The Paper's reporter Huang Song
Walking through the streets and parks of Shanghai, urban sculpture tells and interprets the memory of the city, many artists who create sculptures for the city come from the Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute, Tang Shichu, who is nearly 80 years old, is one of them, the stainless steel abstract sculpture "Link" in the Pudong section of the Nanpu Bridge, the "Huang Xing Statue" in Huangxing Park, and the "Liu Haisu Statue" in front of the Liu Haisu Art Museum are all from his hands.
Since October 1, "Imprints of the Times - A Review of Tang Shichu's Sculpture Career for 60 Years" has been held at the Shanghai Oil Sculpture Academy Art Museum, and the exhibition has exhibited a total of 62 sculpture works and design drafts, as well as a large number of pictures and documents, which is the most comprehensive solo exhibition of sculptor Tang Shichu so far.
At the exhibition site, the sculpture is "Civilian Educator Tao Xingzhi"
Tang Shichu was born in 1942 in Guang'an, Sichuan. In 1960, he was admitted to the Sculpture Department of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1964, he was assigned to teach at the Shanghai Arts and Crafts School. In 1980, he was transferred to the Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Institute to engage in the overall planning and design of urban sculpture, and in 1986, he was transferred to the Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute, specializing in sculpture creation, and in the past 60 years of creative career. Tang Shichu created a large number of sculptures towering over public spaces in Shanghai and many cities across the country.
At the entrance of the Art Museum of the Oil Sculpture Institute, a statue of "Huang Xing" and the exhibition poster and the gray wall of the art museum constitute a quiet and powerful language, and the traces left by the sculpture knife on Huang Xing's shirt seem to make people feel the passion of the artist during sculpture.
Walking into the exhibition hall, it is a world of sculpture, and the small manuscripts, documents, picture materials, etc. of commemorative sculpture outline the artistic process of Tang Shichu, of which the ancient sculptures in Shanxi in 1965 have become a remarkable stroke.
The exhibition begins with a statue of Huang Xing at the entrance of the Shanghai Oil Sculpture Institute Art Museum
Learn oriental lines from Shanxi clay sculptures
Tang Shichu liked to draw since childhood, he drew a lot of blackboard newspapers for the school in his elementary school years, in 1954 he entered junior high school and began to learn about the Italian Renaissance, Greek classical architecture and sculpture in the art class, but as a generation under the influence of Soviet And Russian culture, Tang Shichu was particularly impressed by the Russian touring exhibition school and artists, and aspired to take the Riebin Academy of Fine Arts, for which he also did a series of basic training in painting, and wrote a letter to Professor Leshetnikov of the Repin Academy of Fine Arts to express his wishes, but he did not get his wish. After being admitted to the sculpture major of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, he traveled around most of China in his junior year, visited most of the famous ancient grottoes in China, and went to Shanxi for the first time.
Tang Shichu wrote a study during his time at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts
In 1964, after graduating from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, he was assigned to Shanghai, and entered the newly established Craft Art School to teach (at that time, the wood carving class and the jade carving class all involved sculpture), because there was no teaching material, Tang Shichu thought of ancient sculpture in Shanxi, so he applied for more than 300 yuan of funds from the school, and in the summer of 1965, he went to Shanxi with his colleague Dong Bi of the sculpture group, and copied four sculptures in Taiyuan Jinci Temple and Pingyao Shuanglin Temple.
Tang Shichu copied the male offering at Shuanglin Temple.
Recalling the one-and-a-half-month trip to Shanxi that year, Tang Shichu especially remembered the two Thousand Hands Guanyin of Shuanglin Temple and Datong Huayan Temple, and believed that the two Thousand Hands Guanyin of Yiming and Liao were plump and dignified, gentle and elegant, almost miraculous, and better than the Thousand Hands Guanyin of the Dazu Grottoes. Wandering in ancient Chinese sculpture, comparing the structure and light and shade of the Su school art learned before, the smooth and dense rhythm of the lines of ancient Chinese sculpture gave them a new understanding of sculpture.
Dong Bi's female provider on the side of the main hall
However, due to the limitations of the conditions, they copied 4 sculptures at Shuanglin Temple, including a male and female offering, an arhat statue in the Luohan Hall, and the face of Wei Da.
