interlocution
Q&A
China
Locked 2021.9.24
The revelation of beauty walks with it
/ to beautify people
"Schools should do something for society and bring beauty to society."
--Fan Di'an, President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts
/ In the united states peiyuan
"The highest state of an architecture is culture."
--He Jingtang, chief designer of the China Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo
/ Educate people with beauty
"Conceptual leadership and operational avant-garde bring students some imagination of the future."
--Ye Xiaogang, Chairman of the Chinese Musicians Association
Vol. 1
President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts
Fan Di'an, Chairman of the China Artists Association
In Beijing, as a golden sign of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the graduation season is regarded as an art festival both inside and outside the CAFA campus. Visiting the graduation exhibition has been regarded as an artistic journey by popular fans. Affected by the epidemic, the 2020 CAFA Graduation Exhibition had to be changed to online, which made many students and audiences feel deeply disappointed...
When the 2021 graduation exhibition arrived as scheduled, the works of 1311 graduates attracted countless lights, and the founder of caucus graduation season was Fan Di'an.
Van Di'an: The first three days of the graduation show were a very hot time period, and many of the students' works were subscribed to by collectors.
Wu Xiaoli: It is said that the price is not cheap.
Van Diean: Young students don't have much market experience. Overall, the price is cheap. It is important to let young students feel that their works are appreciated and collected, which will increase students' confidence. The exhibition of the graduates' works is an important node in his artistic path in life and is a collection of teaching achievements of art schools. But today, self-appreciation from within us is not enough. We must let our talent achievements and works get more social tests.
Through the exhibition of this graduation season, students of different majors and disciplines will form small groups to start a business. Now CAFA students do not graduate from single combat, often one is engaged in design, one is engaged in plastic arts, and even a humanities discipline, can write copywriting.
Wu Xiaoli: It is the prototype of a very complete small cultural and creative company.
Fan Di'an: Yes, this is actually a good boost for our college students to find employment and entrepreneurship. Today's entire teaching talent training, in the final analysis, is to cultivate people who can be used by society. They are able to display their youthful talents, but at the same time they can form a combination according to the needs of today's society. For schools, schools should try to build their own small ecology as much as possible. It is not only a cultivation of professional knowledge, but actually helps a person to develop more comprehensively in the stage of adolescent growth.
The Central Academy of Fine Arts should strive to cultivate people with beauty and beautify people, and make unremitting efforts to write a new chapter of Chinese art on the land of China.
——Fan Di'an delivered a speech at the 2021 Freshman Opening Ceremony
Wu Xiaoli: Injecting the power of beauty into characteristic villages is also a very important point for poverty alleviation. Because after that place is beautiful, many people may be willing to go.
Fan Di'an: In recent years, we have targeted education in Jianchuan County, Yunnan Province, to alleviate poverty. On the one hand, it helps some local cultural heritage, such as wood carving and Bai costumes, to sublimate. Let the local artisans have the ability to produce more products to enter the market, solve some of the problems of poverty, and play a guiding role in its rural construction. Today, China's social development must solve the academic and cultural problems in the fine arts, and how to use the creative ability of the arts to help the construction of a beautiful China.
Our nation, after standing up and getting rich, is now becoming stronger, and the next step is to reflect more "beauty." We artists, this team with the word "beauty" at the head of the word to do their best, this is an opportunity.
In today's China, in art, we should be able to appreciate the creations of others with tolerance and a broad mind, and we should not be satisfied with just taking and learning from them. It is very valuable to borrow art to tell a good Chinese story, and we in the entire Chinese art community must also think about this issue together.
Vol. 2
A local Chinese architect
Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering
He Jingtang, Chief Chief Architect of The Architectural Design and Research Institute of South China University of Technology
Some people say that architecture is solidified music, and music is flowing architecture. On the earth, there are no more buildings that can be connected with mountains and rivers, and those that can see the sun and the moon than those that exist beyond time.
In September 2021, the Mid-Autumn Festival, "Haixin Bridge Moon Viewing" became a popular scenic spot in Guangzhou, and this pedestrian bridge spanning the north and south of the Pearl River was newly promoted to a new landmark in Guangzhou after its opening three months ago. The leading designer of this project is he Jingtang, an old friend of "Q&A".
If everyone is their own future, the most authoritative builder, then He Jingtang's life building is inevitably designed later. He once joked that "thirty and standing", but he himself was "fifty and standing". But he also subscribes to the old adage that architects are a late-blooming profession.
He Jingtang: I came back from Beijing and did a great ideological struggle, can I not come back? I think that if I can stay in Beijing to live a well-off life and retire after working for more than ten years, it is also a way of life. But I decided to start from scratch. I came back on Youth Day in 1983, just on the third day of my return, there was a science museum in Shenzhen bidding for a project, my old leader asked me if I could do it, and my first reaction was: the opportunity came.
