I once saw a topic discussion on Zhihu: Why does everyone love Feng Zikai?
Gao Zan replied: Because Feng Zikai has become the shape that people yearn for in their hearts.
Zhu Ziqing once confessed in the preface to "Zi Kai Comics": "We all love that your comics are poetic, just like small poems one after another - small poems with cores." ”
Mr. Yu Pingbo commented on Feng Zikai's comics as "like a piece of Falling Ying, containing the taste of human affection"
1
Bookish Mendi
On November 9, 1898, Feng Zikai was born in Shimen Town, Tongxiang, Zhejiang Province, to a family of scholars. The Grand Canal flows through here, and the people of Tongxiang are brilliant and have produced many important historical figures. There are six older sisters in the family, and Feng Zikai is the only male in the family. His original name was Fengrun, and because his parents loved him very much, he took the nickname "Ciyu".
When he was in elementary school in his hometown, once, there was an election in the countryside. The primary school teacher said that the rural people have a low culture, and the words with many strokes are not easy to write, for future consideration, the name should try to use words with few strokes, so the word "run" is changed to the word "ren", the teacher said that in Zhejiang, "ren" and "run" are pronounced similarly, and "ren" is close to the "ci" of "ci" in the sense, so his name is called "Fengren". (Later renamed "Zi Kai")
2
First encounter with a mentor, travel to Japan, "meet a good teacher"
In 1914, at the age of 16, Feng Zikai was admitted to the First Normal School of Zhejiang Province.
At that time, the Zhejiang First Division was presided over by Jing Hengyi, who was known as the "leader of the reform movement", and the atmosphere was very active, and the teachers were also selected for a while, and Shen Junru, Shen Yinmo, Lu Xun, Ma Sulun, Chen Wangdao, Ye Shengtao, Zhu Ziqing and other celebrities all taught here.
Here Feng Zikai met two mentors who guided him to the true path of art—the motherly Xia Junzun and the strict fatherly Li Shutong.
The two gentlemen are also a generation of people, deeply loved by students, Mr. Xia is straightforward and fast-talking, bitter-mouthed;
Mr. Li is introverted and quiet, not angry and arrogant, and Feng Zikai calls the two "mother's education" and "father's education".
Under the influence of the literary scholar Xia Junzun, he began to be enthusiastic about writing, "Every time I write an article, I always think about it after writing, I don't know what Mr. Xia said when he read this article." ”
Li Shutong teaches music and art, two courses that are not the main course, and are popular because of their unique personality. "Mr. Li's personality and learning have dominated my feelings and convinced our hearts." "Probably my temperament is a little similar to Mr. Li's, and I like whatever he likes."
The teacher advocated "vernacular text", and this kind of popular and easy proposition influenced Feng Zikai's lifelong creation, penetrating from articles to comics.
One night, Feng Zikai, as the prefect of the grade, went to Uncle Li to report on his study, and when he was about to quit, the teacher stopped him: "Your paintings are improving very fast!" I teach in Nanjing and Hangzhou, and I have never seen anyone as fast-moving as you. You can later..."
The words of the teacher, who usually did not say much, sounded like a golden stone thrown to the ground by Feng Zikai.
Thirty years later, he recalled, "These few words that night confirmed my life. I made up my mind to study painting and dedicate my life to art, and I have not changed my mind until now. ”
After graduating in 1919, he and his seniors Wu Mengfei and Liu Tianping founded the Shanghai Junior Normal School, the first private art college in China.
Feng Zikai taught Western painting, when the door of the country was just opened, the society did not know much about Western painting, he said that he who had not received systematic art education could still prevaricate for a while, but as time went on, a half-raw and half-ripe orange in the sketch specimen could hurt himself.
In the spring of 1921, Feng Zikai, who had already established a family and became a father, resolutely decided to go to Japan to study, and the tuition fees were all borrowed from the east and west, and they lasted only ten months in Tokyo.
But the harvest of this ten months is immeasurable.
At that time, Japan was the Taisho period when cultural thought was very active, and Feng Zikai studied hard, quickly mastered Japanese and English in a short period of time, and spent a lot of time studying violin playing, visiting painting exhibitions and libraries everywhere.
Once, he stumbled upon the paintings of Takehisa Yumeji, a painter who had been popular for a while in the last years of the Meiji era, and was known for his later "beauty paintings", but Toyoko Kai preferred the interesting stick figures he sketched with brushes in his early days.
"Takehisa's paintings are composed in Western style, and their paintings are Oriental. Its shape is Western, and its brushwork is Oriental. He also has a little bigger feature, which is the richness of the poetry in the paintings. ”
The concise blankness of Takehisa's painting style and the clever finishing touches of the drawing title can actually be used to describe the future Feng Zikai manga.
