Author: Kim Won-pu
The Beijing Winter Olympics are about to be held, and people's enthusiasm for the Olympic Games is also rising. From January 7th to 16th, the National Art Museum of China", sponsored by the Central Radio and Television Corporation and the National Art Museum of China, held a series of exhibitions on "Collection Revitalization": "Welcoming the Winter Olympics and Beauty in Pursuit of Dreams - Exhibition of Fine Art Works on Sports Themes Collected by the National Art Museum of China", and more than 160 works of fine arts showed the beauty of sports, the beauty of strength and the beauty of art through chapters such as "Dream and Struggle" and "Advocating and Competition", and showed the organic integration of the Olympic spirit and the Chinese aesthetic spirit.
Kicking a Shuttlecock (Sculpture, 1987) by Liu Kaiqu
Coubertin (Sculpture, 2017) by Wu Weishan
Playing Polo (Chinese painting, 1963) by Huang Ji
Ice Dance 3 (Chinese painting, 2011) by Yang Gang
Sport and art have a natural connection. The ice dance and snow competition at the Winter Olympics bring us a thrilling aesthetic feeling. They carry people's dual love for the beauty of nature and the beauty of sports, admiration and appreciation of ice and snow projects, yearning and intoxication of speed and passion, and enthusiasm and attention to the Olympic movement.
The Olympic Charter emphasizes the integration of sport and the arts. The Olympic Charter stipulates: "The Organising Committee of the Olympic Games shall draw up a plan for cultural activities ... The programme of cultural activities must run through at least the entire olympic village opening period. The Olympic Charter also requires that the programme of cultural activities must include "cultural activities organized in the Olympic Village that symbolize the universality and diversity of human culture"; ”
The modern Olympic movement's emphasis on the combination of sports and culture and art has a deep historical and cultural origin. As a model of the combination of sports and culture and art, the ancient Olympic Games set an example for the modern Olympic movement. The ancient Olympic Games not only had fierce confrontations between competitors, but also a variety of cultural and artistic activities. Since the 84th Ancient Olympic Games held in 444 BC, literary and art competitions have been included in the official competition items of the Olympic Games, poets, speakers, musicians, dramatists, sculptors, painters have also joined this grand event, performing music, dance, recitation, singing, sculpture, drama, etc. have greatly increased the cultural atmosphere of the ancient Olympic Games. Athletes dance and sing passionately on the grass, orators eloquently articulate their views, sculptors weave through the crowd in search of creative material, poets capture inspiration in and around the arena, and the square may be staging a lighthearted comedy or a shocking tragedy. Philosophers, poets, playwrights, sculptors, painters, etc. together presented an artistic feast for the Olympic Games.
The modern Olympic movement advocates the harmonious development of human body and mind, opposes the viewing of sports as a simple physical confrontation, and strives to change the undesirable state of spiritual and flesh opposition since the Middle Ages. The combination of sports competition and culture and art will contribute to the realization of this pursuit. Culture and art can enhance the spiritual value of competitive sports, give competitive sports a high aesthetic mood, create a strong artistic atmosphere, cultivate noble moral sentiments, and coordinate social relations between people. Cultural and artistic activities can enrich the content of the modern Olympic movement, and various forms of culture and art combine and complement each other from different angles and in different ways, constituting a colorful cultural landscape of the modern Olympic movement, inspiring people to strive for a peaceful and beautiful future with extraordinary appeal.
The modern Olympic movement combines sport with the arts. Coubertin, the pioneer of the modern Olympic movement, was an advocate and practitioner of the combination of the Olympic Games and art. Coubertin pointed out: "The Olympic movement is not just about strengthening muscles, it is also intellectual and artistic. "Coubertin strives to realize the combination of the Olympic Games and modern culture and art, and injects a rich and profound humanistic connotation into the modern Olympic movement." He loves art, loves painting, is good at playing the piano, has the extraordinary temperament of an artist, a good educational background and a profound knowledge of the humanities. All this gave Coubertin a strong humanistic temperament, and also prompted him to strive for a lifelong effort to achieve the combination of sports and culture and art, to enhance the cultural spirit of sports competition.
