Interview | Professor Gao Shiqiang on "Landscape: The Fuchun River as a Method"

Panel 2 · Landscape Image Project interview

LandscapeThought

Landscape Travels

Since 2019, the China Academy of Art has launched the 4.0 version of the "Landscape Image Project" - "Landscape: Fuchun River as a Method", and the creative collective has walked between the Fuchun landscape many times, carried out the practice of image shooting, and tried the integration of the spirit of landscape and the language of image. Recently, the "Qingshan Endless Journey 2 Tang Poetry Road" art exhibition "Landscape: Fuchun River as a Method" has been launched, and Gao Shiqiang told the deep meaning behind the landscape image project in an interview.

| Professor Profile |

Introduction of Speaker

Gao Shiqiang

Professor of the School of Cross-media Arts of China Academy of Art, doctoral supervisor; director of media city R&D center of China Academy of Art.

| Shanshui: The Fuchun River as a method |

——Interview with Professor Gao Shiqiang on the Landscape Image Project

Gao Shiqiang was interviewed

one

- River of The Literati -

Please tell us about the basic situation of this Fuchun landscape image shooting.

Gao Shiqiang: Before this shooting, we set the theme of "Fuchun River as a method", which is part of the "Landscape Project" of the China Academy of Art, which is a specific chapter. If the "Landscape Declaration" proposed by the China Academy of Art in 2016 and 2017 refers to a book of images tomes, then this shooting actually began in 2019, stopped in the middle due to various reasons such as the epidemic, and continued to shoot a specific chapter this year. Just this year, it also coincided with the school's second "Tang Poetry Road Art Exhibition", and the Fuchun River is a river with special meanings.

If the Yangtze River and the Yellow River are the mother rivers of metaphorical Chinese civilization, then the Fuchun River can be said to be the river of literati in China. Historically, people like Li Bai, Du Fu, Su Shi, Wang Wei, etc. all wrote about the life of literati in FuchunJiang or related to Fuchunjiang. The earliest example is from the Han Dynasty's Yan ZiLing (Yan Guang) living in seclusion in yan zi ling diaoyutai, one vein after another, after the successive dynasties layered superimposed, the Fuchun River represents an aesthetic value of Chinese literati, outlook on life, and Yan Ziling is one of the typical representatives.

In 2019, we originally planned to study the Fuchun River as a method, and after combining this year's "Tang Poetry Road Art Exhibition" activities, I feel that they have an inherent fit. To this end, we also specially asked Professor Lan Yudong of the Academy of Fine Arts, who specializes in landscape poetry and landscape literature, to give a lecture before the trip.

two

- Landscape Concept -

In your mind, what is the landscape?

Gao Shiqiang: In my opinion, when it comes to landscape, there will be many concepts, and most people will think that landscape is natural scenery and natural scenery, which is a statement based on the Western cognitive system, classification system or language system. Translated by Japanese translators, the word landscape refers to the kind of landscape in the history of Western art, which itself has both wind and scenery. Wind refers more to the people's customs, people's feelings, and so on; scenery is a scene. However, in our current application process, scenery specifically refers to those so-called natural mountains, rivers and other scenery that no one has, especially in recent years, the audience who has been trained by the shooting methods of scenery films and feature films thinks that scenery is a scenery film. But the landscape I am talking about is not exactly this kind of thing, but points to a Chinese spirit. I have always said that the spirit of landscape is a world view; landscape painting is the art of a world view.

The development of Chinese landscape painting is slightly later than that of landscape poetry, and it has a relationship with landscape poetry, but the two are spiritually in the same vein. I think it is a materialized expression of the formation of the Chinese landscape spirit, one is to use the language of words, the language of poetry, the other is to express it in the way of vision, material or space, and the two ways of expression, behind which together point to the spirit of landscape, which is what I value.

