Feng Ji, a famous contemporary Chinese writer, painter and cultural scholar, is a rare generalist in The Chinese cultural circles, who plays basketball, draws, writes novels, and has been running for the protection of Chinese cultural heritage for many years.
Recently, Feng Jicai was awarded the "Outstanding Writer of the Year" at the 2021 Southern Literature Festival, which is the most important honor of the Southern Literature Festival, paying tribute to the writers who have made outstanding contributions to contemporary Chinese literature and culture.
On October 24th, Feng Jicai, the "Outstanding Writer of the Year" of the 2021 Southern Literature Festival, brought a wonderful lecture with the theme of "Painting is the Dream of Literature" to the citizens and literature lovers of Shunde at the Concert Hall of Shunde Beijiao Cultural Center.
Art is tactile bypass
At the beginning of the lecture, Feng Jicai poetically showed the audience his painting career with an 8-minute short film "The Treasured Seasons". This film is very well sounded and pictured, and we can feel the beauty of art without words. Feng Jicai said: "The soundtrack in the short film is a passage from Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony, and the second movement of Tchaikovsky's First Steel Association, which is quiet, distant, confused, sad, and very touching to me. ”
Music, painting, and literature are irreplaceable with each other, but they are all connected. Feng Jicai believes that Chinese painting regards the inherent literature as very important. "I know the history of Western painting very well, Western painting does not pursue literature, and in Chinese landscape painting, a sentence of 'very artistic' is the highest evaluation." What is 'Mood'? Artistic conception is the high degree of integration of poetry and painting. If the painter does not have a literary pursuit, he does not understand Chinese painting, does not understand where the superiority of Chinese painting is. Feng Jicai said.
Speaking of novels, Feng Jicai also pointed out that as far as depicting images is concerned, it is possible to paint calmly, but when writing, it is necessary to immediately produce an image. Novelists have to deal with multiple elements, plots, personalities, actions, which require images as support. Writers need to find language that captures the image accurately. Literature needs details, details need to be unique, and it needs to have a sense of picture. This is called "there is a painting in the poem, and there is a poem in the painting".
In traditional Chinese culture, most of the real literati are poetry, painting, printing and printing, and more masters can even resonate with heaven and earth, so "tong" is a very high realm in Chinese culture.
Imagination and sensitivity are the basic qualities of a writer
Writers should give full play to their imagination and then enter writing, which is a very important cultivation of writers. For example, in "Pipa Xing", after the bitter woman told her own life, Bai Juyi wrote a sentence: "The east ship and the west ship are silent, only to see the autumn moon white in the heart of the river." "This sentence has no expression of emotion, but only shows the picture, allowing your readers to enter the scene of art and feel it for themselves." This is the imagination space left for the reader.
The so-called imagination is the ability of the writer to detach from the specific experience, so the writer's language is between describing the specific details and the transcendent details, both metaphysical and metaphysical, both empirical experience and imaginary transcendence, this combination is actually art, which is the so-called form and god-like.
Just as important as imagination is sensitivity. Feng Jicai gave examples from Hugo's "Ninety-Three Years" and Lu Xun's "Blessings": Hugo wrote about an abandoned old city gate that no one had opened for a hundred or two hundred years, and there was a hoe standing on the door, and I don't know who stood there, and the front half of the hoe has grown with the land, and it is full of brilliant flowers. In "Blessings", it is written that Xianglin's sister-in-law was holding a pole, and the lower end was cracked.
In Feng Jicai's view, this cracked detail is the greatness of Lu Xun, writing out the living state of Xiang Lin's sister-in-law, the misery of fate, which reflects a writer's incomparably meticulous and accurate sensitivity, and this is also the key to improving the artistic quality of literary works.
Why do some novels read so hollow? Because the author may rely on his own reading experience or a single imagination. Good writing must completely liberate your facial features, see with your eyes, smell with your nose, taste with your tongue, and only with your senses can you write with your senses brilliant and vibrant.
Protecting Chinese cultural heritage is more important than my personal writing
In the award speech awarded to Feng Jicai this year, there is such a passage: "Feng Ji is a name, but also a cultural feeling." He wanted beauty from art, legend from the world, evidence of civilization from the dying cultural heritage and ancient villages, and the future from the past. His devotion and rescue of the cultural status quo have translated the conscience of intellectuals into a kind of action with inspiration and reflective spirit. Awarding Feng Jicai the title of "Outstanding Writer of the Year" is not only an affirmation of his achievements in literature and art, but also a recognition of his outstanding contributions to the protection of Chinese cultural heritage and ancient villages.
In 1990, Feng Jicai devoted himself to the rescue of urban culture, initiated and presided over the "Chinese Folk Cultural Heritage Rescue Project" in 2002, and proposed the emergency protection of ancient villages by the state in 2012. Feng Jicai sold paintings for the protection of Zhouzhuang, rescued small Western-style buildings and old streets in Tianjin, and went into the countryside to rescue cultural heritage such as woodblock prints, paper cutting, festival culture, folk sculptures, thangkas, oral literature, etc. In the past 30 years, he has walked in the forefront of cultural protection and become the "god of cultural protection" in the mouth of the famous writer Wang Meng.
Feng Jicai believes that rescuing the cultural heritage that is about to be lost is far more important than his personal writing. Feng Jicai can sometimes only write novels in his heart, such as when he goes to Henan to rescue his heritage, starting from Tianjin and taking a car all the way into Zhongzhou, he picks out a novel at this time to think, thinking about the possibility of various conflicts between characters, and when the driver says that it is almost here, then he stops.
"To this day, the cultural heritage of our nation is still under a lot of pressure and impact, and this issue is still more important than my novel." Feng Jicai sighed, "What I want to emphasize is not how much I have sacrificed to protect China's cultural heritage, but how many outstanding and precious cultural heritages have not yet received due attention." “
Nandu reporter Zhu Rongting intern Lu Yang