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In 2017, 51-year-old Wang Liuyun went to study oil painting at a free studio in Shuangxi Ancient Town, Pingnan County, Fujian Province. In the following years, she traveled to her home along the coast of Zhejiang Province, Dafen Oil Painting Village in Shenzhen, and Guanzhuang Village in Zhecheng County, Henan Province, where she studied painting, worked part-time, traveled, and worked as an art teacher in a rural school. In 2020, Wang Liuyun began to "drift north", working as a cleaner in an office building during the day, and painting and writing in his own world at night. Her story has been narrated and interpreted in many media outlets. The recently published "Walking Through a Sea" is Wang Liuyun's autobiographical work, in which she steps out of the narrative of the media and tells the story of her new life from the age of 51 from the perspective of an eyewitness, both a poetic roaming in the mountains and rivers, and a realistic portrayal of a large number of female group portraits.
Written by Wang Liuyun
Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House
Bright Moon Sungai
Early in the morning, I looked back and forth and walked from the hostel to the asphalt road in the north-south direction. I came here yesterday on this road, and I didn't leave much impression by hurrying through.
The spring in Pingnan is damp, rainy and cold, and the water on the road is fine, and the air is precipitated with the fragrance of wind, which I only felt in the Suining Mountains of Hunan more than 20 years ago. In the spring of my hometown of Xinhua, the same rainy day feels different, and I am always stuffy. And in my seaside home in Taizhou, Zhejiang, although this rainy day is commonplace, it is even more different. In Taizhou, often the winter has not passed, and the sea has sent spring. Before the first month, loquat flowers, peach blossoms, and apricot blossoms bloomed everywhere, and the temperature rose as fast as a horse. I wanted to slowly enjoy the blooming of new greenery, but in the blink of an eye, the mountains were full of green.
Hilltop Village, 2017
In order to avoid the rain, I walked carefully from the side of the porch to the intersection facing the Oil Painting City, and it was only after 6 o'clock in the morning. Oh, there's a little bazaar there! I was overjoyed that something that had long been a memory was still there. There are no cars passing by at all, so there are random vegetable baskets in the middle of the road. Locals wear rain hats and even coats made of palm leaves, and use dustpans to carry green onions, green leafy vegetables, white radish, pickled vegetables, chili sauce, etc., all of which are homemade. What opened my eyes was that each pole was covered with all kinds of wild grasses, including wheat winter, bitter oak, seven stars, full of stars, thunder dolls, cornflowers, plantains, wild sesame...... There are many more that I can't name. These were all used as herbs in my hometown, and I later figured out that people here eat them as vegetables. I went around the intersection and asked the price of the food, it was very cheap, but I had nowhere to cook it if I wanted it!
I turned into the stone street, the street is about three zhang wide, about ten meters, the original local area has retained the appearance of three or four hundred years ago, and it has not changed over the years. The shops on the street are two-story gatehouses with blue brick inlaid wooden boards, which are used for both commercial and residential purposes. The smell of moss was dripping from the tiled roof that had accumulated the dust of time, and the dark brown carved wooden plank wall caressed my vision. This is the street I walked yesterday when I went to the town hall to inquire about Mr. Lin Zhenglu. I looked down the street to the end of the densely populated old town, the mountains were covered in white fog and the spring rain was pouring overhead.
I found a small shop and bought two large pancakes for one yuan, which were wrapped in red bean paste, salty, and sprinkled with sesame seeds. Take a bite, sweet and crispy, it is really delicious in the world, I immediately burst into tears, how can there be such a comfortable place in the world!
At eight o'clock, I went up to the painting building. In the corridor, a large group of people gathered around Teacher Lin Zhenglu. I've seen him on TV many times, and this is the first time I've seen him in person. Born in 1971, he is described as withered but very energetic. He used to work as an art dealer in Putian, and he had seen the world and big money, but when he was forty-three years old, he had a cerebral infarction, and two small bones were removed from his head to remove blood stasis and then put on a stent, so that he could save a life, which was later told to me by another assistant teacher. After his illness, Mr. Lin realized overnight that life and money are no longer a matter, so let's change it to someone else. When he came to Pingnan, he saw the ancient village hidden in the mountains for thousands of years and preserved intact, and deeply felt that this was the imprint of national civilization. He devoted himself to the restoration of the ancient village, and in order to let the world know about this place, he put up a slogan "Everyone is an artist" and taught everyone to paint for free, but he did not mean this, which I only figured out later.
