As I get older, I gradually feel that my writing is clumsy. Writing paintings is like writing seal script. The sound of the yellow crane makes the mountain hall quiet, and the Taoist priest is sitting in the afternoon.
Wang Meng moved from the small courtyard where Xia Yan once lived to the ninth floor. Mr. Huang Miaozi, an eighty-seven-year-old calligrapher and painter, happily wrote a couplet as a gift:
The white gull and the sea visitor have no self,
There is no one else who is the woodcutter in Huanghe Mountain.
Neat and free, they are a perfect pair. After repeated tastes, I felt that "Huanghe Mountain Woodcutter" looked familiar. I hurriedly opened the history of Chinese painting and suddenly realized that it was the title of the famous painter Wang Meng of the Yuan Dynasty. "Someone else" naturally refers to Wang Meng of the Yuan Dynasty.
Wang Meng of the Yuan Dynasty, named Shuming, also known as Xiangguang Jushi, also known as Huangheshan Qiao, was a native of Huzhou, Zhejiang (now Wuxing, Zhejiang). At the end of the Yuan Dynasty, he worked as a minor official such as "Li Wen" and "Chang Shi". During the war, he abandoned his official position and hid in Huanghe Mountain, Linping, Yuhang, because he took this title. In the early years of Hongwu in the Ming Dynasty, he was appointed magistrate of Tai'an. "Tai'an County Chronicle" records: "The officials are clean and honest, and the people are safe. The public and the scholar-bureaucrats drank wine and composed poems, and dyed the water in the pond. It was a great event." It seems that the official reputation is good. It is a pity that Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming Dynasty, imposed harsh punishments and jails repeatedly in order to consolidate his dominance. At that time, the left prime minister Hu Weiyong colluded with the remaining forces of Japan and the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty in an attempt to rebel, and was severely suppressed. More than 30,000 people were implicated. Wang Meng once went to Hu's house to view the paintings, but was imprisoned and died in prison in the eighteenth year of Hongwu (1385) at the age of eighty-four. Wang Meng is the grandson of Zhao Mengfu. Zhao is the eleventh grandson of Song Taizu, and after King Defang of Qin, he started the Yuan Dynasty landscape painting style. Wang Mengzhi's paintings have both family roots and extensive teachers from his predecessors. Dong Qichang said: "Wang Shuming's paintings originated from Zhao Wenmin's charm...and spread among famous artists in the Tang and Song Dynasties, with Dong Yuan and Wang Wei as their ancestors. Therefore, their paintings are indulgent and colorful, often beyond the standards of Wenmin." Among the landscape painters of the Yuan Dynasty. , Wang Meng is the only one who wins with his dense painting style. The denseness is mainly reflected in the composition, which often has overlapping loops and complex structures, with mountains and ridges, twists and turns. He creatively used pen and ink techniques to maximize the effect of pen and ink. "As I get older, I gradually realize that my pen is rounded, and writing paintings is like writing seal script." He emphasizes the integration of calligraphy into painting, and pays attention to the characteristics of the forward strokes in seal script. People in the world once wrote a poem praising him: "Shu Ming's writing skills can carry a cauldron. There has been no such king in five hundred years." It is not an exaggeration. Therefore, together with Wu Zhonggui, Huang Gongwang and Ni Zan, he is known as the Four Great Masters of the Yuan Dynasty, representing the highest achievement of Yuan Dynasty landscape painting and achieving a creative transformation in Chinese landscape painting. After the Ming Dynasty, although there were many schools, they lacked creativity and gradually became flat and continuous.