Tang Shichu copied the Shuanglin Temple Wei Donkey statue face
Statue of Wei Da of Shuanglin Temple, taken in 2018
Tang Shichu recalled to the "Surging News" reporter that at that time, the Jinci Temple was under the management of the Cultural Management Office, but the Shuanglin Temple had not yet received attention. They basically ate in their hometowns and lived on the desks of local schools, and after completing the sculpture copying, the villagers helped to beat wooden boxes and stuff straw and transport them back to Shanghai as teaching aids, but they were destroyed for historical reasons, and now only photos remain. In these photographs, we can see their dedication and passion for art in their early 20s at that time, as well as their thinking on the nationalization of modern sculpture. On the side of the portrait of Wei In the photo, you can see that Tang Shichu has consciously integrated the shape structure of the Su Pai into it, although Tang Shichu also admitted that this road of connecting China and the West did not go through, but from the information on the Tianlongshan Grottoes and other places at that time, it can be seen that he understands oriental art.
In the 1960s, Tang Shichu photographed the clothing pattern of the Statue of Tianlongshan Grottoes
A sculptural interest derived from literature
The most prominent position in this exhibition is placed one of Tang Shichu's masterpieces, "Ba Jin Statue", "Don't Tell Lies - A Tribute to Ba Jin in His Later Years". For every celebrity sculpture born in his own hands, there is Tang Shichu's own understanding of celebrities.
Exhibition scene, "Don't Tell a Lie - A Tribute to The Late Barkin", 1994
Ba Jin and Tang Shichu are both from Sichuan, and the young Tang Shichu has to pass by Ba Jin's ancestral house on his way out of school, and he has a special kindness to Ba Jin since he was a child. However, teenagers reading Ba Jin's "Home, Spring, Autumn" and "Fog, Rain, and Electricity" are difficult to really resonate because of their different concerns.
After the "Cultural Revolution", Ba Lao spent 8 years writing "Caprice", and when his thoughts were still imprisoned, he took the lead in picking up a pen and shouting to "tell the truth". This infected Tang Shichu and wanted to make a statue of Ba Jin in his later years. This sculpture was made in 1994, when Ba Jin rarely appeared in public due to physical reasons, and Tang Shichu's acquaintances provided him with a recent photo of Ba Lao, through which he speculated on the charm of Ba Lao and offered a tribute to Ba Jin.
At the exhibition site, Tang Shichu's "Kong Yiji", 1976
In fact, the understanding of literature made Tang Shichu plan to create a series of sculptures of literary figures very early. In 1976, Tang Shichu created the sculpture "Kong Yiji", and Mr. Lu Xun's pen was increasingly swallowed up in pedantic and numb, and the image was concretized in the sculpture, which is still alive more than 40 years ago.
Tang Shichu "Kong Yiji" Bronze et al. 1976
In fact, when doing "Kong Yiji", Tang Shichu was still teaching at the School of Arts and Crafts, and experienced the ups and downs of the times, during which he had done face sculptures and also worked in rural factories, but he always secretly created sculptures, and also worked with neighbors and sculptors to paint clay portraits of Mr. Yan Wenliang.
Sketches of Tang Shichu exhibited in the exhibition
At the end of 1979, Tang Shichu left the art school where he had worked for 16 years and was transferred to the Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Institute to work on urban sculpture. Until 1986, he entered the Shanghai Oil Sculpture Institute. He designed and created a series of urban sculptures such as "Marx, Engels" (collaborators Yu Jiyong and Zeng Lufu) for the Party School of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee of the Communist Party of China, and the large-scale stainless steel abstract sculpture "Link" standing next to the Nanpu Bridge in Pudong until his retirement in 2002.
Tang Shichu "Bond", Stainless Steel, 2000×2000cm, 1997 (Standing next to Nanpu Bridge, Pudong)
Sculpture stems from the understanding of the characters
After his retirement, Tang Shichu still had many portrait sculptures. Before tang shichu creates portrait sculpture, he will generally first deeply understand a person's experience and state of mind, constantly chew the soul of the object, find the traces of the heart through the appearance, and then grasp the image characteristics of the essence of the character, and finally shape the spiritual temperament of the object.
