Image, Word, and Commemoration in Huang Binhong”s (1865-1955) Late Works
(0) This paper takes into focus the Chinese landscape painter and calligrapher Huang Binghong (1855-1955) and his idiosyncratic late-period style of landscape painting, classified as the years of ca.1943-1955, and which has established Huang in modem art history as one of the most important ink-landscape painters of the twentieth century as well as last representatives painting in the tradition of so-called literati artists.Huang”s late style is widely quoted as ”simple, deep and rich, flourishing and luxurious” (hunhou hua zi), or ”dark and dense, rich and heavy”(heimi houzhong) and understood as a testimony to his accomplished ”transformation” in art.Bearing in mind the importance of calligraphy as to Huang”s theoretical and practical approaches as a painter, and calling to mind that learning, in his view, was never understood as an end in itself, but as a tool and means to achieve the artist”s ultimate goal of creative transformation,Huang Binhong”s late works may be perceived as a kind of resumé and final form resulting from his life-long studying of painting and calligraphy, and the process of ”mastering oneself after nature” (shi zaohua) and ”mastering/modeling oneself after antiquitiy/the ancients” (shigu or lingu).Furthermore, his late works are also to be read as emerging as a ”body of accumulated text” (shuti, ”script body”, ”written body”) in the specific context of his late style.Suffering from declining vision since the age of eighty-six (1951), Huang”s worst condition of near-complete blindness reached a pinnacle in early 1953.Contrary to the assumption that facing the acuteness of his handicap, Huang might have rather refrained from his painting and writing activities, the few months that preceded his eye operation in June 1953, turned out to be a highly productive phase.The paper attempts to retrace the developments in Huang”s landscape painting during the last few years of his life and especially this period that immediately preceded his eye operation.It was by force of circumstance that now, the practice of painting and writing calligraphy strongly depended on the repertoire and abilities of Huang”s memory and intuition,and on forms of implicit, or tacit, somatic knowledge that did not depend on confirmation through the physical eye.Rather, it called for the brush holder to ”trust in the hand” (xin shou)and rely on the ”texts” that it as a scripted body had been informed by in the past.Moreover, not only the functioning of automatized processes of bodily movement, but also the capability and power of image-ination, that is, image-generation/production, both mentally and materially, were needed and challenged more than ever.In fact, intermingling themes of remembered,reconstructed ”real” landscapes, and projected, mythical ”unreal” landscapes seem to be prominent motifs of the works produced around this time.The paper argues that the works produced during this short but intense time period possess an unresting yet crucially transitional element, which anticipates something in style and technique that appears to find resolution in the works that then succeeded his eye operation.Rather than ”remembered landscapes”, the paper opts for a use of the term ”commemorated landscapes”.According to the Sinologist and semiologist Hans-Georg M(o)11er and his disambiguation of different cultural notions of remembering and forgetting, while the conventional western understanding of remembering implies an act of ”re-gaining” or ”re-attaining” (wiederholen) of a thing that had been temporarily absent, the Confucian understanding of commemorating (nian) is by contrast connoted with a ritual of an uninterrupted presentation-”presence-ing”-of a thing.This could even be in form of an imagined presence, e.g.an internal visualization of a thing or person, for instance a deceased ancestor, and serves to preserve and ensure a continuous state of presencefor, that what is once forgotten is irretrievably lost forever.The written character nian itself illustrates this notion: According to Bernhard Karlgren, it comes from ”now” (jin) and ”heart” (xin), and means: ”reflect, think;to study, learn by heart, remember;recite, read-to have present (jin) to the mind (xin)”.In explanation of his intense productive output during the spring months of 1953, the discussed work examples by Huang thus point towards his urge to commemorate;to affirm and con-firm, that is, consolidate, and re-inform that what he knew may be at stake: essentially, the constitutive structure and coherence of his script body-in other words, the presence of his self.
何小兰
柏林自由大学
国内会议
北京
英文
179-189
2013-10-11（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）