Chen Hui: From "the landscape in front of you" to "the hills and ravines in your chest", how do Chinese and Western paintings "constantly line"?
China News Service, Beijing, February 6 Title: Chen Hui: From "the landscape in front of you" to "the hills and ravines in the chest", how do Chinese and Western paintings "constantly line"?
China News Service reporter Chen Yubo
Chinese painting rewrites the meaning, Western painting rewrites the reality; Chinese painting emphasizes shen yun, Western painting is heavy and similar; Chinese painting is implicit, restrained, neutral, Western painting is open, strong, direct... For a long time, whether Chinese painting can learn from Western painting and how to "use foreign for Chinese use" has become a topic of endless debate in the art world.
What is the essential difference between Chinese painting and Western painting? What kind of philosophy is reflected behind it? How does Chinese painting stick to its "soul" in inheritance and innovation? Chen Hui, professor and doctoral supervisor of the Academy of Fine Arts of Tsinghua University, recently accepted an exclusive interview with China News Agency's "East and West Question" to interpret this.
China News Service: What are the unique characteristics of Chinese painting? What is the essential difference from Western painting?
Chen Hui: Chinese painting is unique in the history of world art. Philosophically, any cultural formation is governed by thought. Chinese painting was influenced by Taoism, Confucianism, and so on. Taoists emphasize "teaching nature" and "unity of heaven and man", advocating taking nature as a teacher and going to nature to experience inspiration. Ancient Chinese landscape painters used to express the "hills and ravines in their chests" by lying down, traveling, and feeling the twilight of the four seasons, painting feelings and impressions, rather than the physical and objective landscapes in Western paintings.
Confucianism emphasizes that a person's cultivation behavior, ideological thickness and life experience determine the "painting", "painting like his person", that is, the style and artistic conception of the painting. These factors lead us to be different epistemologically different from the West, Chinese painting is an expression of "from the inside to the outside", first emphasizing the inner cultivation and feelings, forming a consciousness through observing nature, and then expressing the image.
Chinese paintings. China News Service reporter Zhang Bin photographed
Influenced by the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras's theory of "everything is numbered", Western painting emphasizes the scientificity and accuracy of objects, pays attention to the proportion structure such as the golden section, and pursues rational beauty.
English painter Elizabeth Butler (1846-1933) 'Joining Connaught's Rangers'. Photo by Du Yang, a reporter from China News Service
In terms of specific expression techniques, Chinese painting is different from Western painting in five points.
First, perspective, the perspective of Chinese painting is two-dimensional, translational, and the West pays attention to focus perspective, near large and far small;
The second is color, the color of Western painting pursues truth and objectivity, and the color of Chinese painting is subjective, which is a kind of understanding that is extracted from life and higher than life, and then creates a picture;
The third is modeling, Chinese painting is mainly line modeling, Western painting is mainly surface modeling, such as forming a junction line through cold and warm color blocks;
Fourth, space, Western painting shows the object image more three-dimensional, for example, painting characters will scientifically analyze the light surface, highlight, chiaroscuro boundary, projection, etc., Chinese painting is relatively flat, and the way of expression in two-dimensional space is more free;
Fifth, materials, Western oil painting is painted on oil canvas, oil paint can be covered, modified and added, Chinese painting is mainly expressed on rice paper with pen and ink, is a kind of "subtraction", a stroke is determined to succeed or fail. Without going through a thousand hammers and hammers, it is still very difficult to paint Chinese paintings.
Xu Beihong's work "Running Horse (Sending White Stone)". China News Service reporter Chen Chao photographed
China News Service: You have used ink to express the Venetian water city, the old streets of Rome, the Swiss towns, etc., what kind of charm can Chinese ink paintings give to these Western buildings or landscapes?
Chen Hui: Ink painting language has many advantages. It is black and white, with a sense of historical vicissitudes and heaviness, which fits well with the characteristics of these ancient Western buildings; it is changeable, and when expressing the broken walls of the Roman column, it can use a more pathetic brushstroke, and when painting the Venetian Water City, the unique fluidity, charm and five colors of the ink in Chinese ink painting can give the Venetian Water City a feeling of flowing water on the Small Bridge in Jiangnan, like a lyric poem.
Chen Hui's work "Former Glory". More pathetic brushstrokes are used when representing the broken walls of the Roman columns. I provide the picture
Chen Hui's work "Venice Docks". When painting the Venetian Water City, the unique fluidity, charm and five colors of the ink in Chinese ink painting can give the Venice Water City a sense of flowing water on the small bridge in Jiangnan, China. I provide the picture
In addition, the expressive techniques of Chinese ink painting are more flexible than those of Western oil painting. Oil painting pays attention to real reproduction, while ink painting can "transfer flowers and trees", which can mix the pictures of several different spaces together and combine them arbitrarily, which can present a kind of historical crossing.
China News Service: You have borrowed from the visual elements of Western painting, such as proportion and composition, and innovated the expression of contemporary Chinese ink painting, how do you think Chinese painting and Western painting should learn from each other and complement each other? How does Chinese painting stick to its "soul" in inheritance and innovation?
