Introduction: On the afternoon of September 19, 2021, the "Book of the Earth, Not Only Blue" Qiandongnan Public Art Action Conference and "Public Art and Rural Revitalization" Forum was held at the Beijing 751 Ronglin Center. The forum was jointly sponsored by China Net Art China and Art and Literature, and scholars and experts from the fields of rural construction, intangible cultural heritage, art, design, cultural creation and other fields launched a dialogue on the theme of "public art and rural revitalization", in order to bring more experience and enlightenment to the current rural revitalization practice.
Fang Lili, Honorary Director of the Institute of Art Studies of the China Academy of Arts and Distinguished Chief Professor of the School of Arts of Southeast University, first delivered a keynote speech. In her title "The Philosophical Foundations of the East in Art Township Construction", she put forward several major phenomena and problems in the field of art rural construction in recent years, such as why are the hottest countries for art rural construction in Japan and China? What are the common aesthetic philosophical foundations of these two countries? How is China's art township building formed and developed, what is the driving force behind it, and how should the future road of art township construction be taken? The following is the full text of Fang Lili's keynote speech.
Former Director of Art Anthropology of China Academy of Arts, Distinguished Principal Professor of School of Art, Southeast University, Director of Institute of Anthropology and Sociology of Art
1. Opening remarks
Hello guests, friends! I felt that her first speech was like a poem, the language was very beautiful, and the second speech was like a declaration, very powerful! The third paragraph is an exhaustive and exciting plan. I've seen a lot of cases and I think this is probably one of the best. First of all, hats off to this team of theirs!
Just now she said a sentence that made me very moved, "Rural revitalization is not a rural affair, it is a matter for each and every one of us", which may be related to the future development of the whole China. Why? I am a student of Mr. Fei Xiaotong, who wrote a book called "Native China", but where will our native China go today? This is a very worthy question to ponder, so our artistic village is not in the past nor just in the present, but in the future.
Qiandongnan Region Image source: Yiwenli
What kind of China will china be in the future? I believe that China will only have a future in the future if it moves towards green and sustainable development. Some people think that China's future is urban-rural China, urban-rural integration, but I think that China's future should be ecological China, in the development of modernization, the city has developed to the extreme, encountered bottlenecks. In the future, only the countryside can break this bottleneck, and there is a code of Chinese civilization in the countryside, that is, the gene of Chinese culture.
The cultural genes of different countries will determine different development choices, the cultural genes of the West are city-state states, so it later developed into an industrialized, commercialized modern civilization, and China's cultural genes are rural countries, if the future of mankind is ecological civilization (the ecological civilization here expresses not only the relationship between man and nature, but also the relationship between people, including the relationship between people and society, including the relationship between countries and countries, will be combined into a new type of civilization with organic relations), The future of this development is likely to be the first practice in China, because the networked structural method of miniaturization, decentralization and diversification of ecological civilization closest to the countryside is not the same as the intensification, standardization and scale of cities. Therefore, our rural revitalization today may be to give us the opportunity to find a green, sustainable development of the new human future prospects, therefore, rural revitalization is not a rural matter, the second is a matter for each of us, because it is related to China's future development prospects, and may even be the future development prospects of mankind.
Wang Sha just said a very good sentence, this sentence is: "we humble learning", the anthropology I study is a discipline of humble learning, which learns from different cultures, learns from different groups of people, the most important sentence I teach students is "humble learning", when we enter a new cultural context, you do not understand that culture, in the countryside, even if it is an illiterate person, he is also the master of his culture, you have to learn from him, You can't be arrogant enough to think that if you are an intellectual, you can go to the cultural systems of different places in your own way to spread some self-righteous culture. In addition to our common culture, many villages and ethnic minorities we face also have a lot of local knowledge that we are not familiar with, and our rural revitalization is to excavate these precious local knowledge for our use today. Of course, these are only now the attention of the state, which is generally called intangible cultural heritage, so in the revitalization of the countryside, it also involves how we understand intangible cultural heritage and how to learn from intangible cultural heritage.
Second, the question is raised and the different aesthetic attitudes in Eastern and Western philosophies
The following topic I am talking about is "The Foundation of Oriental Philosophy in the Construction of Art Township", philosophy is the world view, is the value, aesthetics is actually a choice in philosophical values, what we like, what we love, etc., are related to our value orientation, and our world view, if we can not solve the value, can not solve the world view, we do not know what is beauty, so we want to know what is beauty, the first thing to solve is a philosophical problem.
