Li Shoubai - Heavy Color Painting - "Old Bungalow", 2017
Not only philosophy, but all kinds of aesthetic art are essentially dedicated to solving the problem of human existence.
Any spiritual thinker who has ever examined the world from a purely objective perspective, even if he is hazy and unaware of his own actions, will continue to work passionately and excitedly to understand what is the true nature of things, what is the true meaning of life, and what is the true source of human existence. Only such a thing would be interested in treating our intellect as intelligence which is not bound by the miscellaneous purposes of the will, that is, as a pure subject of cognitive activity, as if, on the contrary, the purposes of the will were concerned only with the subject which regarded the individual only as the object of his own knowledge.
Li Shoubai - Heavy Color Painting - "The Glorious Years", 2013
The result of any purely objective comprehension, that is, any kind of purely artistic comprehension, is more like some kind of expression of the essence of life and human existence, directly answering the question of "what is life?". Every noble and successful work of art answers this question, and in its peculiar way answers it perfectly and correctly, but art can only tell us what is stationed in intuition in childish and childlike language, but it cannot take us to abstract and serious reflection, and the answer of art is only a glimpse of the image, not a stable and universally valid knowledge.
Li Shoubai - Heavy Color Painting - "The Rhyme of Spring", 2012
Every work of art is just to answer that question intuitively, every painting, every sculpture, every poem, every stage play. Of course, music also gives the answer, but music uses a language that can be understood directly by man, and although such a language cannot be retranslated by reason, it has exhausted the innermost essence of all life and human existence, and music is therefore more profound than all other arts. The other arts seem to pose a picture in front of the questioner and say to him, "Look, this is life!" No matter how correct their answers are, they can only provide us with a temporary answer, and still cannot give a once and for all and the ultimate answer.
Li Shoubai - Heavy Color Painting - Shadow of Summer, 2012
Those arts can only throw us fragments, replace the norms with examples, and cannot bring us the whole content of things, which can only be given in the universality of the concept. In a conceptual way, that is to say, by means of reflective thinking in abstract thinking, to obtain a stable answer to that question, an answer that always satisfies us, is indisputably the task of philosophy. In this way, we can glimpse how philosophy is related to various arts, and we can also understand that although the ability to think philosophically and engage in artistic creation is very different in direction from the secondary matters involved, the foundation of the two is the same.
Li Shoubai - Heavy Color Painting - Autumn Love, 2012
It can be said that any work of art is fundamentally trying to reveal to us what life and the multitude of things look like in the truth, obscured by the fog of subjective and objective contingencies, and not everyone can directly grasp the whole picture of this truth. Art blows away this fog.
Li Shoubai - Heavy Color Painting - "Winter Soft", 2012
The works of poets, painters and performing artists are, to a recognized extent, rich in the treasures of the wisdom of life: the wisdom contained in the things of nature is self-proclaimed by virtue of their works, and the artists interpret the content of the wisdom of nature to us in a way that clarifies and doubles the pure reproduction. Even any individual who reads poetry or appreciates works of art dedicates his or her power to present that wisdom in a peculiar way: that is, to comprehend as far as possible the wisdom contained in it, to the extent permitted by his ability and education, as if every ship sailing on the deep sea, within the reach of its anchor length, is thrown as far to the sea as possible. In the face of a painting everyone would stop, as if standing in front of a marquis ready to listen to the teachings, and even if the marquis did not give any orders, he would pretend to have heard something. The works of the performing arts, though they contain all the wisdom of nature, are still only possible and obscure, and on the contrary, the transmission of that wisdom to us in a factual and detailed and open manner is precisely where philosophy strives, and philosophy in this sense is as it is to other arts, as wine is to the fruit of a grape.
Li Shoubai - Heavy Color Painting - "The Old House", 2010
What the philosophical vows offer us is a real cash dividend, a stable and solid piece of land, but what the work of art offers us is something that often needs to be renewed. So philosophy places high demands not only on the people who create the work, but also on the people who appreciate the work, which are prohibitive and insatiable. For this reason, there are very few readers who understand philosophy, and many audiences who appreciate art.
