The Lesson Before I Quit Chapter 14

The distinction between art colleges in the north and south of the Republic of China lasted for several generations. The elders were silent, and the disciples' private discussions were scattered among the young people who were just beginning to learn painting: When I was a child, I heard old students from Hangzhou Art College sneer when they talked about Xu Beihong, and old students from Peking Art College talked about Liu Haisu with even more scorn. ...In New York, when Chinese and Taiwanese painters living in the United States talked about Xu Beihong, they all criticized him harshly. They all respected Li Zhongsheng, the enlightener of abstract painting in the island. Li Zhongsheng also studied at Shanghai Art College in his early years.

After leaving school, Sun Michael Mu didn't care about his old classmates. Apart from his memories, he deliberately avoided the art world. I once asked him: How is Liu Haisu doing? "Yilao Shuantou." How about Yan Wenliang? "I'm honest." Where is Xu Beihong? He stopped smiling and said seriously: "It's misleading!" I like to hear the elders talk about the older elders, but what is surprising is that after more than half a century, except for Leonardo da Vinci and Cézanne, there are no rights and wrongs in art. Follow Sun Michael Mu all the way.

Yes. "All childish", but I read it all true. Xu Beihong and Lin Fengmian are no longer well known today, but over the past sixty years, their followers have indeed taken painting to a completely different direction. Xu Beihong need not go into detail. He is the founder of local realism. Although when I went to school in the north, Soviet-style paintings had already covered him. But in the future, when I heard Michael Mu ridiculing Courbet, I found that I was still a generation removed from Xu Beihong’s camp. successor. It took me a long time to understand: when Michael Mu walked around the Caravaggio or Courbet exhibition halls and then walked away, he was still the boy from the Jiangnan School in his heart.

Has anyone sorted out the influence of Lin Fengmian (the forgotten Wu Dayu and the devalued Liu Haisu should be added)? If the art school had not changed its name, had not converted to religion, and had not suffered the changes of the 1950s, an artistic outlook different from Soviet socialist realism would have bid farewell to nineteenth-century realism, continued post-Impressionism, and led to early modern Europe. Doctrine --- was possible in China sixty years ago, just as it was in the United States, Japan, and the early Soviet Union.

The following names have never been taken seriously by our art world: Zao Wou-Ki, Chu Teh-Chun, Ting Xiongquan, Ding Yanyong... and Li Zhongsheng (including a large group of abstract painters who studied abroad from Taiwan, China in the 1970s led by him) believer). In any case, these painters practiced minimally modern painting outside the territory. The little heretic on this side is Wu Guanzhong. Although his understanding of "form" was narrow and outdated, the "Cultural Revolution" was just coming to an end, which was why he rejected the dogma of "content determines form" and shouted "form determines content"---In short, in Before this group of people, it was difficult to imagine the Hangzhou Art College in the 1930s without Lin Fengmian.