●Jiang Chung
Zeng Hao's full-body portrait of Sister Jiang
Jiang Zhuyun people call her "Sister Jiang", she was born in Zigong City, Da'an District, Dashanpu (formerly belonging to Fushun County) Jiangjiawan farming, she with all her youth to write a red swan song of anti-Japanese salvation and revolutionary struggle, she and her same domain of the township sage and martyr Autumn Harvest Uprising commander-in-chief Lu Deming, Red Third Army Chief of Staff Deng Ping, in 2009 jointly won the national "100 heroes and models who have made outstanding contributions to the founding of New China" honorary title. Prior to this, Liu Guangdi, a sage and martyr who was also born in this land, as one of the "Six Gentlemen of Wuxu", was like a dazzling meteor passing by at the end of modern Chinese history, tearing apart the darkest night of the decadent and dim feudal dynasty with the light of life in a short and snowy light. This is really a "hometown glory" that has attracted attention, and its weight should be a story that has been passed down for hundreds of generations.
1. Hongyan "Danniang"
Jiang Zhuyun, an immortal name that has gained immortality in a fire, it flies all over the land of China with transparent wings, it fills the hearts of countless Chinese sons and daughters with flame-like heat and burns their blood to boil, it is the name of Hongyan "Danniang", symbolizing a kind of unyielding loyalty and selfless struggle for the faith.
The 2021 edition of "A Brief History of the Communist Party of China" has a passage: "On the eve of the liberation of Chongqing, many communists who were imprisoned in the Dregs Cave and the White Mansion were brutally killed by the Kuomintang reactionaries. Jiang Zhuyun, a communist, endured all kinds of torture by the Kuomintang military commanders, but she was unyielding and would rather die than divulge any of the party's secrets, and people affectionately called her 'Sister Jiang'. In the face of the harsh torture of the enemy, she firmly said: "Bamboo sticks are made of bamboo, and the will of the communists is steel." When New China had been established and Chongqing was about to be liberated, Sister Jiang died magnificently at the age of 29. Many revolutionary martyrs represented by Sister Jiang endured all kinds of torture, were indomitable, preferred to die unyieldingly, sacrificed their precious lives for the cause of the liberation of the Chinese people, and condensed into the 'Hongyan' spirit. ”
The novel "Red Rock" created by Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan with a print run of more than 10 million copies, the various versions of the "Red Rock" series of story comics and posters that have a larger circulation than the novel make readers fall in love, the movie "Eternal Life in the Fire" starring Zhao Dan and Yu Lan with hundreds of millions of viewers, the opera "Sister Jiang" arranged by the Kongzheng Art Troupe, the widely sung songs "Red Plum Praise" and "Embroidered Red Flag" composed by Yan Su, Yang Ming, Jiang Chunyang, and Jin Sha, as well as the oath of the young team members in the martyrs' cemetery, and the " The story will be "and those folklore that belong to the street talk, have long made a three-dimensional flesh-and-blood respectable and amiable hero image form a beautiful statue of a phoenix nirvana, towering over thousands of fiery hearts full of reverence. In the stormy dark era, Sister Jiang was an underground member of the Communist Party of China who was both wise and brave, a youth guide for countless students in the campus in the white area, a fire-sower who rebelled against the White Terror, a close comrade-in-arms of the "old woman with two guns" of the Huayingshan guerrillas, a direct leader of the Chenggang martyrs who edited the "Advance Daily" with "gray skin and red heart", and the "backbone" who led the revolutionary aspirants imprisoned in the Dregs Cave Prison to carry out heroic struggles is a heroine who generously went to the disaster with revolutionary martyrs such as Xu Yunfeng on the eve of dawn. The title of "Sister Jiang" has a unique and irreplaceable inspirational appeal, and the spirit of "Sister Jiang" is a pilot lighthouse that leads countless young people to conquer and wander.
Opera "Sister Jiang"
According to the Guangming Daily, on October 14, 1964, Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Dong Biwu, He Long, Chen Yi and other party and state leaders watched the opera "Sister Jiang", and on November 27 of the same year, the "Sichuan Daily" published Mao Zedong's autographed inscription as a revolutionary martyr in a prominent position: "Communism is irresistible! A spark can set the prairie on fire! Long live the martyrs!" It also published a long report on Sister Jiang's heroic deeds, especially the three exclamation points in Mao Zedong's inscription, which highlighted the excitement of the people's leader and made Sister Jiang's glorious example a great motivational force.
