Editor's Note:
This issue of "Sharp Review" starts from the "study of people" of modern scholars, and believes that the current crisis of Chinese knowledge is mainly manifested in the separation from the scene of life. Therefore, it is necessary to take root in people's spiritual life and construct historical interpretation and spiritual expression. Moreover, it is necessary to use art education to break the high barrier between contemporary scholarship and reality, open up subject knowledge, social knowledge and life knowledge, and rebuild the creation of sentient and righteous knowledge, physical and mentally sufficient thoughts, and the unity of knowledge and action.
- Wu Yu Bow
One
The study of people
The higher education of Chinese painting and calligraphy has a profound academic background, and a number of famous masters such as Pan Tianshou, Huang Binhong, Zheng Wuchang, Fu Baoshi, Lu Weizhao, and Sha Menghai have emerged in history. Although they were the founders of art schools, Chinese painting and calligraphy, they were not trained by the art academies of that time. The biggest difference between them and today's "academic school" is their own liberal arts and coherence. They may be the last generation of Chinese people with traditional innate learning and innate experience, who can regard the stroke of the life pen as innate, and the practice of calligraphy and painting and the study of learning as one thing. For them, calligraphy and painting are inseparable from learning, and they must be learned. Therefore, their ideal is to re-establish in the modern college system a kind of "learning from people" that combines art and science, Taoism, and learning. As Huang Binhong has a poetic cloud: "Dao cheng is not related to the art component, Yu Ding soup plate is described as a survival." Higher than in the book of Bulovan, it is necessary to know that the sky has not lost Sven. ”
(Ming) Xu Wei: Notes on the Narrative of Southern Words, notes by Li Fubo and Xiong Chengyu, Beijing: China Drama Publishing House, 1989. Written in the 38th year of Jiajing (1559), the Narrative of Southern Words is the only monograph on southern opera in the fourth dynasty of the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties.
"The study of people" is a fundamental feature of classical Chinese education. 2021 is the 500th anniversary of Xu Wei's birth, and he was born in 2000 after the death of Confucius, a Confucian student with many talents, who is proficient in calligraphy, painting, poetry and drama. Yuan Hongdao was the most critical of Xu Wei, believing that "Wen Chang's eyes are empty for thousands of years, independent for a while", and he is "the scattered saint of the Eight Laws and the chivalrous guest of the character forest". Xu Wei yunwen yunwu can not only plan political affairs, but also counselors in military affairs, in today's words, that is, there is "the study of the people" and "the talent of the people", and he is a "master person".
However, such a "generalist", under the pressure of the world, the times and fate, has fallen down all his life, becoming a criminal, a prisoner, a madman, and a "deformed person". This reader, this Confucian, this "tongren" and "deformed person", his encounters made countless post-learners sigh.
Last year was also the 2500th anniversary of Confucius's death. Confucius's Tao is the way of education, and he advocated "teaching without class", "teaching according to aptitude", "not angry and not enlightened", and "not being embarrassed and not developing". Confucius's Tao is the way of learning, he emphasizes "learning and knowing", "learning to apply", "learning from the past and knowing the new", "taking one and reversing three". The Tao of Confucius is also the way of man and the way of life. He said, "Unknown birth, unknown death." Twenty-five hundred years after Confucius,000 years later, we need to re-understand and commemorate his death. He said, "Although the hundred worlds know it.". Now that hundreds of generations have passed, the Si people have been through the ages, the mulberry fields are in the sea, the mountains and rivers are still there, and the heavens are what the words are!
In fact, although Confucius's Tao has never been popular in the world in 2500 years, it has been repeatedly reborn, relying on a series of scholars, Confucians, and zhishi benevolent people, and Xu Wei is the most unique of these many incarnations. In the 2,500 years since Confucius's death, countless people have followed us in admiring his taoism and righteousness, savoring his songs and crying.
More than a hundred years ago, the May Fourth Movement opened the prelude to China's new culture and launched the overall change in literature, art, education, and society, and the generation of Zhang Taiyan, Liu Shipei, Liang Qichao, and Cai Yuanpei were all created by China's old learning, the so-called "pre-modern" learning system. If the mission of the new culture is to establish a relationship between man and the world, to establish the "time of heaven and man" that modern Chinese, then in this sense, it has never been completed. However, these ancestors were full of initiative and autonomy for the world that was still unfamiliar at that time, and developed a world sentiment of "looking at Thailand and Taixi" from the traditional view of the world. Liang Qichao's poem Cloud: "The world is endless, the sea and the sky are lonely and long", Liang Shuming also has an interesting and very close verse: "I was born with an endless wish, and my heart is full of reclamation to move mountains". In 2020, at the height of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, I quoted Lu Xun's poem many times: "Infinite distances, countless people, are related to me." "From these scholars a hundred years ago, we can see the self in the large span of time and space. In them, there is still a dignified and accessible "tao-righteousness", and today we may have more knowledge than them, but this precious "tao-righteousness" has been lost in us.
