"Taking poetry as the soul and books as the bone" is a significant feature of Fan Zeng's lifelong painting.
The deep family heritage has allowed Fan Zeng to be immersed in poetry for a long time.
From it, he cultivated a deep poetic soul, and then swept into the depths of pen and ink, leaving a reputation of "a thousand pieces of paper".
Fan Zeng always firmly believed that only through years of hard work can he become a generation of masters.
He has also always been convinced, "The more you think about money, the farther money is from you."
Therefore, while many painters were at a loss, Fan Zeng had found his way out.
"Return to the classics, back to nature" is the path he found for himself.
But what was expected, later, he was the first to get off the right track and enter the whirlpool of controversy.
"Assembly line painting" has made his career roll down several steps in succession.
After the work was eliminated by the market, the only thing he could do was to find his original path, once a piece of paper, was it confusing his eyes?
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > Fan Zeng's growth path</h1>
"I know Fan zeng has a trilogy. The first step is to think that he is just a painter, the second step is to think that he is a national painter, and the third step is to think that he is a thinker. In all three respects, he has a superb and profound attainment."
The master of oriental studies, Ji Xianlin, said so.
Fan zeng was born into a family of poets that lasted for 450 years, and this identity allowed him to achieve a social network of "talking and laughing, and coming and going with five hundred dings".
In front of him, a more smooth artistic path has been paved since then.
The year Fan was born, it was 1938.
The long river of history is flowing in this difficult time, and the clarion call of the all-out war of resistance has also given the Chinese people the courage to fight again.
And Fan Zeng's family did not stop the idea of letting this newborn child embark on the road to learning.
At the age of 4, Fan Zeng began his pursuit of education.
Since then, it has made great strides and won many school awards.
While other peers were still confused about their studies and future, 13-year-old Fan Zeng had already achieved his first major achievement.
The title of "one of the three small painters in Nantong" gave the young Fan Zeng the courage to continue to bury his head in hard work.
In the fall of 1955, at the age of 17, Fan zeng traveled north from his hometown of Nantong to Nankai University in Tianjin to study.
Since then, through Fan Zeng, "Nantong" and "Nankai" have achieved a magical connection.
Even two years later, Fan Zeng left Nankai University and transferred to the Central Academy of Fine Arts to study, which did not affect his concern for nankai and the teachers and students of his alma mater.
His friendship with Nankai began in 1955 and has not been broken since.
He thought that Nankai was already an inseparable existence in his life. All his honors will have a part of Nankai.
And then he did.
After 1980, Fan Zeng, who was already famous all over the world, accepted the invitation of his alma mater, Nankai University, and returned to this home where he had been away for a long time.
He plunged headlong into the preparation of the Department of Oriental Art, the cultivation of artistic talents and the establishment of academic funds.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > Fan Zeng's path to fame</h1>
"Obsessed with painting, able to book." Even as a rhetoric, quite lyrical. Good reading history, a little through the changes of ancient and modern. ”
This is Fan Zeng's twenty-four-word self-evaluation of himself.
Since the Ming and Qing dynasties, most of the paintings Chinese have been based on gongbi.
Fan Zeng, on the other hand, did the opposite, learning the technique of stick figure splashing ink since liang kai in the Southern Song Dynasty.
What is rare is that on this basis, he has his own unique style.
Fan once painted characters, which can be described as conveying gods.
Although this is the result of the teachings of famous teachers, it is also due to his quick thinking.
After studying Chinese painting, Fan zeng always believed that the profound understanding of Chinese philosophers, the vast literary thoughts of historians, and the yimai chapters of poets were the source of living water of Chinese painting.
Therefore, when he painted, he always intentionally integrated the "poems, books, and paintings" of ancient China, so that they showed awe-inspiring wind and bone in the flexible emotions.
These gradually became the hallmarks of his paintings.
And the pen and ink can get Fan Zeng's charm, but also because of his perseverance and hard work.
He has not changed his habit of immersing himself in reading in the past, and still spends a lot of time wandering through thousands of books.
He also worked tirelessly, using years and months of hard work to realize the depiction of what he thought and understood in his heart.
He admitted that "people are vulgar, their personality is not high, and their writing must be vulgar, which is not covered up in any way."
He also said, "If a person paints and thinks about how to go to the auction house every day, how to sell his words higher, the more you think about this, the farther the money will be from you."
So he put nearly 80,000 volumes of books in his study.
Even picking out one percent of the must-see from it is enough for him to look at it for 30 years.
He wanted to have a clear understanding of history, culture, the world, the East, in order to get rid of the status of low-level craftsmen.
He also had to use years of hard work to achieve his master and the name of everyone.
Therefore, every morning from 5 o'clock to 7 o'clock, the Fan family's study can always turn on a lamp, and the Fan family's desk is also standing or sitting on a figure from young to old.
These long-term habits have enabled Fan to achieve the transformation from quantitative change to qualitative change in the accumulation of years and months.
He gradually had a lot of achievements.