So in today's speech, the first question I want to ask is: Why are the hottest countries for art village building japan and China, and why? What are the common philosophical foundations of their cultures? Many contemporary philosophical and scientific problems originated from the West, but the art of rural construction is not, they were initiated by Japan and China, why is this so? What are the types of rural construction in Japan, the types of Japanese and Chinese are comparable, and how is China's artistic rural construction formed? What are the categories? Who is actively pushing? Why would I, as an anthropologist, care and discuss this question, and what should be the future path of art rural construction?
First of all, I will briefly distinguish between the attitude towards beauty in Western philosophy and Eastern philosophy. In the West, philosophy is beauty is non-utilitarian, because non-utilitarian is unnatural, it is to be separated from life, therefore, it is necessary to isolate the artwork from social life, put it in art galleries, concert halls, listen, gaze and contemplate, its spirit and nature to maintain a certain distance, through subjective and objective distinction and opposition, to reflect and criticize society, so it is a tool that has a critical and transformative nature of society. In eastern philosophy, beauty is use, beauty is life, beauty is poetry, beauty is realm, life and social order norms are all in it, which is the unity of heaven and man, the unity of subjectivity and objectivity, and the separation of spirit and nature. To sum up: the aesthetic experience of the West: mainly the variation of human spiritual aspects, the pursuit of the enlightenment of individual consciousness awakening, so it is biased towards "the opportunity of artistic sense". The aesthetic experience of the East: mainly accepting the variation from the natural experience, its "natural sense of opportunity" occupies a dominant position.
It is precisely this different attitude towards art that has given rise to the behavior of art villages such as Japan and China.
Japanese Echigo wife has a land art festival Image source: Fang Lili
Third, several types of japanese rural construction
Japan entered modernization earlier than China, so it also encountered the problem of how to revitalize the countryside in modernization earlier, and also tried the practice of art rural construction earlier. It is divided into stages, that is, the types of art rural construction in different time periods are different. (1) The period of poverty alleviation and strong country (1961-1975) was an art township based on the revival of traditional handicrafts.
(2) The period of protection and revitalization (1975-2000) was a creative action for the design of agricultural products in the local landscape industry and closely coordinated with it, when the famous "One Village, One Product Movement" was launched, which successfully activated the countryside with "independent self-reliance" and "creative kung fu", and quickly promoted it to the whole country. 3. Activities of this type of creation (2000-present) are often titled art festivals, biennials, and triennials, and have since been collectively referred to as "art projects" or "local art". Local governments cooperate with artists to integrate culture and art as a docking with the outside world, integrate and utilize agriculture, landscape, industry, and information resources, and realize the activation of local natural resources and human resources.
The Japanese regional art project is not a simple imitation of Western public art and participatory art. In addition to strategically choosing conceptual approaches that can be used for themselves, they are working to shape a "Japanese-type" model of contemporary art that can perpetuate local aesthetic traditions and meet the needs of social reality.
Local art projects in Japan are defined as art festivals with specific regional names, and are a new type of art derived from "modern art" . Compared with participatory art in European and American societies, "not showing political and sharp social criticism" is its biggest feature.
The value proposition of the "Japanese-type" art project is "to create new life and life value." "Festivals" and "conciliatory views" are the driving forces behind the creation of the opposite sex by Japanese-type local art projects. The philosopher Tsurumi Shunsuke once proposed the concept of "limited boundaries" (1956), which refers to a vast field on the dividing line between art and life, which is not created by specialized artists, but by non-professional artists and can be enjoyed by the public. Such as folk songs, potted plants, festivals and other art that takes daily life as the stage, and the art that constantly surges, bursts and deforms in people's hearts is a limited art.
At present, japan's local art projects are named "art festivals", which can be regarded as a theoretical projection of limited art and a traditional inheritance of the local value of "beauty and use as one". The goal of action of the art festival is not "for society" or "for art", but to create another daily sexual act in daily life that prepares for "non-daily celebrations".
The above part of the information about Japan's art village construction comes from the lecture recording of Zhang Ying, a teacher at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, and I would like to express my gratitude here.
