One day in April this year, in Tashkurgan, Xinjiang, the off-road vehicle staggered on the banks of the Yarkand River, which is more dangerous than the natural danger of Tongmai. Looking at the rushing river and listening to the angry waves, I remembered the crazy woman I met in the small town of Benzilan in Yunnan a few years ago, she was innocent and otherworldly, so that I could not tell who was crazy in this world. This woman, Dolma here, still affects my thoughts, jumping in front of my eyes from time to time, and the scene is like a movie lens pushing and pulling.
On the night of the trip along the Yarkand River to Datong Township, we stayed in a Tajik house and listened to the purring of the men in DatongPu, and I lost sleep again and completely.
When people reach middle age, after solving the problem of who to sleep with, falling asleep as soon as possible and sleeping well has become a problem that plagues many people.
Slipping out of my sleeping bag, I walked out the door and stood on the field. Take out your mobile phone, browse WeChat and text messages, a traveler, how many messages and how many lines of text are needed to pass the loneliness of this long night? The sky is full of stars, and the big spoon of the Big Dipper seven stars seems to be within reach. A cat walked across the roof ridge, filling in many gaps.
Brother Wang Zhihong sent a text message in the afternoon: You crazy woman, there is no place you dare not go. Imagining the look on his face as he texted, I was dumbfounded.
Such a text message, The personality characteristics of Brother Zhihong are clearly displayed, without any concealment. Remembering the experience of knowing him, the twists and turns, the conflicts, the ups and downs, made me wonder how to express my feelings. At this time, I feel that he is not a "crazy person" in the land of Lingnan?!
A few years ago, because of Mr. Chen's teacher Mr. Shanxi, I first met Mr. Wang Zhihong in Guangzhou, and naturally at the dinner table, I roughly knew that he was a designer and good at painting. Mr. Wang's table manners are in place, gentle and frugal, so that nothing has fallen. How could such a gentle and humble man not make a good impression.
After two years, I went to Huizhou with Mr. Chen lao to visit Mr. Zhihong, how could this man in front of me be so different from the one I met in Guangzhou? The hair that used to be relatively lush is gone, the politeness is gone, and in front of me is an old man with a Land Rover or a circle of legs. Is it really wrong for me to define Mr. Zhihong as "humble" as Mr. Chen said?
The first trip to the Huizhou Wang Mansion, now I think it is very fruitful, such a man with a similar heart and temper to me, for me is also a teacher and friend, but at that time I did not think so.
He has sinned against me. I don't know why, he seems to be very reluctant to see me, he has been talking to me with a gun and a stick, venting many of his dissatisfaction on me, a person with a high degree of education that he does not look up to, and it seems that I have done the best of the world. Out of courtesy, I just smiled at his words and kept on slandering him. I said to myself: Don't care, it's not this person who leaves this place.
But then I couldn't "dump" this person, he always had a bunch of big and small things to ask you, forced you to think that you should help him, not to help him is your fault, because he is an indisputable wizard. He is extremely willful and domineering, and when he speaks, others must follow him, otherwise you are not his friend; what's more, he loves to drink, and once he drinks it, he ignores it, pulls you to listen to his weishui stories and legendary experiences, and scolds people through wine, just because he is happy and happy, he doesn't care whether he hurts others. What is even more "outrageous" is that he will send long text messages and curse people when he is drunk, and only after he is sober will he regret his behavior for a few minutes, and then say: You can't accuse me like this, and you can't let a sober person watch his drunken performance, which is inhumane.
I've seen personality conflicts, and to say that heavy is a split person, but I've never met anyone who is more divided than him. Willful but sometimes insincere reflection on themselves, disgusted with the collectivist social market but fully aware of all this and used it freely, disgusted with the jianghu circle but many friends are close. To be able to merge the opposing and different things into one in the personality requires enough intelligence and detachment, persistence without attachment, sharpness without harshness, care without concern. After a while, I felt that his willfulness was undertone, his disgust was real disgust, but his personality was uncompromising sincerity, as long as you were his friend. To be his friend is to drink, only to drink Maotai, drunk he thinks that you can look up to him, is the same drunk, is the confidant, unconditionally insert a knife in your ribs.