Before Sister Jiang was killed, the inmates respected Sister Jiang's revolutionary integrity of not betraying the organization and comrades after she was tortured, and wrote poems to give Sister Jiang: "Iron sticks, wooden bars, can't pry open the clenched lips,—— that's the safety line of thousands of soldiers! Use a bayonet to cut the abdomen, and you can dig out -- only the red and hot heart and liver!" In order to comfort Sister Jiang, the victims of the scum cave wrote a poem "Ode to the Soul" by He Xuesong, who recommended the male cell: "You came back in shackles again, and the poison did not yield your loyalty. Many comrades are safe because of your loyalty, and the revolutionary work will take off because of your loyalty. You, you are the embodiment of Danniang, you are the spirit of Sophia, no, you are you, you are a typical example of the Chinese children's revolution. ”
II. The Painter's Mission
Zeng Hao is a young painter from Sister Jiang's hometown to the world, he has listened to his teachers and parents talk about the touching "Sister Jiang" in "Red Rock" since he was a child, he not only watched the "Red Rock" comic book at home, but also packed it in his schoolbag and took it to the school to share with his friends, and painted a portrait of "Sister Jiang" who was regarded as a "goddess" by his own brush, which has always been a beautiful long-cherished wish hidden in his heart.
Zeng Hao is talented and perceptive, and when he was in elementary school, he scribbled on his homework book, which impressed the school teachers and amazed them. He painted a picture of a sitting dog and pasted it on the door of his house, and the neighbor trembled as he walked by, afraid that the painted dog would pounce unrestrained. By the time he was in middle school, he had already mastered the basics of the art of drawing, and his oil painting of a young warrior riding a turtle against a backdrop of fire clouds was published on the cover of the influential magazine "Mysteries", which simply exceeded his parents' expectations. He aspired to be a painter for the rest of his life, and when he left the school, he wore a pen as a sword and entered the art world alone. When he first entered the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang deep in the desert, he was immediately shocked by a strong spiritual shock, which made him fascinated, lingering, and immediately devoted himself to the creation of the Dunhuang Feitian series of oil paintings, expressing the oriental goddess with Western painting techniques. To this end, Wang Wou-ki, editor-in-chief of the Chinese Artists Daily and director of the Dunhuang Creation Center of the Chinese Artists Association, wrote a monograph published in the magazine "Fine Arts", affirming that Zeng Hao, as the pioneer who took the lead in setting foot in the creation of religious oil paintings on the mainland, has a development potential that cannot be underestimated.
Zeng Hao in creation
On May 12, 2008, the Wenchuan earthquake broke out in Sichuan, Zeng Hao resolutely auctioned two works to donate in full to the disaster area. As a result, he conceived a new theme of painting, determined to create a group of portraits of goddesses with Guanyin Bodhisattva, who rescues the common people and protects the world, as the protagonist. Later, Zeng Hao told a reporter from China Education Television who interviewed him his inner feelings: "Guanyin Bodhisattva is the great deity in my heart, she is the ideal embodiment of the truth, perfection and beauty, when a person encounters difficulties, the society should stretch out a thousand hands to help him, and in turn, a person should also extend a hand a thousand times in his life without hesitation to help others." "Thousand, on behalf of the infinite number, a thousand eyes can not miss every corner of the world, a thousand hands can reach out to every place in the world, a thousand eyes, a thousand hands symbolize the way and way of people's assistance can reach immeasurable, infinite, boundless, this is a kind of Chinese nation endless, endless noble spirit and huge positive energy, and Guanyin Bodhisattva's beauty, kindness, wisdom and all-round image out of the dust, is also by the countless good people around the love of the virtue and good deeds of the condensation and recreation of the eternal idol.
Zeng Hao's work goddess image
In 2015, he and Chen Zhongzhong, a famous writer who shocked the literary world with "White Deer Plain", were both selected by the Wuzhou Communication Center of the Information Office of the State Council, the National Cultural Soft Power Research Collaborative Innovation Center and other institutions as "Light of Civilization 2015 Chinese Cultural Exchange Person of the Year" and "Rise of the New Silk Road.2015 Literary and Artistic Innovation Figure", and recommended him as the "'Belt and Road' Cultural Strategy 'Ambassador'". "Promoting Figures", this is really an artistic award.
In July 2021, when Zigong City decided to establish the "Sister Jiang's Hometown Education Base", Zeng Hao was invited to paint a 124x209cm oil painting portrait for "Sister Jiang". Jiang Zhuyun has an extraordinary local relationship with him, belongs to the villagers, she is not only an iron-clad heroine, but also his respectable and amiable immortal elder and youth idol, he must spare no effort to paint a heart of the red rock "goddess", this is a great honor and the artistic pride of the painting career, but also a broadening the subject matter, refining the art of the art extension and trekking power.
