Wonderland in Mind: Art Research of Chen Zizhuang
- show time：2022-12-28 to 2023-03-12
- Organizer：Sichuan Museum, Chengdu Wuhou Temple Museum, Yang Sheng’an Museum, and Beijing Fine Art Academy,
- venue：Beijing Fine Art Academy
The Beijing Fine Art Academy has been engaged in the research on the Chinese art of the 20th century, which is centered on Qi Baishi, for decades. Over this period, our study has barely exhausted but gained increasing significance and appeal. Chen Zizhuang is an artist who has ignited our research passion again. Similar to accomplished art masters of the 20th century, his works reflect the spirit of Chinese culture and he has further innovated the Chinese painting patterns and techniques. Besides, he has broadened the aesthetic vision of Chinese paintings and showcased their openness and inclusiveness.
With the support of the Publicity Department of the CPC Chengdu Municipal Committee, the “Wonderland in Mind: Art Research of Chen Zizhuang” Exhibition, as a part of the “Art Series of 20th Century Artist” exhibition program, was opened on December 28, 2022 at the Art Museum of Beijing Fine Art Academy. The event was co-hosted by the Sichuan Museum, Chengdu Wuhou Temple Museum, Yang Sheng’an Museum, and Beijing Fine Art Academy, co-organized by the Chen Zizhuang Art Exhibition Hall, and organized by the Art Museum of Beijing Fine Art Academy. The exhibition displayed 100 pieces of Chen Zizhuang’s paintings (e.g., flowers and birds, landscapes) and calligraphy works collected by the Sichuan Provincial Museum, Chengdu Wuhou Temple Museum, and Yang Sheng’an Museum. On the first floor of the Art Museum of Beijing Fine Art Academy, the exhibition tells the life story of Chen Zizhuang, who grew from a cowherd boy who liked painting on the ground to an upright person who practiced martial arts and sold paintings across the country in the hope of serving the country, and then to a great master by being devoted to painting despite a destitute life full of setbacks. In doing so, it aims to showcase to the audience the image of Chen Zizhuang in his era. On the second floor of the exhibition hall, an artistic world of Chen Zizhuang is presented through three sections.
Profound Meanings Through Simple Forms: Chen Zizhuang’s View on Paintings
In 1955, Chen Zizhuang, who was aged 42 at that time, became the youngest curator of the Sichuan Provincial Museum of Literature and History. With the gathering of numerous cultural celebrities from Sichuan, Chen made great progress in his cultural and artistic capabilities. He began to study free sketch paintings of flowers and birds, believing that the flowers pruned by hand in the courtyard lacked vitality and life as they did not conform to the natural law of plant growth. Inspired constantly by the inner vitality of nature and life, he preferred wild flowers and birds in the natural world, whether peony flower on the Tianpeng Mountain or wild plums by rivers. That is also reflected in his paintings. He once said in his memoirs, “My love for painting flowers and birds was first inspired by Qi Baishi and Wu Changshuo, and later significantly by Bada Shanren.” In 1962, upon the invitation by the Yang Sheng’an Museum in Xindu, Chen drew Four Scrolls of Flowers, which has become one of his representative flower paintings.
The four poetic paintings of crabapple, pear, narcissus and hibiscus followed the style of Qi Baishi in terms of composition, brushwork and color. In 1963, he drew Dense Cypresses Outside the Town of Brocade for the Chengdu Wuhou Temple Museum by drawing inspiration from Du Fu’s well-known poem Temple of the Premier of Shu. This panoramic painting depicted dense ancient cypresses amid which red walls and ancient temples stand solemnly. Nearby trees are twisted or upright and distant ones are scattered in between. The painting was drawn with wet brush and light ink.
In addition to massive flower and bird paintings, in the 1960s, Chen Zizhuang repeatedly visited Jiange, Guangyuan and other places in the Bashu region to feel the warmth of ordinary natural landscape. It was during this period when he created landscape paintings such as Forest Album and Album of the Year of Reyin in a hope to showcase the appeal of Chinese paintings by striking a balance between inheriting traditions and making innovations.
