Chinese-English Interpretation Practice (36): The Art of Painting Faces

Article 36: The Art of Painted Face Painting

The brush in the hand of the painter Qianzhang shows ease and ease. He can do anything with landscapes, flowers and birds, and tasks. He is especially good at "painted faces". "Performance.

The painting brush of the Chinese artist Qianzhang paints easily: mountains, waters, flowers, birds, human figures – there is simply nothing that the brush fails to paint. Above all, it feels most at home when painting hualian.

"Hua Lian", also known as "Jing", is a profession in opera performances. Jing in Peking Opera is divided into Zheng Jing, Fu Jing and Wu Jing. The character's loyalty, loyalty, goodness, evil, and chivalry can all be expressed from that face, which itself is a symbolic three-dimensional art. There are many people in the painting world who transplant this three-dimensional art onto paper and turn it into two-dimensional art. One is to draw realistic facial makeup on the paper, and the other is opera character painting, which combines specific facial makeup with specific characters, which has the charm of stage sketch.

Hualian, also known as jing, is a major role in China's theatrical performing tradition. In Peking Opera jing includes the categories of leading, assisting and military jing. A particular way of painting jing's face represents a particular identity of the concerned role in a play: it may be a loyal, wicked or good man, or a villain, or a chivalrous hero. The masked face itself is a symbolized work of stereoscopic art. The effort of transplanting stereoscopic art on paper to produce works of plane art is not an isolated phenomenon in the art community. Such work, more often than not, follows one of the two approaches, one of which is to create on paper an exact copy of a masked face, and the other to paint a theatrical figure portrait, casting a particular figure in a mask, quite similar to the work of stage sketches.

This is not the case with the painted faces in Qianzhang’s paintings. He left the specific characters, specific facial makeup, and specific The plot, with a transcendent vision, sweeps across the brush, makes the painted face more abstract, exaggerates the symbolic meaning of the painted face, and enters a new realm of trying to express the human soul. When conducting this kind of artistic exploration, the painter has unique understanding and experience. He broke away from the solid formula of painted faces in traditional dramas and built a bridge between the ancient painted faces art and the psychology of modern people, expressing the joys, sorrows and joys of the world. This process from two-dimensional to three-dimensional forms a momentary flash of space-time art. The innocent and innocent aesthetics that do not violate the rational spirit allow the painter's thoughts to fly freely and make his paintings radiant.

Qianzhang's hualian, nevertheless, represents a different approach to painting. Feeling himself from the rigid commitment of being truthful to stereotypical theatrical figures, masks and plots, he paints quite freely and skillfully. His more liberal vision gives birth to the kind of hualian which is characteristically more abstract and more lavishly exaggerated in terms of its symbolic meaning. In this brand-new realm the artist attempts to best reveal the mind and soul of mankind. In his search for a particular mask-painting art , the artist works with a unique understanding for his object of creation. Ignoring the frozen traditional formula, the artist remains dedicated to constructing a bridge that connects the ancient art of hualian mask painting with the psychology of the modern man, brushing out human joys and sorrows. The transition of the theatrical mask art from a plane form to the present stereoscopic model represents the instantaneous flashes of the so-called time-space art.

A drunkard cannot write poetry. I can't write poetry if I'm too sober. The same is true for painting. I always enter a good state in a state of drunkenness but not drunkenness. I always say that Qianzhang's painted face has the charm of drunkenness, which is a combination of hazy beauty and flowing beauty. To say it is hazy means that it is a blend of ink and color rather than chaos. The involvement of calligraphy brushes brings a flowing rhythm to the painting. This is an artistic effect that combines hardness and softness, movement and stillness, clarity and haziness.

An intoxicated mind writes no poems. Nor does a completely sober mind. It is also true of painting. The best state of creation is one when the artist is partially drunk and partially sober. When I say Qianzhang's hualian smells of drunkenness, I mean that to be an embodiment of obscure beauty with flowing beauty, obscure as the result of mixing ink and color, obscure but not murk. His calligraphic paintbrushing brings flowing rhythm to the work of mask painting, thus achieving an artistic effect of a harmonious combination of firmness with gentleness, of mobility with tranquility, and of precision with obscurity.