ESSAY OF FREE THOUGHTS -- Liao Shutao
1/25/2019
THE PRINCIPLE OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION DEVELOPMENT:
The ultimate height of human civilization development = the ultimate height of human morality.
(Note: The level of human civilization development is proportioned to the level of human morality.)
01/03/2019
In the process of writing, the further expansion and extended description of imagination is extremely necessary and very meaningful. It can expand the connotation of the text and make it present an extraordinary quality.
11/30/2018
ON THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE 21ST CENTURY POETRY
Liao Shutao
Poets are translators of human’s soul.
The purpose of the existence of poetry is to transcend the limits of matter, as a person, that is, to transcend the limits of the body, so that thoughts and emotions appear as a pure spiritual existence. The actual appearance is peeled off layer by layer, and finally presents the essence of absolute life.
How can we transform the thoughts and emotions in our minds with the flows of consciousness into words that can be seen as real visions in the eyes of readers? In poetry, everything is driven by imagination, which must address the significance of the imagination to the poet and the unique strengths of poetry.
No other art forms can freely expand and deeply convey the inner world of human beings, the subtle states of thoughts and emotions, the changes and transformations between them as in poetry. Fortunately, poets are precisely the most imaginative human beings, and they should be the best persons to capture of human emotions and sentiments. The poet has the ability to squint his soul to fly in the sky, to enter the earth, to experience the various possible states of spiritual existence; he can start from a simple word, idiom, sentence, object, endlessly associates that with images, finally cast them into extraordinary significant lines of poetry. We cannot imagine that a great poet does not have such qualities. So how does imagination develop in the creation of poetry?
We have two ways to imagine in the process of writing: the first way, is to, completely without control, let the imagination of the streams of consciousness naturally determine its directions, the poet only needs to do is to follow it, record its development trajectory, thus forming lines of sentences, this situation is usually carried out in the subconscious, can unearth the psychological level that is ignored in the daily life; The second way, is to, first, decide the directions to imagine, and then follow their development process. This method of writing is beneficial to the overall structure of the poem and helps the poet to complete a magnificent poetry.
As for how to cultivate imagination, many theorists of poetry have already discussed it. What I want to describe here is, how to make the imagination unfold in the strongest way to reproduce the reality of the spiritual world.
Imagination can be unfolded in all spaces. From the psychological level of analysis, the formation of sensory power is always achieved through contrast. Various contrasts, such as colors, shapes, sizes, light and shade, can always have a shocking effect on our psychology. In the case of poetry, when our imagination is between the smallest microscopic (such as particles) and the largest macro (such as the universe), the power of imagination, on the psychological level, is in maximized satisfaction, realized in the highest sense, that is to say, the formation of the greatest psychological power is produced among two or more extreme contrasts of different or similar things. The same contrast can be developed between the beauty and the ugliness of things, and get a similar effect, as the contrast weakens, the psychological influence is correspondingly reduced. We should understand that there are also some poets whose concern are not with the extraordinary spiritual shock expressed by poetry, but by another kind of soft, graceful feelings. Such a poet is always surrounded by a specific kind of sentiment, and whose life is written in such a state of mind, such as the American poet Emily Dickinson, which is another matter. The extraordinaryness of such poets is achieved by the penetration of psychological or emotional rather than the tension of imagination.
The imaginations of poetry may be unfolded in different ways: they can be parallel or overlapping, they can be small and large, they can be large and small, they can be flat, or they can be geometrically constructed. All these are not the same.
In the process of writing, the further expansion and extended description of imagination is extremely necessary and very meaningful. It can expand the connotation of the text and make it present an extraordinary quality. Among them, the image description of thinking thread is a powerful complement to the image description of vision.
Today, in the big explosion of knowledge and understanding, we have a new approach, concept and perspective to the material world. The difference between material and spirituality can only be a relative concept. We are getting closer and closer to the concept that the universe comes from the one and goes back to the one. In the creation of poetry, it is very necessary for poets to go further in the depth of expression of the material world as well as the spiritual world. On the one hand, we try our best to explore the various possibilities of the human spiritual world, the subtle differences between emotions and feelings. We must break through the framework of predecessors, limits from the traditional concepts, and explore the lexical and grammatical features more creatively to reveal contemporary humanistic spirit. Based on the rhythm of the soul, with the development of emotions, the lexical and syntactic methods would be changed. The format of the verse does not have to be rigid, so that the poetry can convey the characteristics of contemporary life. On the other hand, the expression of poetry in the material world should reflect the features of our times. The characteristics of this era reflect the current world in science, technology and information explosion, the state of the external world in which human beings are located, the phraseological references and vocabularies of science, technology, information, biology, artificial intelligence not only can not be ruled out, but also necessary. In the context of micro and macro, the differences, contrasts and blends between them are revealed, so that poetry has the rigidity of the material in the real world.
Excessive romantic feeling may be a poison for poetry, because it will make the poet lose the deep involvement as well as expression of human spirit, and indulge in emotions without being restrained. In poetry, as in life, it is harmful. It is easy to make poetry a catharsis of superficial personal emotions. As far as words are concerned, the passionate, imaginative, flamboyant descriptions mixing with simple narration of plain tiling in poetry will receive unexpected dramatic effects. The result is that the impressions of both are strengthened. Such a result makes poetry have a more profound connotation, but also increases the richness of poetry in the field of formal expression.
The segmentation of language is a very interesting topic. It appears in the most unexpected changes in the writing process of poetry, such as: length, jump, shortage, symbolization, meaning division, etc., challenging human sensory nerves, to make our feelings satisfied in affright. Because the language is in a state of segmentation, it does not convey complete information to us. It is precisely because of such an incomplete state that it leaves more psychological space to be understood and developed, and the ideological trajectory to be interpreted makes the poetry quality present a special meaning. Not all poetry lines need to be understood rationally. Some sentences are merely confiding to consciousness, and only need to stay in the senses of consciousness.
“Non-empirical writing” is another very interesting topic. Most poetry writers are only used to writing in a well known process. Very few truly outstanding poets have the kind of constantly changing and updating their writing style. The ability to always make your creative process in an unknown uncertainty, to seek breakthroughs and development. This uncertain situation makes the poet shudder and inspires his imagination and extraordinary inspiration.
The reverse usage of lexical meaning can also add intriguing and inspiring expressions to the connotation of poetry. In a context of common sense, readers have to quest their own thinking. At this time, all the vocabulary is active in the reader's mind, and the verse can achieve extraordinary results. The reversal of lexical meaning is not only a challenge to consciousness, but also a challenge to the usage of language itself.
In the creation of contemporary poetry, it is not necessary to stick to the limitations of the past poetry or poetic theories. The exploration and development of poetry is a must for the poet. Scenes in life, stories, historical events, or intuition, derived thoughts, dreams in the pure spirituality, all can be, one after the other, randomly unfolded in the same poem. It is this multi-level fusion that makes the expression of a poem, achieve broad and profound results.
Scenes in life, stories, historical events, under the ingenious arrangement of poets, become far-reaching images in poetry; intuition, derived thoughts, dreams are important ways to explore the inner spirituality of human beings, because not everything in poetry is in rational and logical ways, sometimes it could be irrational and illogical, perhaps it is this seemingly irrational and illogical, which constitutes a deeper level of rationality and logic in the inner spirituality, and more profoundly reveals the essence existence of human life.
Or more directly, everything we understand is not necessarily a correct understanding. The history in the development of human society is the history to constantly correct the existing knowledge, and the history to constantly re-recognize ourselves and the world. The poet's writing should face the future and leave a spiritual room to be explored.
The grandeur and profoundness of the poet's spiritual vision can be realized in two aspects: micro and macro. In the process of poetry touching these two aspects, the imagination can find the world where it can really play a role. The travel in such a broad field of vision as well as the micro territory, must be a landscape full of surprises and shocks, not only for nature, the world, the existence of human life can also be a panoramic refraction and reflection.
The best poet should be the best representative of the spirit of his times. From the perspective of an individual, the poet reflects the nature of individuality, and reflects the spiritual condition of human being throughout the age. The poet expresses both for himself and for an era. This individual's thoughts and emotions also reflect the universality of human nature; poet cannot belong only to oneself, but must belong to an era.
The "non-personal" theory of poetry proposed by Eliot opposes the romantic tendency of poetry to regard poetry as a personal tendency of self-feeling. "Poetry is not indulging feelings, but escaping feelings, not expressing individuality, but escaping individuality." He also said that "the feelings of art are non-personalized." From this, who argued that literary criticism and literary appreciation should shift interest from the poet to the poem itself. Even from the scientific point of view, such a proposal is impossible to achieve, poet does not have the expression without individual emotional intervention. Moreover, the characteristics of individual emotion are the key to the formation of excellent poetry. Even Eliot's own poetry, what attracted us most was his personal traits rather than the commonality he advocated.
The poem of an era is only a slice in history. Because of this, the poet should have a sense of history and write in the depth of history, so that poetry can convey a richer humanistic connotation, making poetry a veritable humanistic ark, a humanitarian bridge between past and future, not only has the inheritance of the spirit of human history, but also the prospect of the future of humanity.
In the 21st century, with the process of globalization, due to the general degeneration of human nature, selfishness, greed, prejudice, and the game of geographical interests worldwide, it has rapidly infected the entire human race, resulting in the general loss of the human spirit. We have no idealistic feelings in the humanistic spirit that once inspired humanity. In such a realistic context, the poems of the 21st century, as the bearing of human pure soul, to express humanistic care and express humanistic ideals, is extremely important.
Finally, it should be pointed out that any theory about poetry creation cannot replace the deep experience of life itself. This kind of experience needs long-term persistence and constant renewal, and cannot be accomplished overnight. This is why many well learned people, because of the lack of profound experience and sentiment about life itself, it is the reason why they never have created great poems ; it is why some poets have created excellent poems, and later, because of the lack of real feelings about life, can't write a good poem anymore.
10/30/2018
Recently, I am thinking about what are the most important matters for a human being, I have arranged the following issues according to their importance --
1. Life. 2. Emotion. 3. Dignity. 4. Individuality. 5. Freedom. 6. Respect.
Those issues should be our central humanistic concern for now and to the future!
06/05/2018
Liao Shutao's Interview with Tumblr Official Blog, A Major American Internet Media
Official Message from Tumblr Team
(English Translation)
Our current interviewee is Liao Shutao. Liao Shutao was born on 25th August 1963 in Zigong, China. World famous art master, he received Raffaello Master Award, Mandela Human Value Award, Ambassador of Culture In The World from Italian Cultural Association, new humanist movement pioneer and promoter in the world of 21st century, Master Member to Italian Cultural Association 2015, Master Member of Academy of Visual Art "Italia In Arte Nel Mondo" - Cultural Association 2016. Graduated from Fine Arts College of Sichuan, China,1984, Graduated from Fine Arts College of South West Teachers’ University, China, Master Degree in Art,1992, Visiting scholar of University of Ulster, Faculty of Art and Design, Belfast, UK 1998-99, Teacher of Art Institute, Jimei University, Xiamen, China,1992-98, now living in the United States engaging in art creation and writing, author of the essays: “On the Phenomenon of Van Gogh,The Eastern and The Western Culture”, and “A Criticism Over Criticism - A Retrospect To The Decay Of Art As A Mirror Of The Decay Of Contemporary Human Society.
Tumblr: Hello, Mr. Liao, could you tell us briefly about yourself?
Liao Shutao: When I was a teenager, I always dreamed of becoming an outstanding artist and fighting for it. In the passage of time, my childhood love for art has gradually become a dream for the future, the exploration of the meaning of life and the concern for humanistic thoughts, evolved into the thinking and forward-looking of human culture and civilization. I've been working on art all the time, now I'm also writing with schedules, as you see. In whatever cases, no matter it is art, or in a broader view to culture, it is my original intention of embodying humanistic care. Therefore, whatever I do: whether with painting or with writing, is to express concern for people. They are essentially the same thing, but now I have a deeper and broader understanding than when I was young.
