ChinaDaily[970915-8]
Chinese News
China Daily
97 / 09 / 15 /
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1. Artist soars to mountain top
2. Underground dwellers taking a step upward
3. What's on (Page 10, Date: 09/15/97)
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Artist soars to mountain top
"BIG mountains and big rivers (dashan dashui)" inspire Li Baolin,
as for him, they conjure up a sense of heroism and nostalgia.
"Just look at the snow-capped Qilian Mountains that rise high on
the horizon to the west of the Jiayuguan Pass, the ruins of
ancient fortresses lying in the desolate desert, the Great Wall
that snakes its way across the northern provinces, the Yangtze
River that keeps flowing from time immemorial and on," he says.
"All this is suggestive of eternity and an unspeakable pathos."
Li classifies landscape painting into different levels: The lowest
is painting that merely features realistic mountains, rivers,
forests and so on. Then comes one that describes the beauty of the
landscape, transmits the painter's aesthetic values and creates a
feeling world. The highest degree of landscape painting, according
to Li, should be the one that conveys the artist's enlightenment
on the meaning of life, expresses the strength of his personality
and the essence of history.
"This is what I'm after," he says.
This is already distanced from traditional Chinese landscape
painting that emphasizes green mountains and limpid rivers,
creating an attractive place people desire to visit.
Li also likes the landscape of the canals crisscrossing the
southern country, not just because it is minutely beautiful, but
also because it is rich in changes and variations.
Li is an accomplished landscape painter at the Beijing-based
Research Institute of Chinese Painting. He has come a long way to
reach this point.
He was born in 1936 in Siping of the northwestern Liaoning
Province. He grew fond of painting when very young. "I still
remember my mother often gave me a pencil and a piece of paper to
draw whatever I liked and she unfailingly saw something from my
scrawl, saying this was like such and such and that was like so
and so. How heartwarming it was," he says.
Upon his graduation from high school, he made up his mind to
become an art student, although his excellent scores in maths,
physics and chemistry were enough to send him to the best
universities such as Beijing University or Qinghua University.
"I'm mild and easygoing in ordinary times. But when it comes to
making big decisions, I'm fairly resolute and decisive," he says.
He entered the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1958, to the
puzzlement of his high-school classmates and teachers and in
defiant opposition of his father, a locomotive engineer.
Li was lucky to have a number of the best artists in the country
to coach him. "Master Li Keran taught us landscape painting and
calligraphy, Ye Qianyu taught us sketching, Jiang Zhaohe taught us
figure painting and so on," he remembers.
Upon graduation in 1963, he joined the South China Sea Fleet of
the Navy of the People's Liberation Army as a soldier artist,
drawing pieces on military subjects and coaching the rank and file
on art.
During this period, he chiefly enjoyed figure painting, especially
portraying hard-working women in the fishing villages of Fujian
Province.Mountains, rivers, forests and houses appeared in the
background against women slender in form but tough in spirit.
But the backgrounds began to move to the foreground after the
mid-1980s. "Quite by chance, I was invited to participate in a
landscape painting exhibition in the China National Art Museum in
1985 and I offered a number of my landscape pieces. They drew some
appreciation from my fellow artists and critics and this marked my
switch from figure painting to landscape work," he says.
In 1990, after 27 years in the navy, he was demobilized and joined
the Research Institute of Chinese Painting. He has been there ever
since.
When he turned 60 in 1996, Li held his one-man show, which
displayed a few dozen of his works in different phases of a
decades-long career, in the China National Art Museum.
Commenting on Li's art, Zhang Ding, former president of the
Central Academy of Arts and Design and also a famed painter in his
own right, says: "Having turned 60, Li still refuses to settle
down in a fixed style. This shows he still has a long way to go
ahead of him. Or, in other words, he has a very promising future,
in my opinion. For an artist of 60, his art is just beginning to
enter the phase of attaining enlightenment and all the years spent
before the artist's 60th birthday can only be considered
investment in laying down a foundation for his art."
"An old Chinese saying goes: 'Great vessels take years to
produce'," Zhang continues, "It is especially true of artists
engaged in Chinese painting. This is because accomplishments in
Chinese painting are the expression of the accumulation of the
artist's experience, attainment and years of honing skills. When
all this fails to reach a certain height, the quality of one's art
and the mood it creates falls short of being appealing. No
shortcut can be found through petty wisdom."
Critic Lang Shaojun notes that in Li's works, weighty and even
seemingly awkward lines, which are suggestive of powerful cutting
strokes in Chinese seals, are applied to make up images and serve
compositional purposes.
"In my opinion, the ink line is descriptive of nature and the
slashing of ink and colour expressive of nature," Lang says. "In
recent years, Li has been applying more and more ink-splashing and
patches of colour and ink in his works in order to make his
paintings more emotional or lyrical."
But the ink line remains the major graphic factor. Only it has
become more expressive or "emotional" than before, according to
Lang.
Li Baolin himself says he likes the calligraphy cast on bronzes,
carved on turtle shells and animal bones and cut on seals. "The
powerful, weighty, angular and even clumsy lines of this kind of
calligraphy always appeal to the deepest part of my soul and have
found their way into my art," he says.
Beginners in Chinese paintings often exclusively seek fluency of
the ink line, thinking it shows the flowing grace and easy and
casual style of one's art. "They are wrong," Li says. "Too much
fluency only gives an impression of frivolousness. The ink line,
as I understand it, should be tuned somewhere between being fluent
and being controlled to make the painting laden with strength and
gravity as well as smoothly beautiful."
Li Song, a well-known critic, singles out painter Li Baolin's
"Spirit of the Pine" for its calligraphic beauty and expressive
mood.