Li Shoubai - Heavy Color Painting - "Lane Tangkou", 2010
The appreciation of works of art mentioned above often requires the participation of the viewer. Part of the reason is that any work of art can produce an effect only through the function of the medium of imagination, so a work of art must stimulate the imagination of the viewer, and it is not allowed to exclude imagination from the game, not to make it stand aside and do nothing. This is a condition for the production of aesthetic effects, that is, a basic criterion for all aesthetic art. According to such a basic criterion, we can also deduce that the work of art does not require the mobilization of all the senses, but rather, it requires ensuring that the imagination can play its role just in the right track: there is always something left to the imagination, and there is always something to be done by the imagination. Even the writer himself must leave something for the reader to let his imagination run free. Voltaire once said very aptly: "The real secret of boredom is to say everything." ”
Li Shoubai - Heavy Color Painting - Quiet Lane, 2010
The most beautiful thing in an art always belongs to the mind, and is born for the senses: a work of art is made by the artist, but it is born in the imagination of the viewer. This explains why the drafts of the masters of art often have a greater impact than the works they have drawn, because their manuscripts have the advantage that they are completed at the moment of the author's conception; on the contrary, the layer after layer of painted pictures, which rely on the continuous hard work of the author, require the author's clever thinking, and unswerving adherence to his goals, can only be finally produced, but the inspiration cannot last until the painting is completed and does not dissipate. According to the aesthetic principles discussed in the text, it can be further explained why wax figures, although they can achieve the most perfect state in the perspective of imitating nature, they cannot bring us a little impact of beauty, and it is fundamentally impossible to be called an aesthetic work of art. Because wax figures leave no room for imagination. Sculpture has only pure form and lacks color, painting has color, but its form is pure illusion, both require the participation of the viewer's imagination, wax figures give us everything, both form and color, the illusion of authenticity is produced, and imagination is excluded from the game. Instead, poetry can only seek the help of the imagination, because it is committed to expressing itself in pure words.
Li Shoubai - Heavy Color Painting - "Street Mouth Slanting Sun", 2010
Blind (aesthetic) activity, which uses artistic means but has no awareness of the end, is the typical feature of superficiality in any art. This kind of blind activity can be seen in hollow columns in inferior buildings, aimless swirl decorations, various bulges and protrusions, in the aimless noises created in bad music performance, that is, in phrases and musical forms that lack connotation, and in the sound of dancing feet in empty poetry.
Li Shoubai - Heavy Color Painting - Lane Life, 2010
According to the foregoing, and according to my overall view of art, the purpose of art should be to explain what the knowledge of the mindful world really is (in the sense that I understand plato, in this only sense, the word recognizes and understands ideas). Ideas are essentially intuitive things, so that in their inherent prescriptiveness there is no way to be clearly explained, and the description of such an intuitive thing can only be feasible on an intuitive path, which is the path of art. Whoever chooses art as a medium for describing ideas can rightly say that he has fully understood what ideas are. Pure concepts, on the other hand, are entirely about what can be told, about the possibilities of clear thinking, and the concept uses words to describe the whole thing calmly and objectively. But the desire to depict the fruits of thought in the form of a work of art is a useless detour, an aesthetic activity that we have attacked in the previous article, with the help of artistic means but without a cognitive purpose.
Lee Morihaku - Heavy Painting - "Ceiling", 2010
When a work of art is conceived from a pure concept, it is not a real work of art at any time. If we are looking at a work of plastic art, or reading a poem, or listening to a piece of music (the purpose of which is to describe a particular situation), we set aside all our skillful artistic skills and look into a clear, limited, calm, objective concept, and see that such a concept finally surfaces, which is the core of the work of art, and the whole concept of the work depends on the contemplation of this concept. That is to say, what a work of art describes is fundamentally exhaustive; we feel disgusted and disgusted by it, we feel deceived, tricked into visiting, deceived into paying attention.
Li Shoubai - Heavy Color Painting - "Spring Ying Bu Gaoli", 2009
Only when the blank part of a work of art is that we cannot introduce a clear concept with targeted thinking, can our impression of the work be completely satisfying to us. The hybrid (artistic) roots that arise from pure concepts have a reflective character, that the creator of a work of art can already express it clearly in words before he begins to do so, and that what he wants to express can almost be said to be able to achieve all his goals by virtue of the rhetoric he uses. So what a shameless and ridiculous act it is to try (as people often do today) to reduce shakespeare or Goethe's poetry to an abstract truth, and to think that the description of that truth is the purpose of poetry. Of course, the artist must also think when he regularizes the work, but only when the artist is thinking about what has been intuitively grasped by the artist before the thinking activity, can the tension be shown in the subsequent depiction activity, and it will be lasting.