"On the Six Arts, All Scholarships", selected from "Taihe Yishan Huiyu", by Ma Yifu, Zhejiang University Press, June 2020.
In his book "Six Arts Should Take All Scholarship", Ma Yifu expounded the original learning system and knowledge system of Chinese, the teaching of the "Six Arts". In Ma Yifu's view, the Six Arts lead to the reasonable daily life of human beings, rather than focusing on archaeology, let alone a matter that is far from actual life in vain. He believes that the teaching of the "six arts" is not an empty word, but must be practiced. In China's "pre-modern" system, the process of learning is often simultaneously implicated in a meticulous and continuous process of socialization, so that knowledge systems and learning systems can truly act on real life. Today, with the change of the social body, with the obscuration and squeezing of the modern discipline-based knowledge system, the learning that could have been used in the Chinese tradition, under the squeeze of discipline governance and academic industry, is gradually separated from the current reality, and gradually becomes the study of the mind and the study of cultivation, and is no longer the study of application and the study of achievement.
At the beginning of 1928, Cai Yuanpei and Lin Fengmian chose the site of Hangzhou's West Lake and founded the National Academy of Arts, the original institution of the China Academy of Art.
The former site of Xianghu Normal School in Zhejiang Province is now located in Xihe Road, Xiaoshan District, Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province.
Back a hundred years ago, the founders of modern education in China also had different embraces. In Hangzhou in 1928, two pioneers of modern Chinese education each founded a school. One is Cai Yuanpei, who founded the National Academy of Arts on the shore of Xizi Lake, whose purpose is to "break people's views and my views, to gain and lose" and "truly complete people's lives with a heart of love of beauty" through art and aesthetic education. The other is Tao Xingzhi, who founded the Xianghu Normal School on the banks of Xianghu Lake to train rural teachers, to cultivate a kind of "living force" with equal knowledge and civilian education, and to "use education in all directions to create a society that is accessible in all directions."
Nearly a century later, the National Academy of Arts has become today's China Academy of Art, but the Taoist system of Xianghu Normal School is almost extinct. Recently, I have sent a team to work hard to renovate the old site of Xianghu Normal School, hoping to design a system that integrates display and education, and restore Tao Xingzhi's vision and practice in the future.
Two
Knowledge of life
But what is the state of our knowledge today? Frankly, I think that the crisis of contemporary Chinese knowledge is mainly manifested in the high degree of separation from the scene of Chinese life, so that it is difficult to establish a "sympathetic understanding" of people's lives and to survive in Chinese world.
Ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign, the formation of ideas and the creation of art must be rooted in a real society, in the face of a lively problem scene, art and thought can have the depth of reality and the vitality of life. Since the 20th century, with the establishment of universities and modern education systems on a global scale, there has been a disconnect between subject knowledge and social reality in higher education in almost all non-Western countries. The knowledge in the university is profound and systematic, but it cannot solve the problems in reality, and it is even impossible to make a profound explanation of the social life in front of us. For true thought creation and knowledge production take place in concrete historical contexts, in order to solve concrete problems. Detached from the specific problem consciousness, separated from the real historical situation and the actual soil, it will only create the so-called "aimless means" and "inexperienced science", and will only produce the empty shell of knowledge and the false dogma of the discipline. What worries us is that the main body of humanistic knowledge produced and imparted in today's universities is still increasingly disciplined knowledge, and the students cultivated with this knowledge often lack both social perception and life experience, as well as the energy of realistic care and action. The alienation from the scene of contemporary life and the separation from the spirit of classical culture have gradually made our knowledge production lose its historical context, realistic basis and position of speech.
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In June 1950, the "Teaching Policy and Implementation Plan of the National Art College (Draft)" (part of it) was "to carry out theoretical and practical education with the realist system and Chinese folk art" and "to combine various forms with the current practical struggle and mass art, to achieve the consistency of teaching, the unification of theory and practice, and the cultivation of work style and practical work ability linked to reality and the masses".
