Art Salon || Appreciating the art of stone is ancient and modern
When: March 24, 2024
Venue: Dahu United Art Space (2nd Floor, No. 1 Maoming South Road)
Guests: Yu Ying, Tan Yingzhou, Liu Hua
Spirit stones, offering stones, playing stones
Text: Yu Ying
The origin of stone appreciation is roughly related to nature worship. For example, the custom of "Taishan stone dare to be" is an example. The custom of Taishan stone dare to be the ancient people's worship of the spirit stone is the relic of the ancient people's worship of the spirit stone, and it belongs to the cultural category of the town (to ward off evil things). Animism was the initial stage in the development of primitive religious thought. The strange shape of certain rocks, or the special geographical environment in which they are located, may have been endowed with spirituality by the ancients. For example, Maoxian, Wenchuan, Lixian, Beichuan, etc., in the Qiang area of Sichuan, there is still a popular white stone worship.
In addition, stones have made the first and miraculous achievements in the history of human evolution, the so-called "man and ape are different, only a few stones have been grinded, childhood." (Mao Zedong's "He Bridegroom, Reading History") Therefore, the ancients subconsciously have always been in awe of stones, and the worship of spiritual stones is also a sign of this. The theory of offering stones (setting) is more or less a manifestation of this collective unconscious of reverence for stones. That is to say, at the earliest time and even for a long time, the strange stone was more of an offering object - the theory of offering stones, which is more solemn than today's name of playing stones. This may also be the deep-seated reason why traditional stone viewing is more likely to appear with the image or image of the mountain (whole or partial). Because the simple pictogram stone is more interesting, it will dilute the meaning of the offering. Contemporary stone appreciation is regarded as the "art of discovery", and the so-called discovery is the theme of the image represented by the ornamental stone. In this sense, the ancients appreciated the stone, and the present people appreciate the stone. Nowadays, the game of playing stones is more meaningful, and the ancient people's worship of stones is more meaningful.
In ancient times, the stone was beautiful in ugliness, not seeking to resemble the shape, and it may be that the stone was a mysterious force of nature. For example, the Southern Song Dynasty literati Kong Chuan mentioned in the preface to Du Juan's "Yunlin Stone Spectrum": "The essence of heaven and earth is the essence of the qi, and the knot becomes a stone." Negative soil comes out, the shape is strange, or the rock sinus leaks, and the peaks and ridges are ridged. ...... The image of the object is like, as if, although there are many punches, and can contain the beauty of a thousand rocks. In fact, this concept has been described in detail in the Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi's "Taihu Lake Stone Records": "In summary, the three mountains and five mountains, a hundred caves and thousands of ravines, all in it." One hundred punches, a thousand miles in an instant, sit and get it. It can be seen that the image of the mountain is not only the initial image of the ancients, but also the final image of the stone appreciation.
If it is said that "the stone makes people ancient" (Wen Zhenheng's "Chronicles of Long Things" in the Ming Dynasty), then the appreciation of the stone of the image or image of the mountain has a kind of time and space travel with the "ancient". The Song Dynasty poet Tang Geng's poem "Drunken Sleep" wrote: "The mountains are as quiet as the ancient, and the days are as long as small years", which expresses this ancient meaning. Although the mountain landscape stone can also be regarded as a kind of pictogram, however, there are few specific mountain landscapes that completely correspond, and it is more of a comprehensive generalization and condensation of many mountain landscapes, and it is also a refinement and sublimation of the formal beauty of natural mountain and river landscapes.
From the spirit stone to the offering stone to the play stone, the stone is no longer that stone.
Written in Shanghai in the early spring of 2024
Exhibition site
三生石 | 石头的千古风流
Exhibition date: 2024.03.09-03.31
Visiting hours: Tuesday to Sunday 11:00-18:00
Curator: Lin Mingjie
Academic Host: Sun Jing
Artists: Yang Jianyong, Yu Ying, Tan Yingzhou
Organizer: Dahu United Art Space
Co-organizer: Dahu Society House of Classics
Exhibition address: 2nd Floor, No. 1, Maoming South Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai
- Artist Yang Jianyong -
Artist, curator, columnist, director of the Hurun Art Society.
- Artist Yu Ying -
He is a scholar of stone appreciation culture and a scientific and artistic advisor of the China Ornamental Stone Association.
- Artist Tan Yingzhou -
Writer, photographer, professor and doctoral supervisor of the School of Foreign Languages, Fudan University.