"China Is So Beautiful" has come to an end. I thought that those niche but "something-of-a-kind" musicians would be the biggest attraction of this music travel documentary. But after running north and south with this group of musicians for more than two months, they found that those who made them realize the beauty of life are the most worthy of being recorded.
Written by | Xu Jing
Edited | Fresh
Proofreader | Zhang Shuai
Listing |FigureVideo
In the final episode of the first season of "China Is So Beautiful", the Five People Band was invited by zuo Jing, an old friend and chief planner of the Great South Slope Project, to attend the 2021 Autumn Xing Concert in the Net Red Village of Henan Province. On the stage close to the villagers, lead singer Renke deliberately cue to Zuo Jing: "Teacher Zuo is an idealist, but he puts it into practice."
Zhang Xiaozhou, the music chief planner of Qiuxinghui, is a veteran media person. But in front of the camera, he questioned the general director Wang Shengzhi: "I am afraid that you are too beautiful to shoot, and many people cannot afford this beauty."
In Zhang Xiaozhou's view, traffic has brought attention, created an Internet celebrity landmark, and attracted visitors from all walks of life, but they can only see a different kind of scenery in their eyes, but they can't see real people. Zhang Xiaozhou may not know that at the beginning of the planning of this show, the general director Wang Shengzhi once said: "'China is so beautiful', in fact, Chinese so beautiful. This time I'm going to take the best musicians in China, travel to the most beautiful places, and sing their songs in the middle of the most beautiful crowds."
Director Wang Shengzhi did not further answer what a person who was "so beautiful" looked like in his eyes. He uses seemingly aimless shots, using musicians who are accustomed to seeing the stage and lighting as a carrier, to freely connect those who meet, reunite, or remember, and unfold in their stories the "alternative" life course: what are those who are brave, free, and difficult to live for ideals and love.
RenKe, Mao Tao, and Zhang Xiaozhou
Musicians are often labeled "idealists", who give up a comfortable life for music, survive difficult years, and bear the pressure of reality... All of this seems to turn into some kind of proud talk after the "red". But only those who have experienced it firsthand understand that things are not so simple – people who can go into the spotlight and enjoy their dreams come true will always be in the minority. And most idealists just spend the best time of their lives chasing a dream. Their happiness and satisfaction come only from this process of chasing dreams.
Perhaps because they are spiritually homogeneous, whether in a bustling city or a remote mountain village, the nine groups of musicians invited by "China So Beautiful" can always keenly "meet" those who have stories. These people, like stars scattered in the wilderness, are out of place with the hurried and pragmatic world around them, but they give the world another light. If these faint rays of light are connected, they can also converge into a stubborn aura, although it is faint, but it cannot be extinguished.
The brighter this aura, the better the world will be. Generations of young people will always be guided by this light to believe things that adults do not want them to believe.
I didn't ask Director Wang, but I always felt that this was the beauty in the director's mind.
"China Is So Beautiful" has come to an end, and the live in those scenery, food and beautiful scenery is a rare content without shelf life in this noisy variety show era. But I believe that one day they will gradually be forgotten, but I hope that this show meets and salvages ordinary people who shine with ideals in the world, those in Jianshui, in Fengyu, in the Great South Slope, in Shanghai... Chinese who silently insist on what they believe and love in this land, and someone can always remember their stories.
Zuo Jing: Chief Planner of the Great South Slope Project, Associate Professor of Anhui University
As a university professor, Zuo Jing can enjoy the comfort of intellectuals in the ivory tower, but he has spent a decade to build the "Great South Slope": to introduce oversaturated urban cultural resources into the countryside and achieve the rural construction movement with "rural aesthetic education" as the core — a goal that sounds lofty and idealistic, but in practice it is difficult.
Ten years later, the Great South Slope proved that Zuo Jing's painstaking planning was not a fool's dream, and he attracted more and more like-minded people to join in this "rural construction" movement.
Together with the local villagers, they used a large number of abandoned public spaces to convert bookstores, taverns, galleries, cafes, and a themed taxi shop specializing in the surrounding areas of Gojo people. They revived the Huaiwei opera, which had disappeared for more than 40 years, and used the annual Autumn Xing Concert as an opportunity to disseminate the results of the transformation of the Great South Slope.
When the Gojo people arrived and were surrounded by villagers and tourists to sign autographs, Zuo Jing did not seem to buy the popularity of his old friends. He pulled Renko aside and asked in a heavy tone, "How did it come to this?" Renke replied a little humbly, "It's all our fault, and it's all causing you a series of troubles."