Needless to say, today's intellectual colleagues are very different from previous generations. Needless to say, The generation during the New Culture Movement period once said: "I am not a scholar, and my knowledge is forced out by real problems." "For example, the generation born in the 1950s, most of them are cultural, ideological and empirical "omnivores", experienced "going to the mountains and going to the countryside", reform and opening up, making friends with three religions and nine streams, worrying about the country and the world, having the spirit of book business in their hearts, and the righteousness of the rivers and lakes in their hearts... Their scholarship may not be so decent, but they know what they want to do, so they have a certain amount of action and super willpower. The intellectual community of the past two decades has basically been some "university animals". They are particularly good at the so-called discipline construction, compared with the previous generation, their knowledge production may be more standardized, more beautiful, more able to integrate with the European and American academic circles, but they lack both the desire to care for the surrounding society, the ability to understand and the courage to intervene. Separated from the social scene and broken with the feeling of life, it is naturally impossible to form a full subjectivity and action. The most crucial thing is that the separation from reality is the most likely to cause the simplification of problems and the narrowing of ideas, so that they are dogmatic and mediocre.
To change this state of knowledge, I think it is necessary to emphasize two aspects: on the one hand, people in universities should be able to understand the multi-faceted dynamic mechanism between current knowledge discourse, practical experience and social consciousness, to be able to gain insight into the mapping relationship between mass media, social media and self-media in the digital age, and to be able to deeply analyze the living conditions of people created by contemporary technological experience, media reality, and the political economy behind them. Otherwise, it will be difficult for us to sort out today's problem awareness and real situation. On the other hand, we must realize that there is something very positive in the lives of the most ordinary people. It is a driving force for life and production, a life wisdom and everyday force that is more enduring and powerful than subject knowledge. Capturing, presenting, and caring for this everyday power is essential for every intellectual who really wants to make a difference. This power is born precisely where the existing language of knowledge, academic concepts and theoretical discourse cannot reach. In my opinion, this is a collection of the lives of countless ordinary people, and it is a link to the "feelings-feelings-intentions" of all sentient beings. The reality of the lives of countless people is the root and soil of all knowledge, methods and courage, and it is also the historical foundation of our intellectual subjectivity. To this end, we must take root in the contemporary Chinese world of life, and discover a new power of unity of knowledge and action from vivid and complex realities and social consciousness.
Teachers and students of China Academy of Art sketching
Here, I am reminded of Liu Zhenyun's novel "One Sentence Top 10,000 Sentences". This work can be said to be both a thorough realism and an extreme formalism, and its most crucial feature is that it is based on reality and fiction, and reality for emptiness. In the novel's miscellaneous narration, the delicate structure of "hundred family names" is quietly buried, and its formal structure is "hundred family names" and the theme is "hundred people". Countless people and things that cannot be sorted out are filled with books and at the same time appear empty. A personal character in the book is like the nameless figure in "Qingming on the River Map"—those sentient beings who are bustling and self-contained in the same time and space, in their own destinies. Liu Zhenyun wrote about "the spiritual life of the people", the history of life in the dust of these small people, the meaning and meaninglessness of their lives, the resentment and loneliness, the helplessness and compassion, the detachment and bondage... From the greatest to the finest, to the deepest to the heaviest. However, how could this complex and profound feeling of reality and mental state be touched upon by the theoretical discourse and academic papers of the academic intellectuals of the Academy?
The poster and stills of the stage play "One Sentence Top 10,000 Sentences" directed by Mou Sen. The play is adapted from Liu Zhenyun's work of the same name that won the Mao Dun Literature Award.
We must try to construct historical interpretations and spiritual expressions that proceed from the spiritual life of the people. This requires us to try to transcend the knowledge of the discipline and create knowledge outside the university, that is, "the knowledge of society" and, above all, the "knowledge of life.". We must act with sincerity and courage, because to receive information from the spiritual life of the people, we need to sharpen our senses and revise our senses of reality and historical experience. If the ideal of Chinese academia in the 1980s was "liberation through knowledge", what we need now is "knowledge through liberation".
Three
Art education and human thought
Finally, back to the art education I was engaged in.