Tumblr: You are originally a painter, also write poetry, essay, as well as criticism on contemporary culture. What cultural form do you think the best to express yourself?
Liao Shutao: All these different forms of expression have their own limitations and characteristics and they cannot be replaced with each other. I just think that in a certain state of mind, for a certain period of time, with a certain kind of content, I prefer to express it in a certain form, however, which does not mean that form is more suitable to me. It is only a choice under certain conditions. By the way, the reason why I write, was being forced out for a large extent. The reason is that I felt the dominant Western culture in the world has entered in a wrong direction, has become depraved and has lost humanistic value. I had hoped that someone would come out, but no one had this courage and insight. In the end, I had to stand up and point out by myself. I wrote articles to analyze and rebut the dominant cultural phenomenon in today's world. One of my criticisms on this issue: "The End of American Culture" was published in the high-end think-tank forum: "China~US Focus" , created by China-US Exchange Foundation and Pacific International Exchange Foundation.
Tumblr: What is your pursuit of artistic creation?
Liao Shutao: We are living in an era of dramatic changes and cultural deterioration. I have discussed this in many of my previous writings. I have defined this period in which human being is living as the period of Red Civilization that has been kidnapped by geopolitical strategic interests. The reasons for the declining of culture in today’s world are due to the errors in the guiding cultural theory, on the other hand, the dominant culture in the world today has been abducted by geopolitical strategic interests and national interests and has lost its cultural independence. There is a lack of genuine humanistic spirit and humanistic care. In the 21st century today, humankind urgently needs a new humanistic spirit, to obey a higher level of well-being to all people on this planet earth.
With this view, what I am trying to do in artistic creation is to revert to the art noumenon, to reconstruct the humanistic spirit and to express humanistic care. This is specifically reflected in the two regressions: First, the return to the visual primitives, that is, return to focus on the visual basic elements: the significance of lines, colors, shapes, materials, media, and their relationships with psychological emotions; The second is the return to human nature, let the visual expression return back to its humanistic spirit with the core humanistic value. The return to the visual primitives has enabled me to express myself more effectively and bring art back to art. The return to human nature has enabled me to find the ultimate destiny of artistic value and return art to human nature.
Tumblr: What do you think of the current status of Chinese artists in the world?
Liao Shutao: Chinese art stresses on the traditions of the past, in modern times, it gradually lost its vitality and lost itself inside traditions. Even the best contemporary Chinese artists have no influence in the world. The development of Chinese art into the modern era has detached itself from the advanced culture of the world and has appeared in a phenomenon of relative stagnation. Outside of China, who knows Qi Baishi ? Who knows Pan Tianshou? This is the reality of Chinese art in the world.
Contemporary Chinese artists have either blindly refuse or blindly follow Western culture. Chinese artists with truly independent ideas and a new cultural perspective can be described as rare. Chinese artists still have a long way to go to reach international influence.
Tumblr: The rise of the Internet has given many people with little aesthetic level, more opportunities to engage in the works of art, but at the same time, it also caused a separation of aesthetic understanding (for example, some people still judge artworks based on whether or not they can understand it, in the past these people might have no channels to speak, but the network gives them the opportunities to express themselves openly). What do you think about this situation?
Liao Shutao: In today's Internet era, due to the flatness, timeliness, and instantaneous nature of information dissemination, culture has been widely disseminated, at the same time, it has also made consumption of culture more and more like a cheap fast food. To a certain extent, It is easier to approach, but it is more difficult to achieve its humanistic value, because it takes time to truly appreciate and understand a poem or a piece of art. Due to the dissemination of vast amounts of information on the Internet, people have no patience to watch a piece of art, no to mention to understand its true meaning, and it actually lacks the precipitation process that is necessary for aesthetic activities. A piece of art like a good tea, needs time to be tasted slowly. If we suddenly drink out all the water of the tea, no matter how good the tea is, would be no taste. Science and culture have two sides, they promote each other and reject each other. It depends on how people use it. With the development of science and technology, in addition to the online world, human beings need to establish specialized cultural institutions to disseminate humanistic thoughts, respond to the alienation of science and technology to people, and demonstrate the humanistic spirit with its core values.
Tumblr Official Website
05/21/2018
In this world, there are two types of people engaged in culture: one is the people facing the past, and the other is the people facing the future.
The first kind of people facing the past, their work is to spread the cultural knowledge in history that human beings already had, to study, analyze, catalog, summarize, and protect cultural heritage. Such people we can classify them in Academic Type. In most cases, this type of people does not create new ideas, but spreads existing humanistic thoughts or corrects some mistakes in the understanding of historical knowledge, they are like barrels filled with knowledge, so I call them Barrel-Shaped Cultural People.
The second kind of people facing the future, all of their knowledge, is just the starting point or a foundation for what they have to do, helping them to create new humanistic values, new knowledge or to achieve new ideas, such people we can classify them in Thinking Type, because they must research deeply in unknown areas. I call them Cone-Shaped Cultural People.
In short, Barrel-Shaped Cultural People are the people spread existing culture; Cone-Shaped Cultural People are the people who create new culture.
Excellent artists should be Cone-Shaped Cultural People facing the future. If one only knows to face the past, who must be an ordinary artist because he is already mentally misplaced.
04/26/2018
ON THE SPIRIT OF THE 21ST CENTURY CONTEMPORARY POETRY
Poetry serves as a tool, through words, to capture the realities of spirituality, in the 21st century, which should contain the following features:
1. Free imaginations to reach the unlimited possibilities of inner realities;
2. Materialized visions as counterparts of spiritual visions;
3. Using vocabularies of biology and science to capture the newest development of human society;
4. Plain descriptions mixed with lyric expressions to create maximum drama;
5. Life stories combined with illusions to reach the instinctive human nature;
6. Cosmos scopes against micro views;
7. Logic against no logic;
8. Describe Personally, at the same time, impersonally with universal approach;
9. In the dimension of history, as a conjunct point, back to the past, and forward to the future.
10. For the decay of human society in culture from 20th to 21st century, the core value of 21st century poetry will especially emphasize on humanist caring which based on a higher level of harmony in the process of global fusion.
04/09/2018
A SELF-STATEMENT OF A PILGRIM
Liao Shutao
I came to the West as a pilgrim in an era of drastic changes of the human society for chasing the latest footsteps in human civilization, who knew that the inside of this civilization temple had decayed, I had to begin to build a new human spiritual temple again by myself, it was not only for my own art, but also for the future of mankind.
In the long river of history, one hundred years were only a moment, If we look back in the remote future, we will find out that the dominant culture of mankind from the 20th century to the 21st century was only a misguided, barbaric experimental field, the most worthy of cherishing of the humanistic spirit has been lost. The development of science and technology did not make mankind more civilized, but more bloody, this brought new conflicts of civilizations. Humanity of mankind was once so close to the verge of death. The essence of civilization does not exist in the category of science and technology, but exists in the category of humanistic spirit. As long as this world is still governed by the jungle principles of the animal kingdom, mankind is still far from the era of true civilization, in other words, the basic characteristic of civilization is that it is not subjected to the jungle principles.
The enlightenment of the new humanistic spirit in the 21st century is returning to humanity again In a higher sense , it is like on a suffocating unlimited ruin, a rising butterfly carrying the hope for people to the future. With the advancement of science and technology, human beings have become more and more closely linked, and the world’s fusion is no longer an option, it is an inevitable trend of historical development. The problem facing humanity is not whether or not to merge into each other? but how to merge inter each other? Is in fusion of rejection with conflicts? or in fusion as peaceful as possible? becoming inseparable parts from each other, to a unified global society of co-existence and co-prosperity . Laozi's concept of "small country, few people": "The ultimate in governance/delicious food/beautiful clothes/comfortable houses/cheerful customs/neighboring countries in easy reach/hearing the cock’s crowing and the dog’s barking between them/people are old to die/without dealing with those from other countries," which can only be a fantasy of Plato’s Utopian.
The humanistic spirit of the 21st century, must go beyond the limitations of nationalities, races and nations, exceed the chasing of the geopolitical strategic interests. Its core value is common well-being of all people on earth; its ideological foundation is non-confrontation, co-existence and co-prosperity; its characteristic is the concept of existence in harmony; its ultimate goal is to reach A-Unified-World in prosperity without conflicts. All the humanistic spirits in the past were regional and partial humanistic spirits. Today in the 21st century , we must conceive the future human culture in the context to the scope of the entire world. Humanity needs to establish a non-regional, a comprehensive humanistic spirit of mankind that should be a qualitative leap in humanistic thinking, serving to the common prosperity of all human society. Realize step by step, everyone loves each other and helps each other, to live and work in peace and contentment. It is a society free from chaos, which gradually realizes global unification of politics, economics, science and technology, culture, and religions, a global social formation of co-existence and co-prosperity to the highest level.
-- Liao Shutao, world renowned artist, independent thinker, 21st century new humanist movement pioneer and promoter in the world.
03/23/2018
AS A WRITER, I WANT TO WRITE ABOUT LOVE AND THE STRUGGLE TO LOVE.
02/24/2018
The great humane spirit is nothing but the humane spirit closest to humanity.
02/11/2018
Art is about humanistic caring. The great art is a profound expression of humanistic caring.
01/11/2018
The essence of culture is humanitarian concern.
01/03/2018
The Ulcer of Democracy
No one can deny that today we are living in an extremely chaotic world, we have created more bloody conflicts than making the world more peaceful. Look around us, how many deadly incidents have happened every year, every month. every day, from one country to another. One question must be asked: What is wrong with our society? What is wrong with the world? Generally speaking, the most powerful nations in this world are democracy countries, if the whole situation of the world is wrong, which also means the democracy system itself is wrong.
First of all, democracy system can not arrogantly put itself over other different nations with unique cultures and traditions without respect as well as understanding, one simply can not give the others good things by using guns pointing at their heads. The bad results all of us already evidenced and suffered worldwide. The democracy system is creating hatred among peoples and nations instead of making peace to the world.
The wrong is not about democracy itself, but its present system. There are no doubt: democracy is good, but The Direct Democracy is not good, remember Hitler was chosen by people from democracy system, after that we had The Second World War and mass massacres.
For example, one million blind people's choice can not be better than one hundred people's choice with bright vision. The better choices are not about numbers, but about good judgement and understanding with true wisdom.
We don't have to put our future depending on one person as a leader that will be a very dangerous situation. Who knows which monster or devil will be put into the chair of presidency directly by blind majority without real understanding. In a film when Hitler was speaking, thousands of people were touched and drenched in tears by his passionate, beautiful words. Remember history can be and will be repeated in a wrong social system. It is very much like gambling, sometimes we can not afford the huge price of the gamble. We don't need a president, what we need is a group of nine well visioned people, I call them ''The Democracy Balance Number Nine'', to make good decisions for all of us.
The future INDIRECT DEMOCRACY is structured at making the misconduct of leadership as well as the misconduct of majority to be minimal when making a decision. The misbehavior of a president or a leader can be prevented by replacing whom with The Democracy Balance Number Nine; while the misbehavior of majority can be prevented by Indirect Democracy. We still stay with democracy, but it is an Indirect Democracy, not Direct Democracy, which means that people can not directly choose their leader, the president, and we will get rid of the president. People can vote a group of elites, for example, let's say ninety nine elites, who will vote a smaller group of nine from them, ''The Democracy Balance Number Nine'', to manage the nation.
INDIRECT DEMOCRACY will be a much better democracy system with no president for the near future of humankind. It will be a totally fresh vision of human social system, a system without a president or a leader, but ''The Democracy Balance Number Nine''.
-- Liao Shutao, artist, independent thinker, new humanist movement pioneer and promoter in the world of 21st century
THE PRINCIPLE OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION DEVELOPMENT:
The ultimate height of human civilization development = the ultimate height of human morality.
(Note: The level of human civilization development is proportioned to the level of human morality.)