3. Reappear Sister Jiang
In order to live up to his mission, Zeng Hao created a portrait of Sister Jiang that satisfies the villagers and can be widely recognized by the society, he once again read the red classic "Red Rock" and the documentary literature "Red Rock Hero Sister Jiang" created by his hometown writers Liu Renhui and Yang Yuanzi, visited Sister Jiang's hometown, visited the Dregs Cave, Bai Mansion, and Zeng Jiayan No. 50 again, and drove to the old sites and relics of Chongqing, Wanxian and the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River where Jiang Zhuyun lived and fought. He had read Sister Jiang's suicide note written in prison, as well as a poem "Go to the Liberated Area!" that she longed to go to Yan'an to express her feelings during her lifetime, and he seemed to hear Sister Jiang's heartbeat and understood her great regret and an attempted wish: "Burning fire, burning on the ground, burning fire, burning in my heart!" I have decided that I will go behind enemy lines, to the liberated areas...... Reading, reading, Zeng Hao unconsciously burst into tears, his blurred vision seemed to see a dignified and beautiful young woman standing on the horizon, she was wearing a Yin Dan cloth cheongsam, a red woolen jacket, a snow-white scarf around her neck, and a pair of flat-soled round-mouth green cloth shoes, smiling at him, he wanted to run towards her and excitedly shouted: "Sister Jiang!"
Zeng Hao painted a portrait of Sister Jiang
When Zeng Hao devoted himself to creation, there were only two black-and-white bust photos left by Sister Jiang before her death, and he repeatedly observed and wondered how he could copy the photos since the local party organization had commissioned him to create the heroic image of Jiang Zhuyun? In that case, there was still a need to paint a portrait of her? His own creation should not be a copy of old photos, but a new creation, and he had to mobilize his own artistic thinking and sincere painting art to create a radiant youthful image of the revolutionary martyrs, and devote himself to perfectly reproducing her facial features. At this time, Zeng Hao has realized the biggest difficulty of creation, that is, he must rely on his own imagination to complete the realism of the characters, and there is no ready-made reference for each specific detail, at the same time, Jiang Zhuyun's photos before his death are all flat and downward, but to show a revolutionary martyr who sacrificed his life for his faith, it is advisable to take a kind of upward look, so it is necessary to drastically change the angle of his facial features, how can he whimsically pray for the soul of the martyr to descend from the end of the cloud to the mortal world to come to the scene as a "model" I can only mobilize my own artistic imagination to conceive and design, and transform my artistic creativity into artistic realism and sublimation of the painting environment on the canvas.
Zeng Hao's portrait of Sister Jiang is a three-dimensional full-body portrait, the whole gesture and action, he did not freeze her image in a specific period and stage, but a kind of overall generalization of both god and form, ingenuity in the choice of angle, color use, light perspective, especially in the figure, appearance, eyes and other aspects of the depiction of full and high-spirited spirit, as far as possible to perfectly interpret her red plum like not afraid of the cold of the 39 Zheng Zheng iron bones, proud of the ice and snow cliff of the chaste branch clean, reflecting a kind of unswerving dedication to the ideal of incomparable loyalty, The fiery longing of incomparable enthusiasm and incomparable eagerness has brought people the infinite power of advocating light, and has successfully created a wise and calm heroic image, which is enough to inspire and inspire those who come after them to carry forward the past and forge ahead for the future for the realization of the most lofty and magnificent common ideal of all mankind - the communist society. For this reason, Zeng Hao took the Three Gorges Gate of the Yangtze River as the background of the picture, the upper sky of the majestic mountains revealed the dawn of the glow of the glow, the narrow gorge was like an open historical gate to welcome the new world and the new era, and the river and the sky behind Sister Jiang were brilliant and bright, symbolizing that the sacred cause dedicated to the martyrs would irresistibly usher in a beautiful tomorrow of triumph!
When the portrait of Sister Jiang created by Zeng Hao was unveiled in the exhibition hall, it immediately won the eyes of the audience and burst into applause, the famous poet, national first-class writer, and revolutionary veteran Li Jiajian looked at the heroic appearance he admired for a long time, and his heart was surging, and he improvised a poem "Salute to Sister Jiang": "From the mountains and valleys, from the thunder and lightning waves, from the wind, frost, rain and snow, from the foggy history, you are coming to us." The sound of your footsteps, which resonates with the rhythm of our hearts, strengthens our faith and washes our souls. You stepped in front of us, looked us in the eyes, and asked one after another: Have you forgotten your original intention? That is a question mark written in blood by you and the martyrs, how should we respond?"