"A painter with the best Chinese heritage and learning of contemporary painters", "a painter with the largest number of admirers in contemporary times", "one of the painters with the highest price of calligraphy and painting in the field of calligraphy and painting", "the painter who pays the most taxes among contemporary painters", etc., all of which have made his reputation more and more popular in the field of Chinese painting.
More and more people are proud to have his calligraphy and paintings.
Fan Zeng even auctioned off one work after another for sky-high prices ranging from 4.14 million yuan to 7.82 million yuan.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > Fan Zeng's bumpy road</h1>
But just as there must be shadows under the light.
Fan Zeng enjoyed a great reputation, but he was bound to encounter challenges from others.
In May 2010, Shanghai Wen Wei Po published an article titled "Artists Still Have to Speak Based on Works", criticizing some domestic painters who did not pay attention to artistic quality, copied a large number of their own works, and carried out "assembly line operations".
Although the whole article did not name names, after seeing that the author signed "Guo Qingxiang", anyone seemed to point directly to Fan Zeng.
The origin of fan's conflict with Guo Qingxiang dates back to a painting and calligraphy deal in 1995.
At that time, Fan had intended to buy a property in France, but he was too shy to interrupt the plan.
In desperation, he invited Mi Jingyang, the business manager of Rongbaozhai who had cooperated for many years, and asked him to help him find a suitable buyer of calligraphy and painting.
Mi Jingyang found Guo Qingxiang, a famous collector at the time, and sold a large order covering 200 Chinese paintings and 100 calligraphy for Fan Zeng, and agreed on a price of 1,000 yuan.
Less than a month after the matter was decided, Guo Qingxiang received 100 works from Fan Zeng.
This made him surprised and determined to go to the scene to observe.
Guo Qingxiang walked into Fan Zeng's studio and looked at the painting wall covered with rice paper for the first time.
3 square feet of rice paper, piece by sheet, is neatly adsorbed on the painting wall with iron absorbent stones.
The paintings on the rice paper are basically similar themes composed of several character shapes back and forth.
This made Guo Qingxiang feel a sense of dissatisfaction at the same time.
He thought that the repetitive theme of the work would definitely affect his later resale and be detrimental to his marketing.
Therefore, he proposed to replace some of the paintings several times during the period, but he still exchanged them for works with similar themes.
It was not until 1997 that Rong Baozhai held an auction in Dalian that Guo Qingxiang took advantage of the situation to consign the purchased Fan Zeng's works.
In the end, he sold the batch of works for tens of thousands of yuan.
Although there are many benefits from this, Guo Qingxiang always believes that "this kind of programmed and modeled production process is neither the creation of an artist nor the level of an artist." ”
Therefore, in May 2010, he implicitly sent Fan Zeng to the criticism list of Wen Wei Po with a literary criticism article.
Guo Qingxiang
Guo Qingxiang wrote in the article, "This famous artist can actually be mediocre."
"His Chinese paintings of figures are nothing more than 'amplification of comic strips'. The ancients he painted and painted, such as Laozi, Qu Yuan, Xie Lingyun, Su Dongpo, Zhong Kui, Li Shizhen, etc., all had things like photocopied things."
He also wrote, "His calligraphy is 'impossible to have a book, not enough for the style', pretentious, quite tacky. His poems not only have faults with their rhythms, but in terms of content, many of them are pretentious for self-boasting, which is not enough to hang their teeth."
In this regard, Fan once felt insulted and denigrated.
He soon took Guo Qingxiang to court on charges of violating the right to reputation.
Guo Qingxiang also received a summons from the Changping District People's Court in Beijing in October.
The judgment of the Changping District People's Court in Beijing was issued in June 2011.
In the judgment, Guo Qingxiang lost the case, not only to apologize in writing to Fan Zeng, but also to compensate Fan Zeng for mental damage of 70,000 yuan.
Guo Qingxiang was not satisfied with the verdict and subsequently appealed to the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court.
However, in the end, the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court rejected the appeal in the second instance and upheld the original judgment.
However, this time, the court also confirmed the fact that the plaintiff Fan Zeng "streamlined" painting and rejected the plaintiff Fan Zeng's other litigation claims.
In this way, although Guo Qingxiang lost the case, he stood on the commanding heights of public opinion.
Although Fan Zeng won the lawsuit and received compensation, he could not escape the condemnation of "assembly line painting".
Affected by this storm, Fan Zeng's status and prestige in the Chinese painting industry have also been greatly affected.
Since then, the sales of his new works have suffered setbacks.
Fan Zeng subsequently launched 14 works in Beijing Rongbaoqiu and Beijing Kuangshi, only 7 of which were auctioned, reaching a 50% streaming rate, and later his works were lost in the Yunnan collection, once reaching a 100% streaming rate.
This has surprised countless people who pay attention to the follow-up.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > Fan Zeng's climbing path</h1>
The reason why the "assembly line painting" incident broke out can give Fan Zeng such a big blow is because it hit the independence and uniqueness of creation.