01/03/2019
In the process of writing, the further expansion and extended description of imagination is extremely necessary and very meaningful. It can expand the connotation of the text and make it present an extraordinary quality.
11/30/2018
ON THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE 21ST CENTURY POETRY
Liao Shutao
Poets are translators of human’s soul.
The purpose of the existence of poetry is to transcend the limits of matter, as a person, that is, to transcend the limits of the body, so that thoughts and emotions appear as a pure spiritual existence. The actual appearance is peeled off layer by layer, and finally presents the essence of absolute life.
How can we transform the thoughts and emotions in our minds with the flows of consciousness into words that can be seen as real visions in the eyes of readers? In poetry, everything is driven by imagination, which must address the significance of the imagination to the poet and the unique strengths of poetry.
No other art forms can freely expand and deeply convey the inner world of human beings, the subtle states of thoughts and emotions, the changes and transformations between them as in poetry. Fortunately, poets are precisely the most imaginative human beings, and they should be the best persons to capture of human emotions and sentiments. The poet has the ability to squint his soul to fly in the sky, to enter the earth, to experience the various possible states of spiritual existence; he can start from a simple word, idiom, sentence, object, endlessly associates that with images, finally cast them into extraordinary significant lines of poetry. We cannot imagine that a great poet does not have such qualities. So how does imagination develop in the creation of poetry?
We have two ways to imagine in the process of writing: the first way, is to, completely without control, let the imagination of the streams of consciousness naturally determine its directions, the poet only needs to do is to follow it, record its development trajectory, thus forming lines of sentences, this situation is usually carried out in the subconscious, can unearth the psychological level that is ignored in the daily life; The second way, is to, first, decide the directions to imagine, and then follow their development process. This method of writing is beneficial to the overall structure of the poem and helps the poet to complete a magnificent poetry.
As for how to cultivate imagination, many theorists of poetry have already discussed it. What I want to describe here is, how to make the imagination unfold in the strongest way to reproduce the reality of the spiritual world.
Imagination can be unfolded in all spaces. From the psychological level of analysis, the formation of sensory power is always achieved through contrast. Various contrasts, such as colors, shapes, sizes, light and shade, can always have a shocking effect on our psychology. In the case of poetry, when our imagination is between the smallest microscopic (such as particles) and the largest macro (such as the universe), the power of imagination, on the psychological level, is in maximized satisfaction, realized in the highest sense, that is to say, the formation of the greatest psychological power is produced among two or more extreme contrasts of different or similar things. The same contrast can be developed between the beauty and the ugliness of things, and get a similar effect, as the contrast weakens, the psychological influence is correspondingly reduced. We should understand that there are also some poets whose concern are not with the extraordinary spiritual shock expressed by poetry, but by another kind of soft, graceful feelings. Such a poet is always surrounded by a specific kind of sentiment, and whose life is written in such a state of mind, such as the American poet Emily Dickinson, which is another matter. The extraordinaryness of such poets is achieved by the penetration of psychological or emotional rather than the tension of imagination.
The imaginations of poetry may be unfolded in different ways: they can be parallel or overlapping, they can be small and large, they can be large and small, they can be flat, or they can be geometrically constructed. All these are not the same.
In the process of writing, the further expansion and extended description of imagination is extremely necessary and very meaningful. It can expand the connotation of the text and make it present an extraordinary quality. Among them, the image description of thinking thread is a powerful complement to the image description of vision.
Today, in the big explosion of knowledge and understanding, we have a new approach, concept and perspective to the material world. The difference between material and spirituality can only be a relative concept. We are getting closer and closer to the concept that the universe comes from the one and goes back to the one. In the creation of poetry, it is very necessary for poets to go further in the depth of expression of the material world as well as the spiritual world. On the one hand, we try our best to explore the various possibilities of the human spiritual world, the subtle differences between emotions and feelings. We must break through the framework of predecessors, limits from the traditional concepts, and explore the lexical and grammatical features more creatively to reveal contemporary humanistic spirit. Based on the rhythm of the soul, with the development of emotions, the lexical and syntactic methods would be changed. The format of the verse does not have to be rigid, so that the poetry can convey the characteristics of contemporary life. On the other hand, the expression of poetry in the material world should reflect the features of our times. The characteristics of this era reflect the current world in science, technology and information explosion, the state of the external world in which human beings are located, the phraseological references and vocabularies of science, technology, information, biology, artificial intelligence not only can not be ruled out, but also necessary. In the context of micro and macro, the differences, contrasts and blends between them are revealed, so that poetry has the rigidity of the material in the real world.
Excessive romantic feeling may be a poison for poetry, because it will make the poet lose the deep involvement as well as expression of human spirit, and indulge in emotions without being restrained. In poetry, as in life, it is harmful. It is easy to make poetry a catharsis of superficial personal emotions. As far as words are concerned, the passionate, imaginative, flamboyant descriptions mixing with simple narration of plain tiling in poetry will receive unexpected dramatic effects. The result is that the impressions of both are strengthened. Such a result makes poetry have a more profound connotation, but also increases the richness of poetry in the field of formal expression.
The segmentation of language is a very interesting topic. It appears in the most unexpected changes in the writing process of poetry, such as: length, jump, shortage, symbolization, meaning division, etc., challenging human sensory nerves, to make our feelings satisfied in affright. Because the language is in a state of segmentation, it does not convey complete information to us. It is precisely because of such an incomplete state that it leaves more psychological space to be understood and developed, and the ideological trajectory to be interpreted makes the poetry quality present a special meaning. Not all poetry lines need to be understood rationally. Some sentences are merely confiding to consciousness, and only need to stay in the senses of consciousness.
“Non-empirical writing” is another very interesting topic. Most poetry writers are only used to writing in a well known process. Very few truly outstanding poets have the kind of constantly changing and updating their writing style. The ability to always make your creative process in an unknown uncertainty, to seek breakthroughs and development. This uncertain situation makes the poet shudder and inspires his imagination and extraordinary inspiration.
The reverse usage of lexical meaning can also add intriguing and inspiring expressions to the connotation of poetry. In a context of common sense, readers have to quest their own thinking. At this time, all the vocabulary is active in the reader's mind, and the verse can achieve extraordinary results. The reversal of lexical meaning is not only a challenge to consciousness, but also a challenge to the usage of language itself.
In the creation of contemporary poetry, it is not necessary to stick to the limitations of the past poetry or poetic theories. The exploration and development of poetry is a must for the poet. Scenes in life, stories, historical events, or intuition, derived thoughts, dreams in the pure spirituality, all can be, one after the other, randomly unfolded in the same poem. It is this multi-level fusion that makes the expression of a poem, achieve broad and profound results.
Scenes in life, stories, historical events, under the ingenious arrangement of poets, become far-reaching images in poetry; intuition, derived thoughts, dreams are important ways to explore the inner spirituality of human beings, because not everything in poetry is in rational and logical ways, sometimes it could be irrational and illogical, perhaps it is this seemingly irrational and illogical, which constitutes a deeper level of rationality and logic in the inner spirituality, and more profoundly reveals the essence existence of human life.
Or more directly, everything we understand is not necessarily a correct understanding. The history in the development of human society is the history to constantly correct the existing knowledge, and the history to constantly re-recognize ourselves and the world. The poet's writing should face the future and leave a spiritual room to be explored.
The grandeur and profoundness of the poet's spiritual vision can be realized in two aspects: micro and macro. In the process of poetry touching these two aspects, the imagination can find the world where it can really play a role. The travel in such a broad field of vision as well as the micro territory, must be a landscape full of surprises and shocks, not only for nature, the world, the existence of human life can also be a panoramic refraction and reflection.
The best poet should be the best representative of the spirit of his times. From the perspective of an individual, the poet reflects the nature of individuality, and reflects the spiritual condition of human being throughout the age. The poet expresses both for himself and for an era. This individual's thoughts and emotions also reflect the universality of human nature; poet cannot belong only to oneself, but must belong to an era.
The "non-personal" theory of poetry proposed by Eliot opposes the romantic tendency of poetry to regard poetry as a personal tendency of self-feeling. "Poetry is not indulging feelings, but escaping feelings, not expressing individuality, but escaping individuality." He also said that "the feelings of art are non-personalized." From this, who argued that literary criticism and literary appreciation should shift interest from the poet to the poem itself. Even from the scientific point of view, such a proposal is impossible to achieve, poet does not have the expression without individual emotional intervention. Moreover, the characteristics of individual emotion are the key to the formation of excellent poetry. Even Eliot's own poetry, what attracted us most was his personal traits rather than the commonality he advocated.
The poem of an era is only a slice in history. Because of this, the poet should have a sense of history and write in the depth of history, so that poetry can convey a richer humanistic connotation, making poetry a veritable humanistic ark, a humanitarian bridge between past and future, not only has the inheritance of the spirit of human history, but also the prospect of the future of humanity.
In the 21st century, with the process of globalization, due to the general degeneration of human nature, selfishness, greed, prejudice, and the game of geographical interests worldwide, it has rapidly infected the entire human race, resulting in the general loss of the human spirit. We have no idealistic feelings in the humanistic spirit that once inspired humanity. In such a realistic context, the poems of the 21st century, as the bearing of human pure soul, to express humanistic care and express humanistic ideals, is extremely important.
Finally, it should be pointed out that any theory about poetry creation cannot replace the deep experience of life itself. This kind of experience needs long-term persistence and constant renewal, and cannot be accomplished overnight. This is why many well learned people, because of the lack of profound experience and sentiment about life itself, it is the reason why they never have created great poems ; it is why some poets have created excellent poems, and later, because of the lack of real feelings about life, can't write a good poem anymore.
10/30/2018
Recently, I am thinking about what are the most important matters for a human being, I have arranged the following issues according to their importance --
1. Life. 2. Emotion. 3. Dignity. 4. Individuality. 5. Freedom. 6. Respect.
Those issues should be our central humanistic concern for now and to the future!
06/05/2018
Liao Shutao's Interview with Tumblr Official Blog, A Major American Internet Media
Official Message from Tumblr Team
(English Translation)
Our current interviewee is Liao Shutao. Liao Shutao was born on 25th August 1963 in Zigong, China. World famous art master, he received Raffaello Master Award, Mandela Human Value Award, Ambassador of Culture In The World from Italian Cultural Association, new humanist movement pioneer and promoter in the world of 21st century, Master Member to Italian Cultural Association 2015, Master Member of Academy of Visual Art "Italia In Arte Nel Mondo" - Cultural Association 2016. Graduated from Fine Arts College of Sichuan, China,1984, Graduated from Fine Arts College of South West Teachers’ University, China, Master Degree in Art,1992, Visiting scholar of University of Ulster, Faculty of Art and Design, Belfast, UK 1998-99, Teacher of Art Institute, Jimei University, Xiamen, China,1992-98, now living in the United States engaging in art creation and writing, author of the essays: “On the Phenomenon of Van Gogh,The Eastern and The Western Culture”, and “A Criticism Over Criticism - A Retrospect To The Decay Of Art As A Mirror Of The Decay Of Contemporary Human Society.
Tumblr: Hello, Mr. Liao, could you tell us briefly about yourself?
Liao Shutao: When I was a teenager, I always dreamed of becoming an outstanding artist and fighting for it. In the passage of time, my childhood love for art has gradually become a dream for the future, the exploration of the meaning of life and the concern for humanistic thoughts, evolved into the thinking and forward-looking of human culture and civilization. I've been working on art all the time, now I'm also writing with schedules, as you see. In whatever cases, no matter it is art, or in a broader view to culture, it is my original intention of embodying humanistic care. Therefore, whatever I do: whether with painting or with writing, is to express concern for people. They are essentially the same thing, but now I have a deeper and broader understanding than when I was young.
Tumblr: You are originally a painter, also write poetry, essay, as well as criticism on contemporary culture. What cultural form do you think the best to express yourself?
