【Scholar Talk】
Pick up the remnants and put them on the screen
- The past and present lives of the "Golden Ash Pile" painting
Author: Liu Xin (Lecturer, College of Fine Arts, Capital Normal University)
The famous "player" Wang Shixiang wrote in his book "Jin Ash Pile", "Self-Introduction": "Yuan Qian Shun held up a small horizontal scroll, painted with the name 'Jin Ash Pile', and the picture was a claw, a shrimp tail, a chicken feather, a mussel shell, a bamboo shoot, a lotus house, etc., all of which were leftovers and were useless to be discarded." Memories of the past years are clumsy, trivial and miscellaneous, similar to it, because of the name of "Jin Ash Pile". What exactly is the so-called "ash pile"?
A painting with a pattern
"The Golden Ash Pile" was painted by qian Xuan, a painter of the early Yuan Dynasty. Qian and Zhao Mengfu are equally famous, especially good at flowers and birds. This painting depicts broken flowers and leaves, broken vegetables and fruits, fallen feathers, and remaining shrimp shells, etc., and depicts a delicate and lonely scene. Ancient paintings generally portrayed poetic, beautiful and elegant things, why did Qian Shi take such a different path? He explained in his understanding: "Discarding things in the world, the rest is not abandoned, the pen is in the picture, and the sun and the moon are eliminated." Insimming physicists, no one is like Lao Zhuang. In the meantime, all the glory is from the beginning... Glory and glory are each other's roots, and they are born in an endless way. "Brocade" is a symbol of prosperity and beauty, while "ash" means ashes and decadence, and the two complement each other and together constitute the process of the development of things. This concept of "turning ruined things into treasures" is closely related to the social era in which Qian Xuan lived, and seems to bring him hope and comfort. Later Yuan Dynasty scholars Zhang Yu and Yang Weizhen did not hesitate to praise Qian's work, and once again pointed out that "the so-called ash piler of this custom is also". Since then, the name "Ash Pile" has been determined.
There is precedent for depicting discarded things before the money is chosen. At the end of the Northern Song Dynasty, Deng Chun recorded a painting he saw in the "Painting Succession": "The lady of the first palace is exposed to the outdoors, and uses the skin of the stored fruit as a discarded throw. For example, the genus of duck feet, lychees, walnuts, beech, chestnut, hazelnut, and mustard can be identified one by one, and each is not related. This way of entering the painting with mutilated and decadent objects seems to continue the pursuit of realistic techniques in the courtyard painting, which is actually a portrayal of the mood of the literati painter. It can be said that the "reality" of the "golden ash pile" existed in the last years of the Northern Song Dynasty, and the "name" of the "golden ash pile" was finalized in the early Yuan Dynasty.
The wheel of time turned to the Ming Dynasty. The wine glasses fired during the Chenghua period are painted with the patterns of "high-burning silver candles illuminating red makeup, a beautiful person holding a lamp to see begonias" and "nishiki ash pile". The "nishiki ash pile" as a pattern is "folded branches and fruits pile on all four sides also". The folded branches and fruits from the trunk are stacked together, which has the beautiful meaning of auspicious wealth and perfect harvest. This seems to be very different from the original intention of the "Golden Ash Pile" painting. During the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, the pattern of "brocade ash piles" on ceramics was further changed, and the flower clusters became more and more beautiful, rich and rich, and even appeared in embroidery and enamel. At this point, the "Golden Ash Pile" has finally completed the transformation from a painting to a pattern.
Nishiki ash pile, partial money selection
100-year-old birthday figure Six boats
Jin Ash Pile Four Screens Partial Sun Mingqiu
Ruyi Zheng Zuochen
Golden stone rubbings with centenary figures
Another important figure who expanded the connotation of the "Golden Ash Pile" and innovated the form was the "Nine Able Monks" Liu Zhou in the Jiaqing period of the Qing Dynasty. He is good at poetry, calligraphy and painting, is committed to the collection of gold and stone, can identify antiquities, repair ancient artifacts, interpret texts, and is one of the founders of the all-shaped extension process. Liu Zhou said to himself that he had inherited the method of "golden ash pile" and expanded the shaft with the gold and stone sketches he had hidden, known as the "Hundred Years Chart". This "ash pile" is only a method of taking money to select the "broken" imagery and "stacking" in the paintings, not painting or depicting, but expanding - nearly forty kinds of artifacts such as steles, broken tiles, and ancient coins are blocked, moved, avoided, and overlapped, one by one on the same piece of paper. At the same time, the vertebral extension methods of various utensils are also different: take the Ujin topographer, expand the post-glazing, black can be identified; the use of cicada wing pioneer, ink color is light and elegant, thin as cicada wings, dense, thick, light, size, black and white contrast is appropriate, visual impact is strong. It took the artist's bold "Nine-Energy Monk" five years to finally complete this work. The "old" and "broken" in the picture reflect the elegance of the literati, not only with the "game" intention of Ji Jinleshi, but also give the painting a beautiful meaning of "auspicious" and "longevity".
A year later, the "Golden Stone Monk" Liuzhou used broken bricks and tiles mixed with a small number of coins to develop a huge "Shou" character shape, called "Centennial Blessing Shou Tu", the work emphasizes the relationship between the shape and the pattern, simple and elegant, heavy and heavy. The different shades of ink presented by the engraving and stenciling of brick texts make this "Shou" character have a contrasting effect of intensity and weight, and even show a certain sense of writing. Ruan Yuan, a major figure in the literary and political circles at that time, also received a similar "hundred-year-old figure" made by Liuzhou. Liu Zhou first double-hooked the outline of a large cursive "Shou" character on a six-foot huge piece of paper, and then took the hundred kinds of vertebrae of the golden stone, or chose a corner, or up or down, not taking the complete form. The production process needs to be dry and wet, and it needs to be repeated five or six times to complete. This kind of "hundred-year-old figure" process is cumbersome, but this "Golden Stone Monk" masters the "unique secret recipe", which naturally becomes his gift. It is often necessary to prepare several paintings in advance and then write the name of the recipient when necessary, reflecting a certain "commodity" attribute.
