What is the story of Xu Jiang in history?

Mr. Xu Jiang is a famous oil painting artist, one of the most accomplished artists in contemporary China, a famous artist, art educator, and thinker, curator and cultural promoter with international influence who grew up in the reform and opening up.

In March 2008, on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the founding of the China Academy of Art, Xu Jiang, as the director of the Academy of Fine Arts, was busy preparing for the celebration. However, no matter which identity he is, in his life, it seems that there is always one word tightly entangled, that is, dreams. I have lived in Fuzhou, Fujian since I was a child, and my experience as a child can be vividly compared to today, that is, there are three schools, the first school is a middle school, because my parents are teachers in the middle school, and I have spent my time in this middle school since I was a child, this middle school is a hill, a mountain in a field on the outskirts of Fuzhou, this mountain is called Fucang Mountain, just like an inverted bucket, sometimes it looks a little like a big ship driving in a green ocean, so to speak, Looking back today, my soul was largely contaminated by this hill. The mountain was very interesting, there were hundreds of trees, and I had to climb each and every one of them to the point where it was about to break, and then stand on the top of the mountain and look down. At that time, it was the Cultural Revolution, and the Cultural Revolution was also impacted by the Cultural Revolution because his father was a teacher, and there were not many children playing with him, so he was very lonely, and he often climbed very high, and then he was very lonely on the mountain, looking down at it, sometimes imagining, Imagine how I look back at my current commanding heights when I run down the mountain, so now I know that this is called self-reflection, and this kind of self-reflection is a very important way of human reflection, and this kind of self-reflection is a very important way of human reflection.

Growing up in the scholarly atmosphere of an intellectual family and the rural environment, Xu Jiang was fond of contemplation and passion since he was a child, and in the early 70s of the last century, Xu Jiang came to the second school in his life. The second school, that is, later our family moved to a Shaxian county in the mountainous area of northern Fujian, today we have snacks in Shaxian County all over the country, is that Shaxian County, in that mountainous area, and later graduated from middle school, I was in a primary school in a mountainous area, I served as a primary school teacher, this school is very interesting, it is actually a traditional temple, there is a middle hall, the middle steps slowly and slowly rise, the surrounding wings are separated, It's a classroom, it's a complete elementary school, grades 1 to 5, there are five or six teachers, and they are in charge of the school's English, art, and physical education courses. In the memory of this school, there is a big clock, and this clock is always slow, about an hour slower a week, so about every week, we have to set it up by an hour, and then the rest is dominated by the big clock that is always slow, and according to its slower time, we decide our classes and dismissals, but the people of the Quartet have always had a kind of respect for this school. Not only does I work as a teacher at this school, but I also take English classes at several other local private schools around me, so I have to walk around the entire mountainous area for dozens of miles every week. That more than 20 miles of mountain road, it is indeed very steep, it is so steep, that is, in fact, your nose is always to touch the steps in front, you only need to bend down slightly, your nose can touch, it is very steep and steep, so you go up like this, every week about dozens of miles of mountain road, the process is very lonely, but now to think about it, I don't feel very bitter, this is really strange, I don't feel very bitter, sometimes I will bring a book, I would read it when I was resting on the way, and at that time I read a lot of forbidden books and borrowed a lot of forbidden books from the intellectual youth, such as Stendhal's "Red and Black", like Turgenev's "Luo Ting", and "The Gadfly", which was very interesting, and at that time I borrowed a number of books of young heroes, and I would look at these books, and then imagine what it would be like if I became them when I walked on this mountain, in fact, such a large natural space. Instead, it has become a space for the imagination of the mind, so this may also cause a habit of thinking and contemplation for many years. Of course, at that time, I also started to paint, I would draw clouds on the top of the mountain, and paint clouds with watercolors, but in fact, watercolor clouds were the most difficult to draw, so I was always very frustrated at that time, and I always couldn't draw well, but every time I saw a sea of clouds rolling and standing on the clouds, I was very excited. More than a year later, the village teacher went to work in a bone glue factory, where piles of cow and horse bones were transported from Tibet and Inner Mongolia, where workers burned and melted the bones of these animals to make raw materials for capsules and films, and in this place known as the second crematorium, young Xu Jiang burned bones during the day and sketched at night. There are only more than 100 workers in this factory, and more than 90 percent are women, because they were used to make horn combs, and only a few workers who repair machines are male workers, so you imagine that when we were first assigned to this factory, we carried the bone bag, and then slept on a pile of bones at noon, and when we woke up, I felt that the back was very itchy, and I slapped it down, and a dozen insects were in my hands, and I knew that the worm crawling on my back was full of bones, but under that condition, I still insisted on learning to paint. In 1978, after several examinations, Xu Jiang entered the third school in his life: Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, which is today's China Academy of Fine Arts, and his fate changed. This was about 1979, when we were only in the second year of college, in the autumn, we were boating on the shore of Xizi Lake, here is Baochu Pagoda, this is Geling, at that time my hair was very long, and my weight was also very light, about only a hundred and a few pounds, only two-thirds of the current person is the size of such a person, but that era was also high-spirited, very strong student spirit. As one of the first batch of college students after the Cultural Revolution, Xu Jiang and his classmates experienced great artistic shocks as soon as they stepped into the China Academy of Fine Arts. The more than 100 years of art history in the West have been rushing like a flood of beasts, all of which dazzle them. In the beautiful school on the shore of West Lake, they were allowed to paint the human body for the first time, copied foreign art works for the first time, and even held a makeup conference for the first time. This is part of the batch of books that our school bought for 90,000 yuan that year, and we went to take this photo later, and this photo was taken for a long time, and we were not satisfied with it, and then it was taken like this, a lonely bookshelf, in a gap in history. In 1979, I used one-tenth of the school's funds, 90,000 yuan, and bought all the art books and art pictures that year when there was a book fair, and the school was a sensation, so how to meet this batch of pictures and books with everyone, in the way of exhibitions, put them in the window, open the window every day, open a new page and put it away, close the window, we "hummed" to see, it turned out that this was Van Donggen, this is Bauner, and then in the afternoon I took the easel to copy, and the next day I turned a new page, wow, This is who who, that's how we came into contact with the history of contemporary art in the West. In 1988, with yearning and anxiety, Xu Jiang embarked on a study abroad journey at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Germany. If the local team that went to the mountains and went to the countryside made Xu Jiang know his homeland better, then this time the foreign team in the West brought him a life and spiritual reason, and the unforgettable distance made Xu Jiang have another kind of closeness to his homeland.