Liao Shutao: All these different forms of expression have their own limitations and characteristics and they cannot be replaced with each other. I just think that in a certain state of mind, for a certain period of time, with a certain kind of content, I prefer to express it in a certain form, however, which does not mean that form is more suitable to me. It is only a choice under certain conditions. By the way, the reason why I write, was being forced out for a large extent. The reason is that I felt the dominant Western culture in the world has entered in a wrong direction, has become depraved and has lost humanistic value. I had hoped that someone would come out, but no one had this courage and insight. In the end, I had to stand up and point out by myself. I wrote articles to analyze and rebut the dominant cultural phenomenon in today's world. One of my criticisms on this issue: "The End of American Culture" was published in the high-end think-tank forum: "China~US Focus" , created by China-US Exchange Foundation and Pacific International Exchange Foundation.
Tumblr: What is your pursuit of artistic creation?
Liao Shutao: We are living in an era of dramatic changes and cultural deterioration. I have discussed this in many of my previous writings. I have defined this period in which human being is living as the period of Red Civilization that has been kidnapped by geopolitical strategic interests. The reasons for the declining of culture in today’s world are due to the errors in the guiding cultural theory, on the other hand, the dominant culture in the world today has been abducted by geopolitical strategic interests and national interests and has lost its cultural independence. There is a lack of genuine humanistic spirit and humanistic care. In the 21st century today, humankind urgently needs a new humanistic spirit, to obey a higher level of well-being to all people on this planet earth.
With this view, what I am trying to do in artistic creation is to revert to the art noumenon, to reconstruct the humanistic spirit and to express humanistic care. This is specifically reflected in the two regressions: First, the return to the visual primitives, that is, return to focus on the visual basic elements: the significance of lines, colors, shapes, materials, media, and their relationships with psychological emotions; The second is the return to human nature, let the visual expression return back to its humanistic spirit with the core humanistic value. The return to the visual primitives has enabled me to express myself more effectively and bring art back to art. The return to human nature has enabled me to find the ultimate destiny of artistic value and return art to human nature.
Tumblr: What do you think of the current status of Chinese artists in the world?
Liao Shutao: Chinese art stresses on the traditions of the past, in modern times, it gradually lost its vitality and lost itself inside traditions. Even the best contemporary Chinese artists have no influence in the world. The development of Chinese art into the modern era has detached itself from the advanced culture of the world and has appeared in a phenomenon of relative stagnation. Outside of China, who knows Qi Baishi ? Who knows Pan Tianshou? This is the reality of Chinese art in the world.
Contemporary Chinese artists have either blindly refuse or blindly follow Western culture. Chinese artists with truly independent ideas and a new cultural perspective can be described as rare. Chinese artists still have a long way to go to reach international influence.
Tumblr: The rise of the Internet has given many people with little aesthetic level, more opportunities to engage in the works of art, but at the same time, it also caused a separation of aesthetic understanding (for example, some people still judge artworks based on whether or not they can understand it, in the past these people might have no channels to speak, but the network gives them the opportunities to express themselves openly). What do you think about this situation?
Liao Shutao: In today's Internet era, due to the flatness, timeliness, and instantaneous nature of information dissemination, culture has been widely disseminated, at the same time, it has also made consumption of culture more and more like a cheap fast food. To a certain extent, It is easier to approach, but it is more difficult to achieve its humanistic value, because it takes time to truly appreciate and understand a poem or a piece of art. Due to the dissemination of vast amounts of information on the Internet, people have no patience to watch a piece of art, no to mention to understand its true meaning, and it actually lacks the precipitation process that is necessary for aesthetic activities. A piece of art like a good tea, needs time to be tasted slowly. If we suddenly drink out all the water of the tea, no matter how good the tea is, would be no taste. Science and culture have two sides, they promote each other and reject each other. It depends on how people use it. With the development of science and technology, in addition to the online world, human beings need to establish specialized cultural institutions to disseminate humanistic thoughts, respond to the alienation of science and technology to people, and demonstrate the humanistic spirit with its core values.
Tumblr Official Website
05/21/2018
In this world, there are two types of people engaged in culture: one is the people facing the past, and the other is the people facing the future.
The first kind of people facing the past, their work is to spread the cultural knowledge in history that human beings already had, to study, analyze, catalog, summarize, and protect cultural heritage. Such people we can classify them in Academic Type. In most cases, this type of people does not create new ideas, but spreads existing humanistic thoughts or corrects some mistakes in the understanding of historical knowledge, they are like barrels filled with knowledge, so I call them Barrel-Shaped Cultural People.
The second kind of people facing the future, all of their knowledge, is just the starting point or a foundation for what they have to do, helping them to create new humanistic values, new knowledge or to achieve new ideas, such people we can classify them in Thinking Type, because they must research deeply in unknown areas. I call them Cone-Shaped Cultural People.
In short, Barrel-Shaped Cultural People are the people spread existing culture; Cone-Shaped Cultural People are the people who create new culture.
Excellent artists should be Cone-Shaped Cultural People facing the future. If one only knows to face the past, who must be an ordinary artist because he is already mentally misplaced.
04/26/2018
ON THE SPIRIT OF THE 21ST CENTURY CONTEMPORARY POETRY
Poetry serves as a tool, through words, to capture the realities of spirituality, in the 21st century, which should contain the following features:
1. Free imaginations to reach the unlimited possibilities of inner realities;
2. Materialized visions as counterparts of spiritual visions;
3. Using vocabularies of biology and science to capture the newest development of human society;
4. Plain descriptions mixed with lyric expressions to create maximum drama;
5. Life stories combined with illusions to reach the instinctive human nature;
6. Cosmos scopes against micro views;
7. Logic against no logic;
8. Describe Personally, at the same time, impersonally with universal approach;
9. In the dimension of history, as a conjunct point, back to the past, and forward to the future.
10. For the decay of human society in culture from 20th to 21st century, the core value of 21st century poetry will especially emphasize on humanist caring which based on a higher level of harmony in the process of global fusion.
04/09/2018
A SELF-STATEMENT OF A PILGRIM
Liao Shutao
I came to the West as a pilgrim in an era of drastic changes of the human society for chasing the latest footsteps in human civilization, who knew that the inside of this civilization temple had decayed, I had to begin to build a new human spiritual temple again by myself, it was not only for my own art, but also for the future of mankind.
In the long river of history, one hundred years were only a moment, If we look back in the remote future, we will find out that the dominant culture of mankind from the 20th century to the 21st century was only a misguided, barbaric experimental field, the most worthy of cherishing of the humanistic spirit has been lost. The development of science and technology did not make mankind more civilized, but more bloody, this brought new conflicts of civilizations. Humanity of mankind was once so close to the verge of death. The essence of civilization does not exist in the category of science and technology, but exists in the category of humanistic spirit. As long as this world is still governed by the jungle principles of the animal kingdom, mankind is still far from the era of true civilization, in other words, the basic characteristic of civilization is that it is not subjected to the jungle principles.
The enlightenment of the new humanistic spirit in the 21st century is returning to humanity again In a higher sense , it is like on a suffocating unlimited ruin, a rising butterfly carrying the hope for people to the future. With the advancement of science and technology, human beings have become more and more closely linked, and the world’s fusion is no longer an option, it is an inevitable trend of historical development. The problem facing humanity is not whether or not to merge into each other? but how to merge inter each other? Is in fusion of rejection with conflicts? or in fusion as peaceful as possible? becoming inseparable parts from each other, to a unified global society of co-existence and co-prosperity . Laozi's concept of "small country, few people": "The ultimate in governance/delicious food/beautiful clothes/comfortable houses/cheerful customs/neighboring countries in easy reach/hearing the cock’s crowing and the dog’s barking between them/people are old to die/without dealing with those from other countries," which can only be a fantasy of Plato’s Utopian.
The humanistic spirit of the 21st century, must go beyond the limitations of nationalities, races and nations, exceed the chasing of the geopolitical strategic interests. Its core value is common well-being of all people on earth; its ideological foundation is non-confrontation, co-existence and co-prosperity; its characteristic is the concept of existence in harmony; its ultimate goal is to reach A-Unified-World in prosperity without conflicts. All the humanistic spirits in the past were regional and partial humanistic spirits. Today in the 21st century , we must conceive the future human culture in the context to the scope of the entire world. Humanity needs to establish a non-regional, a comprehensive humanistic spirit of mankind that should be a qualitative leap in humanistic thinking, serving to the common prosperity of all human society. Realize step by step, everyone loves each other and helps each other, to live and work in peace and contentment. It is a society free from chaos, which gradually realizes global unification of politics, economics, science and technology, culture, and religions, a global social formation of co-existence and co-prosperity to the highest level.
-- Liao Shutao, world renowned artist, independent thinker, 21st century new humanist movement pioneer and promoter in the world.
03/23/2018
AS A WRITER, I WANT TO WRITE ABOUT LOVE AND THE STRUGGLE TO LOVE.
02/24/2018
The great humane spirit is nothing but the humane spirit closest to humanity.
02/11/2018
Art is about humanistic caring. The great art is a profound expression of humanistic caring.
01/11/2018
The essence of culture is humanitarian concern.
01/03/2018
The Ulcer of Democracy
No one can deny that today we are living in an extremely chaotic world, we have created more bloody conflicts than making the world more peaceful. Look around us, how many deadly incidents have happened every year, every month. every day, from one country to another. One question must be asked: What is wrong with our society? What is wrong with the world? Generally speaking, the most powerful nations in this world are democracy countries, if the whole situation of the world is wrong, which also means the democracy system itself is wrong.
First of all, democracy system can not arrogantly put itself over other different nations with unique cultures and traditions without respect as well as understanding, one simply can not give the others good things by using guns pointing at their heads. The bad results all of us already evidenced and suffered worldwide. The democracy system is creating hatred among peoples and nations instead of making peace to the world.
The wrong is not about democracy itself, but its present system. There are no doubt: democracy is good, but The Direct Democracy is not good, remember Hitler was chosen by people from democracy system, after that we had The Second World War and mass massacres.
For example, one million blind people's choice can not be better than one hundred people's choice with bright vision. The better choices are not about numbers, but about good judgement and understanding with true wisdom.
We don't have to put our future depending on one person as a leader that will be a very dangerous situation. Who knows which monster or devil will be put into the chair of presidency directly by blind majority without real understanding. In a film when Hitler was speaking, thousands of people were touched and drenched in tears by his passionate, beautiful words. Remember history can be and will be repeated in a wrong social system. It is very much like gambling, sometimes we can not afford the huge price of the gamble. We don't need a president, what we need is a group of nine well visioned people, I call them ''The Democracy Balance Number Nine'', to make good decisions for all of us.
The future INDIRECT DEMOCRACY is structured at making the misconduct of leadership as well as the misconduct of majority to be minimal when making a decision. The misbehavior of a president or a leader can be prevented by replacing whom with The Democracy Balance Number Nine; while the misbehavior of majority can be prevented by Indirect Democracy. We still stay with democracy, but it is an Indirect Democracy, not Direct Democracy, which means that people can not directly choose their leader, the president, and we will get rid of the president. People can vote a group of elites, for example, let's say ninety nine elites, who will vote a smaller group of nine from them, ''The Democracy Balance Number Nine'', to manage the nation.
INDIRECT DEMOCRACY will be a much better democracy system with no president for the near future of humankind. It will be a totally fresh vision of human social system, a system without a president or a leader, but ''The Democracy Balance Number Nine''.
-- Liao Shutao, artist, independent thinker, new humanist movement pioneer and promoter in the world of 21st century
12/15/2017
To write，write the great article that can last forever, with the courage to face the truth with a naked heart.
11/25/2017
The Structure of Civilizations and The Deed of Mankind - 2
The character of Yellow Civilization is regional, once human society reached the scope of globe, we are in the Red Civilization as today, which is kidnapped by so called Geopolitical Strategical Interest because the world is divided by the interests of nations which are not always in favor of humanity, in most cases, against it. For the sake of humanity, soon or later, we need go beyond nations that is a real test to human society making a choice between selfishness and conscience, if not, this world will be destroyed by our hands of selfish desire. The secrecy designed by our creator is that we need the balance, the more advanced requires the more sense of morality. Imagine a world without nations, otherwise the collapse of the world would happen.