Chen Hui: The superiority of Chinese painting compared to Western painting is that it is a kind of refinement under perception. We often say, "It is not difficult to paint like it, it is difficult to paint with both charm", as Qi Baishi said, "The beauty of painting lies between similarity and dissimilarity, too similar is kitsch, and if it is not similar, it deceives the world." Chinese painting pays attention to the Taoist view, "Tao" refers to the cultivation, accumulation and realm of the individual, and the things drawn by people with different experiences are definitely different.
Qi Baishi works. China News Service reporter Yu Haiyang photographed
Therefore, the characteristics of Chinese painting's heavy charm cannot be lost, which is its lifeblood. On the basis of adhering to this lifeline, I think there are two points that Western painting can learn from Chinese painting. First of all, the visual impact, in 2003 I saw a comparative exhibition of Chinese painting and Western oil painting in the Ming and Qing Dynasties at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the United States, Chinese painting needs to be viewed very closely, and Western oil painting can catch people's attention at a distance of twenty or thirty meters, since then, I have wondered that the visual impact of the picture can become an aspect of the improvement of Chinese painting. Of course, this has to do with the origins of the two. Ancient Chinese paintings were often painted on handkerchiefs or fans, which were originally intended for literati and inkers to taste each other and feel the state of mind, while Western paintings were common in the temple, and oil painting was a very strong language, so Chinese paintings were in a weak position when displayed in public spaces.
The second is light and shadow, Chinese painting rarely shows light and shadow, but in fact, the addition of light can make the picture produce empty inspiration, a sense of space and mystery. My attempt to include light and shadow in Chinese painting was actually inspired by the Dutch painter Rembrandt, who was very good at using light in the center and slowly weakening the two sides. This is also very similar to the stage play, as soon as the main actors come out, there must be chasing light, and others slowly weaken, so that the picture can have a primary and secondary relationship, there are layers, and there is rhythm.
Chen Hui's work "Chinese Culture". The work attempts to include light and shadow in Chinese painting. I provide the picture
China News Service: After Pang Xuanxuan, Wu Guanzhong, Yuan Yunfu, Du Dakai, Liu Jude and others, you are the fourth generation of Chinese painters advocating the integration of East and West.
Chen Hui: After the founding of New China, the Chinese art world basically belonged to the "Xu-Jiang system" (Xu Beihong and Jiang Zhaohe) and advocated realism, so Pang Xuanxuan's idea of the integration of East and West was not widely adopted at that time, and belonged to "another way". He hopes to combine traditional Chinese culture and art with Western modern art. However, Western art was relatively rejected at that time, and it was not until the "85 Thought" (a trend of art that emerged Chinese mainland in the mid-1980s) that Western art slowly came in.
Wu Guanzhong, Yuan Yunfu, Du Dakai, Liu Jude and others have always adhered to the creative methods under Pang Xuanxuan's artistic ideological system, including Wu Guanzhong's "nationalization of oil painting, modernization of Chinese painting" and "kite continuous line" theory (artists and people cannot break the line, tradition and modernity cannot break the line, the East and the West cannot break the line, sketching and creation can not break the line), which is also an important support for our integration and creation today.
Fortunately, they did not give up and did not have self-doubt, and today it seems that the road of Integration of East and West is very successful. In the future, the exchange between China and the West will be more extensive, and there will be more and more Western artists paintinging ink paintings, and if China can produce more people like Wu Guanzhong, the influence of Chinese painting in the world will definitely become greater and greater.
Wu Guanzhong's work "City Night" depicting a night scene in Hong Kong. Photo by Du Yang, a reporter from China News Service
China News Service: You once said, "Contemporary Chinese ink painting should have a cosmopolitan language." How is this sentence understood?
Chen Hui: Contemporary Chinese ink painting should have a cosmopolitan language, first of all, it must have the connotation of Chinese culture. What the artist paints must first move himself in order to move the audience. Artists live in this land, and only with local complexes can what they paint will be unforgettable. At the same time, the way Chinese painting is expressed in terms of meaning and rhyme should be retained, which is its advantage in going to the world. In the great garden of world art, each ethnic group has its own characteristics, and Chinese painting must maintain its uniqueness.
Visitors visit the "Exhibition of Epic Pictures of the Grand Canal of China" at the National Museum of China. Photo by Du Jianpo, China News Service
Secondly, painting, like music and dance, is a world language that does not require translation to impress the audience. Whether it is the pleasing beauty of poetry or the beauty of the shock of the heart that reflects suffering, an artist's character and experience cast his unique style, and it is good to stick to his true colors.
Third, the work must be contemporary. The works should carry the lifestyle, living conditions and common concerns of contemporary people, such as social issues, environmental issues, urban life, as well as the change of China's well-off life and peasants' living conditions, which can be expressed in the special context of Chinese painting. (End)
Respondent Profiles:
Chen Hui is a second-level professor and doctoral supervisor of the Academy of Fine Arts of Tsinghua University, an expert in the evaluation of the national professional degree level of the Ministry of Education, and the deputy director of the Wu Guanzhong Art Research Center. Representative works include "Chinese Culture", "The Time of The Lost World of Southern Anhui", "Impressions of Shichahai", etc., and his works have been collected by the National Museum of China, the National Art Museum of China and other related units. His artistic resume, works and academic views were included in the compilation of the national key document "History of Modern Chinese Art". He has published a number of academic monographs and personal albums.