Author: Zou Yating
Colorful embroidered pillows, lively and cute puppet tiger toys, lifelike New Year paintings, shadow puppets, imaginative social fire masks... Walking into the national museum of China's "Go to the Folk - Pan Lusheng Folk Art Exhibition", visitors will be moved by these warm, rustic, full of life folk artworks. The exhibition takes the folk art collection, folk art research and artistic creation of Professor Pan Lusheng, vice chairman of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and chairman of the China Folk Writers Association, as the main body, exhibiting more than 500 pieces (sets) of traditional folk art works and contemporary art creations, through five parts: walking thousands of miles, pearl pearls and silk picking, Tuofu Na ling, chasing the light and chasing color, and inheriting ingenuity, systematically displaying folk art treasures, research and their transformation and development in contemporary art creation, vividly reflecting the value pursuit of contemporary folk art workers rooted in the folk and inheriting ingenuity.
Pan Lusheng's fiber hand-embroidered work "Wind and Rain". (Courtesy of Guobo)
"Go to the folk - Pan Lusheng Folk Art Exhibition" scene. (Photo by Du Jianpo)
Pan Lusheng fiber hand embroidery work "Fuhu Town House". (Courtesy of Guobo)
Around this exhibition, the reporter interviewed Pan Lusheng and listened to him talk about the original intention and perception of "going to the folk", and about the inheritance of traditional folk art in contemporary times and the nourishment it provides for artists' creation.
It is our mission to rescue and protect folk art
Reporter: When did you first start fieldwork, and how did you feel? Why did you keep insisting on it, and what drove you to go to the people?
Pan Lusheng: In the early 1980s, I began to go to the folk to investigate the style. I remember that in the summer of 1981, when I went to Shidao and Dayu Island in Yantai, Shandong Province, to sketch, I saw that the window flowers pasted by local fishermen on the windows were particularly vivid and vivid, and there were large fish plates for daily life. Later, I used the winter and summer vacation time to successively inspect the New Year paintings, paper cuts, face sculptures, toys, clay sculptures and other folk crafts in Heze, Jining, Binzhou, Gaomi, Anhui, Bozhou, Henan and other places in Shandong. At that time, folk craftsmanship had not yet been so commercialized as it is today, full of local atmosphere and simple life emotions. After the work, with the encouragement of Zhang Tong, Wang Chaowen, Zhang Daoyi, Sun Changlin and other division commanders, I further embarked on the road of folk art investigation and research and rescue and protection.
General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out in his speech at the forum on literary and art work: "Chinese aesthetics emphasizes the support of materials and words, allegorizes reason, emphasizes conciseness and conciseness, condenses moderation, emphasizes both form and spirit, far-reaching artistic conception, and emphasizes the unity of knowledge, affection, intention and action. "Folk art is the creation of the beauty of life, is the concentrated embodiment of the spirit of Chinese aesthetics, as long as you walk into the field, you will be infected by that kind of strong, simple, warm and beautiful emotions." Immersed in it, I completed my first monograph" on Chinese Folk Art in 1990. Wang Chaowen, an older generation of writers and artists from Yan'an Luyi, wrote in the preface that the publication of the book "is conducive to eliminating the negative influence of national cultural nihilism." This sentence has a deep impact on me. Since then, spontaneous fieldwork has gradually transformed into a conscious action to protect national and folk culture, and the scope of investigation and collection has gradually expanded from Shandong to the whole country. The ideal of folk art toward goodness and beauty and the encouragement of the older generation of writers and artists have given me firm strength.
Reporter: What are some of your impressive stories in fieldwork? How do you feel that the changes of the times have affected the development of folk art?
Pan Lusheng: The fieldwork directly confronts folk artists and their works, bringing me rich feelings and inspiration. Each piece in this exhibition has unforgettable memories and stories. There was no income during the student years, and the main way to collect the collection was to exchange it for study. The Jiaodong paper cuts and New Year paintings in the early collection were exchanged for the portraits of peasant friends. There are also some objects that seem to have no valuable value and are discarded and picked up. Folk art collection is not like an antique collection, the collection is a daily necessities, it is important to use heart and affection to discover, find the value of it.
The impact of the changes of the times and the transformation of society on folk art is extremely enormous. It is the historical mission of cultural scholars to rescue and protect folk art and continue the cultural context of national life.
Draw warmth and inspiration from vernacular artifacts
Reporter: This exhibition shows a large number of folk art collections, including traditional embroidery, textiles, woodcuts, printing and dyeing, New Year paintings, clay sculptures, paper-cutting, porcelain painting, shadow puppetry and other craft categories. Tell us about one or two important collections and the stories behind them.