Red Civilization is an extremely long and difficult evolution process. In the era of red civilization, due to the existence of countries, geopolitical competition is inevitable, and it is necessary to take into account many factors of human development. What we really need to pay attention to is that we should not make such a competition out of control. Once out of control, it may have catastrophic and even devastating results for mankind.
With the rapid development of science and technology, mankind will inevitably face the danger of losing control of science and technology. It will be driven to the inhuman by science, human nature and emotion will be marginalized. Survival or being destroyed will become one of the most important issue. Sometime in the future, all nations in the world will be forced to sign a deed to defend the threat posed by science. That will be a prelude to blue civilization.
As the deed of mankind gradually evolves mature, the importance of countries will diminish and become the burden or obstacle to the progress of human society. Eventually it will only be a management unit for the people on earth, similar to states or provinces today, without the existing essential definition of a country, to the demise. At that time, mankind has become one, is free to go and live on this planet earth. The primary task of mankind then is to jointly act against the potential threat of alien life and immigration to outer planets in order to ensure the multiplication of mankind and not being destroyed when the disaster strikes Earth.
When we are in a world without nations, we are in Blue Civilization that will be a world of universal harmony, where mankind is in common prosperity for all people, and a world where humanitarianism is fully realized. At that time we can say that we are in a civilized world without conflicts, killings and tragedies caused by the interests of large groups of people. At that future time, all human dispute will not be solved by war or threatened to be solved by war, but by peaceful means of mutual understanding.
The best social system for human society is not Democracy System, but a higher level, mutual tolerant Harmonious System. If humankind can pass through all the difficulties, it will surpass Earth Civilization and become an integral part of Interstellar Civilization.
-- Anne-Marie Vandormael & Liao Shutao, new humanist movement pioneer and promoter in the world of 21st century
10/13/2017
The Structure of Civilizations and The Deed of Mankind - 1
We catalog all human history in three civilizations: Yellow, Red and Blue. We are still in the period of Red Civilization, far from really civilized.
Yellow Civilization, the civilization before globalization - conflict & blood, Single Civilization ;
Red Civilization, the civilization self centered and power based - conflict & blood, Single Civilization ;
Blue Civilization, the civilization with universal harmony, Mutual Civilization.
By Anne-Marie Vandormael & Liao Shutao
07/15/2017
To be or not to be is not figurative, it is not abstract either, which is nothing and everything.
07/10/2017
Let feelings become emotions, emotions become colors, light and shadow, let colors, light and shadow become images, images become a vision, vision becomes a life, an evidence of life.
06/21/2017
In To be or not to be, I began with Shakespeare, but ended in Taoism.
n To be or not to be, I
06/16/2017
In To be or not to be, I am measuring the distance between Shakespeare and Taoism, between life and death, between joy and pain, between simplicity and complication, between day and night, between past and present, between existence and nonexistence, between having and nothingness, between freedom and cage, between peace and war, between time and eternity.
06/14/2017
To be or not to be is a philosophical approach in vision.
06/08/2017
To be or not to be, is a forever question, especially today, in the chaotic world.
06/07/2017
I carry humanity on my shoulders, I keep love and passion in my heart, I live on truthfulness and purity. As a Pilgrim, to the spiritual temple of humanist, walking beyond concept as well as material world. I whole am a believer today in a world of lost, in a world of chaos!
Where people see interest in the world, I see love.
05/31/2017
To Be or Not To Be, a manifestation of the connection between Material world and spiritual world，going back to the highest point of simplicity with instinctive understanding.
02/02/2017
Without the caring of humanity, art is nothing!
02/17/2017
CHANGE and CONTRAST are major power, the maximum power is from the maximum change and contrast.
01/18/2017
ON THE SPIRITUALITY IN ART
We have two ways to realize the spirituality in art: INTELLIGENT APPROACH and EMOTIONAL APPROACH, in most cases they are twisted inter each other but not always. The Intelligent Approach applies with the concept of abstraction to quest the central principles of the existence of the Universe by symbolizing, the artist here acts more like a philosopher for everlasting principles, the condition of immortality which I call Universalism, a good example is Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan; while The Emotional Approach applies with emotional charge to quest the meanings of the existence of life, the condition of mortality to lives, especially the fleshed human beings, which is Humanism, a perfect example is Vincent Van Gogh.
As I stated above, the pure Intelligent Approach, basically, is a job of a philosopher or scientist more than an artist, which is not the central value of art. The central value of art is from humanism and back to humanism, and for humanism.
12/28/2016
I don't need a big house, I don't need a big studio; I carry my studio with me in my mind everywhere, I carry the values I truly believe in my heart, travelling as a true pilgrim to the permanent humanist spiritual temple in this life.
12/27/2016
When I was a little child, I experienced the emotional touch deeply from the love of my parents (my beloved father Liao Xuewen廖学文, mother Gan Dingyuan甘定元), and the emotional beauty of the natural environment which was so strong that was impossible to be forgotten or overlooked. I have evidenced from the very beginning of my life that emotion created the meaning and the beauty of my life. Through the long journey of this life till now, I have reached the conclusion that human emotion is the central, essential presentation of humanity, and also is the central, essential value, beauty of art, it gives us a reason why we live in this world and why we feel the beauty of life. Art is from emotions and is back to emotions. Emotion is a symbol of importance, beauty and humanity.
11/02/2016
By art, I truthfully build a permanent temple for human emotions accentuating its importance and beauty. This is my message to the world.
07/22/2017
THE END OF AMERICAN CULTURE
Introduction
Before we start this article, we need to confine ourselves to the definition of The End of American Culture: It doesn’t mean that American culture will stop to develop, it does mean that America as the cultural leader and the center of the world is being ended. Since the first half of the 20th century, New York City has replaced Paris playing a key role, as the cultural center of the world. A deep crisis is that American culture has lost its true value of humanity becoming merely the game of concepts and established rules with spiritual immorality in the reflection of the conflicts of a morally decayed chaotic world. Everything is in the process of reformation, human culture today is not an exception.
When we think about the American culture, our mind automatically get connected with those great names as Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Jackson Pollock,Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko etc. Who can forget the great humanist president Abraham Lincoln? The genius expression of Edgar Allan Poe? The most masculine optimistic imaginative poetry of Walt Whitman? The interesting stories at Mississippi River filled with humanist compassion from Mark Twain? The courage in The Old Man and The Sea of Ernest Hemingway? The sense of freedom from the paintings of Jackson Pollock? No one could doubt that 20th century is an American Century, a century of liberation, a century of freedom. Why is America culturally losing its real value and decaying? What and why this happened here.
If we really want to understand the facts and the conditions today, we must review as well as analyze the history, giving a more accurate evaluation and widen the scope of our investigation from facts to facts.
A brief view of the rising history of American culture
Culturally speaking, the unique American style in literature was much earlier than in art.
In 1832, Edgar Allan Poe began writing short stories – including "The Masque of the Red Death", "The Fall of the House of Usher", and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" – that explore previously hidden levels of human psychology and push the boundaries of fiction toward mystery and fantasy, had a very strong influence in theory and in practice on French poet Baudelaire and many others.
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, two of America's greatest 19th-century poets could hardly have been more different in temperament and style. Walt Whitman was a working man, a traveler, a self-appointed nurse during the American Civil War, and a poetic innovator. His magnum opus was Leaves of Grass, in which he uses free-flowing verse and lines of irregular length to depict the all-inclusiveness of American democracy. Taking that motif one step further, the poet equates the vast range of American experience with himself without being egotistical. For example, in Song of Myself, the long, central poem in Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes: "These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me ...". Whitman was also a poet of the body – "The body electric," as he called it. In Studies in Classic American Literature, the English novelist D. H. Lawrence wrote that Whitman "was the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something 'superior' and 'above' the flesh." On the other hand, Emily Dickinson lived the sheltered life of a genteel unmarried woman in small-town Amherst, Massachusetts. Within its formal structure, her poetry is ingenious, witty, exquisitely wrought, and psychologically penetrating. Her work was unconventional for its day.
Mark Twain was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast – in the border state of Missouri. His regional masterpieces were the memoir ‘Life on the Mississippi’ and the novels ’Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’. Twain's style influenced by journalism, wedded to the vernacular, direct and unadorned but also highly evocative and irreverently humorous changed the way Americans write their language. His characters speak like real people and sound distinctively American, using local dialects, newly invented words, and regional accents. The economical and understated style of Ernest Miller Hemingway had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction.He wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), The Old Man and the Sea (1952). T. S. Eliot wrote spare, cerebral poetry, carried by a dense structure of symbols. In The Waste Land, he embodied a jaundiced vision of post–World War I society in fragmented, haunted images. Like Pound's, Eliot's poetry could be highly allusive, and some editions of The Waste Land come with footnotes supplied by the poet. In 1948.
The first time America art had a strong voice in the years after World War II to exert major influence internationally: abstract expressionism. This term, which had first been used in 1919 in Berlin, was used again in 1946 by Robert Coates in The New York Times, and was taken up by the two major art critics of that time, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. The first generation of abstract expressionists included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt and many others also related,were important and influential artists during that period.
Many of the first generation abstract expressionists were influenced both by the Cubists' works (which they knew from photographs in art reviews and by seeing the works at the 291 Gallery or the Armory Show), by the European Surrealists, and by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Henri Matisse. The abstract expressionists decided to try instinctual, intuitive, spontaneous arrangements of space, line, shape and color. Abstract Expressionism can be characterized by two major elements: the large size of the canvases used (partially inspired by Mexican frescoes and the works they made for the WPA in the 1930s), and the strong and unusual use of brushstrokes and experimental paint application with a new understanding of the process.
The real breakthrough was from Jackson Pollock. From his art, America had an international independent influential milestone. Since then New York became the world art center, replaced Paris, and since then has leaded the world in culture until now.
We can see so many art movements which were the pioneer in the world culture as Color Field painting, Neo-Dada, Post painterly abstraction, Op Art, hard-edge painting, Minimal art, Shaped canvas painting, Lyrical Abstraction, new movements like Pop Art, the Bay Area Figurative Movement and later in the 1970s Neo-expressionism.
Lyrical Abstraction along with the Fluxus movement and Post minimalism (a term first coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in the pages of Artforum in 1969) sought to expand the boundaries of abstract painting and Minimalism by focusing on process, new materials and new ways of expression. Post minimalism often incorporated industrial materials, raw materials, fabrications, found objects, installation, serial repetition, often with references to Dada and Surrealism is best exemplified in the sculptures of Eva Hesse.
Lyrical Abstraction, Conceptual Art, Postminimalism, Earth Art, Video, Performance art, Installation art, along with the continuation of Fluxus, Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, Hard-edge painting, Minimal Art, Op art, Pop Art, Photorealism and New Realism extended the boundaries of Contemporary Art in the mid-1960s through the 1970s.
Lyrical Abstraction shares similarities with Color Field Painting and Abstract Expressionism, especially in the freewheeling usage of paint texture and surface. Direct drawing, calligraphic use of line, the effects of brushed, splattered, stained, squeegeed, poured, and splashed paint superficially resemble the effects seen in Abstract Expressionism and Color Field Painting. However the styles are remarkably different. During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s painters such as Adolph Gottlieb, Lee Krasner, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Richard Diebenkorn, Jean-Michel Basquiat and dozens of others produced vital and influential paintings.
Members of the next artistic generation favored a different form of abstraction: works of mixed media. Among them were Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) and Jasper Johns (1930- ), who used photos, newsprint, and discarded objects in their compositions. Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol (1928–1987), Larry Rivers (1923–2002), and Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997), reproduced, with satiric care, everyday objects and images of American popular culture—Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans, comic strips.