Thorns and Courage, 2022
Teacher Lin Zhenglu's voice was thick and gentle, and a smile appeared in a flash, indicating that he was always thinking differently under the cover of this face. Everyone greeted him and asked him for advice on the paintings. With joy and gratitude, I leaned forward to say hello and stood on the outside of the crowd. Teacher Wang Yufei told him on the side that I was Wang Liuyun, who just came yesterday to paint horse lanterns.
Mr. Lin smiled more sincerely, saying that he had seen the lights I painted last night, and the flames were painted real and beautiful. When we first met, my teacher actually praised me for my beautiful paintings! I couldn't believe it, and I immediately became convinced. He was very busy, so he explained a few words to the assistant and went to another ancient village with the driver. Lin Zhenglu led people to restore those ancient villages one by one, and the project was huge, cumbersome and arduous.
Wang Yufei found a few painting friends who came earlier than me to study painting with me in the room yesterday. She asked us to draw the broken wood, the crooked table, and the lame bench in front of us in the same picture, and for a limited time, she said the "old saying" again, and asked us to draw these things with our own thoughts, our own eyes, and our own hands. With that, she turned around and went to another studio.
As soon as Wang walked away, we started chatting. Sister Li from Beijing is financially free, in her fifties, beautiful and temperamental. Her year-old friend Xiao Li is a senior white-collar worker in Nanjing, and out of love, she took a three-month long vacation to study painting here. The two became inseparable after they met in Sungai and took care of each other. Zhang Zhang, a tall man from Tianjin, is a veteran college student, who was still the owner of a big hotel a few years ago, and is now retired. His wife, an executive of a state-owned enterprise, went to Guangzhou for a meeting, and brought Lao Zhang here to relieve her boredom. One is a retired male teacher from Anhui, who is not tall and has a very anxious temperament. He was looking around with a thick pen line study, which was the work of half his life, and he brought it to Lin Zhenglu to look at and show us one by one.
There was also a tall, thin woman, forty years old, a horse, with a straightforward and enthusiastic personality, and a smile like nectar flowers. I introduced myself to her: "I am Wang Liuyun. She said, "Oh, Sister Wang Liuyun, I like you." "Her name is Chen Liyun, and she is from Tongliao, Inner Mongolia. She looked down and said, "Oh, Sister Wang Liuyun, the shoes you wear are more exquisite than your people, where did you buy them?" I said that they were sent by relatives in my hometown in Zhejiang, which is a common commodity in our country. I also described to her the sea of Taizhou and Ningbo in Zhejiang. Relatives of the older generation of our family went to the neighboring Seokpo to catch the sea to make a living and settled there. Last year, I went to visit with gifts, in fact, to see the deep sea up close, and to enjoy the ancient town that has been prosperous for thousands of years. My relatives gave me a lot of wild crabs, fish, and dried fish, and gave me these flat shoes with a cowhide texture and a black rabbit fur upper. Just because of these rabbit furs, the style of cheap shoes has been greatly changed. Wearing it to Sungai and along the way, people mostly looked at me on shoes and not at people.
I like to make friends with people I can talk to, and I like the life of the spring breeze all over the world. Chatting with each other, several people immediately mingled. Everyone started to draw, and they talked about it as they went.
"An Old House in a Mountain Village Through Childhood and Adolescence", 2022
I've always had this lame bench that we're going to paint, and I've always had it at home. My father cherished utensils all his life, and all the furniture he saved money and food bought from the rich and ruined families year after year. In the old days, even if it was just an ordinary bench, the objects of the rich family were made of thick wood, with a red clay lacquer surface, exquisite workmanship, and the look and feel seemed to be favored by God. And the fir wood bench in front of me that has revealed the wood grain, there are a few of them in the villagers of Yanjiakou, and I have touched them thousands of times, and the shape and texture are all familiar to me. In just an hour, I was able to move a few things from the room onto the drawing board, just to extract memories.