Tang Shichu, "Tao Xingzhi, Civilian Educator", Bronze, 90×90×200cm, 2009 (Collection of China Art Museum, Shanghai)
Among them, two pieces of "Tao Xingzhi, a Civilian Educator" that began to be created in 2007, were collected by the National Art Museum of China and the China Art Palace (Shanghai Art Museum), recalling the creation of "Tao Xingzhi, a Civilian Educator", and Tang Shichu also had a lot of feelings. At the beginning of the conception, Tang Shichu did not want the works to be duplicated with other Tao Xingzhi sculptures, and first thought of putting students into the sculptures, he chose the history of Tao Xingzhi's founding of Xiaozhuang Normal School on the outskirts of Nanjing, and designed the scene where Tao Xingzhi walked down from the slope and two rural schoolchildren surrounded him.
Just as the draft was gradually deepening, "a lady from Nanjing learned from the media that I was creating Tao Xingzhi and took the initiative to visit me in Shanghai, bringing many written books and materials about Tao Xingzhi. She was touched by the fact that the society has not forgotten these older generations of national elites, and I also feel the great responsibility on my shoulders. Tang Shichu said, "Later, I went to Nanjing to visit the Tao Xingzhi Memorial Hall that was converted into the original site of Xiaozhuang Normal School, and saw a large number of photos displayed in it, which became an important material for my formal creation." "The "Civilian Educator Tao Xingzhi" collected in Beijing and Shanghai is actually two versions, and the creation of Beijing is the first, because it belongs to the "art creation of major national historical themes" has been adjusted several times; the Shanghai version of the collection of the China Art Palace is more one-stop, becoming the more preferred version of the sculptor himself.
Tang Shichu created a sculpture of Liu Haisu
In 2018, Tang Shichu created the liu haisu statue that is now standing in front of the Liu Haisu Art Museum, as before, Tang Shichu will read a large number of documents related to it at the beginning of creation, in his heart, Liu Haisu in addition to the identity of the painter and the founder of modern art education, is also a "madman", in the initial design, in addition to the current big head shape, there is also a small draft of Liu Haisu's full body portrait sketched in Huangshan, but after looking at the venue, Tang Shichu finally used the version of the big head. In fact, this version also originates from a photograph of Liu Haisu's life in Huangshan in his later years, but slightly weakens the "crazy" part in the actual sculpture, so that it echoes with the art museum building.
Tang Shichu "Liu Haisu" Bronze Height 340cm 2018 (Standing at Shanghai Liu Haisu Art Museum)
From entering the Sculpture Department of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1960 until 2019, Tang Shichu has continuously published works, and through this exhibition, we can see the arduous exploration and persistent cultivation of a sculpture parent cultivated by New China for 60 years.
Tang Shichu, "Putting the Bottom of the Prison Through" Plaster 40×25×20cm, 1984
However, because many of Tang Shichu's sculptures stand in urban space, they can only be presented in the form of small manuscripts, clay sculptures or photographs in the exhibition. However, in addition to urban sculpture, the exhibition also presents many human bodies and abstract sculptures, which shows its solid basic skills and continuous innovation and attempts.
Exhibition site
In addition, "Remember Those Beautiful Eyes", created in 2003 to commemorate the national fight against SARS, reminds people of the present; in the same year, "Black Hole", created with the theme of mining disasters, expresses the artist's concern for social reality.
Tang Shichu, "Remember Those Beautiful Eyes", FRP 35×35cm, 2003 (Made to commemorate the national fight against SARS, Shanghai History Museum Collection)
This exhibition is one of the "Passing on the Torch - Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute Artist Series Exhibition" launched by Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute since 2011, which sorts out and excavates the internal academic tradition of Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute through case studies. So far, he has held solo exhibitions for 11 artists who have worked in the oil carving institute, including Chen Daotan, Gu Shiben, Zhou Jiahua, Eguijun, Fuhua, Zhang Yibo, Xia Baoyuan, Chen Gukui, Ren Lijun, Li Xiangyang, and Wan Futang. The exhibition is the 12th solo exhibition in the series and will run until October 23.
Editor-in-Charge: Ruoxi Chen
Proofreader: Liu Wei