The 83-year-old Zeng Xiaolian has personally experienced the compilation and painting of the important national chronicle "Flora of China", and he has worked at the Kunming Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for nearly 40 years, painting more than 2,000 plant science paintings. After retirement, he studied the field of bird science painting, continued to expand biological naturalist painting, and continued to express flowers and birds, so as to call and present the closeness and protection of man and nature.
On the occasion of Zeng Xiaolian's solo exhibition "Painting and Photography" recently held at the Shanghai Photography Art Center, The Paper,000-year-old man who loves nature conducted an interview.
Guan Guan Ju Dove in the River Continent
Pi Di is away from the seedlings of Pi Ji
More than 2,000 years ago, what did the dove and millet look like in the Book of Poetry? The Japanese Edo period scholar Hosoi Hiroshi once wrote a "Illustrated Illustration of Famous Objects in the Poetry Classic" to popularize the public. However, similar work is almost blank in the hands of the Chinese people. Not long ago, Zeng Xiaolian, an 83-year-old Chinese bio-naturalist painter and former senior engineer of the Kunming Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the surging news reporter that a number of domestic biological painters are about to make up for this regret, and they have worked together to verify and draw about 150 of the 180 kinds of creatures in the "Book of Poetry". The eldest, Zeng Xiaolian, undertook 86 drawings, which are urgently awaiting publication.
Zeng Xiaolian is creating. Photo by Liu Xiangcheng
Zeng Xiaolian, born in 1939 in Kunming, Yunnan Province, is a person who inherits the past and the future of Chinese plant painting, and has personally experienced the compilation and painting of the important national chronicle "Flora of China". He has been involved in the Kunming Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for nearly 40 years, painting more than 2,000 plant science paintings. After retirement, in order to taste his long-cherished wishes, he expanded from simple plant science painting to bio-naturalist painting, and collected plants, birds and their ecological environment into the pen, striving to shorten the gap between Chinese bio-naturalist painting and the world level, and using art to arouse the public's awareness of ecological environmental protection.
Recently, Zeng Xiaolian's solo exhibition "Painting and Photography" was held at the Shanghai Center of Photography, with 40 paintings of plants, flowers and birds surrounding the exhibition hall, and early notebook manuscripts and flower and bird-themed stamps designed for the State Post Bureau were also interspersed.
At the exhibition hall site, Zeng Xiaolian drew a plant illustration
Zeng Xiaolian designed a stamp for China Post
Zeng Xiaolian's life trajectory is closely related to flora of China. This set of the world's largest and most abundant tomes, a total of 80 volumes, 126 volumes, 50 million words, collected millions of specimens, including more than 30,000 species of seed plants, from data collection to final volume, spanning nearly 80 years. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the "Flora of China" project was launched, with the participation of more than 300 plant taxonomists and 164 plant illustrators across the country. Together, the illustrators drew more than 9,000 plates, each containing more than 5 species of plants. Half of the illustrators who painted with Zeng Lao have passed away.
"Each flower has its own tricks, a manifestation of a strong sense of survival, the most distinctive, the most peculiar, and sometimes really beyond human imagination." Zeng Lao has a masterpiece "Longleaf Green Velvet Artemisia", this plant grows at an altitude of 3,000 to 5,000 meters, the growth environment is harsh, the soil is thin, and the green velvet artemisia almost survives between the stone crevices. Elder Zeng said, "People who have not been to that environment cannot see it because they cannot take it down." If we were in such a harsh environment and suddenly saw a tense and heart-pounding flower in the snow, it would feel different from the flower we saw in the garden. The petals of Artemisia verrica will be like satin, shooting a wonderful light in the sunlight, like a ghost calling us. Europeans praise Artemisia annua as the "beauty of the East", there are about 54 species of Artemisia vermilion in the world, and 43 species in China.
Flora of China
Illustration of plants drawn by Zeng Xiaolian
In the longer history, the Emperor's tome "Flora of China" is the epitome of the relay of generations of botanists and plant painters. After 1915, Qian Chongshu, Hu Xianhua and a group of botanists who studied abroad returned to China to create a modern Chinese botanical research system. The Department of Biology of Southeast University, the Institute of Biology of the Chinese Science Society, the Beiping Institute of Biological Research, the Natural History Museum, the Beiping Institute of Botany and other academic research institutions have been established successively. During the Southwest United University period, talents gathered in Kunming and continued scientific research in the fires of war. In 1950, the Kunming Workstation of the Institute of Plant Taxonomy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences was named. In 1959, the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences was officially established.