Brother Zhihong admired art, and even more admired himself who loved art, and of course, I soon understood that he had a respect for people who had more literate children than him. He is not the kind of artist who has always spied on the direction and trend of art, and he has not joined any art groups and associations so far, and he despises the so-called art galleries and artists who hang sheep's heads and sell dog meat. It's an innate sense of natural confidence.
He made no secret of his abilities and achievements, and at first I was very dismissive of the words and deeds of the famous local architectural decorator, even quite prejudiced, and once joked with him: "I have seen someone who can blow, I have never seen someone as good as you." He said to me very seriously, "One day you will understand." ”
In May, after returning to Guangzhou from Tibet in Xinjiang, I visited the Wang Mansion by the West Lake in Huizhou, and this time I looked at him differently. In two months, I have heard a lot of stories about Brother Zhihong, all of which are heroic and courageous acts, and seem to be full of anger. He and I used to be soldiers, a new soldier to a veteran, I naturally have to pay him three points. Perhaps, what should be more regrettable is that the tension and concern he showed when I experienced the earthquake in Nepal and Tibet made me abandon my previous suspicions and turn "enemies" into friends with him. Wang Zhihong is a friend I will not give up in this life.
When he was young, Zhihong brother was mainly engaged in sculpture and design, and when he reached middle age, he was still entangled in painting and calligraphy, and even thought that the matrix of art was painting, which was also the art theory of the elderly man.
I like the roughness of the rice paper, the sharpness of the texture. In Brother Zhihong's large studio, watching him pick up his pen and drop the ink on the paper, I said that it was like early spring, and the misty water vapor slowly wet and opened, and he said: Good mood also fell on the paper. Stroke after stroke of a word appeared in front of him, and the air rhyme flowed. For a writer, not every word can make people read "qi", most words are dead. You can only feel it in the words of some, and only in the words of the fewer, "a special twilight, a depth and an inevitable breath." Something that cannot be communicated and is involuntary blows coldly towards passers-by", the calligrapher is not. This kind of "qi" is a Taoist, a Buddhist, and a fusion of the hundred schools of the sons.
The calligraphy masters are rich in body, willow body is energetic, Han Li is flowing, wild grass is like lightning in the sky, and Wei monument is like a hammer hitting a rock. I am particularly happy to rule Hong's brother's letters, one by one "wave" melodious flow, reminiscent of the cornices of ancient buildings. Through these strokes, Brother Zhihong conveys his inner sorrows, joys, wishes and ambitions, all of which are literati and philosophical in life. At this time, Brother Zhihong was a poet.
He sat on a high stool in front of the painting table, and Ren Xuan's thoughts and dreams floated and sank. Life, often have to bow their heads, there is helplessness and respect, perhaps the moment of bowing their heads, the rice is ripe, the moment of looking down, the distance between heaven and earth only the height of people, the moment of looking down, the flowers blossom and fall, and the fog gathers and disperses. Many things in the world, like a handful of sand, leak from the fingers of time, and this is the normal life. People tend to indulge in the normalcy of life, where everything goes with time. But only at the break of normal life can the emergence of poetry cease to be a glorification of the romance of reality, but a painful dream that is really struggling in the void of reality. There is anticipation, there is confusion, there is unwillingness, and suddenly the feeling of weightlessness in losing place in the world.
The new horizon also rises from there.
Wang Zhihong's view of painting, one is feeling and the other is imagination, and does not deliberately emphasize technique. Imagination is related to memory, and more importantly, he re-finds reality from imaginative pictures. The uniqueness and subtlety of the feeling is indescribable. For painting, visual accumulation and cultural literacy are required, so as to control the creative process and make it have an artistic quality self. In a sense, what is felt is not necessarily able to understand it, and only what is understood can feel it more deeply. The relationship between painting skills and physical sensations is more or less so.
