"Remembrance of Jiangnan": a landscape poem sung in the painting

Author: Fan Zhizhong Qiu Huang

Gangnam is good, can you not remember Gangnam?

The creative music and dance poetry and painting program "Remembering Jiangnan" of the 2022 CCTV Spring Festival Gala created a stunning aesthetic experience in the multiple spaces of tradition and modernity, poetry and painting and song and dance, nature and humanities.

An audiovisual feast across time and space

The beauty of "Remembrance of Jiangnan" is that it realizes the intertext and dialogue across time and space with "Fuchun Mountain Jutu". Thinking back to that year, Huang Gongwang, who was more than eighty years old, integrated his skillful landscape painting techniques and transcendent worldly state of mind into the two banks of the Fuchun River, which is unique in the world of strange mountains and rivers, and depicted the "Fuchun Mountain Residence Map", which can be described as the peaks and peaks undulating, the flying waterfall pavilions are dotted, the mountain roads are winding and rugged, and the layout is dense, which has a huge impact on the creation of landscape painting in the Ming and Qing dynasties and even in modern times. Zou Zhilin of the Ming Dynasty believes that the "Fuchun Mountain Jutu" is "the Right Army's "Lanting" also, holy and divine." ”

The main creative team of "Yijiangnan" split "Fuchun Mountain Jutu" into nearly 200 elements in a program of more than 4 minutes, and created a beautiful imaginary world in the picture scroll through high-tech digital modeling. In the program, "Fuchun Mountain Residence Map" slowly unfolds in the form of a picture scroll, with thick and overlapping landscapes, dense trees and stones, and ever-changing layers, creating a transcendent landscape realm, immersing people in the artistic conception of traditional Chinese landscape painting, and bringing the audience the aesthetic experience of "people swimming in the middle of the painting".

The point-and-dotted figures in landscape paintings are generally fishing, trees, cultivators, reading, and hermits, who generally play some embellishment roles, occupying little position and pen and ink. However, these dot scene figures are often full of business and full of interest in life, and they embody the spiritual pursuit of the painter's spiritual world. In "Fuchun Mountain Residence Map", the painter Huang Gongwang carefully outlined eight characters with very different looks. In the dialogue across time and space, "Remembering Jiangnan" realizes the personification of "landscape painting" through "acting painting with people". Pu Cunxin, Li Liqun, Ayunga and other eight artists from both sides of the Taiwan Straits incarnated as the characters in the paintings, and followed the traditional viewing order of the "Fuchun Mountain Jutu" scroll from right to left, changing scenery step by step, and the eight characters appeared in turn.

Gong Zhi of the Yuan Dynasty once titled Huang Gongwang Painting Cloud in the "Collection of South Lakes": "This old man is known in the world, and there are poems in paintings in poetry. "There are paintings in poetry, and there are poems in paintings, which is exactly where Huang Gongwang's artistic ingenuity lies." In order to render the poetic mood of "Fuchun Mountain Jutu", five Tang and Song poems were selected in the program, from Wu Rong's "Fuchun" of the late Tang Dynasty to Cui Tu's "The Woodmaker", and then from The Song Dynasty Lu You's "Queqiao Xian Yi Rod Wind Moon" to Su Shi's "Xingxiangzi • Crossing the Seven Mile Se", and finally written in the Yuan Dynasty Zhou Xun's "Fishing Platform", the scenery of Fuchun Landscape and the philosophy of life contained in it are rendered layer by layer, which is fascinating.

"Remembrance of Jiangnan" appeared on the stage of the much-anticipated Spring Festival Gala in the form of music and dance poetry paintings, and presented the world-famous work "Fuchun Mountain Jutu" in an unexpected way to the eyes of the national audience. Artistic elements such as calligraphy and painting, poetry, music, dance, and recitation are condensed into a slowly unfolding Jiangnan picture scroll with the blessing of new technologies. It not only finds a three-dimensional expression for "Fuchun Mountain Residence Map", but also allows traditional culture to gain a new life under the empowerment of modernity image expression.