Today’s Wang Meng is from Nanpi, Hebei Province. Nanpi, Zhang Zhidong’s hometown. Of course, he was born in Beijing and returned to Nanpi after his birth. When the "July 7" Incident broke out when he was three years old, his family fled to the capital in a carriage. Looking back on his childhood many years later, he still remembers it as "a childhood of hardship." He joined the Communist Party of China at the age of fourteen. He became a cadre when Peiping was liberated at the age of fifteen. Now he is a part-time professor at more than one university, but his real academic qualifications only went to the first grade of high school. Later, he wrote novels, essays, poetry, reviews, and researched "Dream of Red Mansions", etc., and finally became a great scholar-type writer. , completely relying on self-study. Initially, I wanted to study architecture and go to the front lines of the hot construction industry, but when I was not approved, I decided to write a novel. In 1953, he wrote the novel "Long Live Youth". In 1956, he published the short story "The New Young Man from the Organization Department". Its style is fresh and simple, the language is vivid and sharp, and it is full of strong satire and humor. The writer is astute, promptly discovered and bravely raised anti-bureaucratic issues, and reflected the tendency of the party's leading organs to be scatterbrained, perfunctory, conservative and disconnected from the masses after the victory of the revolution. The novel aroused strong social repercussions, and of course he paid a heavy price for it. Some newspapers and periodicals launched discussions and debates, but Yao Wenyuan labeled it as "standing on the hostile side of the party and opposing bureaucracy." After hearing this, Chairman Mao Zedong made it clear: "Wang Meng is against bureaucracy, and I support it. I don't know Wang Meng, and I am not his son or daughter!" It should be said that it was Chairman Mao Zedong's affirmation that enabled him to be favored before the sudden misfortune. Protect. However, it was still labeled as a "rightist" in the end, and the final "balance" of the organization was in 1958. The fate of the next twenty years was determined by this "balance". First, he went to the outskirts of Beijing for labor reform, and then moved to Xinjiang with his wife and children. He lived and worked silently there and could no longer write. Despite the tragic adversity, he still did not lose confidence in life and the future, and faced everything with optimism. He returned to Beijing in 1979 and started a new life journey. He successively served as editor-in-chief of "People's Literature", vice-chairman of the Chinese Writers Association, and minister of culture. Although he has a high official position, he takes it lightly, "For a writer, all kinds of experiences are valuable and a big lesson in life. I think whether it is my experience as the Minister of Culture or my experience of living in a cowshed. It’s precious, it’s fate, it’s a lesson social life has taught me.” Therefore, he believes that the most suitable thing is to be a writer. As a writer, I have been pursuing and exploring unremittingly.
"Long Live Youth", written when he was nineteen and published more than twenty years later, gave up the main line of the story and created a new narrative structure; in the 1980s, in the face of Chinese literature and world literature, he used a courage to conquer the world His pioneering spirit, efforts to open up artistic space and spiritual space, experiments and explorations in modern novels including stream of consciousness, "The Voice of Spring", "Dream of the Sea", etc., made him a fluttering butterfly in the sky of Chinese literary circles. , a flying kite! After more than forty years of ups and downs, what he pursues is no longer the innocence of youth, but justice, harmony and tolerance. He has carefully constructed the seasonal series and has created four volumes: "The Season of Love", "The Season of Broken Love", "The Season of Hesitation" and "The Season of Carnival", and will create two more, which he continues to write to this day. After all, he has evolved with the times and is a participant in various political events in China and a witness to the history of New China. He had no intention of writing about the major events of various eras head-on, but he wanted to use them as a background to write about his pride, integrity and self-esteem and the pride, integrity and self-esteem of people like him, so as to provide a testimony to history. He wants to use his works to create a world, a world of reflection and thinking. This world embodies the passion, hope and confusion of one generation as well as the pursuit, pain, disappointment, awakening and excitement of generations above and below them.
It is such a coincidence that Wang Meng of the Yuan Dynasty and Wang Meng of today have the same surname and the same name after more than six hundred years. The two have nothing to do with each other, just because *** has this symbol that the world calls for. In fact, apart from their names, they also have another important characteristic, that is, they all have a character of courage to explore and innovate, which makes them: one occupies an important position in the history of Chinese painting, and the other plays a decisive role in the contemporary literary world.
This is Wang Meng!