In the afternoon, we painted another one with a pot of violets. In the evening, Mr. Lin Zhenglu taught everyone to draw a piece of paper in the big studio. He folded a flat piece of paper into one corner, crumpled the other corner, and then pasted the white paper on the wall, asking everyone to draw the light and shadow it showed in the light. Again, he doesn't give any hints or advice, it's all up to us. Even if tens of thousands of people come again, the only lesson Lin Zhenglu teaches is drawing paper, and his teaching is really like the hint - unspeakable, unspeakable.
Since I only send out two sketchpads a day, I have a lot of time to get out of the studio and wander around the old streets of Sungai.
Nestled among the rugged mountains of Pingnan, Sungai is a small basin like a treasure. The people here are simple, and the people are industrious and wise. When I went, I saw vegetables growing in every inch of the col, and peach and plum fruit trees planting on every steep slope. There is a native chestnut species called cone chestnut in the local area, which has a thin and sweet skin after improvement, and is planted all over the hills and slopes. Of course, it's also very popular with squirrels, civets, and hamsters, who are well fed before they are picked and sold, and stored in the crevices of the rocks that we can't find.
In the low-lying flat land with convenient irrigation, the villagers are willing to plant rice. The agricultural cooperatives in Fujian Province take great care of each and every one of the farmers in the middle of nowhere, and they sell all the vegetables and fruits themselves. I can't help but think that in Zhejiang, where there are many people and little land, how many vegetables and fruits on people's tables come from the deep mountains of this world!
The surnames Zhang and Lu are the Sungai giants. At the end of the Tang Dynasty, the Taizu of the Zhang family offended the imperial court, and his close friend Lu came to the rescue. That place is called Qianqiao, where they have been cultivating and breeding for hundreds of years, and they dare not go out of the mountains. In the Southern Song Dynasty, a scholar who came out of the back cliff entered the court as an official, and the glorious family began to pioneer in the treasure basin of Shuangxi. In order to repay the Lu family for their rescue, all the flat slopes and fertile water were given to the Lu family, and the Lu family's ancestral hall was also in the center. As for the surname Zhang, even when Zhang Jiang, a famous minister in the Southern Song Dynasty, was in office, he only built a ancestral hall on the northwest slope, and the left side of the ancestral plaque was enshrined with the tablet of "Enzu Lu XX" in the past dynasties, which can be said to be toothless and do not forget the grace of saving the family.
Although the terrain here is steep, it is the land of northern Fujian, near Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province in the north, and close to the sea road in the east. Tea, mushrooms, fungus, cloth, and dry goods are distributed here, and then transshipped to the sea. In just a few hundred years, this square inch of land has gathered rich businessmen and magnates. From here, the north arrives at Zhenghe, and the west takes Nanping. People took straight lines between the valleys and laid stone official roads, so that distant mountain secrets could also be reached quickly, and trade was unimpeded.
There is a Confucian Temple near the mountain in the west of the town, which enshrines the Confucian saint, and there is a tall City God Temple on the north side of the Confucian Temple. On the top of the hill was once a academy, and the brick carved mountain gate is exquisite and gorgeous. From the southern foot of the mountain, climb 999 wide stone steps to reach the entrance of the College, while next to the Temple of Literature, there are 366 slightly steeper stone steps leading to the gate of the College. Today, the old academy has been converted into the first primary school in Shuangxi Township. When I went to visit, I found that in addition to the new school building, the office is still the same as the old building from hundreds of years ago, which is very interesting.
The Waves, 2023
Sungai's rare sunny days in spring are also always misty and grey clouds are low. I am so intimately infatuated with this ancient town, walking day in those deep alleys of stone slabs that have been twisted and turned, precipitated by the years, shuttling between the decaying and abandoned thick earth wall holes, and it also looks at me affectionately with hundreds of years of dim eyes, and I and Sungai are each other's Jingting Mountain.