Yumeji Takehisa and the famous Chinese painter Zeng Yandong in Japan merged their painting styles into one, forming Feng Zikai's artistic style.
Since then, he has discarded the oil paint and canvas of the West and returned to the paper and ink of the East.
3
"Zi Kai Comics" swept the country
After returning to China in 1922, Feng Zikai was invited by Xia Junzun to teach music and art at Chunhui Middle School in Shangyu, which is located on the shore of White Horse Lake, with pleasant scenery and famous teachers. His colleagues include Ye Shengtao, Xia Junzun, Zhu Ziqing and so on.
Feng Zikai planted a willow in his own courtyard, and the "Willow Cottage" was born. He said that the willow tree he loved the most was never ruthless, but instead bent over and did not forget Ben, blowing people's heads with the wind, like a peer cute.
In the Willow Cottage, Feng Zikai began to use a paintbrush to sketch what he saw and heard at random, and when he was finished, he posted it behind the door to enjoy it for himself.
In 1924, his famous work "A Hook of the Crescent Moon After The Dispersion of People Is Like Water" was published in a magazine, and the painting only had a table tea vessel nearby, a round of curved moon in the distance, quiet and long, such as the hook crescent moon heralded the consummation of the future reunion, and the afterglow was lingering.
Look closely, the crescent moon on the painting is facing right, some people have proposed that the remnant moon is facing right, And Feng Zikai has made a common sense mistake, which is really ridiculous and generous.
Later, astronomers came forward to solve the puzzle: the painting depicted was a crescent moon in the middle of the night, friends gathered together, and chatted until late at night, which corresponded to this scene.
The layman is self-defeating, but he does not know the delicacy of Feng Zikai's thoughts, the depth of insight, and the bland style of writing, which contains deep emotion.
Just like his later paintings, the shape is refined, seemingly easy to imitate, but in fact, it is implicit and profound, and the charm of this literati painting is difficult to copy.
Zheng Zhenduo, who edited the Literary Weekly in Shanghai, discovered Feng Zikai for this painting, repeatedly asked him for illustrations, and published his first collection of paintings for him in 1925, "Zi kai Comics", and since then, his reputation has not gone away.
Some people call Feng Zikai "the father of Chinese comics", he himself does not agree, but it is true that the term "comics" began to become popular after the appearance of "Zikai Comics". His paintings are unique, not known for their comical satire, but more lyrical and poetic.
4
Teaching at the school
In the winter of 1924, due to differences with the school's running ideas, Feng Zikai and his colleagues Kuang Husheng, Zhu Guangqian and others founded the Rieter Academy in Shanghai.
He sold the Willow Hut for more than 700 yuan, plus the fundraising of the rest of the fans, raising a total of 1,000 yuan of start-up funds.
The start was difficult, but with a group of like-minded partners preaching and teaching, Feng Zikai still felt happy. "I can skip meals, but I can't drink."
Feng Zikai loves wine very much, and especially likes Shaoxing yellow wine, on the grounds that it is not easy to get drunk compared to liquor, and it is not fun to get drunk when drunk. Zhu Guangqian later recalled: "(We) often gather together, slowly drinking, not panicking or making trouble... After drinking, everyone has their own victory.
I like Zi Kai's red-eared, graceful and idyllic, and harmonious demeanor the most. ”
During his teaching at Rieter Gakuen, Feng Zikai also translated or compiled many art books such as "History of Western Art" and "Common Sense of Music".
"Fudan Fudan, Weiwei Academy Article Huan." The old school song of Fudan University is composed by Liu Dabai and composed by Feng Zikai.
In 1935, Ye Shengtao published a set of "Enlightened Chinese Textbooks", which was written by him and illustrated by Feng Zikai.
The textbook was reprinted more than 40 times at the time, and was once again a hit after its publication in 2010.
Some people commented that Feng Zikai, as a senior disciple of Li Shutong, has achieved remarkable achievements in poetry, calligraphy and painting in his life, except that he did not act on stage as Li Shutong did when he was young, and he inherited it in various fields.
5
Bittersweet does not change its mind
In 1954, Feng Zikai moved several times, and finally settled down at No. 93, Lane 39, South Shaanxi Road, until his old age.
This Spanish-style apartment is very distinctive, the second floor has a small indoor balcony, southeast, south, southwest have windows, there is a skylight above, sitting indoors can watch the operation of the sun, moon and stars, Feng Zikai chose this as a study.
Therefore, he named the new house "Sun Moon Building", recited a sentence "Sun and Moon In the Sun Moon Building", thinking bitterly about the link and not being able to do so, and finally Ma Yifu wrote a wonderful pair of "Galaxy In the Galaxy Realm", and wrote it as a couplet to give him, which was regarded by Feng Zi kai as a treasure and hung in the house.
After the Founding of The People's Republic of China, Feng Zikai was employed at the Shanghai Museum of Culture and History.
