The famous writer Zhang Jie died of illness in the United States on January 21, 2022.
Zhang Jie is an important representative writer of Chinese literature in the new era, and joined the Chinese Writers Association in 1979. His works such as "Heavy Wings", "Wordless", "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten", "Emerald", "Child from the Forest" and so on have a wide influence. He has won the second and sixth Mao Dun Literature Awards, and has won the National Outstanding Novella Award and the National Outstanding Short Story Award for many times. Some of his works have been translated into many languages and have won the Order of the Italian Knights and the German, Austrian, Dutch and other multi-national literary awards.
Tie Ning, chairman of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and chairman of the China Writers Association, and Zhang Hongsen, secretary of the party leading group and vice chairman of the China Writers Association, respectively expressed deep condolences for Zhang Jie's death and expressed deep condolences to Zhang Jie's relatives. In its condolence telegram, the Chinese Writers Association expressed its high respect for Zhang Jie's outstanding contributions to contemporary Chinese literature.
Love cannot be forgotten, and Zhang Jie's works and demeanor have long existed in the hearts of her readers.
Guangming Daily's report on Zhang Jie
Every deep soul needs a mask
——Zhang Jie's self-portrait
□ Xing'an
Zhang Jie oil painting "2011"
Zhang Jie oil painting "2014.2"
The starting point of the writer Zhang Jie's painting is different, she has nothing to do with leisure, nor is it the filling and reflection of literary writing; her painting is completely from the heart of the need, a kind of rebellion against the status quo, is a writer who dedicates most of his life to literature and is pressed by countless honors to the literature and even the expression tool of literature and even the reflection. It should not be a coincidence that she named her most important work so far "No Words", although it is 900,000 words, but the whole text is an unspeakable, unexpressible pain and despair. When silence is more powerful than speech, the conclusion it draws is by no means a denial of what is said, but a guardian. After she eliminated several unsatisfactory works that she thought she had been in her early years, such as "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten" — a novel that was once a household name and at least two generations in China — and deleted an unfinished novel from her computer, Zhang Jie decided to stop writing, bid farewell to the literary world once and for all, and began her simple and undistracted career in oil painting. Critic Li Jingze once regarded this determination as "wordless" after "Wordless", "After "Wordless", Zhang Jie used painting, lines and colors to talk to the world..." But I think that this is not so much a dialogue with the world, but rather Zhang Jie's silence of the world, she hopes to use silent figuration and abstraction to get away from the hustle and bustle of this world. Therefore, I think of Zhang Jie's choice as another way of expression or existence that she has discovered and found after literature/text.
Because I first saw Zhang Jie's paintings and had many exchanges with her, I have a certain understanding of Zhang Jie's oil paintings. If classified by traditional themes, Zhang Jie's works can be divided into landscapes, still lifes, animals and portraits. But these works, without exception, have no title, only time-marked and English signatures, which also corresponds to her original meaning of "wordless". In all her works, self-portraits are undoubtedly the most important component and the most worthy of our careful study and interpretation. We know that in the history of Western painting, self-portraiture occupies a very special place. From Dürer to Rembrandt, from Caravaggio to Munch, from Kollwitz to Frida. Van Gogh's self-portrait is particularly important, if Van Gogh did not paint self-portraits, it is not the current Van Gogh, he became the world's most famous artist is also unimaginable. Of course, Zhang Jie's self-portrait is not a self-portrait in the traditional sense, but a self-portrait in a more modern and contemporary sense. Therefore, she rarely acknowledges or emphasizes which one is a self-portrait, preferring to use the word "portrait", and she tries to dilute the realism of the portrait and the similarity of the face to the creator.
Zhang Jie's self-portraits are the three paintings that impress me the most, namely "2014", "2011" and "2014.2". "2014" depicts a bald woman with her nose, mouth and jaw up, a typical cold and arrogant posture, but her gaze is level,with a soft light that is both contradictory and expectant, and blends with the background and the blue in the distance. The composition of the work is quite interesting, most of the artists paint the head, most of them use vertical composition, but Zhang Jie uses the horizontal composition, and the head is close to the right side, occupying less than half of the position of the picture. Is this a blank space derived from traditional Chinese ink painting? Or did the author want to draw something on the opposite side of the character to echo it and finally give up? Neither seems to be. I tried to crop the work reasonably on the computer, but it always didn't work as well as before. The most wonderful thing about the work, I think is the high forehead and forward-leaning jaw, one up and down, two beautiful arcs, constitute the balance of the picture as a whole, and the intersection of the two arcs is precisely the C point of the golden section that we pursue. Of course, this is a special artistic effect created by Zhang Jie's natural intuition, but it gives us a mysterious aftertaste.
