Author: Lee Kim Chul
Eastern aesthetics, Western aesthetics, or a combination of East and West. In the development of cultural history, people have moved from firm to vacillating, and then re-selected in the swing. Today, the return of oriental aesthetics not only regains the cultural confidence of the Chinese people, but also makes people think about what is the aesthetics of life in the times. Mr. Xin Yiyun, a Chinese scholar and educator, wrote "Twenty Lectures on Aesthetics - Aesthetics of Life in the Times" (hereinafter referred to as "Twenty Lectures on Aesthetics"), which sorts out the different aesthetic pursuits of the East and the West over thousands of years, traces back to the roots, reveals the deep spiritual core behind these creations, and also provides us with a practical perspective for understanding the emerging "national style".
The "experience" of life
What is aesthetics? Many people can't tell, and they don't know where to start. Western theoretical research is esoteric and obscure, and it is not affordable for ordinary people, and most of the beauty people talk about focuses on the expression of subjective sensibility, simply thinking that they like it, which is art. This is not the case.
This made Xin Yiyun, who had been teaching basic aesthetics courses in school for a long time, feel a little helpless. "If people can have a little aesthetic foundation, they can enjoy beauty more deeply, and they can have more happiness from art."
Behind this, what is revealed is actually the lack of aesthetic education.
In the book, he starts with himself. Since he was a child, he has been immersed in the art of his parents. His parents studied English literature, loved Western opera arias, and were also proficient in traditional Chinese culture. Among them, his father is good at calligraphy and seal engraving, and loves to dress up Peking Opera big face; Her mother was good at calligraphy, playing both violin, huqin, sanxin, and often playing tickets. It is this family atmosphere of "East meets West" that enlightens Xin Yiyun's feelings and cognition of beauty. He still remembers when he was led by his mother, the family quietly watched the flowing water waves on the lakeside of Zhongshan Park in Nantai, listening to the language of nature in silence. His mother also taught him to read chronologically, from myths and religious stories to Western modern and modern novels. In particular, Western novels from the 19th to the early 20th century often discussed aesthetic issues, which aroused Xin Yiyun's strong interest.
According to modern disciplines, aesthetics belongs to the category of philosophy, so Xin Yiyun applied for the Department of Philosophy in college. During this time, he built the foundations of Western aesthetics. However, although Western philosophy has tens of millions of mansions, it is difficult to have the breadth of Eastern aesthetics. How to connect the east and west, Xin Yiyun is at a loss. Until he met Mr. Qian Mu.
In 1967, Qian Mu, a master of Chinese studies, moved from Hong Kong to Taipei, and since then has written and lectured for more than 20 years, influencing a generation. Xin Yiyun is also among them. Xin Yiyun is Qian Mu's disciple of the house, Qian Mu instructed Xin Yiyun that to understand Chinese aesthetics, we should start with the Western Zhou Lile system, especially carefully study classic works such as "Book of Poetry", "Liji", "Le Ji", "Zuo Chuan", "Analects" and so on, experience the "affection" in Chinese culture, and truly understand oriental aesthetics.
Xin Yiyun realized that the affective concept of Eastern aesthetics and the truth concept of Western aesthetics are precisely the "differences and differences" between these two knowledge systems. He was overjoyed and realized that "after that, I can immerse myself in this Chinese and Western aesthetic enjoyment, and even share the aesthetic emotions shared by human beings". Here, Xin Yiyun started a life journey that integrates Eastern and Western aesthetics from his own life experience.
Now, as a professor at Taipei University of the Arts and a visiting professor at Beijing Normal University, what Xin Yiyun wants to do is to share his feelings, impressions, and perceptions accumulated over the years, so that people can learn to enjoy art, connect art with aesthetics, and reap the happiest and greatest enjoyment of life. This is also the original intention of the creation of "Twenty Lectures on Aesthetics".