Plain Styles: Chen Zizhuang’s Artistic Philosophy
Spending the last third of his life in Chengdu, Chen was committed to painting during the two decades, hoping to shape a brand new style. After years of accumulation, Chen shifted his focus of creation from freehand flower and bird paintings to landscape paintings, forming a working mode of “sketching - refining - creation” . Thanks to his different views on sketching, Chen could break away from tradition and the time to shape his own style. In his view, painters should draw based on the spirit, which must be cultivated. Sticking to the creed of “sincerity lies at the heart of rhetoric” in artistic creation, he stressed that sincerity is crucial to artistic work and artists should not bluff people with their fame. In his eyes, the landscape of the Bashu region was an inexhaustible source of his artistic creation. He stressed the importance of “shenhua”, that is, focusing on the painting purpose and process. In other words, it takes time for painters to create a mature piece of work from depicting objects to drawing nature on the paper. In 1972, Chen created Longquan Landscape Album, marking the maturity of his landscape paintings. His representative works in this field include Supplementary Album After Serious Illness, Twenty-four Paper Album, Shihu Painting Fan Collection, and Gift Album Sent in the Year of Bingchen. Among them, the Supplementary Album after Serious Illness is another album created after Longquan Landscape Album, which consists of 8 pages and includes many outstanding works. In his inscription, Chen dialectically described the strengths and weaknesses of this album, explaining that those works failed to his expectations due to the limitation of Jiajiang paper on which his paintings were created.
Chen Zizhuang was good at painting on fans. The Shihu Painting Fan Collection consists of paintings with unique and natural structures, fully demonstrating his fan painting skills. From these paintings, we can see Chen’s outstanding ability of enforcing brevity by learning from masters such as Huang Binhong. He strove to present plain works by adopting light and simple styles.
Peak of Artistic Creation: Chen Zizhuang’s 1974
In 1974, Chen Zizhuang reached the peak of personal mature artistic creation. His paintings created during this period, including Rainy, Village Fun, Spring Morning, Creek and Bridge Under the Cliff, Swallow Cliff, and Autumn Coolness, all show a distinct personal style.
Improved Jijiang paper was used for works such as Shushan Album, which can better highlight the uniqueness of Chen’s brushwork and color use. That year, he was relieved partly from heart diseases and visited Mianzhu, Hanwang and other places in western Sichuan province to create sketches.
In the Album Created After A Mountain-Visiting Journey to Hanwang, he depicted the majestic mountains of western Sichuan, different from the hilly landscape in the central part of the province, by using rich and vigorous brushwork. Those erecting peaks show his artistic pursuit of boldly expressing himself on the paper. He strove to break away from the conventional artistic paradigm to move towards a transcendent state of art. His artistic creation seemingly implies to us that the existing evaluation methods and traditional technique system cannot restrain people’s subjective initiative. Artistic innovation is not a break with tradition, nor is it a creation out of nothing, but a cognitive liberation that can be realized in practice. Perhaps it is the energy field formed by this spirit that has attracted our attention.
The Exhibition of Chen Zizhuang’s Posthumous Works held in 1988 brought Chen, an active figure in the Bashu region, to the forefront of the Chinese art. Now, after 34 years, his works are exhibited in Beijing again. Through the research on his works in the academic community, the Beijing Fine Art Academy aims to define his artistic value more clearly so that it will be a common subject in art history. The ultimate purpose is that the research will enter a natural cycle and provide rich nourishment for artistic creation at present and in the future.
Chen Zizhuang’s Profile
Chen Zizhuang (1913-1976) was born in Rongchang, Sichuan Province (now Yongchuan, Chongqing Municipality). His original name was Fugui, his nickname Fugui (different from the former name in tone and writing), and his courtesy name Zizhuang. In his early years, he used Lanyuan as his pseudonym, and later he was also known as Nanyuan, Xialibaren, the owner of the Twelve Plum Blossom Trees, Shihu Shanmin, etc. In his later years, he was known as Shihu. He learned painting since childhood and began to travel across the country at the age of 16, performing on streets and selling paintings for a living. After the age of 20, he started to study The Book of Songs, The Song of Chu, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, and other works from Xiao Zhonglun, Chen Buluan and other teachers. Inspired by masters such as Bada Shanren, Wu Changshuo, Huang Binhong, and Qi Baishi, he created many landscape and flower and bird paintings with a uniquely personal style. He was once a researcher at the Sichuan Provincial Museum of Literature and History and a member of the Sichuan Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. His disciples compiled the book Shihu’s Essentials of Painting.