The separation from real life has caused "no one in sight" in the field of contemporary knowledge, and has also caused the current academic and artistic "different knowledge and action, physical and mental separation". This is not only the plight of intellectuals and artists, but also the reality of all contemporary people. The spiritual dilemma and spiritual crisis of contemporary Chinese are not only because the traditional theory of righteousness cannot be settled in modern philosophy, but also because the discipline and bureaucratic production of knowledge lacks some life experience. Physically and mentally unable to settle down, what emerges from this predicament is the unique personality of a new generation of Chinese youth: laissez-faire but conformist; fantasizing about becoming a wanderer of the world but trapped in a highly closed self; being prematurely trained as an "actuary of life" but also a "purposeless person". Teaching and educating people is first of all to cultivate the realistic feelings and self-knowledge ability of this generation of students, and then to open up a self that is open to others and can achieve transcendence. This requires a specific opening, which is the essence of the Renaissance that Jiang Baili emphasized in those years - "the discovery of the world, the discovery of man".
In the face of the physical and mental plight of contemporary youth, in the face of many unbearable, unwilling and unwilling things in today's art world and education circles, why does art education live by itself? How can our knowledge become "sentient learning" and "learning to be accomplished" again, and how can we obtain the autonomy of the mind, the openness of the mind and the mastery of intellect? Here, a kind of "learning based on body and mind" is crucial, and Ouyang's indifference to "sadness and anger and then learning, helpless and then learning" is crucial. This is what makes us live.
I believe that the physical and mental settlement of contemporary Chinese is the most fundamental responsibility of art and education. In order to find a way out for the spiritual dilemma and spiritual crisis of contemporary people, we must first solve the problem of "the difference between knowledge and action, and the separation of body and mind", which requires the knowledge of sentient righteousness, the thought of being physically and mentally sufficient, and the creation of the unity of knowledge and action.
Left: Flowchart of the evolution of the "Art" glyph. Right: The "Explanation of Words" records the "art" page of the book shadow.
Such knowledge, thought and creation should be the true connotation of art education. Because the process of artistic creation itself is a process of self-creation. Art and education are unified at the root, not only because the traditional character "art" of "art" is originally a kind of "planting" and "cultivation" that is unified with education, but also in the dual sense of "learning for oneself" and "learning as an adult", the problem of education is the problem of art. Our art education should guide students to truly perceive the world in the social scene, and achieve "grid to perceive". At the same time, it is also necessary to guide students to explore and experience the process of art. In this process, it is not only necessary to express one's own sorrow and joy and gain opinions, but also to understand others and feel the society in the artistic life of the community, in different creative groups, to establish a kind of care and social perception beyond the ego, and to achieve "qualities to conscience". Whether it is "lattice to perception" or "lattice to conscience", it is necessary to cultivate a broad mind and an open vision. There is the so-called "Xuanxuan of The Middle District" in the "Wenfu", a creative mind can do it for thousands of years, traversing thousands of miles, and going far and wide.
Art education is oriented to the cultivation of human sensitivity and the stimulation of creativity. As an art educator, I think art has two values: reinventing the everyday, and imagining beyond experience. However, its highest goal is to propose to the times with the creation of the mind, from which the possibility of reimagining itself, imagining the future, and mobilizing society will be generated, and then a social process will be born. On this level, art is a social movement of the mind, a deep spiritual production, an action to promote social renewal.
Integrating art courses and social engineering, the China Academy of Art actively participates in the construction of a beautiful China and recreates landscapes in the urban and rural construction of the new era.
If art is love for no reason, and education is love without complaint or regret, then art education is the superposition of two kinds of love. Its fundamental is to establish the learning and learning, Tao and art of facing the real problems, and then discover the purpose and possibility of life in common life. For in the original sense of "nurturing," art education is oriented towards an awakened person, a person who feels about his own life situation, who is aware of our historical causes, who creates the purpose of life and establishes self-responsibility.
A few years ago, I edited a series with friends called "Human Thought", hoping to advocate such a kind of care: beyond the global operation field of contemporary knowledge production, starting from the real life of our people, to practice and establish a system of self-education and self-production; to experience and relearn another way of speaking and creating, another attitude towards things, another kind of communication ethics, and another understanding of life from the local society. For us, in order to penetrate into these issues, we must achieve "thinking in the world", that is, to understand the people's spirit and thoughts from the perspective of living people, and then re-experience the local and historical, home country and society from the perspective of people's life history.
Gao Shiming is the president of the China Academy of Art
(This article was originally published in Art Observation, No. 3, 2022)
Source | Art Observation
Editor| Liu Yang Tong Gexin Xing Ke
Review | Xu Yuan Ding Jianfeng
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