Western "True"
"Twenty Lectures on Aesthetics" is divided into four volumes, the first volume talks about Western aesthetics, and the second volume talks about Eastern aesthetics, forming a reflection.
Xin Yiyun believes that the essence of Western art is truth-seeking art, which is truthful reproduction, reproduction, and seeking its accuracy and perfection. To find out, we need to start from philosophy.
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato divided the world into ideas, reality and art, reality is the imitation of ideas, and art is the imitation of reality, which determines that the best art must be a reproduction of reality, so as to infinitely approximate the "truth" of ideas, that is, the objective world.
In the 14th and 16th centuries, the Renaissance movement was launched in the West. Art began to break free from the shackles of religion and reveal an earthly world that had never been seen. How to define beauty? There was an open discussion in which they established the philosophy and poetics of Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, as the only literary paradigm – everything that is broken and broken is ugly, while a creation that is complete, complete, evenly harmonized, and radiant and colorful is beautiful. Aristotle's philosophy deepened Plato's "theory of imitation."
Here, the 16th century Italian art master Michelangelo, although mainly created by the order of the church, his human body is no longer as calm as the medieval painters, and the perfect body reflects the great power of man to transform the world. Rembrandt, Vermeer and Latour, three 17th-century Dutch painters, also set their sights on ordinary figures. In the paintings of "Dr. Dupu's Anatomy Lesson" and "Girl with a Pearl Earring", we can clearly see the muscles, hair, and blood vessels of the characters, and they are greatly and realistically reproducing the picture of life in front of us. By the 19th century, the pursuit of perfect true presentation was still a major principle of artistic creation.
The profound analysis of oneself also confirms the pursuit of beauty—that is, the depiction of reality according to the rules of natural science. The fixed-point perspective method discovered in the early Renaissance gave the aesthetic art of pursuing true reproduction the opportunity to fall on paper. This is because perspective can accurately reproduce the most beautiful conditions in nature and vision, including the combination and presentation of light and color, the weight of matter, and the real three-dimensional block surface.
Xin Yiyun pointed out that the great tradition of Western culture comes from the natural philosophy of ancient Greece, and natural philosophy must be rigorous, which requires artists to present what the world is like. This has framed the path of Western classical art, and the pursuit of camera-like realistic reproduction has always been regarded as the guide.
The "Gods" of the East
If Western philosophy explores the "truth" of the objective world as a concept of truth, Eastern philosophy focuses on "love", benevolence loves others, and is embodied in a concept of affection. Love here is the love of the benevolent and the love of others, proposed by Confucius, which refers to two-way communication between people. Xin Yiyun believes that "only under this two-way communication can we communicate with you and me, break the barrier between isolation and subject and object, integrate with each other, and achieve a state of balance and harmony." The "Western Zhou Lile System" that Qian Mu asked Xin Yiyun to study condensed this kind of love.
The "Golden Mean" says, "Joy, anger and sorrow have not yet been sent, but it is said to be in the middle; It is the sum of the middle section". Seven emotions and six desires cannot be erased by heaven, but uncontrolled joy, anger and sorrow are like a flood of beasts, which is bound to crush people. Li disciplines joy, anger and sorrow so that they "come out of the middle of the festival." Therefore, propriety does not bind people, but incorporates people's primal emotions into a whole social order. At the same time, the rituals contained in rituals make people's emotions move from blindness to order, "so that all things can flourish and thrive under the balanced and harmonious order of the universe."
"The benevolent loves others" is a kind of mind transmitted by Confucius, and the Taoist Zhuangzi allows this mind to lead to the transcendent realm of "selflessness". Zhuangzi's "Getaway" "There are fish in the northern underworld, and their name is Kun. The size of the fish is unknown, and I don't know how many thousands of miles it is; Transformed into a bird, its name is Peng... Pengzhi migrates in the southern underworld, the water strikes 3,000 li, and the one who shakes up is 90,000 li." The sense of spiritual freedom and the grandeur of the momentum are all shocking. It is often called "God". Evaluating whether a work is good or bad, how good it is, Chinese often say, it's really God, it's wonderful. The "god" here is that after people communicate with the work, they reach a high degree of spiritual fit at that moment.