Fourth, the background and origin of the emergence of Chinese art township construction
(I) The country's major policies: In 2005, the Fifth Plenary Session of the Sixteenth Central Committee proposed "building a new socialist countryside", and in the report of the 19th National Congress in 2017, "rural revitalization" became a national strategy; in 2021, the "No. 1 Document of the Central Committee" once again emphasized that it is necessary to "comprehensively promote rural revitalization", which means that rural construction is not a stopgap measure, but a long-term and stable major policy of the country.
(2) A new way of presenting contemporary art: Avant-garde art unremittingly rebels against tradition, innovates for the sake of innovation, and individualizes for the sake of individuality, and ultimately exhausts the internal motivation of rebellion. This internal crisis has prompted contemporary art to step out of the ivory tower, and new artistic concepts and artistic practices such as "public art" and "land art" have emerged. In a sense, "art township construction" is actually "public art" going to the countryside, which can also be said to be a subtype of "land art".
(III) Reconstruction and utilization of traditional culture: China has an extremely deep accumulation of agricultural civilization, and although contemporary rural society has been greatly impacted and destroyed, it still retains a large number of traditional villages with unique cultural qualities, which provides an indispensable social and cultural space for "art township construction". In the modern city, those abandoned industrial heritage sites have been transformed into cultural and artistic spaces, becoming a model of the combination of classical and modern. Following this logic, artists turned their attention from the city to the traditional villages.
(IV) The hardware facilities of contemporary society, the emergence of high-speed rail, highways, and networks have made the countryside no longer distant and remote, and provided a new stage for the activities of artists.
Therefore, the emergence of art township construction and social transformation and scientific progress also have a lot to do with, the emergence of high-speed rail, highways, networks so that the countryside is no longer far away, so that the countryside is no longer remote, today we have the network can become where I am, the center is where, you bring your own traffic, so the famous artists to the countryside is still in the city, still in the center of the world, and thus for artists to be active in the countryside to provide new possibilities, so that it can become the stage of the artist's activities. It is of great significance for artists to appear in the countryside, because artists follow the cultural centers and fashion centers, and wherever they go, they will become cultural places, fashion places, which is what the countryside needs most today.
Five, the four different types of Chinese art township construction
The biggest difference between China's social development and Japan's social development is that we are not a developed society, after the reform and development of a short period of forty years, after a short period of forty years, after the completion of the History of the West for one or two hundred years, Mr. Fei Xiaotong summarized it as "three levels and two jumps", that is, there are some local industrial societies have not yet had time to enter, and the post-industrial society has come, so the different stages of Japan's art rural construction model are happening side by side in today's China. Below I roughly divide it into four types.
Xucun, Shanxi Image source: Fang Lili
Gansu Shijiezi Village Image source: Fang Lili
Jingmaishan, Yunnan Image source: Fang Lili
Guangdong Qingtian Village Image source: Fang Lili
(1) Contemporary art going to the countryside
Representative projects: 1. Kuwa-yan's Xucun Plan: Holding a large-scale art festival in the countryside, viewing the countryside as a space for contemporary art activities, has some similarities with Japan's "art festival".
2. Jin Le's Shijiezi Art Museum: Place contemporary art in the village, turn the village into a contemporary art museum, turn the villagers into contemporary artists, and hold contemporary art activities in the village regularly.
(2) Restore the rural and cultural ecology as a whole and rebuild the local landscape type
Representative projects: 1. Quyan's Qingtian Plan, etc. Later, the "Qingtian Paradigm" made by Qu Yan was to use local traditions from all aspects of history, economy, beliefs, customs, nature, environment, farming, folk life, etc., and then connect with the times to form new cultural values and social ecology, and then rebuild the rural community society.
2. Zuo Jing's Bishan Plan and Jingmai Mountain Cultural Protection have similarities with Quyan's Qingtian Plan, but more emphasis is placed on landscape reconstruction and handicraft revival.
(3) Introduce new villagers through "art township construction", and attract artists and urban people to settle in the countryside and build a joint construction type
Representative projects: 1. Lin Zhenglu's Fujian Pingnan Project solves the problems of active cooperation between artists, villagers' lives, interaction with foreign populations, and governments at all levels.
More than 60 outdoor people have settled here in Longtan Village, they have rented and restored the old houses here, recreated the rural landscape and social space, and the indigenous people of the village have returned to their hometowns, and the village has grown from 150 to more than 600 people.
2. Sichuan Mingyue Village Project: The main body of the project is the local government, introducing artists as new villagers in the village. With the arrival of artists, there have been ceramic art workshops, dyeing and weaving craft workshops, and distinctive houses, which constitute a virtuous circle of common development of art, tourism and agriculture.
