On December 26th, "The Soul of Mountains and Rivers - Southern China Oil Painting landscape research exhibition" (Shanghai exhibition) opened at the Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute Art Museum, the exhibition from Liu Haisu, Wu Dayu, Wu Guanzhong, who drew nutrients from European oil painting, to Jin Shangyi and Zhan Jianjun, who learned from Supai painting, to the painter's interpretation of oil painting landscape after the reform and opening up, showing the development of oil painting landscape.
For the exhibition, the audience can't help but ask what is the difference between "landscape" and "landscape"? Why does the concept of "South" emphasized in the exhibition? Yang Xiaoyan, a professor at the School of Communication and Design of Sun Yat-sen University, believes that "landscape" and "landscape" represent different aesthetic orientations in the East and the West, but now the two are producing a subtle interaction, and "oil painting landscape" just shows that this role is tending to surface. This article is Yang Xiaoyan's interpretation of "Southern Oil Painting Landscape".
Exhibition site
A few years ago, some oil painters from the south gathered to discuss the local nature of art. As a result of the discussion, they gave it a name that people had never heard of, called "oil painting landscape". From the perspective of customary classification, "oil painting landscape" is unambiguous. The way Western oil painting depicts nature is "landscape", just as Chinese called the depiction related to it "landscape". British art historians once had a monograph on landscape called "Landscape into Painting", which discussed how natural landscapes have become artistic schemas of different eras, different types and styles from the perspective of art history. The American iconographer Mitchell pushed this problem to the social level, and in his book "Landscape and Power", which he edited, he listed various manifestations of the close connection between natural scenery and social consciousness, thus revealing the different viewing positions held by human beings in the face of their surrounding environment, and how people's perceptions will profoundly change the original appearance of nature when this viewing position is integrated with the power of the world.
Wu Dayu", "Morning in the Park", oil on canvas, 75×70cm, 1973, Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute Collection
Traditional Chinese painting does not have the concept of "landscape", we use "landscape". Even, in the eyes of Guo Xi in the Song Dynasty, the nature that the literati wandered was a kind of "true landscape": "The valley of the true landscape looks far away to take its momentum, and the close-up looks at it to take its quality." The clouds of true landscape are different from four times: spring melts, summer is lush, autumn is thin, and winter is bleak. "The smoke of the true landscape is different from four times, the spring mountain is light and smiling, the summer mountain is green and like a drop, the autumn mountain is as clear as makeup, and the winter mountain is as bleak as sleep." "The wind and rain of the true landscape can be seen from afar, while the near one cannot investigate the mistakes and stop the trend, the yin and sunshine of the true landscape can be exhausted, and the close ones cannot get the traces of obscurity and concealment." The fact that "landscape" is "true" shows the connection between the concept of "landscape" and nature. Looking at the concept of "landscape" in reverse, it is exactly what the Italian 15th-century architect Alberti emphasized in "On Painting": "Let me say that the function of the painter is to depict and color with lines on the board or on the wall, so as to have an observed plane that is no different from anyone, to ensure that when viewed at a specific distance from the center, the picture is vivid and full of volume." Notice a word here called "observation plane," which refers to a kind of viewing by the painter at a "specific location at a specific distance from the center." This viewing is the visual reason for the formation of the "landscape".
Liu Haisu, "Landscape of the Bund", 97cm×163cm Oil on canvas, 1964
The reason for enumerating the different orientations of the above-mentioned "landscape" and "landscape" is to illustrate that the concept of "nature" that occurs in the foreign painting of oil painting and the consciousness of "landscape" that occurs in the traditional style of ink painting just represent the different value judgments and aesthetic orientations of the East and the West. The problem is that with the entry of Western culture and the rise of oil painting in China's local art practice, the "landscape" behind oil painting has increasingly profoundly affected our artistic practice and has a subtle interaction with "landscape". "Oil painting landscape" just shows that this role has become superficial, and it contains a possible goal of interesting reorganization and value reconstruction.
In terms of concrete practice, the "role" referred to here should happen in this way: the "nature" that enters our viewing field with oil painting must contain perspective, color, specific composition and representation, which are obviously "Western", in line with a metaphor provided by Alberti of the Renaissance - "window". In Alberti's view, the landscape based on the rules of perspective is actually the view seen through the window, and the distance and spatial sense in it, just like the "cross-section of the cone", coincide with the general law of the object of our eyes, in order to obtain a lifelike effect.
Those who work on oil painting are very familiar with the principles that Alberti expounds here. This amply illustrates that style and specific paintings are closely related to the nature of a particular medium, in today's popular terms. Oil painting has the composition rules of oil painting, just like traditional landscapes have their own laws, and it is not easy to move between them. How can a person who is accustomed to the unique expression of oil painting use the natural landscape factor to operate the position? In turn, people who are familiar with the layout of the landscape will not have a "window" in their hearts, so they will not be able to see a scenery similar to the perspective of the focus, let alone depict it.
