The Lesson Before I Quit Chapter 17

I believe that New York has significantly subverted Michael Mu’s imagination of Western modern art. In the final stage of his writing, he was still trying to go further and more freely in the literary space without boundaries and non-ism, but I would like to say with certainty: in the final stage of his painting, he was far away from modernism.

The trouble is, how can he settle down his painting hobby?

The game that fascinates him is the two poles of things - or even multiple poles - and not necessarily "cosmopolitanism", let alone "East" or "West" (the plaque hanging in the memorial hall It's called "The Hall of Wodong and Huaixi", a purely Chinese literati expression). The first batch of figures in the New Literature and New Painting Movement generally regard new learning and old learning, vernacular and ancient Chinese, Western painting and Chinese painting... as two inherent ends, and they may choose one or the other, or switch successively. Michael Mu , may be the last case of this group. Looking at literature alone, his ability to control classical Chinese and vernacular Chinese is perfectly mature, but his talent, pleasure, and ambition occupy and erase the traces of both ends, turning them into his own two poles --- His literature Readers must agree: he is the one who wrote "Balon" and "Pseudo-Solomon", as well as the "Book of Songs" and countless haiku.

His likes and dislikes in painting (such as the several times I got angry with him) are not his likes and dislikes in literature (as evidenced by "Literary Memoirs"). He detests the realism of almost all paintings, but loves and respects realist literature (after counting various modern schools, he said that the future of literature may still be realism); he does not care about, and does not know much about surrealism. Painting, but he talks endlessly about surrealist literature. He loved and admired Leonardo da Vinci and Cézanne all his life, but he simply turned a blind eye to the countless painters whose names spanned more than four hundred years (if not to put it too seriously), but literature and poetry (since ancient Greece, "The Book of Songs") All the way down), as long as he has read it, he doesn't want to miss a book, but each has his own experience.

There are too few Western painters he likes, and he couldn't make the list mentioned above. Compared with Western literature and music, it took me a long time to realize that Michael Mu was not really obsessed with Western painting.