Realism has also been continually popular in the United States, despite modernism's impact; the realist tendency is evident in the city scenes of Edward Hopper, the rural imagery of Andrew Wyeth, and the illustrations of Norman Rockwell. In certain places Abstract Expressionism never caught on; for example, in Chicago, the dominant art style was grotesque, symbolic realism.
At the beginning of the 21st century Contemporary art in the United States in general continues in several contiguous modes, characterized by the idea of pluralism. The crisis in painting, current art and current art criticism today is brought about by pluralism. There is no consensus to one particular representative value of the age. There is an anything-goes-attitude that prevails; an "everything going on" syndrome without clear direction.It shows that art has lost its direction in culture.
The process of decay
If we study the recent development history of American culture as an entity, you realize that the basic value has been changed, the early true humanist value has been replaced by the emptiness of concepts which was guided by the misleading theory: “Art is a creation” and the arrogance of its organizers. There were two factors we need to consider: 1, The earliest colonists gained prosperity based on selfishness, cruelty, racial group interests as well as other people’s suffering, afterwards they were acting more like selfish nationalists and racists against immigrants, putting their interests over the people of other nations. 2, The early humanists had the ideal to produce equality, freedom, democracy and happiness to all the people in this world. Those two forces were always in battle in the history of this nation, the summit point of the conflicts was American Civil War (1861–1865), and a recent development was the Virginia deadly conflicts of the city Charlottesville’s plan to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee on August 12, 2017. When everything in this nation was fine, the opposed two forces could stay in some point of reconciliation, but in a time of difficulty, they would emerge on the surface and produce a great deal of trouble and chaos.
Why do we analyze this? Because the rise of American culture was based on the humanistic value, not otherwise. Those values which touched our hearts, liberated our feelings of freedom, emancipated our passion and imagination to a brighter future by announcing that everyone in this world has the right to chase happiness. People from all over the world were touched by the deep humanistic compassion and love by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her novel: Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. Art, in the early 20th century, carried out this precious humanist value, embraced and opened to the whole world, and then, developed an independent American vision. We can regard the art of Pollock as a symbolic gesture of liberation, freedom and passion, we can also see those values on the works of de Kooning, Rothko and many others who were probing the true human spiritual value in vision. Dadaism was the first sign of decay, but Andy Warhol was a real turning point when he used machine products to replace human creation. Guided by the theory: “Art is creation”, everyone in art wanted to break the boundary, “Break the Boundary” itself became art, with the slogan: “Everything could be art”, artists were searching wasted garbage for “ found objects”. Notable universities such as Harvard University and Princeton University produced a lot of curators to major museums as well as art institutions from their Art History Departments, deftly followed out those art rules or guidelines to bring “new art” to this world without the care of humanistic value. Guidelines were priority and all. The job of a curator was well known as a lazy job. We could not see humanism anymore, what we truly saw was the most eccentric conceptual games in circus where human beings were treated as fools. If everything could be art, there would be no art anymore, the same logic was, if everyone was an artist, there would be no artists. Artist, basically, is a title to those people who has devoted their life to art. We wanted to see true creation, we wanted to see true passion, we wanted to see true imagination and true devotion, but we failed to do so. What we saw were the odd colorful new toys in museums for children, besides, being a useful propaganda, art in America has been kidnapped by political as well as national issues for more than a decade. It has lost its own independent identity in the case as a useful tool in favor of politics and national interests, but remember great art always stands for universal value of humanity that is always-go-beyond the boundary of a nation, always-go-beyond the limitation of its culture.
The pluralism in the 21st century Contemporary art in the United States with an anything-goes-attitude exactly demonstrates American art has lost its guidance and central value. It was said art is dead by someone, but the real death was the American humanist spirit. Art is not a creation, art is a spiritual and emotional creation, which means not any creation is art, the creation has to be deeply connected with human life and spiritual personalities to become art. Concept is concept, only if it is deeply touched by human spirituality the concept could be art. When we used machines and everyday found objects with witty designs as art to replace human creations, we are closer to the playground of games than closer to art itself.
We need these new guidance for art in the 21st century: 1. we reject that any creation without human spirituality is art. 2. we reject that any creation made by machine, without direct human spiritual activity is art. 3. we reject that any new found objects without deep personal reflection and confection is art. 4. we reject that pure concept without the stains of personal life is art. 5. we reject that useful and beautiful design is art. 6. we reject that art will go to an end. 7. we reject that new art classified in material area, if it does not carry new spirituality. 8. we reject the idea anything could be art.
True art has to be deeply rooted in humanity. In order to be art one has to be deeply touched by human life with emotions, spirituality, wisdom, passion, imagination, devotion in the process of creative activities.
The decay of American century was rooted in the decay of American humanist value in culture. If America wants to be great in culture again, it has to restore its early humanist value that was founded by its political, cultural pioneers. To achieve this, international humanism has to overcome nationalism and racism, only by this way, America is able to embrace a bright future.
Culture in the 21st century - After America Era
The rise and collapse of a nation or a civilization is essentially rooted on its culture, not on politics or the strength of power, which is only appearance. Right now we are in the swamp of a cultural chaotic world. The old cultural structure collapsed, the new cultural value has to be established. Culture in the 21st century is entering into an After-America-Era. A New Humanist Movement is urgently in need to recall the true human value in culture in the world scope where its central value is characterized by mutual prosperity and harmonial coexistence among different civilizations or nations, beyond any past cultural structures of self-centered as well as power-oriented, It is a non-centered-cultural-era After-America-Era, an era of a higher, and also different scope of civilization has to be constructed to lead the whole world to prosperity, otherwise this world will remain in a brutal, chaotic darkness. To move forward, the new world leading culture must be close to the need of humanity. From the history we recognize that all civilizations, neglecting and manipulating by arrogance, the concern of the majority of people would be abandoned in the end.
Western culture has ruled the world more than a century with great achievements in that period, but also proved its shortcomings. It was always self-centered and based on the strength-of-power. The democracy system never had harmony and equal relations with other cultures and civilizations on this planet earth. In the new era of 21st century, we, human beings, need to have the wisdom to stay together in harmony on this earth which becomes smaller with the advance of science. We must learn how to live together with peace and respect. In this situation, Confucianism may be the rescue because it is about a world of mutual beneficial coexistence of harmony, not a world of confrontation and antagonism as in the western culture. It is about tolerance, without dividing friends and enemies, to resolve the cultural and political conflicts brought about by the conflict between religions and civilizations, to provide a comparative advantage for the major problems from nations and peoples, and to firmly support a peaceful dialogue in human cultural and political life. At this point, the old Confucianism must go beyond its original and national limitation to be modernized with the western idea of equality of humanity, democracy and freedom, providing peaceful sunshine for all people with different religions and cultures, avoiding conquest and antagonism. As Confucius stated: “We are in harmony even though we are different” ；“If there is something you don’t like others put on you, don’t do that to people either.” With the modernized Confucianism, we do understand the difference, we do respect the difference, more over we do appreciate the difference which makes this world more colorful and interesting. The harmony of mutual prosperity will emerge from a dream to reality.
The culture in the 21st century After-America-Era should be a culture deeply rooted in humanity with all the thoughts, emotions and colors of the world, to explore the unlimited potential of human spirit, life and imagination into an eternal , prosperous future.
（Liao Shutao, artist, independent thinker, new humanist movement pioneer and promoter in the world）
09/26/2016
By art, we go beyond the physical reality, go beyond the limitations of life to the eternity, show off the significance of spirituality and emotions with purity, passion and love, a most true documentary of humanity as a spiritual being.
To write，write the great article that can last forever, with the courage to face the truth with a naked heart.
11/25/2017
The Structure of Civilizations and The Deed of Mankind - 2
The character of Yellow Civilization is regional, once human society reached the scope of globe, we are in the Red Civilization as today, which is kidnapped by so called Geopolitical Strategical Interest because the world is divided by the interests of nations which are not always in favor of humanity, in most cases, against it. For the sake of humanity, soon or later, we need go beyond nations that is a real test to human society making a choice between selfishness and conscience, if not, this world will be destroyed by our hands of selfish desire. The secrecy designed by our creator is that we need the balance, the more advanced requires the more sense of morality. Imagine a world without nations, otherwise the collapse of the world would happen.
Red Civilization is an extremely long and difficult evolution process. In the era of red civilization, due to the existence of countries, geopolitical competition is inevitable, and it is necessary to take into account many factors of human development. What we really need to pay attention to is that we should not make such a competition out of control. Once out of control, it may have catastrophic and even devastating results for mankind.
With the rapid development of science and technology, mankind will inevitably face the danger of losing control of science and technology. It will be driven to the inhuman by science, human nature and emotion will be marginalized. Survival or being destroyed will become one of the most important issue. Sometime in the future, all nations in the world will be forced to sign a deed to defend the threat posed by science. That will be a prelude to blue civilization.
As the deed of mankind gradually evolves mature, the importance of countries will diminish and become the burden or obstacle to the progress of human society. Eventually it will only be a management unit for the people on earth, similar to states or provinces today, without the existing essential definition of a country, to the demise. At that time, mankind has become one, is free to go and live on this planet earth. The primary task of mankind then is to jointly act against the potential threat of alien life and immigration to outer planets in order to ensure the multiplication of mankind and not being destroyed when the disaster strikes Earth.
When we are in a world without nations, we are in Blue Civilization that will be a world of universal harmony, where mankind is in common prosperity for all people, and a world where humanitarianism is fully realized. At that time we can say that we are in a civilized world without conflicts, killings and tragedies caused by the interests of large groups of people. At that future time, all human dispute will not be solved by war or threatened to be solved by war, but by peaceful means of mutual understanding.
The best social system for human society is not Democracy System, but a higher level, mutual tolerant Harmonious System. If humankind can pass through all the difficulties, it will surpass Earth Civilization and become an integral part of Interstellar Civilization.
-- Anne-Marie Vandormael & Liao Shutao, new humanist movement pioneer and promoter in the world of 21st century
10/13/2017
The Structure of Civilizations and The Deed of Mankind - 1
We catalog all human history in three civilizations: Yellow, Red and Blue. We are still in the period of Red Civilization, far from really civilized.
Yellow Civilization, the civilization before globalization - conflict & blood, Single Civilization ;
Red Civilization, the civilization self centered and power based - conflict & blood, Single Civilization ;
Blue Civilization, the civilization with universal harmony, Mutual Civilization.
By Anne-Marie Vandormael & Liao Shutao
07/15/2017
To be or not to be is not figurative, it is not abstract either, which is nothing and everything.
07/10/2017
Let feelings become emotions, emotions become colors, light and shadow, let colors, light and shadow become images, images become a vision, vision becomes a life, an evidence of life.
06/21/2017
In To be or not to be, I began with Shakespeare, but ended in Taoism.
n To be or not to be, I
06/16/2017
In To be or not to be, I am measuring the distance between Shakespeare and Taoism, between life and death, between joy and pain, between simplicity and complication, between day and night, between past and present, between existence and nonexistence, between having and nothingness, between freedom and cage, between peace and war, between time and eternity.
06/14/2017
To be or not to be is a philosophical approach in vision.
06/08/2017
To be or not to be, is a forever question, especially today, in the chaotic world.
06/07/2017
I carry humanity on my shoulders, I keep love and passion in my heart, I live on truthfulness and purity. As a Pilgrim, to the spiritual temple of humanist, walking beyond concept as well as material world. I whole am a believer today in a world of lost, in a world of chaos!
Where people see interest in the world, I see love.
05/31/2017
To Be or Not To Be, a manifestation of the connection between Material world and spiritual world，going back to the highest point of simplicity with instinctive understanding.
02/02/2017
Without the caring of humanity, art is nothing!
02/17/2017
CHANGE and CONTRAST are major power, the maximum power is from the maximum change and contrast.