Chinese plant museum paintings accompany modern Chinese botanical research. In 1925, Feng Chengru painted a number of exquisite illustrations for the thesis "The Variation of the Shape of a Goldfish", which became the pioneering work of modern Chinese animal museum painting. Feng Chengru also founded the Jiangnan Academy of Fine Arts in 1943, becoming the only higher education institution in China that specializes in cultivating talents in biological naturalist painting, and cultivating the backbone of the later Flora of China, the Flora of China and the painting of flora in various places.
Group photo of representatives of the China Botanical Science Painting Academic Exchange Conference Kunming 1983
Zeng Xiaolian was young
Zeng Xiaolian sketched in the rainforest in his early years
By chance, Zeng Xiaolian, a 19-year-old young man who loves painting, started a career in plant painting and also integrated into the context of the development of Chinese botany. In 1958, Zeng Xiaolian, who graduated from high school, was admitted as the director of the Kunming Workstation of the Institute of Plant Taxonomy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Whether it is the british long-established plant magazine or the grass and trees of the South China Botanical Garden, Zeng Xiaolian is like a sponge absorbing water. Later, with the preparation of the Flora of China, the Kunming Institute of Botany began to train Zeng Xiaolian to take charge of the painting of plant natural history.
Audio: Zeng Xiaolian recalls his experience and feelings when he walked into the rainforest of Xishuangbanna.
In the mid-to-late 1960s, Zeng Xiaolian walked into the xishuangbanna rainforest to participate in the "523 Mission" to solve the problem of malaria in combat troops in the tropical jungles of Vietnam. "When I first went to the rainforest, I was completely shocked by the creation of the Creator. In the morning, the rainforest is foggy, like a mysterious world, full of strange insects, vines and thorny plants, and if you are not careful, you will be tripped up and have no courage to enjoy the scenery. Zeng Xiaolian described the state of the time with excitement, horror, excitement, admiration, admiration, and worship, and after a while he slowly calmed down in the waterway, began to observe the species and their ecological distribution, and felt the competition and dependence between species.
"Immersed in it, I felt like I was part of nature. As the party moves forward, I will stay behind to paint a certain species, and I am the only one in the whole forest, and I can feel the wonderful notes of nature beating in the pulse, and will forget all the entanglements and troubles. After countless field trips, I had too many things to paint. Zeng Xiaolian said.
The jungle is dormant with the "four brothers of the Ma family" – ants, locusts, wasps and red deer lice. Once, Zeng Xiaolian was collecting specimens among the bushes and was bitten by locusts. At first he noticed blood pouring out of his skin. Returning to the station at night, he fell asleep and woke up the next day to find multiple skins sticking to the sheets, forming dry blood clots. He counted and found that he had been bitten 42 times.
Zeng Xiaolian "Beautiful Tong"
Zeng Xiaolian "Round Cypress Fruit Branch"
In the past five years, in addition to the rainy season, Zeng Xiaolian basically stayed in the rainforest bordering Yunnan and Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar, participated in the expedition with scientific researchers, collected specimens, and then sketched on the ground according to the types selected by the scientists, and compiled and printed them into a book. Eventually, the Asteraceae plant "Artemisia annua" was screened out, and scientists extracted the active ingredient "artemisinin" from it. In 2015, Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for her research achievements in "artemisinin".
The five-year rainforest experience was the happiest and happiest time of Zeng Xiaolian's painting career, and it was also the beginning of his creative transformation, from a botanical illustrator to a plant museum painter. "Accuracy is no longer the high standard of herbarium paintings, and restoring their state of life according to the laws of nature is the goal worth fighting for." This is not a change in working methods, but the establishment of a value concept with life as the core, and unswerving determination. "After returning from the rainforest, when drawing the camellia atlas of the Flora of China, Zeng Xiaolian changed the traditional form of flora illustration and painted a group of Yunnan camellias in a photorealist style. In addition, Zeng Xiaolian also participated in the illustration of scientific works such as "Flora of Yunnan" and "Flora of Tibet".