Coubertin emphasized that the modern Olympic Games should pursue two realms, namely beauty and dignity. "Anyone who has studied the ancient Olympics will find that the two basic reasons for their far-reaching impact are beauty and dignity," he said. If the modern Olympics are to have the impact we expect, it should also show beauty and inspire reverence — a beauty and dignity that transcends without limit all that is expressed in our most important sporting competitions today. Coubertin pointed out: "Sport must create beauty and provide opportunities for beauty." It creates beauty because it creates living sculptures— athletes; it offers opportunities for beauty because it brings beauty through architecture, scenes, and celebrations. "From the immortal poem "Ode to Sport" that he left us, people can deeply understand Coubertin's sacred ideals and profound thoughts, and feel his deep humanistic care, full of passion for life and beautiful and moving writing. Coubertin regarded musical dance gymnastics as an interaction between sports and art, believing that both sports and art can contribute to the active cultivation of people's ability to feel beauty, and a person with artistic aesthetics can experience the beauty of sports more, and vice versa.
In 1906, the International Olympic Committee convened the "Consultancy Conference on Art, Literature and Sport" at the École de France in Paris, inviting artists and sports people to discuss the integration of art and the Olympic Games, the purpose of which was to study "the form and extent to which art and literature enter the Olympic Games, in short, with sports competition, in order to benefit the Olympic Games and make the Olympic Games more noble and meaningful". In order to achieve the integration of art and sports, Coubertin proposed and decided to make art competitions part of the Olympic competition. The International Olympic Committee set up five art competitions in architecture, painting, sculpture, literature and music in the Olympic Games, called the "Muse Pentathlon Art Competition". The Olympic art competition program began in Stockholm in 1912 and continued until the London Olympics in 1948, during which art competitions were held in the same way as Olympic sports competitions, and artists and athletes won medals in the same way.
Participants in the Olympic art competition must be amateur authors, not professional artists, and the entries are uneven and cannot arouse the interest of the audience. At the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, art competitions were discontinued and replaced by cultural exhibitions and cultural celebrations. In 1954, the IOC adopted a programme for an exhibition of Olympic art, which was enshrined in the Olympic Charter. Since then, the art competition at the modern Olympic Games has come to an end and replaced it with the Olympic Arts Festival.
In order to promote the development of sports culture, the International Olympic Committee founded the Olympic Sports and Arts Competition in 2000. It aims to disseminate the Olympic ideal through art forms and promote the all-round development of young people. The competition consists of first, second and third prizes and awards of excellence. The IOC combines the competition with the Summer Olympics and holds it every four years. In 2000, the IOC hosted its first Sports and Arts Competition in Sydney. Since July 2003, the 2004 Olympic Sports and Arts Competition has become the second Sports and Arts Competition organized by the International Olympic Committee. At this conference, mainland artist Sun Yumin's painting "Qiu" won the gold medal.
The Olympic art of Beijing has a deep tradition. From the 1950s to the 1970s, many artistic masterpieces focused on sports were produced. The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games formed a peak of Olympic art. Today, the Beijing Winter Olympics have once again stimulated the enthusiasm of artists to create more and higher quality art works, "beauty in the dream", a group of artists contributed their elaborate masterpieces, such as Wu Weishan's "Coubertin", Huang Yin's "Playing Polo", Liu Kaiqu's "Kicking the Shuttlecock", Zhu Cheng's "A Thousand Juns and An Arrow", Tian Jinduo's "Going to the World", etc., which greatly stimulated the enthusiasm of the whole people to participate in Olympic art, especially children. On January 10th, the "First China Sports Art Works Exhibition" opened in Beijing Winter Olympic Village. More than 100 works by 100 artists present artistic masterpieces with the theme of "Olympic Culture, Chinese Sports Culture, and Traditional Chinese Culture", and present the Olympic spirit of "faster, higher, stronger and more united" through Chinese art forms, waiting for visitors from all over the world. The exhibitors include 90-year-old elderly people, 9-year-old primary school students, professional artists, professors, and amateur art lovers; works by overseas Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and overseas Chinese, as well as national non-hereditary inheritors, "double Olympics" and "licensors".
The marriage of art and sports has decorated the Beijing Winter Olympics with a beautiful picture of the future together.
You see, they are deeply in love...
(The author is a professor at the School of Liberal Arts, Chinese Min University)
Source: China Writers Network