01/18/2017
ON THE SPIRITUALITY IN ART
We have two ways to realize the spirituality in art: INTELLIGENT APPROACH and EMOTIONAL APPROACH, in most cases they are twisted inter each other but not always. The Intelligent Approach applies with the concept of abstraction to quest the central principles of the existence of the Universe by symbolizing, the artist here acts more like a philosopher for everlasting principles, the condition of immortality which I call Universalism, a good example is Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan; while The Emotional Approach applies with emotional charge to quest the meanings of the existence of life, the condition of mortality to lives, especially the fleshed human beings, which is Humanism, a perfect example is Vincent Van Gogh.
As I stated above, the pure Intelligent Approach, basically, is a job of a philosopher or scientist more than an artist, which is not the central value of art. The central value of art is from humanism and back to humanism, and for humanism.
12/28/2016
I don't need a big house, I don't need a big studio; I carry my studio with me in my mind everywhere, I carry the values I truly believe in my heart, travelling as a true pilgrim to the permanent humanist spiritual temple in this life.
12/27/2016
When I was a little child, I experienced the emotional touch deeply from the love of my parents (my beloved father Liao Xuewen廖学文, mother Gan Dingyuan甘定元), and the emotional beauty of the natural environment which was so strong that was impossible to be forgotten or overlooked. I have evidenced from the very beginning of my life that emotion created the meaning and the beauty of my life. Through the long journey of this life till now, I have reached the conclusion that human emotion is the central, essential presentation of humanity, and also is the central, essential value, beauty of art, it gives us a reason why we live in this world and why we feel the beauty of life. Art is from emotions and is back to emotions. Emotion is a symbol of importance, beauty and humanity.
11/02/2016
By art, I truthfully build a permanent temple for human emotions accentuating its importance and beauty. This is my message to the world.
07/22/2017
THE END OF AMERICAN CULTURE
Introduction
Before we start this article, we need to confine ourselves to the definition of The End of American Culture: It doesn’t mean that American culture will stop to develop, it does mean that America as the cultural leader and the center of the world is being ended. Since the first half of the 20th century, New York City has replaced Paris playing a key role, as the cultural center of the world. A deep crisis is that American culture has lost its true value of humanity becoming merely the game of concepts and established rules with spiritual immorality in the reflection of the conflicts of a morally decayed chaotic world. Everything is in the process of reformation, human culture today is not an exception.
When we think about the American culture, our mind automatically get connected with those great names as Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Jackson Pollock,Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko etc. Who can forget the great humanist president Abraham Lincoln? The genius expression of Edgar Allan Poe? The most masculine optimistic imaginative poetry of Walt Whitman? The interesting stories at Mississippi River filled with humanist compassion from Mark Twain? The courage in The Old Man and The Sea of Ernest Hemingway? The sense of freedom from the paintings of Jackson Pollock? No one could doubt that 20th century is an American Century, a century of liberation, a century of freedom. Why is America culturally losing its real value and decaying? What and why this happened here.
If we really want to understand the facts and the conditions today, we must review as well as analyze the history, giving a more accurate evaluation and widen the scope of our investigation from facts to facts.
A brief view of the rising history of American culture
Culturally speaking, the unique American style in literature was much earlier than in art.
In 1832, Edgar Allan Poe began writing short stories – including "The Masque of the Red Death", "The Fall of the House of Usher", and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" – that explore previously hidden levels of human psychology and push the boundaries of fiction toward mystery and fantasy, had a very strong influence in theory and in practice on French poet Baudelaire and many others.
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, two of America's greatest 19th-century poets could hardly have been more different in temperament and style. Walt Whitman was a working man, a traveler, a self-appointed nurse during the American Civil War, and a poetic innovator. His magnum opus was Leaves of Grass, in which he uses free-flowing verse and lines of irregular length to depict the all-inclusiveness of American democracy. Taking that motif one step further, the poet equates the vast range of American experience with himself without being egotistical. For example, in Song of Myself, the long, central poem in Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes: "These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me ...". Whitman was also a poet of the body – "The body electric," as he called it. In Studies in Classic American Literature, the English novelist D. H. Lawrence wrote that Whitman "was the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something 'superior' and 'above' the flesh." On the other hand, Emily Dickinson lived the sheltered life of a genteel unmarried woman in small-town Amherst, Massachusetts. Within its formal structure, her poetry is ingenious, witty, exquisitely wrought, and psychologically penetrating. Her work was unconventional for its day.
Mark Twain was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast – in the border state of Missouri. His regional masterpieces were the memoir ‘Life on the Mississippi’ and the novels ’Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’. Twain's style influenced by journalism, wedded to the vernacular, direct and unadorned but also highly evocative and irreverently humorous changed the way Americans write their language. His characters speak like real people and sound distinctively American, using local dialects, newly invented words, and regional accents. The economical and understated style of Ernest Miller Hemingway had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction.He wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), The Old Man and the Sea (1952). T. S. Eliot wrote spare, cerebral poetry, carried by a dense structure of symbols. In The Waste Land, he embodied a jaundiced vision of post–World War I society in fragmented, haunted images. Like Pound's, Eliot's poetry could be highly allusive, and some editions of The Waste Land come with footnotes supplied by the poet. In 1948.
The first time America art had a strong voice in the years after World War II to exert major influence internationally: abstract expressionism. This term, which had first been used in 1919 in Berlin, was used again in 1946 by Robert Coates in The New York Times, and was taken up by the two major art critics of that time, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. The first generation of abstract expressionists included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt and many others also related,were important and influential artists during that period.
Many of the first generation abstract expressionists were influenced both by the Cubists' works (which they knew from photographs in art reviews and by seeing the works at the 291 Gallery or the Armory Show), by the European Surrealists, and by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Henri Matisse. The abstract expressionists decided to try instinctual, intuitive, spontaneous arrangements of space, line, shape and color. Abstract Expressionism can be characterized by two major elements: the large size of the canvases used (partially inspired by Mexican frescoes and the works they made for the WPA in the 1930s), and the strong and unusual use of brushstrokes and experimental paint application with a new understanding of the process.
The real breakthrough was from Jackson Pollock. From his art, America had an international independent influential milestone. Since then New York became the world art center, replaced Paris, and since then has leaded the world in culture until now.
We can see so many art movements which were the pioneer in the world culture as Color Field painting, Neo-Dada, Post painterly abstraction, Op Art, hard-edge painting, Minimal art, Shaped canvas painting, Lyrical Abstraction, new movements like Pop Art, the Bay Area Figurative Movement and later in the 1970s Neo-expressionism.
Lyrical Abstraction along with the Fluxus movement and Post minimalism (a term first coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in the pages of Artforum in 1969) sought to expand the boundaries of abstract painting and Minimalism by focusing on process, new materials and new ways of expression. Post minimalism often incorporated industrial materials, raw materials, fabrications, found objects, installation, serial repetition, often with references to Dada and Surrealism is best exemplified in the sculptures of Eva Hesse.
Lyrical Abstraction, Conceptual Art, Postminimalism, Earth Art, Video, Performance art, Installation art, along with the continuation of Fluxus, Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, Hard-edge painting, Minimal Art, Op art, Pop Art, Photorealism and New Realism extended the boundaries of Contemporary Art in the mid-1960s through the 1970s.
Lyrical Abstraction shares similarities with Color Field Painting and Abstract Expressionism, especially in the freewheeling usage of paint texture and surface. Direct drawing, calligraphic use of line, the effects of brushed, splattered, stained, squeegeed, poured, and splashed paint superficially resemble the effects seen in Abstract Expressionism and Color Field Painting. However the styles are remarkably different. During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s painters such as Adolph Gottlieb, Lee Krasner, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Richard Diebenkorn, Jean-Michel Basquiat and dozens of others produced vital and influential paintings.
Members of the next artistic generation favored a different form of abstraction: works of mixed media. Among them were Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) and Jasper Johns (1930- ), who used photos, newsprint, and discarded objects in their compositions. Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol (1928–1987), Larry Rivers (1923–2002), and Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997), reproduced, with satiric care, everyday objects and images of American popular culture—Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans, comic strips.
Realism has also been continually popular in the United States, despite modernism's impact; the realist tendency is evident in the city scenes of Edward Hopper, the rural imagery of Andrew Wyeth, and the illustrations of Norman Rockwell. In certain places Abstract Expressionism never caught on; for example, in Chicago, the dominant art style was grotesque, symbolic realism.
At the beginning of the 21st century Contemporary art in the United States in general continues in several contiguous modes, characterized by the idea of pluralism. The crisis in painting, current art and current art criticism today is brought about by pluralism. There is no consensus to one particular representative value of the age. There is an anything-goes-attitude that prevails; an "everything going on" syndrome without clear direction.It shows that art has lost its direction in culture.
The process of decay
If we study the recent development history of American culture as an entity, you realize that the basic value has been changed, the early true humanist value has been replaced by the emptiness of concepts which was guided by the misleading theory: “Art is a creation” and the arrogance of its organizers. There were two factors we need to consider: 1, The earliest colonists gained prosperity based on selfishness, cruelty, racial group interests as well as other people’s suffering, afterwards they were acting more like selfish nationalists and racists against immigrants, putting their interests over the people of other nations. 2, The early humanists had the ideal to produce equality, freedom, democracy and happiness to all the people in this world. Those two forces were always in battle in the history of this nation, the summit point of the conflicts was American Civil War (1861–1865), and a recent development was the Virginia deadly conflicts of the city Charlottesville’s plan to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee on August 12, 2017. When everything in this nation was fine, the opposed two forces could stay in some point of reconciliation, but in a time of difficulty, they would emerge on the surface and produce a great deal of trouble and chaos.
Why do we analyze this? Because the rise of American culture was based on the humanistic value, not otherwise. Those values which touched our hearts, liberated our feelings of freedom, emancipated our passion and imagination to a brighter future by announcing that everyone in this world has the right to chase happiness. People from all over the world were touched by the deep humanistic compassion and love by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her novel: Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. Art, in the early 20th century, carried out this precious humanist value, embraced and opened to the whole world, and then, developed an independent American vision. We can regard the art of Pollock as a symbolic gesture of liberation, freedom and passion, we can also see those values on the works of de Kooning, Rothko and many others who were probing the true human spiritual value in vision. Dadaism was the first sign of decay, but Andy Warhol was a real turning point when he used machine products to replace human creation. Guided by the theory: “Art is creation”, everyone in art wanted to break the boundary, “Break the Boundary” itself became art, with the slogan: “Everything could be art”, artists were searching wasted garbage for “ found objects”. Notable universities such as Harvard University and Princeton University produced a lot of curators to major museums as well as art institutions from their Art History Departments, deftly followed out those art rules or guidelines to bring “new art” to this world without the care of humanistic value. Guidelines were priority and all. The job of a curator was well known as a lazy job. We could not see humanism anymore, what we truly saw was the most eccentric conceptual games in circus where human beings were treated as fools. If everything could be art, there would be no art anymore, the same logic was, if everyone was an artist, there would be no artists. Artist, basically, is a title to those people who has devoted their life to art. We wanted to see true creation, we wanted to see true passion, we wanted to see true imagination and true devotion, but we failed to do so. What we saw were the odd colorful new toys in museums for children, besides, being a useful propaganda, art in America has been kidnapped by political as well as national issues for more than a decade. It has lost its own independent identity in the case as a useful tool in favor of politics and national interests, but remember great art always stands for universal value of humanity that is always-go-beyond the boundary of a nation, always-go-beyond the limitation of its culture.
The pluralism in the 21st century Contemporary art in the United States with an anything-goes-attitude exactly demonstrates American art has lost its guidance and central value. It was said art is dead by someone, but the real death was the American humanist spirit. Art is not a creation, art is a spiritual and emotional creation, which means not any creation is art, the creation has to be deeply connected with human life and spiritual personalities to become art. Concept is concept, only if it is deeply touched by human spirituality the concept could be art. When we used machines and everyday found objects with witty designs as art to replace human creations, we are closer to the playground of games than closer to art itself.
