Zhang Houquan's oral history "Long Lens: Seventy Years of Me and the Camera" is recommended
Text/Zheng Ruru
County School Lane is on the east side of the old city hall of Yueqing, originally I rode from The West Tower Mountain down to Yueqing City No. 2 Middle School to school, passing through the county front road, county school lane, and later I rode from here to send my daughter to school. Whenever I pass by the Wanglai Bridge in Xianxue Lane, I want to stop and look at this scenery, the distant mountains are like Dai, the near water contains smoke, the weeping willows blowing on the shore, the clear and clear, this Yueqing style is deeply imprinted in my heart.
Perhaps a similar turn back a thousand years ago, the ancients also saw the Penglai Wonderland here, so the bridge was named "Wanglai Bridge".
Standing on the Wanglai Bridge On the left bank of the river is the county school lane
It is a pity that today, the young people are in such a hurry, and the elderly are sitting on the bridge, and they seem to be a certain loneliness, completely unsightly.
01 How did the ancient building in Yueqing County disappear?
Since the Southern Song Dynasty, Yueqing students have been passing through here in an endless stream. Since the Northern Song Dynasty Xian ordered Jiao Qianzhi to set up a "county school" in Yueqing, in the fifth year of the Southern Song Dynasty Gaozong Shaoxing (1135), the Yueqing County School moved to Wolongfang (now the compound of the old city government). From the Southern Song Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the People's Republic, the county school (Confucius Temple) of Yueqing was established here.
Qingdao Guang Yueqing County Zhi Painting Yueqing County School
The characteristics of ancient official studies are the mutual integration of county studies and Confucius temples, and through the combination of schools and Confucius temples, it is equivalent to firmly integrating education and faith and reinforcing each other. The Book of Rites and The Sons of King Wen stipulates that "all scholars who have established themselves must be laid down in the first saints and teachers", and the first lesson for all students to enter the academy is to express gratitude to the first saints and teachers. From the moment he entered the Confucius Temple, Meng Tong's values began to be shaped, and he was asked to become a person as virtuous as the sages.
Map of Qingdao Guangyueqing
Today, whenever I walk through this familiar land, in addition to the towering ancient trees and the county school lanes and county front roads, these old place names seem to be still whispering elegy, and I will no longer see the face of the county school and the Confucius Temple.
I have always had a question, how did the ancient building of Yueqing's county school (Confucius Temple) disappear?
It wasn't until I read Mr. Zhang Houquan's oral history , "Long Lens: Seventy Years of Me and the Camera" that I found the answer in the memories of my predecessors. Mr. Zhang Houquan recalled:
"I remember that before the 'July 7 Incident', Yueqing was bombed by the first Japanese aircraft, and the target was very clear, that is, it was directed at the school. ... The city is small at the beginning, in the lower Giethoorn County Xuetanbei first Confucius Temple, there is a large training ground outside the Confucius Temple, there are several football fields as big as ... The county school is used as a playground by the school. Later county party committees and county governments were built in this location.
At that time, the early warning bell for anti-aircraft alarms was placed on Mount Cita. That day, when the bell rang, Zhang Houquan, who was in the second grade of primary school, was in class, and the teacher heard the warning and rushed to evacuate the students, and everyone ran in the direction of the field.
As soon as we ran out, we heard the roar of the plane, followed by an earth-shattering explosion, and the entire ancient building of the Confucius Temple was blown into a pile of rubble. Fortunately, the bombing children fled in time without casualties... The second bombardment at the Hong House... The third bombardment was in Gaoxiao, and those who ran slowly were killed on the spot. ”
02 Three young people on the county school alley
In 1937, the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression broke out in full swing. Three handsome-faced, thin, and modern young people appeared on the county school alley. They are Zheng Yefu, who returned to Yueqing from Hong Kong, Wang Liangjian, a returnee painter who studied in Japan, and Lin Fu, who came to Yueqing from Shanghai. The three of them later became the pioneers and founders of the "emerging printmaking movement" in the mainland.
In the face of the barbaric aggression of the Japanese army, the united front of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China rose up to resist the war. The pioneers and organizers of these "emerging printmaking movements" turned from the cities to the countryside, combined with their mission in their hearts, and took their "weapons", knives and pens, to the front line of the anti-Japanese resistance. Yefu, Lin Fu, and Wang Liangjian often bowed down to create those classic prints in the ancestral hall of the First Tu Mansion in Xuetannanshou, Qianxian County, Confucius Temple, and they used black and white woodcut prints to call for the whole people to resist the war. At that time, Zhang Houquan, who was still in elementary school, stood by the table and observed how the gentlemen designed the patterns and carved the master plates.
It was also during this period that Mr. Noo created a large number of works that have been handed down to future generations, including "When the Bomb Explodes", "Pan-Regional Shipwreck", "Cotton Grabbing" and other works that have influenced the whole country.
Zheng Yefu prints when the bomb explodes
Speaking of the "Emerging Printmaking Movement", we have to mention its initiator, Mr. Lu Xun. If Lu Xun's abandonment of medical practice is an attempt to awaken the numb hearts of the Chinese people with articles, then woodblock prints are the fighting weapons advocated by Lu Xun in art, Lu Xun believes that the current China is in need of a kind of art work that can profoundly reflect society, and woodblock prints have a wide range of mass nature, can be taken from anywhere, printed in large quantities, and rapidly disseminated, which is undoubtedly a "revolutionary art" with great achievements.