Here I would also like to focus on the full-form expansion of one of the "nine energy" of the six boats. The full-shaped extension refers to the extension of the shape of the ancient artifacts, mostly bronze, bricks, tiles, and ceramics. This technique began with Ma Qifeng during the Jiadao period of the Qing Dynasty, but the full-form expansion technique of this period was not very complete, and it did not talk about perspective. Chen Jieqi, a geologist of the same light period, matured this technology. He often first drew the original large sketch of the artifact, similar to the outline of the word "Shou" in advance by Liuzhou; then outlined the perspective relationship of the small places, and then pasted the sketch on the body, slowly and carefully inking it several times. Chen Jieqi also advocated the paper-splitting method, which placed the paper one by one to the corresponding parts of the utensils for pounding, and formed a full map through splicing technology.
Liu Zhou is a key figure in the painting form of "Jin Ash Pile" that can continue to this day. He extended the content of the "Nishiki Ash Pile" from flowers, birds, melons and fruits to the damaged gold and stone artifacts of the grinding, and extended the production method of the "Nishiki Ash Pile" from tracing and painting to the vertebral tuo, and associated with the full-shaped tuo technique, adding the process of first sketching the outline or sketch of the painted object, then pounding and then splicing. During this period, the perspective principles of Western painting were also combined with the technique of full-shape expansion, which inadvertently also had an impact on the works of "Jin Ash Heap".
The elegance and vulgarity of the eight broken paintings
In the late Qing Dynasty, many paintings created by the "preset splicing" method appeared, and most of them were named after "jin ash piles". Such paintings take gold stone inscriptions, rare books, flowers and birds, landscape sketches and other paper objects as the main content of the picture, tearing, broken, insect moths, burning, folding, mold and other subtle traces are vivid, three-dimensional sense is very strong, showing a kind of sublime and ancient literati feelings. Sun Mingqiu during the Guangxu period was one of the earliest artists to devote himself to the creation of such "golden ash pile" paintings. His "Four Screens of The Golden Ash Pile" paints five antiquities per screen, or Chinese painting fans, or letters and inscriptions, or printed books, arranged separately, occasionally stacked and stacked, the composition is loose and relaxed, the color is elegant and natural, without exception, the paper is curled and yellow, the engraved posts and printed scores are broken, and the atmosphere of "old" is rendered by him to the fullest. The "Golden Ash Pile" works of the Fujian painter Yang Weiquan were also famous in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, and in the 1930s and 1940s, he was often seen holding exhibitions and updating the information of Runge in the "Declaration", "Shangbao Pictorial" and "News Daily". The objects depicted in his works are more numerous and more diverse than those depicted in Sun Mingqiu, including half a fragment of a post, a private document, a short certificate of abolition, and so on. He first presets the overall combination shape of these objects, leaves a large amount of residual white in the picture, and then organizes the depicted objects together through orderly stacking, accumulation, obscuration, and interspersing, with positive and negative, half-cut, and angled, like embers and crumpling, forming a sense of airtightness. The "sparseness" of the overall layout of the work contrasts strongly with the "dense" of the subtle arrangement.
This kind of work pays too much attention to the realism of techniques and the realism of images, deliberately pursues the damage and dilapidation of objects, and has never been able to enter the mainstream literary circle because of the loss of natural interest and childish simplicity, so there are few records in relevant literature. However, since the liuzhou, the "golden ash pile" has been given the auspicious meaning of "golden stone for many years, auspicious and beneficial", which has been recognized and loved by the public, but it is generally popular among the citizens. In the early days of the Republic of China, the title of such works also began to change, and while continuing the name of "Jin Ash Pile", the names of "Collection broken painting", "eight broken", "pick up broken", "flipped paper basket" and "collection of treasures" and "broken fragments" were added. Among them, the term "eight broken" was the most recognized in the Beijing area at that time. Because "eight" has an auspicious meaning, and "broken" is exactly the same as the content of the picture, representing the broken objects in the picture. The combination of two seemingly contradictory words means to break the old and obtain the beautiful, and to pray for the auspicious future.
Zheng Zuochen's "Eight Broken Paintings" painted in 1950 stacked gold and stone rubbings and remnants of old paintings into a "Ruyi" shape, highlighting the images of shouxing, ancient ding, ancient mirrors and ancient coins. After that, the "Eight Broken Paintings" also appeared in a large number of crafts such as New Year paintings, snuff bottles, porcelain, etc., compared with the "Jin Ash Pile" painting works and the "Jin Ash Pile" pattern in the ceramics of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, paying more attention to the use of a variety of colors, bright and bright. This made the relatively elegant and light style of the Guangxu period gradually disappear, and it was filled with human fireworks and worldly atmosphere, and the commercialization tendency was strong.
It seems that "customary" and "elegant" are also like "rong" and "emaciated", which are dynamically developed, mutually influencing and transforming each other. The situation of literati alone has begun to change in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China painting world, and more folk elements have been able to appear. Looking back on the past and present lives of the "Jin Ash Pile" painting, we can deeply feel the thoughts and emotions of the previous generation of artists, touch the depth and thickness of history and culture, and taste the breadth and depth of traditional Chinese art.
Guangming Daily ( 2022-04-17 09 edition)