It is from this philosophical soil that oriental aesthetics grows up, both well-versed and leisurely, and seeking the realm of selflessness. The achievement of art finally reached its peak in the Tang and Song Dynasties. Economic prosperity is bound to lead to the great development of culture. The scholarly class pursues a high-level humanistic spirit, upward influences the taste of the royal family and nobility, and guides the taste of the citizen class downward. Putting incense on paper, hanging pictures, arranging flowers, ordering tea, the Song people's elegance once drifted overseas.
Calligraphy, painting, utensils... Different from Western classical aesthetics, which diligently seek truth, Chinese classical aesthetics does not stick to objects and images, but focuses on presenting the spiritual feelings and temperament personality of scholars.
"Fusion" of East and West
"Fusion" is the process of each other moving towards each other. In the mid-to-late 19th century, Western aesthetics was impacted by the development of science and technology. The advent of cameras poses a mortal threat to art. Fortunately, the development of science and technology has also opened up a new way for art, that is, to capture the "separation and fusion of light and color". They found that the color of a particular thing is not actually stable, but changes with the surrounding environment, breaking down into patches, dots or colors that reflect each other and flicker. Impressionism was born.
The French painter Manet boldly abandoned perspective and used new elements to express what he saw and heard. In this way, art transforms from objective truth to subjective perspective and becomes the visual expression of the artist's individual. As a result, we see that the Impressionists were no longer limited by ancient myths, heroic legends, and religious beliefs, but sunk their gaze into everyday life. Manet's "Tavern Hostess", Degas's "Dance Classroom", Monet's "Impression Sunrise"... Gentlemen and ladies and people in the market all flashed unprecedented styles in the picture.
Monet drew from oriental aesthetics. Xin Yiyun pointed out that after being exposed to Chinese literati paintings and Japanese ukiyo-e, Monet turned blocks into lines. His famous "Water Lilies" uses lines to outline and color with oil paintings, and uses the capitalization of Chinese painting to paint peonies, water plants, and water lilies. Monet also imitated Chinese painting to paint scrolls two meters high and more than ten meters long, thus completely eliminating the fixed-point perspective method and replacing it with scattered perspective.
Since the rise of Impressionism, Western painters have shifted from advocating the "truth" of depicting objective things to expressing people's inner feelings. Impressionism is thus known as the starting point of Western modern art. Later, Matisse, the founder of Fauvism, Picasso, the master of cubism, etc., all adopted the strengths of oriental aesthetics. Picasso even told Zhang Daqian, who came to visit: When it comes to art, China ranks first, and Europeans don't understand art at all.
Picasso's words are of course exaggerated, but they point out the fact that Eastern and Western aesthetics meet and merge. At the same time, Chinese artists were also learning from Western art. For example, Xu Beihong advocated life drawing to strengthen the realism of Chinese painting; Li Keran incorporated perspective, light and shadow, sense of volume, and heavy ink into landscape painting, turning the ethereal and distant of traditional painting into deep and heavy. The French painters Zao Wou-Ki and Sanyu are praised for their fusion of Eastern and Western aesthetics to form a unique style.
The "beauty" of the future
The future direction of art has always been concerned by Xin Yiyun. He traveled all over the art of the East and the West, but those are the achievements of the predecessors, and where we, as the future generations, will go, is what we need to think about. Combining Eastern aesthetics with Western aesthetics on the basis of Zao Wou-ki to form the "most modern" artistic creation is only a creative direction. Xin Yiyun believes that aesthetics is the common characteristic of human beings, and artistic creation is a common creative activity of human beings. The future of aesthetic education should begin with "the understanding of one's own life". (Lee Kim Chul)
Source: Liberation Daily