At the exhibition hall site, Zeng Xiaolian painted a plant illustration in the 1990s
Zeng Xiaolian is sketching. Photo by Liu Xiangcheng
In 1997, Zeng Xiaolian retired from the Kunming Institute of Botany. He revisited his homeland and returned to the tropical rainforest, central Yunnan and northern forests to regain the feeling of integration into nature in his early years. In the past, Zeng Xiaolian mainly painted the individual form of species, but now, he wants to make up for the relationship between species, express the relationship between species and the environment, and paint paintings with ecological factors. "There are too few people painting in China in this regard, and there are many people painting abroad. I felt like I still had time to paint and to move young people. Zeng Xiaolian said.
In 1999, the World Horticultural Exposition was held in Kunming. Zeng Xiaolian was invited to create the "Top Ten Famous Flowers in China" and "Eight Famous Flowers in Yunnan" series. In 2018, he created a mural draft for the Beijing World Horticultural Exposition, "Chinese Plants Affecting the World", which is the largest scale work he has ever created, full of 37 kinds of plants.
Zeng Xiaolian "Blue-winged Greek Stork"
Zeng Xiaolian, "Blue Peacock", Chinese Painting, 2012
Zeng Xiaolian", "Sea Potato"
In the exhibition, there is a group of paintings on the theme of "birds". Painting birds has always been the wish of zeng lao. In the 1980s, during his work and training, he drew a large number of bird sketches at the Beijing Zoo. In 1992, while painting the Flora of Hong Kong at the University of Chinese in Hong Kong, he bought several collections of works by British animal museum painters and began to create bird museum paintings. When he retired, he officially devoted himself to the painting of bird museums, and also asked Professor Yang Lan, an ornithologist at the Kunming Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, for advice to learn bird knowledge from scratch.
Zeng Xiaolian once wrote: "Man's understanding of nature always begins with local phenomena and details, and any living individual contains infinite information about the universe, although our cognition is superficial and we cannot understand the information in case." But in terms of the wisdom and magic of the phenomena of life alone, we can already appreciate the creative work of the Creator. Linnaeus, the founder of modern plant taxonomy and a Swede, once said: "We people are not the masters of nature, not the bystanders of the high, nor the businessmen who only make money, we should be a part of it." ”
Anna Atkins, "The Anchovy Fern"
Lynette Zehn "Ran"
In the interview, Zeng Xiaolian also said that the more important dimension of naturalism is the relationship between man and nature: "Everyone can observe nature, when you observe flowers, birds, plants and trees, you can use words, paintings, music, nature notes to record in various forms, this is naturalism, this discipline makes up for the past separation of man and nature." Professor Liu Huajie of Peking University said that naturalism is outside the natural sciences, people's way of life and cultivation. ”
After decades of hard work, Zeng Xiaolian and the older generation of botanists and plant science painters completed the National Chronicle, and animal and plant science paintings no longer stay in the figurative anatomical layers. Where does science painting go from here?
"I think it is necessary to go out of scientific research institutes and go to nature, make science paintings more vivid, more grounded, more popular, plus aesthetic appeals, so that more people have a sense of intimacy and identity." Some primary and secondary school students began to take natural notes, observe, record, and paint, which has a great effect on cultivating the ecological and environmental awareness of the next generation. Zeng Xiaolian said, "Everyone can't be perfect, we have achieved staged achievements, and many people don't have the wish to do it, and they need young people to do it." Over the years, young painters in this area have emerged, and they must be aware of their responsibilities and responsibilities. ”
Araki Keisuke "Erotic Flowers"
Carl Browsfield, "The Barbed Bluebell"
"Painting and Photography - Zeng Xiaolian's Solo Exhibition"
Exhibition period: March 5, 2022 - May 22, 2022 (Due to the epidemic situation, the exhibition hall will be temporarily closed from March 10, and the public account of the exhibition hall can be consulted when the opening hours are resumed. ）
Venue: Shanghai Center of Photography (No. 2555-1, Longteng Avenue, Xuhui District)
(Reference for this article: Nie Rongqing, director of the Kunming Museum of Contemporary Art, wrote "One Flower, One Bird, One World" for National Geographic and the exhibition album.) ）