The second time I went to Mr. Zhihong's studio, I saw several "lotuses", which gave me the aesthetic feeling of "hitting my head". Some people say that in the middle and late 20th century, there were few flower and bird painters who were not influenced by Qi Baishi, and few who painted landscapes were not influenced by Huang Binhong. In Brother Kezhihong's "Lotus" series, there are many high-ranking people, but you can't know where it is from which high-ranking person. Chinese painting is an innate art, Zhi Hong's "Ink Lotus" in "Bold Lotus", "Autumn Wind", "Solo Chanting", "Ink Tuan Tuan Li TianDi Wide", is not it a tribute to Elder BinHong? Lines, points, and polygons are extremely rich. That "Residual Red" is meticulously employed, changing the painting method of "ink clusters", and the color setting is also rich and precise. His "Lotus" series has a variety of forms, including the simple and simple "Flowers Don't Know the Fish Music", leaving a wide white space, a painting with only one lotus canopy, a lotus leaf, and a tail of fish; there is the indulgent Xu Wei's "Junxin Like a Lotus Not Stained with Mud", which is strong and feminine, with a poetic lyricism and sense of rhythm; the composition of shi Tao's "Cold Autumn Endowment", which conveys the profound realm with a close-up scene, the pen is unrestrained, and there is a bold and lush momentum. But all this is Wang Zhihong's shigu innovation.
"Good words, approach God and unite with God. It is the perfect manuscript of God, the shadow of God's brush, the music of God, the melody of God", if I remember correctly, this is what Michelangelo said.
"A cloth dress travels the world, and half a grass hall talks about the rivers and lakes" "The sky is vast and independent, only the breeze vibrates my clothes" "I was once drunk and whipped a famous horse, afraid of being tired of beauty", this is the link written by Brother Zhihong, which reminds me of the self-portrait inscription of Li Baiying when he went to Beijing: "Laughing at the sky and going out, my generation is a basil person." Li Bai is a genius of poetry, but he aspires to be the prime minister. He was sensitive and hard, like a yellow bell or a big ding, and when he fell, he would not break, but he would just smash a pit in the ground, or he might have smashed the instep of his own foot.
Obviously, he was a cloth dress, but he thought that he was not wearing an official robe, and there was Liu Yong, who thought that the confused emperor Lao Er had omitted him as a sage. He wrote down "Endure the floating name, change the shallow low singing", how arrogant this is, it is simply blind. Obviously, he has not achieved his fame and is depressed in his heart, but he prefers to comfort himself with the "white-clothed Qingxiang". These can only explain Liu Yong's ambivalence at that time, of course, this ambivalence can also be understood, whether before or after Liu Yong, many poems are also frustrated in the official field to see through life.
When Brother Zhihong was young, he had all kinds of arrogance, arrogance and pride, and he also had the glory that made him proud, like the experience of Li and Liu, but he finally chose to stay away from the world, self-exile, and "bury the sword of books".
One day, I told my friend Yao Zhongcai that Wang Zhihong sometimes made me feel like a great general who could sweep through the battlefield, but sometimes he was like a big bandit leader, not an ordinary mountain king. Although my eyes ran far away when I said this, I felt that I was still extremely right. The so-called great general, according to his personality, temperament, and way of doing things, if he stayed in the Song Dynasty, it is estimated that he would have achieved another Yue Fei or Di Qing, and if he fell into the Tang Dynasty, he might have become Chai Shao or Qin Qiong, not to say that it was not so far, just in the Republic of China period, Wang Zhihong, a Hunan man, may have become a hero of the national army who bravely killed the enemy in the "Changsha Defense War". It's not the right time! Sigh. He himself was still modest, and from time to time he would say that he was like a bandit, and there was a hint of pride in his cunning eyes. In fact, he is often out of line in doing things, and the way of solving problems is rude, contrary to common sense, but he does not lose his pure heart. I really want to say to Brother Zhihong, which dynasty and which generation are the same, the name of the loyal subjects is in history, the perverse son is left behind for thousands of years, and the ending is not the same? Fortunately, he is "hidden in the city".
With calligraphy and painting, Brother Zhihong will not die alone, and with a bone that is not willing to be silent, he is alone on paper lyrically, and he despises many people and things in this way. The words and plots of those later lives are resurrected in his pen, so although he is deliberately or not deliberately ignored by the whole world, he will also live secluded in his own prosperity...
In the studio, he sat quietly across from me, a cigarette in his mouth, and behind him hung a drunken "stand out." There was very little smoke left, and the faint smoke would not hide him for too long...