In 1972, Tang Xiaoming went to Beijing to participate in the first national art exhibition.
In 2017, the National Art Museum of China's "Its Destiny is New - Guangdong Fine Arts Centennial Exhibition" and in 2021, at the Art Works Exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China held at the National Art Museum of China, a classic oil painting work was exhibited, Tang Xiaoming's "Never Cease".
In the picture, a deeply contained force travels through time and space, making Mr. Lu Xun's spirit jump in front of his eyes, attracting a large number of Beijing audiences and critics to stop and refuse to leave for a long time.
From more than 50 years of art, Tang Xiaoming has devoted himself to the hot era and life with a paintbrush, extracted the true taste of art with wisdom eyes, calm thinking and superb interest, and painted a classic art work. His classic works such as "Never Cease War" (Lu Xun), "Full of Enthusiasm" (Bethune), "Let Wisdom Shine" (Li Siguang), "Dr. Sun Yat-sen" and other classic works have precipitated the spiritual imprint of an era Chinese.
"When I look at the heavens and the earth, it is all painting and poetry." Tang Xiaoming's artistic path not only practices Chernyshevsky's realistic creative concept of "life is beauty", but also coincides with the concept of "foreign teacher creation, middle gain" concept of Chinese art. His decades-long creative process has shown a strong spirit of truth-seeking, tenacity, romantic feelings, and a generation of artists with a high degree of national cultural self-confidence.
Character business card
Tang Xiaoming male, Han ethnicity, born in August 1939. Artist (oil painting), 57 years of art. He was the chairman of the Guangdong Provincial Artists Association, pioneering the path of "thematic oil painting portrait creation", so that the portraits of those characters who are full of texture in the big era shine in simplicity, and are realist painters who are connected with the flesh and blood of the times. He planned and prepared the Guangdong Museum of Art. His representative works include oil paintings "Never Truce", "Female Committee Member", "Humen Militia", "Let Wisdom Shine", "Full of Enthusiasm", "Dr. Sun Yat-sen", comic strips "Lu Xun in Guangzhou", "Song of the Proletariat", "Revenge" (the latter two works cooperated with Chen Yanning) and so on. He has been selected for many national art exhibitions and won awards, and won the second Guangdong Lu Xun Literary and Art Award, the first prize of Guangdong Excellent Art Works Creation, the second prize of National Comic Strip Creation, the third prize of national science exhibition, and the first National "Comic Book" Golden Ring Award.
Depicting people is more about creating a spirit
In "Never Truce", Tang Xiaoming created the image of Mr. Lu Xun's cold and resolute determination and holding the disease in the painting, which has become the classic memory of Lu Xun's image for generations.
In 1971, at the age of 33, Tang Xiaoming was tasked with creating a portrait of Mr. Lu Xun in order to cooperate with the exhibition of the Lu Xun Memorial Hall in Guangdong Province. He locked himself in the bucket room, repeatedly changed it, spent more than ten days to draw a sketch, and completed the oil painting in about a week.
In the creation, Tang Xiaoming showed a unique and bold processing method and extremely skilled oil painting skills, and he accurately portrayed Mr. Lu Xun's resolute gaze of "horizontal eyebrows and cold pairs", which made the viewers tremble in their hearts. He deliberately downplayed the contrast between light and shadow, using a cool gray tone that was rare at the time, which was particularly eye-catching in the "red, light, bright" style works of that year.
Soon after, he created two portraits of "Female Committee Member" and "Humen Militia", which, together with "Never Truce", were selected for the 1972 "National Art Exhibition Commemorating the 30th Anniversary of Chairman Mao's Speech at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art". Tang Xiaoming exhibited three works by one person, becoming a groundbreaking "singles champion" and emerging in the national painting world.
In 1973, Tang Xiaoming and Chen Yanning went to Beijing to create 67 sketch comic strips "Songs of the Proletariat", which further laid his influence on the national painting scene.
At this time, Tang Xiaoming began to think, can he convey a profound theme of the times in his portrait paintings? In the following years, he put this thinking into painting practice, creating "Full of Enthusiasm" (Bethune) in 1974, "Let Wisdom Shine" (Li Siguang) in 1979, and "Dr. Sun Yat-sen" in 1984, all of which had important repercussions throughout the country.
If Tang Xiaoming portrayed Lu Xun's spiritual strength as the backbone of the nation in "Never Cease War"; then in "Full of Enthusiasm", he depicted the spirit of Bethune's internationalism, which was widely praised at that time; in "Let Wisdom Shine" and "Mr. Sun Yat-sen", he also depicted the spiritual greatness needed for the nation to be rebuilt and to move toward rejuvenation and rise...
"He's not painting a picture, he's shaping a spirit." His portrait creations highlight the grand narrative and thematic nature, and engrave the spiritual identity of an era and a nation.
Practice hard for daily classes and burn hard for creation
"Life is an inexhaustible source of creativity. We will always have to appreciate the mystery and accept the inspiration that life gives. Tang Xiaoming said.
In the early years of study in Central and South America, the school required students to go to the countryside for one month a year to create. Every time he returns to the countryside, Tang Xiaoming will come up with a large number of sketches and watercolor creations. He pays special attention to observing and capturing rustic, people-like elements in life.