Therefore, I think that what the two words "Shanshui" represent is a unique Chinese cultural heritage and spiritual purpose that is naturally integrated into the three cultural spirits of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism in the process of development.

three

- Building Spirit -

During the Northern Song Dynasty, Fan Zhong was drowning in Hangzhou, and his friend asked him to write an article for the rebuilt Yueyang Tower, but he never went there. So what is your perspective on landscape and what is the landscape realm in your eyes?

Gao Shiqiang: This is a very interesting question, everyone knows that Fan Zhongyan has never been to Yueyang Lou at all, and it is entirely based on his friend's description and his own imagination to "flicker" out of the famous "Yueyang Lou Record". Originally because of the construction of Yueyang Tower and the production of the text "Yueyang Lou", after the bearing of history, you will find that the two material and spiritual carriers are interchanged, Yueyang Lou has been renovated several times, and its current existence is precisely because of this "Yueyang Lou Record". It is protected because of this text, which is a bit like Yan Ziling Fishing Platform.

Yanziling Diaoyutai itself is a material existence, a place with beautiful scenery but can be found everywhere in Jiangnan. Precisely because Yan Guang fished here, it became a historical text, a historical concept. All kinds of celebrities kept going to worship and write poems to praise him, to praise him, I call it the "proliferation" of the spirit. In this sense, it is very interesting, whether it is material firstness or spiritual firstness, if we are not so philosophical, we are to explore the real material existence / natural landscape is more important, or the spiritual construction of landscape in our minds is more important. This is like the relationship between "Yueyang Lou" and Yueyang Lou.

Then there is the value of culture and art and the significance of its inheritance. As our creation continues to advance, an ordinary material existence, or a landscape, a landscape, will also be given different meanings by us. At the same time, in response to my previous vision of a "near future", this is also the positive meaning of our creative action. By constantly creating, we will add our opinions to the design of the future, and this opinion, which I think is a very good part of the Chinese tradition and Chinese culture.

shop

- Rich Roots -

Why did you choose fuchun river as the object of your landscape image project? Why is the Fuchun River a method?

Gao Shiqiang: "Landscape: Fuchun River as a Method", as mentioned earlier, first of all, it is a river of literati, and at the same time, through the study of this Fuchun River (like Hu Xiaoming, who also did this research), we found that in fact, the Fuchun River represents a spiritual life and spiritual expression of Chinese literati, and through the study of the Fuchun River and the cultural connotations it carries, we can explore a method of constructing the spirit of traditional Chinese culture.

The reason why it is said that the Fuchun River as a method, one of the important reasons is Huang Gongwang's "Fuchun Mountain Residence Map". "Fuchun Mountain Jutu" was originally just a painting, a painting given to his disciple by Huang Gongwang. With the changes of successive generations, it has almost become a transcendent way of life for Chinese literati to pursue spiritual supremacy, as well as a representative of a reclusive spirit. Especially now, this work is dramatically divided into two parts for historical reasons, one in our mainland and one in Taiwan, and it has another meaning. In any case, all of this, like the formation of a layer of accumulation of rich minerals, we talk about mineral deposits, there are poor mines and rich mines, the Fuchun River is like a rich mine, through the investigation, excavation and shooting of this river, or a kind of poetic expression with images, as if in mining, a kind of cultural mining, or spiritual roots.

In the process of doing this, we hope to be able to excavate these literati and celebrities of all dynasties, whether it is Xie Lingyun in the Wei and Jin dynasties, from the landscape poems he began to create, and the landscape spirit formed along the way. Among the literati and scholars, many of them were officials, on the one hand, they participated in the governance of the state and society as officials, and on the other hand, after they returned to the study, they meditated in their own landscape poems or landscape paintings, seeking a kind of spiritual wealth and balance. There is a philosophy of life or a philosophy of existence. We want to study and explore these aspects, and use an image to find, summarize and summarize a method. This method may have the potential to play a balancing or healing function in the existence or survival of each of our current individuals, when the spirit and mind encounter a crisis, which is one of our expectations.

five

- Contextual Excavation -

What shooting locations were chosen for this shoot? Are there any encounters that have been particularly impressive?