For a number of reasons, he focused his work on translation, when Russian was so hot that the 52-year-old learned it from scratch in 1950.
Feng Zikai studied foreign languages in pursuit of speed, and as early as 1931, he wrote in the article "My Experience of Hard Study": "Language and writing are only a tool for studying, not learning itself." It will take a lot longer to learn some tools, but how much knowledge will there be in this life? ”
Due to excessive use of the brain, he fainted from cerebral anemia at one point, but he did not give up daily review during the convalescence. After spending more than half a year reading Tolstoy's War and Peace and Turgenev's Hunter's Notebooks, he spent five months translating the latter and publishing it at the end of 1952.
In 1955, the People's Literature Publishing House included this translation in the "Foreign Classical Literature Masterpieces Series" for reprint.
Beginning in 1961, Toyoko was fully engaged in the translation of the classic Japanese classic The Tale of Genji, until it was finalized in 1965. For this purpose, he filled out a poem "Huan Xi Sha", "The color pen used to depict the turbid world, and the white head now translates 'Red Chamber', and people will be called old winds."
But the "Havoc" struck, and the book didn't come out until 5 years after his death.
A loose and self-contained intellectual entered the new era, Feng Zikai could not hide in the small building to become a unified, he wrote some odes to the new China from the heart, and also wrote critical articles on the "Hu Feng counter-revolutionary clique".
Feng Zikai likes cats, and in 1947, his famous essay "White Elephant" was written to commemorate the departed cat, published in the "Declaration • Free Talk", many readers sighed after reading the pity, and sent cats to writers. The children of the Feng family did not refuse, but only adopted. There are too many cats, not enough to eat, naughty at home, Feng Zikai also specially called a family meeting, and finally decided to improve the food treatment for the cats, buying three thousand yuan of cat fish every day. After living in the Sun Moon Building, the family resumed the tradition of raising cats.
After the release in 1962, Feng Zikai's essay "Amy", which recorded the funny story of the kitten, became a crime.
Some people reprimanded the "cat uncle" (Shimen dialect) in the text for alluding to "Uncle Mao", and charged many unfounded crimes. Although Feng Zikai was not branded a rightist at that time, he was still doomed to the "Cultural Revolution".
Some of his cartoons were also turned over as evidence of an offensive against the revolution.
For example, he once used Su Manshu's poem "A Mountain full of red leaves and a girl with red leaves" as the title of the painting, in which three red leaves fell from the tree, which was interpreted as his vicious attack on the "three red flags" landing.
Feng Zikai was branded as an "anti-communist veteran" and "counter-revolutionary black painter", and was later listed in Shanghai's "Top Ten Key Objects of Criticism".
His home was raided, his paintings and calligraphy were confiscated and burned, and even his beard, which he had grown for more than thirty years, was forcibly cut.
In order not to worry his family, he instead put on an optimistic look, covered his empty beard, and sighed: "Wildfires burn endlessly, and the spring wind blows again." ”
The wildfire was still burning, but the spring breeze of Feng Zikai was delayed.
He was repeatedly dragged to criticize the fight, but when he returned home, he never complained of bitterness, but only asked for wine, and his family tried their best to meet his needs for one pound of yellow wine a day.
6
In the spring of 1975, Feng Zikai returned to Shimen Bay for the last time accompanied by his daughter's students, and wrote many words to send people, the most written was He Zhizhang's "Book of Returning to the Hometown": "The little boy left home and the old man returned, and the township voice did not change and the sideburns declined..."
When he left, Feng Zikai said, "I will definitely come again next year." ”
It's just that this next year will never come.
He died of lung cancer on September 15 of that year.
Liu Haisu was an old friend of his, and spent a month's food to buy real flowers and tie a wreath to send them, when raising flowers was still regarded as a "bourgeois way of life". He said: "Zi Kai's art is a true flower with life and integrity. ”
Feng Zikai once wrote in an article remembering his mentor: "I think that human life can be divided into three layers: one is material life, the other is spiritual life, and the third is soul life. Material life is food and clothing, spiritual life is academic literature and art, and soul is religion. Life is such a three-story building. ”
He believes that Master Hongyi walked up layer by layer, blooming on each floor; he always stayed on the second floor, "but he often struggled to climb the escalator and look up the third floor."
And he looks at the world with the eyes of an artist, writing about all things with feelings, using words or pictures, and eternally existing in a sentient world with a pure heart.
His hands and pens for painting, not his own hands and pens, are The soul of China's deep traditional culture.
Aesthetics master Zhu Guangqian also said: "The main thing that forms Feng Zikai's character and paintings is China's national cultural tradition. ”
Feng Zikai loves this land and the people deeply, so in his paintings, "piece by piece of Falling Ying, they all contain the taste of human affection." ”