I think that people are the most important, no one has no culture, only people are the carrier of culture, they are the porters of culture, and the flow of people is the flow of culture. If you want to revitalize the countryside, you must first introduce talents to the countryside? How to make rural people return to their hometowns? This is the most important work to be done at the moment, with talent there is creativity, with native locals, there is a local culture and story, even if we transform the countryside into a very dazzling, very beautiful place, but the local farmers can not go back, if there is no other outsiders to go in, how to solve this problem, should be the foundation of future rural revitalization.
Xinhua Village, Heqing, Yunnan Image source: Fang Lili
Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Image source: Fang Lili
(4) Attract artists with traditional craftsmanship to activate the local cultural industry type
Representative projects: 1. Xinhua Village, Heqing, Yunnan Province, attracts artists, designers and students from art academies at home and abroad with traditional metal craftsmanship, becoming the world's first silverware village.
2. Jingdezhen, with its traditional porcelain handicraft system and the vacant factory of ten state-owned porcelain factories, has attracted designers, artists and young students from home and abroad to be resident artists, open studios, and start businesses.
This is the type of local cultural industry that attracts artists with traditional craftsmanship, and the biggest difference between this type and the previous three types is that this type is not a project organized by man, but is naturally formed. For example, xinhua village of bai in Yunnan, village of bai people. Since ancient times, there have been many people and few land, farmers are busy planting land and farmers are idle to do crafts, in the past, local farmers had some skills to supplement pots and washbasins, and later after the reform and opening up, some farmers went to Tibet to learn the technology of metal craftsmanship, and began to provide gold and silver jewelry and silver pots for the surrounding ethnic minorities. Later, the handicrafts here attracted the attention of some art college students, they came here to do graduation works, but also brought new designs, this place gradually became famous, there are many designers, students in the past, let this village suddenly catch fire, used to be a very poor village, now this village annual income has reached a hundred million, completely out of poverty.
Another place is Jingdezhen, which I've been studying for 20 years. Jingdezhen is developing well today because many artists from all over the world "Jingdrift" go there to do art creation and open studios. There are designers and artists from Australia, Europe, the United States, South Korea, Japan and other countries. Through their participation, the traditional handicrafts of Jingdezhen were activated, and at the same time, the development of the entire city was promoted.
The Encounter between anthropologists and artists in the countryside
Finally, why anthropologists and artists meet in the countryside. This is one of the most critical topics I'm going to talk about today. When artists enter the scene of life from the art museum and intervene in social construction, including involving rural construction, anthropologists and artists meet, because anthropologists have always been on the scene of life, have always worked in the rural fields, and there is a very deep social background behind the encounter of these two academic teams, which represents the great transformation of society, this transformation is the era is calling for the alliance of high technology and high humanities, and the land of this alliance is in the countryside. Through this alliance humanity will find new modes of production and new ways of producing, which is a very exciting social practice.
In such a new social practice, the style of life began to be transformed into the style of art, the style of art also began to transform into the style of life, and the combination of beauty made mankind enter an era of aesthetic modernization, which is the work that our artists can participate in.
But the art of rural construction creates not only art, but a meaningful artistic life. It reveals a completely new philosophical value system, but its roots lead to traditional Eastern philosophical thought. Therefore, this is a new experimental field that arises in the Eastern context and in Eastern philosophy,
In this experimental field, it is not only art, but also culture and values, including the reconstruction and reorganization of production methods and lifestyles. Therefore, this is also a new cultural movement, which constructs a cultural discourse space, and art is only a carrier and symbol. Especially in the discursive arena of pluralism and differences in culture, anthropologists have a say, so anthropology and contemporary art have become an important alliance to explore the many possibilities for the future development of art in the countryside, and for this reason, the establishment of art township has become one of the important topics of art anthropology.
China Art Village Construction Exhibition Image source: Fang Lili
2019 China Art Village Construction Forum Image source: Fang Lili
As a researcher of art anthropology, I began to pay attention to the issue of art rural construction in 2016, so the Institute of Art Anthropology of the China Academy of Arts as the organizer held the "First Art Intervention in Rural Construction" academic seminar in Beidaihe in cooperation with the local government, and since then I have planned and organized a seminar almost every year, and at the same time, with the China Academy of Art as the organizer, the "First Chinese Art Rural Construction Exhibition" was held at the Millennium Monument in 2019, and I was the curator. Qu Yan, Zuo Jing, Jin Le, three artists and practitioners of art township construction were invited to participate in the exhibition, the leaders of the China Academy of Arts, the leaders of the State Council Counselor's Office, the leaders of the Ministry of Agriculture and important scholars in the field of anthropology attended the opening ceremony.