Zheng Yefu prints Lu Xun
In 1931, Zheng Yuying, a 22-year-old from Lingcun Village in Yueqing City, attended a "woodcut workshop" organized by Lu Xun at the Neishan Bookstore in Shanghai, and since then, the young man has changed his name to Yefu and become a staunch follower of Lu Xun in the left-wing printmaking movement. It was also under the influence of Lu Xun that Yefu poured his compassion for the toiling masses, his expectations for awakening the people, and his political ambitions behind the woodcut creation.
These young people who threw themselves into the left-wing woodcut movement did not art for art's sake, they carried the suffering of the nation in their hearts, shouldered the opening of the people's wisdom on their shoulders, looked at the refugees, wounded soldiers, unemployed workers, and working people living at the lowest level of society, and used knives to create a series of moving prints that spurted the blood of the times.
Zheng Yefu prints refugees
Their arrival lit up the spark of Wenzhou printmaking in the history of modern Chinese art, and also directly cultivated a group of accomplished "woodblock printmaking warriors", such as Zhang Longguang, Zhang Huaijiang, and Wang Siyu. And these artists who created for the people in turn nourished the soil of Yueqing's art education.
Lu Xun's letter to Yefu
In that era, with the development of the international left-wing movement, the new prints had appeared on the international stage under the main impetus of Lu Xun, and at that time, woodblock prints could also be regarded as an international trend art form. Zhang Houquan has already begun the initiation study of woodblock prints in the primary school classroom in Yueqing District. Until Zhang Houquan spent his life with the camera and became a photographer, people also saw a strong printmaking effect in his landscape photography works, which was inseparable from his early influence by woodblock printmaking masters.
In Mr. Zhang Houquan's oral history of "Long Lens: Seventy Years of Me and the Camera", he recalls the last side of his life with Mr. Nobu, when Zhang Houquan and his unit came to Beijing at the same time as the unit to visit Zheng Yefu, who was then deputy secretary general of the China Artists Association and one of the founders of the National Art Museum of China.
"When the group arrived at the National Art Museum of China, they saw that the big character newspapers were all over the place, there were big character newspaper columns built with reeds everywhere, and there were many people reading the big character newspapers, and in the middle of the crowd, they saw a person sweeping the floor with a large bamboo broom, that person was a wild man, he also saw me, he stopped, we looked at each other, and then he turned around and continued his labor, this is the last time I saw him..."
03 Use art to embody light
In this "Long Lens: Seventy Years of Me and the Camera" Mr. Zhang Houquan's oral history, in addition to the characters I just introduced, such as the Yueqing County Xuekong Temple, Zheng Yefu, Lin Fu, and Wang Liangjian, we can see a lot of place names familiar to Yueqing, as well as the youthful figures of Yueqing cultural celebrities such as Zhou Changgu, Zhang Huaijiang, Zhang Houguang, and Zhang Liangquan.
Mr. Zhang Houquan leisurely recalled the life course of more than 90 years, witnessing the revolutionary era before the founding of New China, the cultural construction in the early days of the founding of New China, and the prosperity of the motherland's economic development. Having seen the ups and downs of history, accustomed to the ups and downs of personal destiny, and seen all aspects of human nature, Zhang Houquan pinned his life pursuits on photography, and in a conversation with the painter Zhou Changgu in early 1955, he defined creation - "For our generation, using art to embody light in work is the eternal theme."
Zhang Houquan Photography Ye Ye ru smell the wind and sound
Today, People call Zhang Houquan "the soul photographer of the West Lake and Yandang Mountain".
Zhang Houquan Photography West Lake
He said, "Spring flowers, summer winds, autumn leaves, winter snow, sunrise and sunset, cirrus clouds, and the change of twenty-four solar terms throughout the year are, in my opinion, the gifts that nature has given to landscape photographers." In the fog, after the rain, the mountains rise layer by layer, and the moment when the clouds open and the fog disperses after the rain, everything seen in the eyes is rich, soft and dynamic, not to mention the happiness experienced in the process of discovering beauty and capturing beauty, just standing there, with the feeling of fresh breeze. This is not only the creative artistic conception that the artist diligently strives for, but also the realm in which man and nature blend with each other and forget both things and themselves. ”
"Long Sky Long Lens: Seventy Years of Me and the Camera" Zhang Houquan Dictation Zhang Zhijie Shan Leng Finished by Zhejiang University Press
epilogue
Where is the wind and temperament of a city? Probably you walk there, both to think about the ages and to look forward to the future. The history under our feet lets us know where it came from, and those whose local history remembers it tell us what life is. When I asked Mr. Zhou Kaiyang about the history of Yueqing County, he said that Yueqing Zhuangyuan Wang Shipeng had also studied here, so there was once a "Zhuangyuan Pond" in the county school. Walking on the county school alley, just as Wang Shipeng's poem said, "The group of sages and young people have passed by, and the meandering water flows to remember Yonghe".