Pan Lusheng: As a handmade object, folk art objects originate from the needs of emotional communication and expression in life. There is a group of pottery sculpture children's molds in the exhibition, and in my hometown of Heze, it is a pottery model used by children to play with mud. They are both informative and interesting. "Fighting Child Model" is part of children's entertainment life. After a child has a child model, he always wants to try it out among his peers, who has more stories, who tells better, and who does more than whom. In the exchange or exchange, the children naturally increase their insights, understand historical allusions or myths and legends, and also internalize the moral concepts of benevolence, righteousness, and wisdom, the meaning of auspicious patterns, beautiful expectations, and the common feelings of people in local life, becoming the cornerstone of their personal values when they grow up. I think this is the memory, the nostalgia, the continuation of living in the local utensils. Without them, how can this feeling of hometown and life be maintained and how can it be sustenance? We need folk art, which are the bonds and bridges that can lead to the wider and farther realms of time and the soul.
Reporter: There are also your artistic creations in the exhibition, please introduce a few representative works, what creative inspiration do they derive from, and what nutrients are drawn from folk art?
Pan Lusheng: Art is like the waves that flow in the long river of life. Drawing creative nutrition from people's lives and practices is the basic path for the creative transformation and innovative development of China's outstanding traditional culture. The series of works such as "Luban Line" and "Distance Between the Middle Line" in the folk art exhibition are inspired by the ink bucket of folk woodworking tools, and alongside these works, there are also ink buckets from my collection. The ink bucket is an important tool made by traditional Chinese carpenters, and unlike the standardized measurement tools in the West, the extension of the line is elastic, including the creativity of people and things, things and things. Through the criss-cross and infinite extension and intersection of the ink bucket bullet line, it is transformed into a schematic representation of contemporary composition meaning, implying the contemporary enlightenment significance of traditional values.
With the theme of the Silk Road's "Hundred Craftsmen's Works", the work "Master's Silk Road" depicts the traditional craftsmanship scenes on the Silk Road in the form of a long scroll, including handicraft production, trade and commerce, and the life of customs and culture, while depicting the pearling, trading and shipbuilding technology of the Maritime Silk Road, showing the scene of people carrying silk, ceramics and spices on the means of transport such as boats and sea boats. The Silk Road is not only a commercial road connecting the East and the West, but also a road to the dissemination of traditional Chinese craftsmanship and culture, this work highlights the spread of the Silk Road hundred craftsmen by showing the labor scenes, skill inheritance, customs and habits of the Silk Road masters, etc., and shows the development and change of traditional crafts on the Silk Road.
Innovative communication evokes broader spiritual resonance
Reporter: The video playing at the exhibition site mentioned the overseas exchange activities you participated in. In the process of exchange, how do overseas audiences view and evaluate traditional Chinese folk art and the contemporary art created on this basis?
Pan Lusheng: A good work of art can arouse the spiritual and emotional resonance of the viewer. The silk, ceramic and metal media paintings in this exhibition were exhibited in France, Italy, Spain and other countries in 2014. Overseas audiences showed great interest in works full of Chinese aesthetic concepts, and marveled at the creative vitality of the profound Chinese culture. Professor Anna Maria of the University of Venice in Italy said: "The crystal clear Luban line, looking for directions and roads in the labyrinth map like a brain structure, runs silently and endlessly, sometimes breaking, sometimes continuing, jumping and spiraling on the huge porcelain vase, blooming in the endless continuation of the flower of living life." "Starting from folk art, returning to the source of life and exploring the expressive space of art also provides a possibility for dialogue between Eastern and Western art on the spiritual level."
Reporter: Is the exhibition on the theme of folk art attractive to young people? How to let more young people know and feel the roots of our national culture?
Pan Lusheng: In local folk art, there are roots of Chinese culture and have a natural affinity. At present, the local teaching materials of primary and secondary schools absorb national and folk culture and art, and the children have received the education of loving the hometown and loving the land from an early age, and have learned about the excellent traditional Chinese culture, and have already had a certain degree of cultural consciousness. Among the more popular young people in this exhibition are the "Door God" installation transformed by the New Year painting and the fiber works of the "Heaven and Earth" series, who stop in front of these two groups of works and take a group photo. Our culture and art have roots and traditions, but also continue to evolve and develop, the pace of life, the flow of time does not stop, generations of new people are growing, what we want to pass on is a long-standing spiritual force, cordial and long-
Source: People's Daily Overseas Edition