Twenty days later, the judges evaluated the bid in the afternoon of the same day and informed me at dusk that the bid had been won. I felt like the first shot of my life had been fired. Before the age of 45, there was not an article, there was not a work, there was no award, so I just came back and fired this shot, thinking that I could do a big job.
He Jingtang, chief designer of the China Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo
Speaking of the architect Pei, who was born in his own contemporary, He Jingtang commented: Pei is like an elegant ferryman, integrating the intricate interests and cultural differences between the East and the West like Tai Chi. Due to the different experiences of the times, China's local architects may face the limitations of their own creations.
Wu Xiaoli: You said that mature architectural designers are all late bloomers, why do you say that?
HE Jingtang: I admire I.M. Pei. From several of his works, such as the Fragrant Hills Hotel in Beijing and the Suzhou Museum, we can see a lot of oriental aesthetic genes in it. Moreover, I.M. Pei is one of the representative figures of modernism, he has always been in tune with the times, and will not engage in some concrete, trivial, retro things.
Works by I.M. Pei Suzhou Museum
I also thought that I should take the path of preserving China's own cultural genes while designing modernist architecture. Moreover, I especially like to do some cultural architecture, often it embodies a spirit. I hope that a person can exert positive energy, make a work that is used by people, and after watching it, his spirit can be improved, which is a kind of idea that I pursue.
Dachang County, Langfang City, Hebei Province, Dachang Nationalities Palace
Works by He Jingtang
Vol. 3/ The nature of the ear
Chairman of the Chinese Musicians Association
Dean of the School of Music, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
September 25 is the 140th anniversary of Lu Xun's birth, and the large-scale symphony "Lu Xun" created by Ye Xiaogang will be passionately performed at the Shaoxing Grand Theater. "Using musical language to tell Chinese stories well" is an important theme of Ye Xiaogang's music creation in recent years.
Wu Xiaoli: German classical music, American musical techniques, and Chinese classical music are the cornerstones of your creation, what do they bring to your creations?
Ye Xiaogang: In China's classical culture, on the one hand, it is to seek social unity and harmonious order, which is the ideal of Chinese. The "world's equality and cooperation" that we refer today, including the "Belt and Road Initiative", is inherited from classical Chinese culture.
On the other hand, Chinese folk music. I am very familiar with the musical traditions of dozens of ethnic groups in China, and these things constitute the aesthetic support of Chinese culture in my works. The structure of Chinese music is a combination of beginning and ending, and my musical structure cannot be found in any Western musical style, which is my unique advantage.
As for American musical techniques, I have studied in the United States and feel that American technology has its advantages. The orchestration of American music is very brilliant, and the theater effect of contemporary Works in the United States is good, and the music cannot be monolithic, it must all be together.
German classical music is the spirit. Wagner's music is poison, Beethoven's music is constantly enterprising, and the power of his spirit has always been there. My music has the shadow of German music, but my appearance is a Chinese shell, and the way of expression is the beauty of the United States, and I will be moved every minute.
If you don't look in all directions,
That's "blind confidence."
Wu Xiaoli: You have been immersed in Chinese music education for a long time, and you have seen the growth of Chinese music, which is no less than the international level.
Ye Xiaogang: Because I did China's first very famous and important Beijing Modern Music Festival, I did the Music Festival of Qingdao Ocean International Music Festival, the Art Festival of the Greater Bay Area, and the Shenzhen "Belt and Road" International Music Festival. That's how this confidence comes from. If you don't look around and don't know all the situations in the world, your self-confidence is "blind confidence."
Collecting wind, investigating... Ye Xiaogang's footprints over the years have spread all over China. He rejects the creation of "floating on it", but needs to be immersed in the scene, deeply understand the land, and then use his works to impress the world and bring beauty into life.
Ye Xiaogang: When I talked about "cultural poverty alleviation" when I proposed the CPPCC, it is useless to just say it, what is "grounded gas"? It is necessary to go down to the grass-roots level, because looking at flowers cannot solve practical problems. I have been to the hardest place, mountain people, children get up at four o'clock in the morning, light torches and walk more than ten kilometers, from the mountain to the bottom of the mountain in a primary school where even the tables and chairs are not complete, eat a potato at noon, how can this kind of place be seen abroad? This is a very different impact on people's hearts. I have not personally stayed in those places in northern Shaanxi, how can I write about China profoundly?
As an artist of my contemporaries, I have the responsibility to express these things and write about some of the beauty of China. In this way, I may have the opportunity to do a little more for the nation.
For more highlights, please tune in:
Premiered on September 24, 2021:
Q&A Shenzhou Homecoming Season - Walking with beauty
Choreographer: Zhang Heng, Su Jenny
Editor: Ma Jin