The crooked and twisted pine tree brought out by forceful and
seemingly clumsy ink strokes is almost bare of pine needles and
rises from the shoulder of a rock. In the background are dots of
casually scattered ink and colour patches. "Is it snow, or wind,
or cloud, or rain? It seems to be all of this and yet none of
this. This kind of abstract ink language plays a very important
role in bringing about the needed atmosphere and fanning up the
passions," Li says.
Discussing the seeming awkwardness in Li's paintings, the critic
says "awkardness" constitutes a very important aesthetic category
in Chinese painting. "Although proficiency in skills is
emphasized, it is not regarded as the highest phase of art.
Instead, awkwardness acquired after the artist has transcended the
stage of skill proficiency is the highest level of artistic
attainment, suggesting gravity, simplicity, profundity and
richness in implications," he says.
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_Date: 09/15/97_
_Author: Hua Jia_
_Copyright© by China Daily_
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Underground dwellers taking a step upward
TAIYUAN (Xinhua) -- In his novel "The Time Machine," British
science fiction writer H.G. Wells describes a futuristic society
in a world where the sun and moon don't shine.
Wells comes unwittingly close to describing the situation of the
villagers of Xi'niu, in Pinglu County of North China's Shanxi
Province, who have existed in such a place for thousands of years.
Wang Zhongqin, a farmer in the village, has been living
underground for over half a century. Gazing around her "basement
house" -- a huge pit with a square central yard and cave dwellings
on each side, adorned by several wild jujube trees at the entrance
and large patches of moss in the corners -- Wang has mixed
feelings.
The pit covers a total area of about 0.67 hectares and is a legacy
from her ancestors.
Poverty and the rarity of stones on the Loess Plateau led to the
building of the underground houses, most of which reached a depth
of at least 10 metres below ground level.
A sloping packed earth entrance led people down into an
underground compound, covering an area up to hundreds of square
metres, with separate cave dwellings dug for different branches of
the family.
A cistern was also needed to hold rain to prevent flooding in the
yard and to give the residents enough water to drink.
The "underground people," as they are called, go to work at
sunrise and turn in by the light of the moon, Wang says.
For many years, to live above ground was a long-cherished dream of
the poor farmers, she explains. Only the wealthiest people in
Pinglu County were able to live in traditional houses made of
stones and bricks from elsewhere.
But over the past few years, more and more farmers in the village
have been settling their families in above-ground houses paid for
with earnings from crops of fruit and tobacco.
Wang now has to move out of her pit because of the pressure from
her daughter-in-law, who is excited about the idea of a four-room
brick house at ground level.
"I'm fed up with living in the cave dwellings, which are dark all
day long and wet throughout the year," the young lady says.
"And I don't want to become humpbacked like my mother-in-law and
most of the old people here," she adds. The high humidity in the
underground houses has left many of the residents with arthritis.
Although Wang agrees that moving up has its advantages, she still
has some worries about the change. "I'm afraid that I will not be
able to get used to the weather in the upper world," she says,
explaining that this is because the underground houses are cool in
summer and warm in winter.
And like most older people there, she will grieve for the place
where most of the significant events of her life occurred.
The Pinglu government has been trying to talk all the residents of
its over 15,000 underground houses into moving above ground so
that the county can gain about 3,400 hectares of farmland.
Official figures show that building brick houses on the ground
occupies less land than digging the pits and caves.
The most representative of the underground houses might be turned
into tourist attractions.
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_Date: 09/15/97_
_Author: _
_Copyright© by China Daily_
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What's on (Page 10, Date: 09/15/97)
Japanese Ballet -- The Japan Nagoya Theatre of Ballet and Junior
Ballet, headed by Yoko Tsukamoto, will present first-class
performances at the Beijing Beizhan Theatre.
Sponsored by the Beijing Venus Performing Company and the Beijing
All-Culture Development Company, the Japanese dancers will perform
pieces from Western classical ballet, Japanese modern ballet and
Chinese modern ballet, including "Don Quixote," "Pirate," "Swan
Lake," "The Red Detachment of Women" and "The Moment of Angels."
Time: 7:30 pm, September 19-20
Place: Beijing Beizhan Theatre
Modern dance -- The Guangdong Experimental Modern Dance Co. will
display their well-trained modern dance techniques September 19-20
at the International Theatre of Poly Plaza.
The Guangdong Experimental Modern Dance Co was set up in 1992 by
Yang Meiqi, a 1963 graduate of the Beijing Academy of Dance. She
invited Willy Taso, a prominent dancer and choreographer from Hong
Kong City Dance, to become the company's artistic director.
In the past five years, the company has taken part in many dance
festivals including the Fourth Macao Arts Festival, the 10th
Singapore International Arts Festival, the 14th Montpellier Dance
Festival in France and the 15th Hong Kong Festival of Asian Arts.
Time: 7:15 pm, September 19-20
Place: Poly Plaza International Theatre
Tel: 6500-1188
Exhibitions
Chinese history -- A display showcasing a new version of the
general history of China is now open in the Chinese History
Museum.
More than 5,400 exhibits from pottery kitchen utensils made more
than 10,000 years ago to the Chinese classics which have survived
foreign invasions in the late Qing Dynasty -- will be on show.
They offer visitors the country's past in a more accurate and
multi-faceted way than the perennial display of the museum ever
available since 1959.
Nearly 1,000 pieces of important archaeologic findings were added
to the list.
Time: 8:30 am-5 pm, daily. Place: National Museum of Chinese
History, east of Tian'anmen Square. Tel: 6526-6604, 6512-8901
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_Date: 09/15/97_
_Author: _
_Copyright© by China Daily_
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