The great southern slope is red, but Zuo Jing wants a real and powerful case to create for the revitalization of China's rural areas, not a special case. Just as he invited well-known musicians such as Gojo and Xiaohe to participate in Nanpo Qiuxing, he did not want to use their fame to take the stage and take money to leave, but seriously asked them to "start from the earth".
Feng Xincheng: Founder of Xiangchuang China and founder of New Weekly
"New Weekly" was once one of the most influential magazines in the domestic periodical market, and many of its classic themes became forward-looking symbols in the cultural field at that time, triggering extensive social discussion. As the founder and executive editor of New Weekly, Feng Xincheng was regarded as a cultural idol by many literary and artistic youth in the era when the influence of the journal was in full swing.
In 2013, Fengxincheng Rapids bravely retired from the New Weekly, moved to Fengyu, Dali, and built his own courtyard collection in an orchard in Fengyu, the Regression Hall, to carry out the innovative practice of "cultural township construction", nurturing and developing art, culture and music from this land, and turning the backward corner in the eyes of the world into his "first class of the earth" through "space media".
Michelle: Drummer
Michelle is a world-class drummer who has played drums for the police band Sting and participated in the world's top concerts. Now this simple couple chooses to receive old friends from afar in a few old houses in the mountains that have not yet been renovated.
Shi Wenqing: Promoter of Bai culture
Shi Wenqing was a postman when he was young, and in the process of delivering letters and writing letters, he came into contact with the genealogies of many local families in Fengyu. Obsessed with these ancient and vivid history and cultures, he came everywhere for more than ten years to collect and study, and accumulated a thick pile of various written materials, but his wife said that "I got a bunch of waste paper, and I can't even get back the money from a bag of laundry detergent"...
Despite this, Shi Wenqing, who had reached the age of teasing Sun, was still addicted to it. In his own yard, he set up a "Anglai Collection". After the people in the village finished their farm work, they all came here to sing and tell stories. He sorted out and preserved the Bai dialect of Fengyu and organized regular gatherings to spread his native language.
Xie Bilin: The owner of the Walled House in Shangping
After leaving Lianping, the Hakka teenager Xie Bilin worked in the hairdressing industry in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, and became the royal hairstylist of a number of Hong Kong stars. But he did not go down the road of star stylist, and chose to return to Lianping's hometown to build an ancestral house, where a tile and a beam were carefully selected and condensed the family's painstaking efforts. Xie Bilin turned the renovated courtyard into a Hakka-style restaurant.
This kind of Hakka courtyard, the construction of time-consuming and labor-intensive, Xie Bilin invested millions of yuan before and after. Although he was under a lot of pressure and questioned by his family, he always remembered the days when his family was poor when he was a child, and his father lamented that "he could not see a tile when he raised his head, and he could not see a piece of soil when he lowered his head". Since then, building a house has become a kind of complex for him, insisting on completing it for so many years.
Lin Wenjing: Street dance teacher
Lin Wenjing is a member of the university's street dance club, and after graduation, he and his partner returned to their hometown of Lianping and opened a street dance classroom. More and more children fall in love with street dance under their influence, so that these rebellious teenagers who were once incomprehensible by society and their families have found the value of persistence.
Grydon: City Rover
Every city with a bit of history will have this number of people, who are middle-aged and obsessed with old things. The transparent no longer has to wonder why the walking habits and collecting habits and sharing habits are exploding, and what is the point of keeping memories for the city's residents. Gree Dong was confused, is it like this to roam to the old age will not find nothing?
Huang Mohua: The old photo studio photo master
In the bustling metropolis of Shanghai, Chef Huang Mohua has been engaged in photography for more than 40 years and still maintains a photo studio called "New People's Photography". Master Huang said: "We are a traditional photo studio, traditional photography pays attention to layers, light and shadow, through light to make people's facial features three-dimensional." Although selfies and beautification are popular at the moment, for traditional photographers like Master Wong, "we still have to keep it real".
Zhou Yongle: Private chef
Riley (Zhou Yongle) is a typical Haipai figure, decent, exquisite, and extraordinary. He had opened a Western restaurant, but he did not like to be bound by the rules of Western food, so he opened a rather stylish Haipai private restaurant and immersed himself in the study of the "tonkatsu" loved in old Shanghai. He is also a cellist, and plays with professional musicians such as Lu Chen and Xiao he.