Gao Shiqiang: This shooting actually started with Lutz, a hermitage next to YanziLing, which is a very beautiful place. Fang Gan was also a famous hermit in the Qiantang River area, who was slightly later than Yan Guang. It is said that he lived in seclusion because of his ugly appearance, and although he was very talented, he could not be reused. He lived in seclusion in the small village of Lutz, because he was very knowledgeable and respected in the family, and his sons and nephews slowly gathered around the village, and then Fang Gan devoted himself to his family education. After years of education, he cultivated many jinshi and yuan, so he later became a very successful educator and also led the cultural tradition of that place. This has become a vein that grows on the Fuchun River.

Our second stop is in the ancient city downstream of Lutz. Upstream of it is a reservoir power plant dam, because of the modernization of the construction, resulting in the downstream throttling after the water level decreased, the formation of a lot of sandbars. When we were shooting, a few colleagues said with great emotion that although its scenery is beautiful, there is a desolate beauty, this beauty is not like Jiangnan such a beautiful place, it is a bit like the taste of the northwest. This is also like a metaphor for us, whether some of the operations and influences of our modernization have caused some kind of temperamental change in the Qiantang River or the Fuchun River. Visually, from the visual point of view of the scene, it is full of visual desolation, if viewed from the temporal dimension, it is full of historical depth and a sense of desolation of time. From an ordinary river to a unique landscape that does not conform to the landform, it is also a kind of historical desolation. So this second location impressed me a lot.

The third location is the Yanziling Fishing Platform. Although it is the road of Tang poetry, but going back, what we seek is a kind of poetry spirit, not limited to which Tang poem, or the simple level of poetry with painting, but we pursue the spiritual core of poetry. The first is a spirit of birth and seclusion, Yan Guang is precisely one of the most important figures, you can also say that Yan Guang is the founder of the Fuchun Jiang literati spirit or the hidden tradition. In the early days of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Yan Guang was a classmate of Liu Xiu, the Emperor of the Han Dynasty, and was also a high-achieving student at that time. Liu Xiu admired him very much, and after winning the world, he wanted to invite him out of the mountain several times and three times, but he did not come out. He lived in seclusion in Yanziling Fishing Platform, saying that he was fishing, but in fact, he was living a secluded idle pastoral life. Later, Liu Xiu also gave up. It is precisely because of this that yanziling diaoyutai has become a famous spot that all the literati of the Qiantang River have to go to pay homage and sing songs. Although these people may be involuntarily in their careers or in their own lives, they all have a spirit of yearning for Yan Guang, who regards his fame as dung and is indifferent to fishing in the world. In fact, this has established a hidden spirit of the Fuchun River. This spirit echoed with the later Taohuayuan spirit.

This is a spiritual source of the Fuchun River, and in fact it is also the deepest point of our shooting. Because further up is the Xin'anjiang Reservoir. Then we went to Jiande Gumei City and followed the guidance of Meng Haoran's song "Su Jian Dejiang". When I went, it was daytime and I felt the vastness of the Jiande River. Because it is already part of the reservoir, the water level should be much higher than that year, and it is not the same as the meaning of the year, showing a kind of prosperity and prosperity.

At the last stop, we went downstream to Tongzhou Island, which we had photographed many times before. Tongzhou Island is a sandbar in the heart of the river, I love this island, I have been to many times before, I am very familiar with the grass and trees on the island, but every time I go there is always a new experience. There is a hermit life on Tongzhou Island that is different from that of the literati, and it is a very idyllic pastoral life that is currently Chinese by ordinary people. The farmers on the island, who live a very ordinary life, open a homestay, not a luxury homestay made by a large investment group company, but a family-style. When we went there, we often complained that daily necessities and the like were not very complete. But on the other hand, it embodies a very natural pastoral of ordinary people, so I personally love this place very much. That's probably how it was filmed.

land

- Book of Images -

Your landscape imagery project has been running for about five years, what have you learned from it?

