I feel that ink painting has cost me my life, except for Jiang Zhaohe, because I don't think of him as a Chinese painting. Xu Beihong may have started a mistake by believing that all painting must be learned from sketching, which ruined Chinese painting.
Works by Jiang Zhaohe
Chinese painting starts with a thread, from an eye, from a part. This is wrong in the eyes of Western painting rules, but that set of rules for Chinese painting is also wrong. Take the Western sketch life law and tell you to sketch with a Chinese brush, the expressive power of the brush and line is finished, and the way the Chinese look at the object is forever lost.
Liang Kai's works
I am ambivalent about Chinese painting. On the one hand, I actually look at Chinese paintings with Western "eyes", because my eyes have been Westernized. On the other hand, I am an absolute traditionalist, because tradition corrects my Westernized "eye" by itself.
Zeng Whale "Portrait of Wang Shimin"
The beauty of Chinese painting lies in the fact that it does not rely on 1510 sketches, but still paints people very emotionally, and they are very similar. For example, Zeng Whale, he painted Wang Shimin or Wang Jian, painting a portrait of him when he was young, how good! There is also the painting that painted the portrait of Dong Qichang, I forgot the author's name, how good the painting is! It's not a sketch at all, especially not the sketching of the Academy of Fine Arts. Even if it is sketching, there are a thousand ways to sketch painting, and it is not just the salon academy. Copying is the right thing to do.
Works by Zhou Sicong
I've always wanted to write a book, and that is not to believe in the phrase "sketching is the foundation". This statement is wrong. I've seen art from all over the world, and sketching is definitely not the foundation. Sketching was just a way of germangaining in Renaissance Italy, then continued for hundreds of years, became an academic system in the 18th century, then spread to the Soviet Union, and then to China – which was disastrous. The Egyptians and Indians were able to paint people and things thousands of years ago in a very similar way, like a mess, and there was no such thing as sketching at all.
Ink sketches
We must unravel this matter, otherwise Chinese painting will have no future. The decline of Chinese painting began with the teaching of drawing. Mr. Xu Beihong must have been very upset if he saw that the sketches he had tried so hard to advocate would later turn out like this, just as Chen Duxiu criticized his early thoughts in his later years, and he understood that he was too extreme back then.
It is wrong to be completely suspicious of the Chinese painting tradition, but it is difficult to correct it nowadays. Without the abolition of plaster sketching, Chinese painting will not have a future. But the pre-exam class has become the largest team.
Ink sketches
This road is impassable. I was in New York at the time when I heard about the rise of "New Literati Painting" in China, and I was very interested: the term "New Literati Painting" was completely nonsense, but their important contribution was to interrupt the process of "revolutionary Chinese painting" and then integrate it with the pre-Qing Dynasty, and the technical joint of the Chinese painting revolution was the Western-style sketch life system.
The "Chinese painting revolution" pioneered by Xu Beihong was tolerable, and he did make Chinese figure painting more possible, but later sketch training almost replaced the most valuable rules of Chinese painting. Now some middle-aged painters have returned to the ancients, but they no longer paint the ancients, but the present. The Chinese painting revolution proved to be a failure in them, and I think so. However, in today's so-called contemporary art space, Chinese painting suffers quite a lot. Because its "defining word" is only "Chinese painting", just "ink painting"—I have never seen such a rich creation with painting types and tools. Have you seen it?