Jin Shangyi, East China Sea, 43cm×53cm Oil on canvas, 2013
Wan Muchun once discussed the difference between "landscape" and "landscape painting". He proposed a concept of "landscape awakening" to illustrate the process of transforming landscape into art: "The 'awakening of landscape and water' requires artistic language as a medium,...... Painting may have taken impetus and inspiration from literature, expanded its own language, and caught up with the 'arousal' effect of literature in five generations at the latest. The language of landscape painting transcends the expression of landscape painting and becomes the object of art itself. This is exactly as Clark once said, in the West, "landscape" into painting has a process of language change, and in history is divided into "symbolism", "classical", "romantic" and "reality" and several different stages. In the 1930s, the aesthetician Zong Baihua declared that the style of oriental art was "rhythmic beauty", and its formal language was line, flowing and flying, changing in a thousand ways, focusing on the expression of artistic conception, emphasizing the poetry in the painting, and thinking that there was also a painting in the poem. He pointed out: "We have said before that Egyptian and Greek architecture and sculpture are a kind of clumps. ...... Ancient Chinese artists wanted to break this lump, make it virtual and real, and make it unblocked. Chinese paintings... Special attention is paid to the line, which is the organization of a line. ...... Next to the Chinese word 'shape' is three hairs, and three hairs are used to represent the lines on the body. This also shows that the organization of the image of Chinese art is line. Li Zehou also in "The Course of Beauty", through the high generalization of Chinese art over thousands of years, effectively strengthens this understanding from an aesthetic point of view. In particular, his description of the "realm of my own" in the yuan painting, he discussed when comparing the literary achievements of the same period: "Parallel to the literary taste, and the specific embodiment of this interest constitutes the characteristics of the meta painting is the prominent emphasis on pen and ink." This is another creative development of Chinese painting art, and yuan painting has thus obtained its unique aesthetic achievements. That is to say, in the view of literati painters, the beauty of painting lies not only in depicting nature, but also in the line and color of the painting itself, that is, the so-called pen and ink itself. Pen and ink can have a relatively independent beauty that is not dependent on the object of expression (scenery). It is not only a formal beauty and structural beauty, but also in this formal structure, it can convey people's subjective spiritual realms, 'charm', and 'interest'. ”
Zhan Jianjun, Plateau Love, 109cm×187cm Oil on canvas, 1982
Obviously, the difference between Chinese and Western art lies not in its surface, but in its interior. Fundamentally, Chinese art is the art of thread, the art of time, an art of expressing the creation of all things in outlining, and therefore also a kind of freehand art. Western painting, on the other hand, emphasizes the texture of the object, emphasizes the effect consistent with the perception of the eyes, uses chiaroscuro to shape the body, and takes the focal perspective as the basis for viewing, so that the picture has a visual authenticity, and therefore, Western art is considered to be a realistic art. On the question of the form of Western art, Wolflin has an original interpretation. In his book "Art StyleOlogy - Basic Concepts of Art History", he pointed out that the two historical styles of "line drawing" and "drawing" were pointed out: "The line drawing-shaping style is related to the close spatial hierarchy of the flat style, and there is a natural and close relationship between the independence of the image structure and the independence of the components and the perfect clarity of independence." On the other hand, the uniform effect of incompletely clear forms and with degraded components will naturally combine with non-tectonic fluctuations and find their best place in the Impressionist-pictorial conception. Here, Wolflin emphasizes a formalistic historical change that matches the visual, intelligently articulating the basic points of Western art in its approach.
Quan Shanshi, Jiangnan Water Town, 54cm×49cm, oil on cardboard, 1982
Since modern times, oil painting has entered China, followed by the spread of viewing methods and expression methods that are very different from those in Middle-earth behind oil painting. Especially in the context of traditional art, this difference eventually led to an artistic revolution. As a result, the drawing and color system that originally belonged to the West has become the foundation of our entire art education today, and has shaped the aesthetic judgment and style consciousness of several generations of Chinese artists. With the passage of time, especially with the rise of China, a new understanding of its own tradition has quietly opened the curtain. The people in oil painting are more consciously aware of the long-term and unique value of tradition. They are also acutely aware that this value must be transformed through some kind of modern transformation to gain real meaning, to bring art closer to the times.
Xu Jiang, "One Day two in the middle of the mountain", 73cm×50cm Oil on canvas, 2021
In fact, in concrete practice, Chinese oil painters have consciously and quietly changed their forms. Although the medium is still oil painting, as far as depiction is concerned, whether in composition or formal composition, it no longer follows or does not completely follow a set of perspective and color relationships attached to the original schema, no longer for the purpose of real scene reproduction, but strives to create a poetic meaning in it. The key is "arousal", so that the "awakening of the landscape" becomes the consciousness of the language of oil painting, so that this medium escapes from the style described by Clarke, and uses oil painting to "evoke" our feelings about the land of China, so that "landscape" stands in the brushstrokes full of lyrical meaning.
Chen Junde, "Sinan Road Boulevard", 80x100cm Oil on canvas, 2005
"South" also has a profound meaning, that is, the unique terrain and mountainous features presented from north to south have given long-term vitality to the locality. The plains of the Central Plains, the xiuyi of Jiangnan, the steepness of Xiaoxiang, the windsweet of The Five Ridges, the green wash of Hainan, and the abruptness of the southwest all give people unforgettable inspiration. Looking out again, the towering west, the hegemony of the north, the majesty of Qinghai-Tibet, the endless grassland, running in the middle of the curved Yellow River, the stretching Yangtze River, the surging Pearl River, and countless long rivers Qingxi, mountains and mountains. China stands alone in the world with its 5,000-year civilization. The reason why Chinese civilization has such a strong vitality is that the core of our civilization has always contained a deep insight into human nature and an aesthetic adherence to nature. Traditional Chinese visualizations of art and their expressions are condensed in the aesthetic expression of "the unity of heaven and man", which has created great splendor. Today coincides with the prosperity of the world, we naturally want to let the mountains and rivers leave traces, give their souls in a unique form, using oil painting as a medium, to reconstruct the aesthetic harmony between man and nature. The task is long, the righteousness is not reversed, the generosity moves forward, we evoke the landscape because of the oil painting, and shape its soul because of the landscape!
Note: The author is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Communication and Design of Sun Yat-sen University, and a researcher at the Southern China Oil Painting and Landscape Research Institute; the original title is "Mountains and Rivers Shape Their Souls - Using Oil Painting as a Medium to Reconstruct the Aesthetic Harmony between Man and Nature"; the exhibition will be on display until January 7, 2022.