Gan Daofu: Porcelain maker
He is the "outlier" of Jingdezhen, seeking artistic expression and modern expression of Qinghua at the moment when yuanqinghua antiques are prevalent. The teacher who helped GanDaofu to burn porcelain plate paintings even teased him: Throwing what you make on the street is not picked up. Gan Daofu is looking for nourishment in the relationship between Eastern and Western culture and art, and his creation is lonely, although he has made great achievements in the field of contemporary art, but in the field of traditional ceramics, he is still the "outsider".
"Blind Brother" Luo Guoxin: Ceramic collector
"Blind Brother" is also the "outlier" of Jingdezhen, and he has done a lot of things that people don't understand: for more than 20 years, he collected ancient porcelain pieces like "scavenging", spent 8 years and millions of debts, and finally "spelled" a Ming Dynasty Xuande Cloud Dragon Pattern Vat. Someone bought it at a high price, but he turned around and donated the dragon pattern vat to the Jingdezhen Ceramic Museum.
Last year, the "blind brother" collected countless Ming and Qing Dynasty official kiln porcelain pieces together with himself, and all of them were "donated" to Jingdezhen, and a porcelain specimen museum was established. In his studio, filled with fragments and spliced semi-finished products, there is a camp bed on which Luo Guoxin sleeps all year round, and the man who was known as a "liar" and a "rogue" in the early years has a crooked line written on the wall at the head of the bed: Retain the roots and soul of Jingdezhen.
Zhou Xin and Ye Xiang: Porcelain makers
The young couple, not long after graduating from Jingdezhen Ceramic University, ran a ceramic studio with their brothers and sisters, and are experiencing a process from scratch. They don't make much money, but they live happily. You can glimpse in them a sense of innocence and healing happiness: "In these busy times, everyone is in a hurry, and we are busy, but we just want to build an amusement park." 」
Yu Jian: Poet
Yu Jian is a pure self-defining person, he lives in jianshui homestay "Listening to Purple Clouds", likes to tell visitors about his outlook on life: "What is the most important meaning of life?" It's not how you live, it's how you die — that's Heidegger's concept of living to die. Now the people are so miserable, they are all dying in the hospital, full of all kinds of wires, sad like an animal. When I was old, I lay down on my bed and brought me the porcelain bottle that was as beautiful as a beauty that I bought in Yeosu in my youth. I touched it again and slowly ended with this porcelain bottle in my arms. My life's struggle is for this beauty, not to die like an animal."
Luo Xu: An architect
Luo Xu, the designer of the Yunnan Internet popular attraction Jianshui Ant Workshop and Maitreya Dongfeng Rhyme, once opened an art company and restaurant in Beijing, is a successful businessman, and also has a variety of titles and auras. Later, he decided to tear off those labels on his body, abandon everything that the world envied, and devote himself to what he really cared about--making art into a house in the land of his hometown in Yunnan, and then making art in a house he built himself.
Yang Feng: Zhenghe tea farmer
Fujian Zhenghe is the hometown of tea, there are many rich tea farmers, many tea farmers who earned their own value in the years when the market was good in the market changed their tea leaves to houses, but Yang Feng is different from others. He invested a lot of the money he earned from growing tea into collecting old tea from all over the world, and also replaced his house with tea, established a database of tea leaves, and a museum, hoping to carry forward the tea culture of Zhenghe.
Ye Xiangmei: Primary school teacher
Ye Xiangmei teaches at the primary school in her hometown, where hundreds of college students once came out, changing the future of a small town. Now, there are fewer and fewer children in the local area, but Teacher Ye has always hoped that his alma mater has not been removed, and hopes that such a simple and bland teaching career can continue forever.
Chen Mujin: Rural calligrapher
Chen Mujin, a native-born politician and farmer, taught himself calligraphy fascinated. In order to marry and have children, he had to give up his hobby of reading and writing and return home to work as a farmer. His wife, He Lianmei, saw that he had to bring a book to the ground every day, so she took out the 800 yuan dowry given by her in-laws when she got married and supported her husband to go to a calligraphy correspondence class. Chen Mujin, who finally got the opportunity to learn, cherished it immensely, and practiced writing until three or four o'clock in the morning every day.
Three years later, Chen Mujin won a silver medal in a calligraphy competition. When he received the award, he deliberately let his wife collect it, but her wife could not even write her own name, so Chen Mujin taught her to write from scratch. The couple's decades-long affection has interpreted the meaning of "true love" in the most ordinary way.
The large-scale outdoor music documentary program "China Is So Beautiful" is co-produced by Straits TV, Southeast TV, Tencent Video and Figure. Full version of the musical character story, please pay attention to the show.
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