. For example, China's calligraphy itself is an art related to time and space, and once this traditional China art form with time and space attributes is combined with western modern art principles, it will inevitably lead to a series of problems such as the new meaning of visual language after the two-way deconstruction of Chinese and Western art and culture. Therefore, in his own works, Mr. Gu Gan pays special attention to the research and thinking on the existence of instant culture, and his works such as Love in the Woods and Extending in All Directions are the same.
In Mr. Gu Gan's genealogy of knowledge, there is not only a detailed understanding of China's traditional culture, but also a concern about the current achievements of natural science. In Mr. Gu Gan's works and theoretical writings, the following thoughts and concepts have been shown for a long time: in the newly established quantum cosmology, the four-dimensional hypersphere shows that the three-dimensional space of the universe is boundless, but its real time has a beginning, which is one of the Taoist classics of China, and before that, it is a denial of the present existence.
Buddha's eye 64×64cm 1993
The newly established quantum cosmology has a brand-new conclusion, which holds that there was an initial space-like curvature singularity in the universe in the past, which made the four-dimensional curvature of the space-time of the universe extremely large and led to the disappearance of all existence including time and space; In other words, all the causal chains in space-time loading will be broken under the observation of space-like curvature singularity, forming chaos similar to Feng Fengyi and Cave (Huainanzi-Astronomical Training). And this mess was nothing before the above one. Therefore, in our view, the confusing aesthetic feeling in Mr. Gu Gan's works is precisely that he screened the visual and cultural information he collected as much as possible, making it no longer chaotic, becoming a word, a song and the name of a life (A Deep Examination of the Spring and Autumn Stories-Names), that is, through meaningful activities, becoming the visual realization of the explained object. On Creation The above-mentioned deconstruction and reconstruction theory embodied in Mr. Gu Gan's works belongs to a kind of creation theory, which is undoubtedly a contemporary observation of China's traditional art theory and even philosophical thought based on the modern scientific and humanistic vision.
Einstein's theory of relativity, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle's breakthrough in the pursuit of static accuracy and objectivity, and the theory that any theoretical system can't prove its hypothesis foundation by Godel's incomplete theorem will all be involved in the works realized by Gu Gan's creative theory, intentionally or unintentionally. Therefore, we can really regard Mr. Gu Gan's modern calligraphy as a synaesthesia language blocked by human superlogical thinking and superlogical language, and as an inspiration for the change of current cultural concepts.
Finally, we want to say that although Mr. Gu Gan's modern calligraphy is an artistic image that does not need logical visual reading, all his modern calligraphy is based on China's visible words. This is a wise choice. In China's writing, there are so-called six methods of word-making, namely: (1) looking at things in a symbolic way; (2) Pictographs that are "painted as objects" and "drawn with the body" by copying; (3) Combining semantic symbols with sound symbols, taking things as names, and giving inferences by analogy; (4) Use icons to combine friendship with class, so as to see the condescending meaning; In addition, there are two methods: transfer and borrowing (these two methods are not word-making, but word-using).
This makes the Chinese character Liu Shu system the oldest and most basic information symbol system. Taking it as the basic information of artistic creation will undoubtedly help to link people's subjective world with objective and external social nature, so that the aesthetic subject can be unified in the new cultural landscape, and art under this unified care will become the existence of language closely related to the real world, including people's mind.