Li Shoubai - Heavy Color Painting - Autumn Rhyme Shangxian Fang, 2009
Here we want to say without restraint that when a work of art is first formed in a mold, just as the manuscripts of the painters we mentioned were inspired in the first moment of conception, they were already completed. Like melodies captured unconsciously, without any participation of reflective thinking, entirely inspired, and at all like lyric poetry, pure songs, the deep feeling of the pulse of reality and the impression of the world around them are poured out in words, so that these words are arranged according to the requirements of rhythm and rhyme - I say that one of the great advantages of all these works of art is that they are great works created by momentary inspiration, passion and genius impulses, without any intention or reflective thinking. Thus more and more pleasant and ornamental, without the distinction between skin and core, their influence on later generations will be more faithful to the original appearance and not deviate from the original than those great works that rely on lengthy and elaborate expression.
Li Shoubai - Heavy Color Painting - Twilight in Xichengli, 2009
In these great works of art, namely those great historical paintings, long epics, immortal operas, etc., reflective thinking, authorial intentions, and deliberate selection all occupy a prominent place: intellect, skill, and established procedures must be used to fill gaps that genius ideas and thus inspiration cannot fill, and additional works are treated as solidified powder smeared between great parts, and each scene must be coherent. From this we also understand why the most perfect works of all the greatest masters (such as Hamlet, Faust, Don Juan) are not included in the sequence of those works, that is, without the peculiar cloak and the boring content, which will make people enjoy the pleasure of appreciating the works of art wither. The Messiah, for example, is a typical example of this, such as "The Freed Jesus", and even "Paradise Lost" and "Aeneas", and Horace wrote very calmly: "If the noble Homer also dozed off, I really don't know how to sustain myself." ”
Li Shoubai - Heavy Color Painting - "Auspicious Day Meilan Fang", 2010
But it is also because of the limited power of human beings that this situation has emerged.
The mother of practical art is poverty, and the mother of aesthetic art is surplus. The father of practical art is intellectual, but the father of aesthetic art is genius, a genius of some form of surplus, whose excess of cognitive capacity is enough to exceed the degree required to serve with will.
《Lee Morihiro Self-Portrait》
Li Shoubai, born in Shanghai in 1962, specializes in painting and paper cutting. He is currently the deputy director of the Paper-cutting Art Committee of the Chinese Culture Promotion Association, a deputy to the Shanghai Municipal People's Congress, the vice chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Federation of Literature and Literature, the chairman of the Shanghai Folk Writers Association, a member of the Shanghai Artists Association, a master of arts and crafts in Shanghai, a visiting professor of the East China Normal University in Shanghai, a visiting professor of the Shanghai Academy of Arts and Crafts, and a representative inheritor of the "Intangible Cultural Heritage" Shanghai school of paper-cutting. Over the past 40 years, he has created and published more than 1,500 works of art, and his works on Urban Themes have injected new vitality into contemporary Shanghai art, and have been praised by the media as "Mr. Shikumen of Shanghai". His exhibitions have been held in France, Germany, Austria, Cuba, Australia, Singapore, Japan, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other countries and abroad, and his works have won more than 10 gold medals, including the "Mountain Flower Award" for Chinese folk art and the "Cultural Heritage Day Award" of the Chinese Ministry of Culture. He has been awarded the titles of "Master of Paper-cutting Art" in China, "Literary and Art Worker of Virtue and Art Shuangxin", "Leading Talent of Shanghai", "Excellent Young and Middle-Aged Artist of Shanghai", "Model Figure of China's Non-genetic Inheritance and Innovation Meritorious Achievement" and so on. His works have been collected by the Shanghai Art Museum Collection Committee, Shanghai Municipal Archives, Shanghai Urban Planning Museum, China Paper-cut Museum, Mali Art Museum, Shanghai Grand Theatre Gallery, Starbucks Enterprise Management Co., Ltd., CITIC Pacific Plaza Limited and other multinational institutions and private collectors around the world.
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The relevant pictures come from Li Shoubai and the Internet
Thanks again to Schopenhauer for his article
Infringement contact removal
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