I studied there in 1988 and 1989, when there was not much painting in the West, and today there is no painting, painting has become more and more declining, more installations, and at that time it was new media art that was in its embryonic state. So when we go to the West with a kind of painting skills and painting ideals, we have difficulties and problems, and our professors, he has an oriental imagination of China, and he thinks that you can either change or save your own original in China, because your thing, the original thing is very good, he can't write calligraphy, he uses his own shoelaces to make up his own calligraphy, so he thinks you should write calligraphy, you should paint Chinese painting, how do you paint our oil paintings, and this oil painting is our classical oil painting. In the midst of the ridicule of reality, life in a foreign land, and the separation of language, Xu Jiang began to turn his attention to other places and China. Because at that time, I was thinking, what to do, because it was very conceptual, one day there happened to be a person in that school who could play Chinese chess, and I played chess with him, and as a result, there were a lot of people around the side, watching this chess, they couldn't understand it, and one person said on the side, ah, oh my God, this is like God fiddling with people, ah, yes, I think this is, this is indeed a training ground, because compared with chess, Chinese chess has many very unique places, such as the handsome chess, The emperor and queen can go to the territory of the other party, and the commander of Chinese chess can only go in the Tianzi grid, and this consciousness of defending the territory is very obvious. There are no cannons in chess, but there are cannons in Chinese chess, and the horses in chess do not have feet, while Chinese chess horses have feet, and interpersonal relationships are particularly complicated. It was very interesting, it had a lot of cultural characteristics, so at that time I started to make a lot of works about chess. Xu Jiang tried to express the confrontation and dependence of Eastern and Western cultures with unpredictable scenes, but this fashionable cross-media experiment did not last long, and over time, his creation returned from spatial installation to flat painting, and the content of his works also changed from a competitive chessboard exercise to a city overlook, a process that Xu Jiang called the return of spiritual travelers.

In 2001, Xu Jiang became president of the China Academy of Art, and to many, the multi-tasking leader and scholar-painter seemed mysterious and heavy. However, in the interview, he emphasized that he actually has a rather interesting side, which may be seen from this special poster. In 2002, twenty years after graduation, Xu Jiang and his classmates reunited on the shores of West Lake. The classmates who didn't want to be good in the past now laugh and grudge each other, and everyone still hugs warmly when they didn't succeed in their relationship in the past, and then we made a T-shirt and printed all the photos we took when we entered the school on this T-shirt. There was a content in the party called "Old classmates tell the truth", so Xu Jiang's green past was brought up again. There are a lot of their own stories, because many of their own stories are even collective memories, for example, I and Mr. Shi Hui, you know that you are a lover, we fell in love from a Chinese class, Guo Moruo's "Phoenix Nirvana", there need to be two classmates with a man and a woman to recite, one is a phoenix, and the other is a phoenix, so everyone recommends, then the phoenix recommends himself, and the phoenix recommends Shi Hui.