Gao Shiqiang: In fact, it is still quite emotional. Five years have passed, and I originally said that I would make a ten-year plan and retire until I retired, but of course it was just a relatively loose plan in general. It is roughly the turn of interest in learning and creating in the second half of my life, and my own career is to use images to carry out a kind of run-in, communication, collision and dialogue with the traditional Chinese landscape spirit.

The first time I shot "Landscape: A Declaration" version 1.0, at that time, it was based on the "Xishan Travel Map" as a basic prototype, looking for majestic mountains and rivers like the "Xishan Travel Map" from nature. Later, because the conditions of the exhibition halls were different, there were various versions of "Landscape: A Declaration" 2.0 and 3.0. The 1.0 version was first exhibited in the Rhine Palace in Strasbourg, France, where I used three huge 8-meter-high screens to shoot vertical compositions of traditional Chinese landscape vertical axes, with 6 4:3 screens on the side, plus some small video works by other young artists in our creative group.

The first point of "Landscape: A Manifesto" is to establish the spirit of landscape as the direction of research and exploration. This direction does not mean that we are blindly retro, but that we use contemporary media and use images as media carriers to connect with the spirit of traditional landscapes. We don't want to do pure retro, because if it's pure retro, it's good to take a brush and paint landscape paintings, right? We are trying to make a connection with our current life through a new medium transformation of the traditional landscape spirit.

The second point is the establishment of the concept of "creative collective". A creative collective is not a collective creation. Collective creation is a bit like what we now call a lot of major art projects, with a title or a big painting, and then a lot of artists together to paint a painting or make a sculpture. The creative collective is that everyone participates in this matter with a common wish, purpose, spiritual pursuit or cultural pursuit. In this process, for example, we walk together between mountains and rivers, shoot together, discuss together, and then each person will have an independent work, and everyone will work together as a whole. That is to say, you participate in a general collective discussion and the construction of a spiritual community, and at the same time you maintain your independence and integrity as a creator, so it is called a creative collective, not a collective creation. But at that time, the concept was still confused, not very clear, the initial shooting was to follow the "Xishan Travel Map" such a diagram to go to the real mountains and real waters, more is to try to find a spiritual, cultural mirror image from the external image level.

After that, we made a second work, "Six Chapters of Cloud Mountain". "Six Chapters of Yunshan Mountain" adopts the traditional Chinese method of a six-fold screen, which is also a vertical composition. At this time, it began not only from the image level, but from the traditional imagery and meaning of Chinese landscape poetry or landscape painting to find, subdivided words also involve a lot of specific key concepts or keywords, which we excavate from the landscape culture to express paragraph by paragraph. It is therefore also a poetic video installation.

The third year, 2019, "Landscape: The Fuchun River as a Method". At that time, after the first issue was filmed, it stopped because of the epidemic and other things, but at that time, a basic concept was already clear, that is, we could think of this ten-year plan as a huge video book about the spirit of China's landscape and landscape culture. The previous "Landscape: A Declaration" is like the preface or preface to a book, and the later chapters are the first chapter of the "Six Chapters of Yunshan". Originally, the second chapter of the plan should be "Landscape: The Fuchun River as a Method", taking the "Fuchun Mountain Residence Map" as a starting point to explore the cultural spirit and heritage of the Fuchun River to explore the strategy of Chinese literati to live and survive.

The later "Landscape: Dictionary of Tang Poetry" is also inspired, we can not only through the study of visual landscape painting, but also from the landscape poetry to explore. Including the fact that we invited the late Professor Xiao Chi, a well-known scholar of landscape poetry at the National University of Singapore, to give exchanges and lectures, based on various factors, I began to slowly incorporate landscape poetry, landscape articles and even landscape philosophy. So my understanding of landscape is from the beginning of the more sensual, visual, pictorial things, step by step, and then I find that the more I do it, the more flavorful it is, and the more I do it, the more content I do. My creative method is to start reflecting on some of the work that I have already done, and then I start to reflect on the later shooting.