Years later, Tang Xiaoming still remembers this experience vividly. "From the bamboo hedge hut to the grass and trees, from the sunrise to the sunset, use childish techniques to capture their own life feelings, paint and paint again, and will be excited for half a day for no reason."
"If you have the opportunity to paint, just paint." In the 1970s, Tang Xiaoming entered the Provincial Literary and Art Creation Studio and became a professional creative staff of the art group. He began to enter the productive period of creation, and almost all of his time was devoted to creation.
In 1977, Tang Xiaoming created an oil painting "Anti-Japanese War Song Resounding through the Taihang Mountains" for the Military Museum of the Chinese People's Revolution, so he specially ran to Pingshan County, Hebei Province, to collect materials, painting day and night, sleeping and forgetting to eat, and as a result, he became ill with overwork, his weight plummeted to less than 100 kilograms, his hair was all gray, and his body and spirit were once close to the limit.
He has worked hard and physically for his creation, but Tang Xiaoming has always maintained a calm thinking. He believes that painters must observe the things around them at any time and anywhere with a pure and innocent mentality similar to that of children, find, judge, choose, and establish their own order from the state of disorder, in order to create satisfactory works.
The portraits of female teachers in "After Class" in 1979 and Shui Village Girl in "Pearl River Girl" in 1980 show Tang Xiaoming's superb skills that "originate from life and are higher than life". These portraits may not come from real and specific people, but they accurately convey the spirit of the characters of a specific era... All of them come from Tang Xiaoming's subtle observation and exquisite grasp of life.
Tang Xiaoming does not leave the paper for many years, observes at any time, and then drops the pen, and after years of sketching, he has cultivated a high degree of unity of eyes, hands, heart and brain. He tried to cultivate an artistic intuition and instinct with this kind of "daily lesson" of thousands of hammers, and finally he was able to remove its verbosity and essence, and go deep and unique.
Inscribing the Era, Promoting the "Cultural Drift" of Oil Painting in China
In 1985, Tang Xiaoming served as the executive vice chairman of the Guangdong Provincial Artists Association, and he also had an important identity at that time as the "director of the Preparatory Office of the Guangdong Museum of Art". At the closing ceremony of the Third American Congress in Guangdong Province in 1985, he read the "Appeal for the Establishment of the Guangdong Museum of Art", which won endless applause.
In 1990, Tang Xiaoming was elected chairman of the Guangdong Provincial Artists Association, and when he took over, he said he wanted to paint "a big picture" here. In November 1997, the Guangdong Museum of Art was inaugurated and the wishes of several generations of Guangdong artists were fulfilled, and Tang Xiaoming finally completed the "big painting" other than this work.
At the end of the 1990s, a number of female body sketches he created during his convalescence in Zhuhai, as well as works such as "Western Australian Female Painters", "Actors", "Female Workers" and landscape paintings such as "Little Bridge" and "Rising and Falling Tide", began to show a distinct chinese traditional calligraphy and painting writing in oil painting, which is not unrelated to his perennial fine Chinese painting and calligraphy. Hagi flower boat, distant mountain people...... In his oil paintings after 2000, small scenes of Lingnan are very Chinese freehand spirit, conveying the quiet beauty of profound meaning.
Over the years, he put aside more oil painting pens and palettes, picked up brushes, and began to write freehand flowers and birds and calligraphy creations. Talking about the reasons, he said that he should draw nourishment from traditional Chinese art, but stressed that he "has never been dead to oil painting" and is still a staunch "believer in realist art".
Liang Jiang, a famous art critic, believes that Tang Xiaoming's oil painting language is permeated with the aesthetic appeal of Chinese, and the use of Gu Kaizhi, a great figure painter of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, is tantamount to the oil painting version of "Conveying the Gods and A Block". His creative process reflects the process of "cultural drift" of oil painting in China, and is an example of a generation of Chinese oil painters moving toward cultural self-confidence.
In April 2019, the Guangdong Museum of Art held tang Xiaoming's first large-scale solo exhibition "The Era of Inscription - Tang Xiaoming's Art Research Exhibition" for Tang Xiaoming more than 50 years after practicing art. In the face of reporters' questions, 81-year-old Tang Xiaoming was in good spirits and said slowly and clearly: "My wish is still to paint better." ”
In September 2019, the exhibition was transferred to the National Art Museum of China, and at the exhibition academic seminar, art critics from Beijing and Guangdong gathered together, Li Jinkun, vice chairman of the China Artists Association and chairman of the Guangdong Provincial Artists Association, and Zhang Qing, deputy director of the National Art Museum of China, believed that unlike the experience of staying abroad that the first generation of Chinese oil painters generally had, Tang Xiaoming, as the first generation of oil painters cultivated by the new Chinese art education system in the 1950s and 1960s, they more deeply integrated their thoughts and feelings into the times, and their works more deeply reflected the times and nationality. The feelings of home and country and the cultural values contained in it cannot be reproduced.
"To the vast and the subtle." In the exhibition hall, the classic works created by Tang Xiaoming touched many audiences, they were inscribed with a distinct atmosphere of the times and national aesthetic styles, and exuded a timeless brilliance.
● Southern Daily reporter Li Pei