I believe that China's rural revitalization is China's century-old pain, how we turn this hundred-year pain into a hundred years of motivation, and how to inherit and continue the academic achievements of the research and practice of the older generation on rural revitalization, this is worth our consideration. Therefore, I invited Mr. Fei's students, as well as the descendants of Mr. Fei Xiaotong and Mr. Liang Shuming to participate in the seminar. Under the impetus of artists, designers and anthropologists, China's art township construction has been carried out more deeply.
VII. Conclusion and Reflection
There is still room for further in-depth study of the work of artistic rural construction, and there will be many problems to be solved and discussed, such as scholars who have proposed that the restoration and construction of artists and architects in the "countryside" is often subject to the absolute will of personal aesthetic tastes, so that the process of reviving the countryside is often withdrawn from the rural reality or even unrelated to the countryside. This kind of aesthetic game that empties the rural area is nothing more than a part of the design of huge urban consumption.
As the earliest practitioner of Chinese art township architecture, Professor Qu Yan responded: he will try to reconstruct the culture of rural society in a "de-artistic" way, and "de-artistic" includes critical reflection on "art township construction", so as to eliminate "art township construction" that deviates from the cultural context of local society and the demands of the subject. Proposed: "De-artistic" art township construction is actually a multi-subject practice based on the restoration of contemporary Chinese vernacular culture, which is the overall practice of the "Trinity" of society, culture and perception.
My view is that we can "get rid of the artisticization of formalism", but we cannot "go to have the aesthetic context of Oriental philosophy", because aesthetics is not only a philosophy, but also a value concept, and the reason why China's art township construction has attracted attention is that it has a common place with the Japanese art township architecture, that is, it has the tendency of daily life in oriental aesthetic philosophy to artistically, and also has the aesthetic pursuit of traditional craft values. However, when Chinese contemporary artists carry out art rural construction, they start from the aesthetic conception of the East like Japanese artists, but more from the concept that art in Western contemporary art intervenes in society and art becomes a tool for transforming society. However, in China's civil society, there has been a trend of Chinese aesthetic return, in promoting the development of China's cultural economy in this regard, this trend is the artists who do art rural construction need to pay attention to, and this time the Qiandongnan Public Art Action is doing this exploration, hoping that it can continue.
Mr. Liang Shuming once believed that Western culture focused on solving the "problem of survival". But when the problem of survival is gone, humanity "will shift from the era of material problems to the era of man-to-man problems", and Chinese culture has an advantage in the era of man-to-man problems. Therefore, whether we can start from the art township construction, reconstruct China's rural values and activate these rural values in the form of art, and find a sustainable development path that is more in harmony with nature, harmony with people and society in the oriental aesthetic philosophy, may be a problem that we need to constantly think about in the construction of art townships.
The theme of the Book of Land project in Qiandongnan is public art action, which takes action as the key word, emphasizing not the work but the action and process, which is more in line with the concept of "beauty and use" in Eastern philosophy, if the Western people pay more attention to theoretical summary, the Eastern people pay more attention to the practical experience. There is no concept of an artist in ancient China, but almost all literati are artists, because what they pay the most attention to is "self-cultivation", in such a process, almost everyone can play chess, calligraphy and painting, they are the practitioners of art life, I think that in the future, at a higher level of social development, this may become a new pursuit for people to get all-round development.
As an anthropologist, what I hope most is that people will take the revitalization of the countryside as the entrance and the oriental aesthetic philosophy as the basis, and find a sustainable development path that can be more in harmony with nature, with people, and with society in the action of art. In short, such thinking and theory are still in progress, there is no conclusion, there is no model to say, because different local knowledge is not the same, but it is necessary to find a common philosophical basis and development concept, which needs to be continuously explored and improved.
(This article was compiled and revised on the basis of the keynote speech by Fang Lili, former director of art anthropology at the China Academy of Arts, distinguished chief professor of the School of Art of Southeast University, and director of the Institute of Art Anthropology and Sociology, and the article has been published with the authorization of Fang Lili herself.) The pictures in this article are provided by Yiwenli and Fang Lili)