Seven

- In Pursuit of the Big Self -

Why did you start creating landscape images? How are the similarities and differences with your previous image creations?

Gao Shiqiang: In fact, it has not only been five years, but there have been five years of stagnation in between. My creation ten years ago was very different from today's creation, and one of the biggest differences was the same use of video, poetic expression, which I could call more world-bound at that time. In my early creation, I compared myself to a huge nerve ending, placed in our current time and space, in society to feel the warmth of the world's life, more from the perspective of my personal "small self" to feel the existence, and then through the experience of the sense of existence to carry out personal feedback or dialogue creation of the world. It has a lot of conceptual components, of course, there are also poetic components, social reality care components, hot issues, and self-sorting components.

Many of my early works, like Eighteen Sending Gifts, were about an inherent tension and traditional dilemma between the chinese genders. My initial feeling is that many of the parents of our generation are actually not in a good relationship, because when they were married, they were combined for various strange reasons, and the couple quarreled all their lives, and they did not forgive each other, but their reason for not divorcing was for the sake of the children. Later, the younger generation, such as my generation, may be divorced after the 70s and are relieved of each other. But my parents' generation, the person they hate the most in their lives, may be their other half, saying that they are not divorced for the sake of their children, in fact, they have caused great harm to their children in the family. It has formed a long-term Chinese family atmosphere that I call "calm bad mood", and I start from this point, this is my personal observation and reflection on life, of course, it also has universality.

A work like "Revolution" is based on my interest in history and the history of political thought, and some of my feelings and reflections when I read modern ideology and politics, and then proceed from this point. I arranged an absurd drama on the roof of the building, which was the story of a group of beggars "making a revolution". After "Revolution", I thought more deeply about this issue, to explore the tradition of our Century-old Revolution in China, and at the same time to find my own positioning.

"Halo Oxygen" is a theme about my mutual imagination and misreading between different cultures and civilizations in China, and it can also be said that different levels of economic development, because it involves some Tibetan themes.

By the time I made Higashiki Aohama, it was strictly speaking, my last work of this kind. I was on a mission to shoot "Frontline", a school about the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Party. In order to shoot the "frontline" to find green mountains and waters, I went to a small island next to Dongji Island and found green mountains and green waters, but I also found that modernization construction led to the loss of my homeland and the sense of alienation from my hometown. Later, I encountered a personal creative dilemma, that is, when I used this mode to see everything around me, it would get almost the same feedback. I began to dislike such personal creations, and at the same time I was a little tired of this "small self" style of creation, that is, the way of creating based on personal thinking and feelings. But I didn't find a new way to create, so for five years I was stagnant, not shooting at all.

Later, it was also very accidental that I began to make landscapes, and Gao Shiming proposed the "Spirit of Landscape" at that time, and initially I cooperated with the shooting in order to complete the task. However, in the process of shooting and creating, I slowly found a new direction, that is, I found that in addition to the artist's personal "small self", there is also a kind of "big me", which is the big spiritual tradition and cultural tradition to which the artist belongs, and there is a big culture and a big background in our national tradition.

In this direction, I find that as I dig deeper and deeper, more and more things can be expressed. Coupled with an idea of my own, I have always said that my research field is the spirit of landscape at one end and the near future at the other end. I hope that through two efforts, the excellent shanshui spirit in the Chinese tradition can be connected with the near future, and for our imagination of the future, or the future direction of our next generation, we can actively join the shanshui spirit in the Chinese cultural tradition in the direction, and the meaning behind it, so as to try to solve the crisis of modernity.

So far, our society has developed along the perspective of Western progress, including the development of capitalism, pseudo-liberalism, and pseudo-individualism, and today it has encountered various problems and dilemmas, and the current international situation, including Sino-US relations, is clearly showing this state, especially as reflected in this epidemic. The previous so-called final conclusion of history, the optimism of Western capitalism plus individualism or liberalism has completely collapsed, and human civilization seems to have reached a new crossroads. At this time, I feel that as a Chinese, we also had such a good culture and spirit, and we have the responsibility to continue it and participate in the game of future vision.

split open

- Creative Collective -

What is the significance of the Landscape Image Project for you to pursue your work in art education?