Most of the ancient street houses in Sungai are three storeys high, with strong and straight cedar wood as beams and columns, mortise and tenon structures, blue bricks and rammed earth walls painted with lime mortar that has been undefeated for thousands of years. The mansion is called a house, such as Zhang Cuo, Lu Cuo, Jiang Cuo, Gancuo, etc., which is carved on the brick or stone slab in the upper left corner of the gate. The houses are timeless, and the crimson earthen lacquer doors retain relief patterns that symbolize wealth and glory and the prosperity of children and grandchildren. The small garden in the patio inside the gate mostly retains a large thick terracotta tank for fire prevention. A winding wooden staircase leads to the third floor, and the cloisters on all sides have carved railings and benches.
People still live in these ancient houses today. I walked into one house and one house after another. People were more than willing to lead me into the house and see every room up and down. Exotic flowers and plants are planted in the patios of every house, many of which were planted by ancestors. In those days, the water tank used for fire prevention was replaced with tap water, which was used to raise fish and water lilies, and the ancient water lilies are still alive today.
I asked them to slow down their speech, and only then did they understand a little bit of the local language: when it rains, dark clouds are called "Tianmo", when they return, they are called "Deng", and when they take a bath, they are called "sprinkling their bodies...... I learned a few words, and they burst into laughter. I met an enthusiastic hostess who brought me sweet rice wine and boiled eggs. As I drank, they told me that a long, long time ago my ancestors had been admirals in the Qing Dynasty's maritime frontier, or that their first few uncles had gone to a strange country in South Asia or Europe.
"Little Sable in a Tree Hollow", 2022
I climbed the 999 stone steps that meander up from south to north on the West Mountain, and when I reached the middle section near the Temple of Literature, I saw a deep old mansion that was not very tall. There is a deep well in front of the door, the purple-red stone well platform is hexagonal outside, the inner mouth is round, the old stone trough, the washing stone platform are complete, and the carved pattern is still there. The vines climbed over the huge old wooden trellis in the forecourt and continued to climb up to the west side of the eaves, but although it was fruitful, it was white and small. When I first passed by, I simply felt the melancholy beauty of this garden piercing through the years. It wasn't until one day, when I passed by for the twentieth time, that I hesitated to enter the wide, but not too high, door of the house.
Inside is a three-entry courtyard, with quiet wings on both sides, and a small patio in the middle, full of flowers. It seems that planting flowers is an old tradition here, and there are many flowers that I have never seen before. I greeted a middle-aged man who came out to greet him and told him I wanted to visit the mansion. Although this man grows vegetables for a living, he is delicate and fair-skinned. He welcomed me very much and introduced me that his great-grandfather was a famous painter in this area in the last years of the Qing Dynasty, and that he had painted tigers and mountains for the county grandfather, and that his family had passed on his painting skills for several generations. During the conversation, he took me up to the second floor to see the evidence. It was a large drawing board of camphor wood, nearly a meter wide, about two meters long, and an inch thick, and it was already black and shiny. I understand that in those days, painters spread paper on this board and painted in ink.
However, I really don't understand why there are so many painters in such a place the size of a sparrow's nest, and it is possible that in the old days they could support a large family by selling paintings? So I asked him, and the villager surnamed Lu glanced at me and said that his great-grandfather had framed the paintings and sent them out of the mountains by sea in a horse caravan. Many of the people who had wandered there earlier to make a living and settled there bought paintings from their homeland for gold, and some of them were sold to the wealthy foreigners in Nanyang for collection.
Then, he spoke more proudly about one of his uncles who had gone to Europe more than a hundred years ago to paint, and that his cousin's son had become a well-known painter after studying in England. As for his own family, his grandfather, as the eldest son, wanted to inherit the property and the mountains and forests, so he stayed, and the descendants, including himself, knew nothing about painting and were no longer interested.
The ancestral house is well preserved, and he thinks that his grandfather is very old-fashioned, and he didn't go out back then.
The grape outside the door is a foreign seed that my great-grandfather brought back from abroad when he was repairing the house. In the distant past, it was a thing of beauty, and the fruits were like new green beads. He told me to pick some when it was ripe.
A grapevine and a stone well have been together for a hundred years, and they have seen generations come and go.
Strangely, when I first saw this courtyard, I decided to draw it, but I couldn't draw it well, and after meeting its owner, it only took me one afternoon to complete it.
New Media Editor: Zheng Zhouming
Pictured: Artist's drawing
i: iwenxuebao
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