The second is "2011", which has never been recognized by Zhang Jie as a self-portrait, but I value it very much. I once analyzed its creative process and hidden meaning in the article "Zhang Jie is a God". "The picture" is of a woman wearing a Chinese-style side-buttoned blouse, between vague and unreal, like an illusion of an old era. Her eyes especially touched me, sideways squinting, feminine, flexible, tolerant, and frank. For some reason, in the presence of this unfinished work, which seems to me to have been completed, I saw in a trance the women of two eras, one a mother when she was young and the other a daughter who grew up, two mothers and daughters of different eras who coincided at the same age at a wonderful time. This is probably a work of providence, beyond skill, beyond art, it is a kind of revelation and realization of Zhang Jie's subconscious, and she may not have noticed it herself. This painting reminds me of the 'person who hurts me the most in the world' (the title of a long essay that Zhang Jie is famous for) that has gone away but is always worried about in Zhang Jie's heart, and it also reminds me of Zhang Jie herself, who was 'orphaned at the age of fifty-four'." The color of this work is very simple, almost blurring the line between oil painting and sketching, and a few strokes have finally become a masterpiece. Fortunately, this work was not painted by the author at that time, so that we can see the true softness in Zhang Jie's heart.
The most controversial and shocking self-portrait is Zhang Jie's "2014.2". It is a work with an expressionist style. The picture is rough, exaggerated, and extremely impactful, and explained by the modernist self-portrait theory, it is not so much the painter's own face as a mask. The main red and shadow parts of the green, blue, black and slightly white form a strong contrast between cold and warm. Red is like a burning fire, encroaching or melting the surrounding green trees and ice beds; red is like a splash of blood, soaking and flowing between the green space and the city wall. This red is also a red with archetypal significance, and it reminds me of Munch's Self-Portrait in Hell, or Marlene Dumas's self-portrait Of Banal Evil. And the mask-like face reminds me of another work by Dumas, "Neomi". At this moment, I feel as if these three masterpieces were produced and existed in order to illustrate and support Zhang Jie's work that spanned time. If the first two self-portraits of Zhang Jie have significant feminine characteristics or feminine consciousness, then this work is a deep expression of the concept of transgender or hermaphroditism in Zhang Jie's paintings. I can certainly have many interpretations of this work, and I have even found many figures in this complex face, such as its eyes, on the left I think is Proust (the author of "Remembrance of the Watery Years"), on the right should be Faulkner (the author of "Hustle and Turmoil"), and the two eyes are combined to be the Crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, the eyes are full of compassion, redemption and crying. The mouth is also a focal point of the work, and if the face and eyes are masculine or neutral, the lips are fully feminine. The lines are delicate and feminine, both sexy and arrogant, and the realistic and accurate shape contrasts sharply with the roughness and masking of the picture as a whole, and this contrast also confirms Nietzsche's famous saying in "The Other Side of Good and Evil": "Every deep soul needs a mask." "It is a resistance to false and superficial interpretations. Judging from Zhang Jie's preference for this work, it precisely focuses on Expressing Zhang Jie's contempt and alienation from the secular and vulgar worlds.
Freud once divided self-portraits into three types: subconscious, disguised, and alternative. There was also a theory during the Renaissance that "every painter paints himself." In this sense, all of Zhang Jie's works can be regarded as her self-portraits. For example, the rocks she paints, the open doors, the beautiful cheetah that looks up at the distance, and even the car, are all a reflection of the twists and turns of her self-portrait or a different kind of image. She's painted old cars a few times, wheels stuck in weeds, and the body of the car mottled and dilapidated, which reminds me of her latest collection of essays I once edited, Stray Old Dogs. Of course, the old dog is her self-deprecation, a kind of mood portrayal of herself traveling the world alone, wandering and wandering, and the situation of the broken car should also be a metaphor for her helplessness and loneliness in the current society.
The above is my attempt to speculate on the connection between Zhang Jie's oil paintings and her personal heart from the perspective of Zhang Jie's self-portrait, through her poetic and visually conflicting artistic language. When I re-examined Zhang Jie's series of self-portraits in order to write this article, I unconsciously remembered a sentence from the French painter Courbet: "Behind this smiling mask that you know, I hide sorrow and pain, and the sadness that grips my heart like a vampire." In the society in which we live, emptiness can be touched effortlessly. To some extent, this sentence represents my feelings and thoughts about Zhang Jie's self-portrait.
On June 25th, Today Art Museum, Zhang Jie's self-portrait work "2014.2" will be specially launched in the exhibition "Dream brush shenghua: literati art in the contemporary context of China", I hope that this magical work will arouse more people's attention, forget our existing artistic concepts, and regard it as a strange work, a symbol of the soul - through the transformation between symbolism and metaphor, seeing and being seen, quietly and sincerely understand and experience the artistic charm of Zhang Jie's paintings. I believe Zhang Jie's self-portrait also searched for and gazed at some future viewer of the painting at the same time.
(The author is a literary critic)
Source: China Writers Network, Guangming Literature and Art
Editor-in-charge: Wang Yuanfang
Editor: Sun Xiaoting