The poetic dwelling of life

Since ancient times, the creation of landscapes has contained the spirit of classical Chinese humanities and contained an attitude towards landscapes. "Lin Quan Gao Zhi" says, "The reason why a gentleman longs for Lin Quan is precisely because of this good place." Gentlemen are eager for mountains and rivers because they can travel and live. Therefore, the person who paints should paint with the purpose of "swimming and living", and the person who appreciates the painting should enjoy and play with the purpose of "swimming and living", so as not to lose the original meaning of landscape painting. This meaning not only shows the core value of Chinese painting, but also the core value of Chinese culture.

Therefore, although the waters of the Fuchun River are not long, its historical memory in Chinese culture is very long. Throughout the ages, the literati and inkers have continuously inherited and enriched the value connotation of fuchun river, making it a classic Chinese cultural symbol, and "Fuchun Mountain Residence Map" is the most brilliant stroke.

From a detail, Huang Gongwang clearly marked the real and specific place names in the inscription of the "Fuchun Mountain Residence Map", which was rare in the previous Song dynasty real landscape paintings. The significance of this transformation is that the landscape has changed from a "scenery of sightseeing and viewing" to a "place of rest and residence", which has made the landscape begin to have the meaning of spiritual conversion. The "Fuchun Mountain Residence Map", which took four years to paint, means that the painter almost regards the process of painting as a process of cultivation, containing a rich experience of dialogue and exchange with the landscape of Fuchun. Through the picture scroll, it is not difficult for us to feel the painter's free and comfortable attitude towards life that the painter wants to express. In other words, when people return to nature, stay with the mountains and rivers, and accompany the poetry, they also realize poetic inhabitation.

"Remembrance of Jiangnan" explores this core of value and expresses it as a belief in life that returns to nature. In the presentation of pictures and poems, whether it is a walker, a woodcutter, a fisherman or a reader, they all reflect the characteristics of being at ease, and find their inner peace and beauty in the beauty of nature. Here, the ecological value of green water and green mountains is transformed into the spiritual value of a better life, condensed into a natural belief in life. The audience gains not only the visual beauty, but also the aesthetics of life contained in the picture.

It can be said that from "Fuchun Mountain Residence Map" to "Remembering Jiangnan", the two artistic creations separated by more than 600 years tell the landscape view of Chinese from ancient times to the present, and continue the spiritual blood of the Chinese nation.

The aesthetic experience of empathy

"Remembrance of Jiangnan" not only shows the deep combination of cutting-edge technology and humanistic heritage, but also reflects the far-reaching expectations revealed in the interaction between creativity and the times.

In traditional Chinese culture, "Jiangnan" is not only a party of water and soil, but also an image, but also a pursuit. A better life is the inner yearning of every Chinese the present. "Remembering Jiangnan" shows the isomorphic relationship between the "Jiangnan" image and a better life. "Remembering Jiangnan" is to use the eye-catching stage presentation and profound cultural core to establish the isomorphic relationship between the "Jiangnan" image and the beautiful life. The image of "Jiangnan" is equal to a good life, and the audience's love for "Jiangnan" is also the expectation of a better life.

Historically, the "Fuchun Mountain Residence Map" was once divided into two, and its fate of hundreds of years reflects the history of the compatriots on both sides of the strait being forced to separate at a special time. However, the Strait Graben cannot cut off the common cultural identity of the Chinese nation, let alone block the blood connection of the Chinese. As a cultural symbol closely linked to the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, "Leftover Mountain Map" and "Useless Master Volume" are integrated in "Remembrance of Jiangnan", which embodies the ardent expectations of each Chinese for the return of baodao to the motherland.

As an ancient country of human civilization, China's excellent traditional culture can be described as long-standing, broad and profound. In recent years, more and more TV literary and artistic creation teams have paid more and more attention to drawing inspiration from traditional excellent culture and creating fashionable and classic, trendy and quaint TV literary and art programs such as "Tang Palace Night Banquet" and "Roselle Water Endowment". CCTV Spring Festival Gala's "Remembrance of Jiangnan" once again amazed at home and abroad, which shows that our literary and artistic creations can only be based on modern vision and rooted in excellent traditional culture, in order to bring people an aesthetic experience of empathy, so as to build the aesthetic idea of a community with a shared future for mankind.

(The author Fan Zhizhong is the executive dean of the Film and Television Development Research Institute of Zhejiang University, and the author Qiu Huang is a doctoral candidate of Zhejiang University)

Source: Guangming Network - Literary And Art Review Channel