Gao Shiqiang: My other identity, as a university teacher, especially a teacher of the Academy of Fine Arts, the main significance of the Shanshui Project is the establishment of the concept of "creative collective" mentioned above. Creative collective it is actually a concept that somewhat imitates the filming of the former Soviet Union. Because the early Soviet era was still a period of socialism full of vitality and hope. They are not like the later master studio, but called the first creative collective, the second creative collective, the third creative collective, it does not highlight the individual, but highlights the collective, of course, their collective is actually in a sense a collective creation. But what is interesting about it is that each time it is a collective creation, and the collaborators who are tied together for a long time will inevitably form a tacit understanding, an artistic value or a common context/basis for the aesthetics of artistic taste, which is what I call the concept of the community formed by the more valuable creative collective.

After having such an understanding, in the teaching process, I first tried in the graduate student team, and took the graduate students of all grades to walk between the landscape once a year, a landscape shooting and creation, and if I had the opportunity, I also made a landscape exhibition display. Throughout the process, I have always emphasized that we are a creative collective and a community. In the process, everyone discussed with each other, sometimes listened to my lectures, and sometimes I did not talk much. The earliest time was to let each student put the day's material out for everyone to see, and then discuss and comment on each other, and then more and more students, the workload is getting bigger and bigger, I let them pick 5 most representative or proud shots every day to communicate with each other, and slowly it will form an aura, influence each other, and thus establish a community. This community may not be easy to perceive internally, and may feel that I am different from your direction, or very different, but if you take the content of any one person in the middle into the context of other people outside this group, you will find that it is very unique, and there is a very strong commonality between us. This is a community, and I am talking about forming a common artistic pursuit, artistic value, and artistic level through the community, just like cultivating a relationship with a common foundation.

Later, I gradually brought some of the more excellent undergraduate students to participate, maybe the next step through a certain mechanism of the setting, want to try a little in the undergraduate stage next year, maybe combined with the countryside, like our cross-media undergraduates, their understanding of the traditional landscape spirit is still relatively shallow, or even more exclusive, so it must go through a certain transformation. In a sense, this has also shaped my graduate teaching in recent years, and may affect my later undergraduate teaching in some way.

Nine

- Northern Landscape -

Finally, what are your thoughts on the next chapter of the Landscape Plan?

Gao Shiqiang: So far, except for the northern landscape - Yuntai Mountain in Henan Province, which was photographed in the first work "Shanshui: A Declaration", I have basically not photographed the northern landscape since then. At that time, the shooting of Yuntai Mountain was also because of a famous event in the history of painting, that is, Gu Kaizhi wrote "Painting Yuntai Mountain". He hadn't actually painted it, he just described what he was imagining what his painting should look like, so we went to Yuntai Mountain in Henan. In fact, what Gu Kaizhi really wants to paint is not the current Yuntai Mountain in Henan, but a "small dirt bag" in Guangyuan, Sichuan, which has no visual impact at all, but because it is a very important mountain in Taoism, gu Kaizhi also has a Taoist spiritual appeal and expression behind it when describing this passage. And it is precisely in Henan's so-called "incorrect" Yuntai Mountain that we have discovered the "correct" spirit of landscape, which is very interesting. Because the Chinese civilization or the traditional Chinese culture of The landscape spirit of Dr. Richmond, which we are talking about in the general sense now, is more of a recent landscape in the south of Jiangnan represented by the "Fuchun Mountain Jutu". In fact, most of the literati in the early days of China lived in the Central Plains, that is, in the north. In this regard, I would like to go back in the next chapter, and may go to the Taihang Mountains to shoot. If conditions permit, I hope to be able to complete the Taihang Mountain shooting plan in 2022.

(Based on the recording of the interview)

Source| Media City R&D Center

Editor| Ark Zhao Yucen

Review and | Ding Hongqi

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