A painter who always copies others or repeats his previous works will inevitably make his works lose their due brilliance and become a "fake" after copying and pasting.
Fan Zeng's behavior once made him deviate from the original intention of artistic creation and become a printing machine for commercial creation.
It also made his previous fame appear an unshakable stain.
In an earlier interview, the moderator asked Fan Zeng, "You are the United Nations Special Cultural Adviser, so where is this adviser in particular?" ”
Fan once replied that "where is it special, that is, less, less is special."
But later he forgot this principle that "things are scarce and expensive".
Fan Zeng painted with an assembly line, which gave his precious works a heaviest blow, and also gave a wake-up call to the increasingly impetuous Chinese painting community.
Countless artists began to reflect on their own mannerisms and rethink their original intentions.
But these public opinions from the public, in the end, only let Fan Zeng fall on the originally smooth artistic road.
It did not deprive him of the right to get back on his feet.
In 2010, at the donation ceremony of the Yushu earthquake-stricken area, Fan Zeng appeared again.
Fan zeng donated 10 million yuan to the people in the disaster area, which accelerated the progress of reconstruction in the disaster area and also accelerated the process of resettlement of the people in the disaster area.
In the years that followed, he continued to do so.
From 1998 to 2020, Fan Zeng donated a total of 6 billion yuan worth of calligraphy and paintings to the state and the government, making outstanding contributions in many aspects.
And this generosity and dedication in the face of major national events and national righteousness has also saved his reputation to a certain extent.
More people gradually took their eyes off his original stain and focused on his true strength and transformation.
In 2013, Fan was invited to participate in the interview of the second issue of "China Master Road", with the theme of "Tianxingjian, Gentleman with Self-Improvement" throughout the interview process.
At the end of the interview, the host asked him, "Mr. Fan, what are you doing at the moment?" ”
Fan Zenghui said, "At present, I am holding a series of lectures on traditional Chinese studies, which are about 30 lectures, and now I have given 7 lectures."
He said, "I want people to know that Guoxue is not only Confucianism, but also not only Confucius. In traditional Chinese studies, there are Confucians, Legalists, Famous Scholars, Mo Scholars, Taoists, Yin and Yang Families, BingJia, Peasant Families, Miscellaneous Families, and Zongheng Families, and this knowledge is very rich. ”
Since then, at the age of more than 70 years old, he has also tirelessly promoted Chinese studies to the world, only to enhance national self-confidence and make Chinese culture widespread in the world.
And this is also his concern and dedication to the inheritance of Chinese culture.
At the same time, he also worked tirelessly, piling up works taller than he was.
Among them, there are more than 160 kinds of published works, such as painting collections, calligraphy collections, poetry collections, prose collections, art theories, and speech collections.
The 130 of them are in the collection of the National Library of China for the world to learn and borrow.
In addition to devoting himself to the inheritance of traditional Chinese studies, Fan Zeng has gradually achieved higher achievements in his "old line" - calligraphy and painting creation.
As of 2021, Chinese painting artist Fan Zeng has been listed on the "Hurun Chinese Art List" for 12 consecutive years.
The Hurun China Art List is a list of the top 100 living Chinese "national treasure" artists ranked according to the total turnover of works in the public auction market in that year.
Therefore, it has always ignored controversies and only takes the turnover of works as the only evaluation criterion.
This allowed Fan Zeng not to be too affected by the "assembly line painting" controversy in 2010.
On the contrary, with the help of public opinion, Fan has achieved a higher value in the debate and obtained a larger turnover of works.
Fan Zeng first topped the Hurun Chinese Art List in 2011, when he received the greatest resistance.
This year, although the sales of his new works were resisted to a certain extent, it did not affect the buyers who originally acquired his works to achieve a new round of high-priced resales.
In 2012, Fan Zeng also won the top spot in the "Hurun Chinese Art List" again with the highest turnover of works.
Since then, from 2013 to 2020, Fan zeng's ranking in the "Hurun Chinese Art List" has fluctuated from time to time, but it has basically stabilized in the top five of the list.
This is undoubtedly a proof of his status and strength in the chinese painting industry.
Unfortunately, the release of the "Hurun China Art List" in June 2021 broke his previous record.
For the first time in 12 years, the 83-year-old Chinese painter fell out of the top five of the list, ranking 6th in the "Hurun Chinese Art List" with a turnover of 140 million yuan.
Chinese artists ahead of him are Cui Ruzhuo, 77, Zeng Fanzhi, 57, Zhou Chunya, 66, Liu Ye, 57, and Zhang Xiaogang, 63.
Behind him are Liu Xiaodong, 58, Zhu Yankui, 89, Jia Aili, 42, and Mao Yan, 53.
Among them, Cui Ruzhuo maintained the same ranking as last year, Liu Ye and Fan zeng dropped a ranking, and everyone else got a ranking higher than last year.
But as the only artist in his 80s to be on the "Hurun Chinese Art List" and ranked first, Fan Zeng has also achieved achievements that many people can't hope to achieve.