We need these new guidance for art in the 21st century: 1. we reject that any creation without human spirituality is art. 2. we reject that any creation made by machine, without direct human spiritual activity is art. 3. we reject that any new found objects without deep personal reflection and confection is art. 4. we reject that pure concept without the stains of personal life is art. 5. we reject that useful and beautiful design is art. 6. we reject that art will go to an end. 7. we reject that new art classified in material area, if it does not carry new spirituality. 8. we reject the idea anything could be art.
True art has to be deeply rooted in humanity. In order to be art one has to be deeply touched by human life with emotions, spirituality, wisdom, passion, imagination, devotion in the process of creative activities.
The decay of American century was rooted in the decay of American humanist value in culture. If America wants to be great in culture again, it has to restore its early humanist value that was founded by its political, cultural pioneers. To achieve this, international humanism has to overcome nationalism and racism, only by this way, America is able to embrace a bright future.
Culture in the 21st century - After America Era
The rise and collapse of a nation or a civilization is essentially rooted on its culture, not on politics or the strength of power, which is only appearance. Right now we are in the swamp of a cultural chaotic world. The old cultural structure collapsed, the new cultural value has to be established. Culture in the 21st century is entering into an After-America-Era. A New Humanist Movement is urgently in need to recall the true human value in culture in the world scope where its central value is characterized by mutual prosperity and harmonial coexistence among different civilizations or nations, beyond any past cultural structures of self-centered as well as power-oriented, It is a non-centered-cultural-era After-America-Era, an era of a higher, and also different scope of civilization has to be constructed to lead the whole world to prosperity, otherwise this world will remain in a brutal, chaotic darkness. To move forward, the new world leading culture must be close to the need of humanity. From the history we recognize that all civilizations, neglecting and manipulating by arrogance, the concern of the majority of people would be abandoned in the end.
Western culture has ruled the world more than a century with great achievements in that period, but also proved its shortcomings. It was always self-centered and based on the strength-of-power. The democracy system never had harmony and equal relations with other cultures and civilizations on this planet earth. In the new era of 21st century, we, human beings, need to have the wisdom to stay together in harmony on this earth which becomes smaller with the advance of science. We must learn how to live together with peace and respect. In this situation, Confucianism may be the rescue because it is about a world of mutual beneficial coexistence of harmony, not a world of confrontation and antagonism as in the western culture. It is about tolerance, without dividing friends and enemies, to resolve the cultural and political conflicts brought about by the conflict between religions and civilizations, to provide a comparative advantage for the major problems from nations and peoples, and to firmly support a peaceful dialogue in human cultural and political life. At this point, the old Confucianism must go beyond its original and national limitation to be modernized with the western idea of equality of humanity, democracy and freedom, providing peaceful sunshine for all people with different religions and cultures, avoiding conquest and antagonism. As Confucius stated: “We are in harmony even though we are different” ；“If there is something you don’t like others put on you, don’t do that to people either.” With the modernized Confucianism, we do understand the difference, we do respect the difference, more over we do appreciate the difference which makes this world more colorful and interesting. The harmony of mutual prosperity will emerge from a dream to reality.
The culture in the 21st century After-America-Era should be a culture deeply rooted in humanity with all the thoughts, emotions and colors of the world, to explore the unlimited potential of human spirit, life and imagination into an eternal , prosperous future.
（Liao Shutao, artist, independent thinker, new humanist movement pioneer and promoter in the world）
09/26/2016
By art, we go beyond the physical reality, go beyond the limitations of life to the eternity, show off the significance of spirituality and emotions with purity, passion and love, a most true documentary of humanity as a spiritual being.
07/03/2016
Art is not about ideas, art is not about concepts, art is not about colors, art is not about forms, art is not about skills, art is not about creations, they are only means and stay as means. Art is about how we live emotionally and spiritually as a human being.
07/03/2016
Art is stories, and the most true stories about life, the hope, the pain, the struggle, the love, the passion, the regrets, the moments of beauty we never could forget, through which we found the meaning of why we are living and the reason who we are.
05/15/2016
I create art which is not for beauty, but for truth, only through truth, I can see the true beauty.
05/14/2016
When I am doing art, I am most cautious to make sure that the art work will not be pretty or beautiful. prettiness or beauty is a true poison for me. The last thing I want to do is to make my art beautiful, because I can not feed people's eyes while leave their souls hungry.
01/01/2016
A CRITICISM OVER CRITICISM - A RETROSPECT TO THE DECAY OF ART AS A MIRROR OF THE DECAY OF CONTEMPORARY HUMAN SOCIETY
It was declared by someone that everything could be art. This was a very misleading statement. Obviously, NOT EVERYTHING IS ART! Further, I have to say that the foundation of modern art theory was wrong, that was why time and time again, we discovered ourselves placed in a contradiction of complexity, a vague situation of dilemma.
Tracing back to the early period of the last century, an art theorist proclaimed that ART IS CREATION. Since then, it has become a guidline for the generations to come for doing art. To be understood in the circumstances, for the artists, which always meant you had to do something new, otherwise, it was not art; for the art organizers, they always wanted to find something surprising, something they never knew or saw before, otherwise it was not great. In this case, the "CREATION" was defined by the artist who did something which no one had done before, mostly this was confined in discovering new methods, new materials , new concepts to do art. If you did not do so, you were not in creation, at the same time, you did not make art too, and you were outside of the game already. In the end, CREATION has become art itself that dominated art, and slaved art.
With the discovery of photography, some people were scared to announce that painting was dead, then Duchamp gave a deeper blow: Art was dead! He has tried to manage so by placing the toilet in museums, and it is still in a museum! Materially speaking, all the means and media had limitation. If we defined new media as new art, art was going to a wrong direction. The definition of new art must belong to the spiritual area instead of material methods. The most important understanding and fact are that only the development of the spiritual life is forever that is beyond any limitation. That was quite logical why Duchamp declared art was dead since he already saw the dead end of materially discovery, who successfully launched his propaganda to make himself well-known although the propaganda itself was meaningless and ridiculous. Who cared about the matter of fact? Duchamp has vandalized the art world without true understanding as well as by the short of true imagination. Instead of struggling hard to have the true vision of art and human culture for the future, he chose the easier way to insult people's intelligence, to be more precisely, to insult people's stupidity for establishing himself historically.
Let us take a glance of the modern material history in creating art. Talking about the pigments in doing art, if you had used paint to paint, in order to be different as new, we chose soy sauce, and then, cow shit, human blood, then fire, ash, female latex; talking about the tools, being revolutionary, you had used brush, we chose cloth, mop, tree branch, finger, human body, animal, machine, most recently, female breast and vagina. Every artist tried very hard to discover a new method to be "Revolutionary", pushing oneself to the extreme for "thinking out a great art" overnight. We, people, found us pretty in a gigantic circus, an animal kingdom with lots of fun. I have a question for you: If those methods had the power to transfer a nonsense into a great art or a great art would be less great because which did not use those new methods? The answer was absolutely "No"!
Then we are going to have a look at Performance art. Performance art was most likely began with Pollock's so called "Gesture painting" which he used female bodies to perform on large canvases from the 1940s. Harold Rosenberg, an American writer, educator, philosopher and art critic. coined the term Action painting in 1952 for what was later to be known as abstract expressionism. What was rooted on new psychoanalysis were beginning to flourish and were changing people's perception of the physical and psychological world and civilization’s understanding of the world through heightened self-consciousness, awareness of subconsciousness mind. It was a good start!
Performance art activity is not confined to European or American art traditions; notable practitioners can be found in Asia and Latin America. Performance art is a term usually reserved to refer to a Conceptual art which conveys a content-based meaning in a more drama-related sense, rather than being simple performance for its own sake for entertainment purposes.
On the process of the development, something began to change and going awful, instead of probing inter the true human spiritual value, performance artists were competing cruelty for breaking the boundary: placing self in cold water, in a bag out of air, in a dirty toilet, cutting self skin for dripping blood, cutting own penis in slices and sewing back again, making sex in the bright light of a gallery around by the public, eating human flesh. In short, to do whatever could be striking. A friend told me that he has found a "great artist", who was strongly against the idea of showing art to the public at anywhere because he said the matter of art is totally personal. His performance was to pump his own head inter hard surfaces such as a cement wall. However his greatest performance was not created yet because that performance would pump himself to die, but he had a problem to find anyone to record this greatest performance. He should be more revolutionary by just pumping himself to die, it was not his intention to show his art to this world anyway, why record?
Last we need to have a deeper understanding about so called Conceptual art. First, artists were showing actual paintings and installations, then they were advanced showing blank canvases, to be more conceptual, even a blank canvas is too much, they would announce a show without displaying anything but the empty room itself, but it was still too much for an announcement, it might be better to only talk to have a show, finally, even the talk was also too much, where they could go? The utmost Conceptual art only happened in a brain without doing anything. If a conceptual artist who was doing the extreme concept with zero doing, who finished being known as an artist but who wanted to be recognized as an artist. One artist put her dirty bed in a museum on which she wrote hundreds names of the people who had sex on the bed with her including a relative. She declared this bed was her art. One day she received an interview from a philosopher: " How can you define this bed is art?", she replied: "Because I think it is art, so it is art". The object was art only because she said was art, the definition of an art did not belong to that actual objective reality anymore, it only depended on whom announcing that. Thanks to Duchamp. we had an easy, terrific art game which did not need too much effort.
To be sure with no mistake, true art is not a game, which always requests a life time commitment, devotion, love, passion as well as purity.
Those so called "art" were based on insulting human dignity as a spiritual being replacing by cruelty and ugliness to the direction of inhumanity.
Life is life while art is art; Life is not art as art is not life. The same as a fish, shallot and condiments are not a delicious dish, you need to cook first to make them as a good dish.
The decay of art was not the fault of art itself, which was only a mirror. The fault rooted in our contemporary society, the sickness and brutality of a troubled world today. Those kinds of art had also some value only because they mirrored our troubled present world, showing us negative examples to be good again in human culture and society, reminding the weakest moment in the history of human culture, reflecting a complete failure in theory of modern art and a severe corruption of human value.
Tolstoy had fully believed that much of the art of his day was corrupt and that artists had been seriously misled in their paths. His view was that true art needed to connect the artist and the audiences through a special emotional bond, which would continue to live on within the observers. By relating a specific emotion through the work of art, a true artist could inspire that emotion within the others and by this virtue the act became true art.
ART IS A SPIRITUAL AND EMOTIONAL CREATION. The most magic part about human being is the ability to emotions, tear, not only is a reveal of pain, but also is a show of extreme happiness, a symbol of the complexity of emotions, when it is combined with the highest level of intelligent activity, with passion, love and imagination, this is the birth of art! Art will die only if we lose a certain part of those essential elements. The spiritual journey will be continued and refreshed from generations to generations as long as human still lives.
01/28/2016
If we don't appreciate the small, neither we can enjoy the big.
12/14/2015
A MEMOIR FOR A FRIEND IN A LIFE TIME
If no one loved you
god love you now
you died on a high mountain
you died in a wheat field
in an anonymous Summer.
You were sent to the battlefield
to kill your brothers
as a train followed its tracks roundabout blindly but strictly
joy in your Summer's naivety
you invented the war culture.
Nation trained you, church blessed you
old men always were there to increase your ignorance and naivety
in the period of change, it was not enough to have courage
bees were circling down the golden metal from the sun
timid rats died
you also died on your mountain
never understood the reasons behind.
You strawed people's braveness
set up and rotten away
someday in the future
we will come to remember you
and cut your names on a gravestone .
-- For the memory of my friend Penjing, and his endless passion!
We met so many people and friends in life, but few we can really remember, no to mention who could reach your heart , stay in your memory and influence you profoundly. I did have such a friend, the only one who has put his influence on me, the one never could be forgot after so many years.
Memories went back to the year when I was 18. I saw myself was departing with my mother near the railway station of my hometown Zigong, she was giving me twenty Yuan which was nearly half of her monthly salary at that time. I refused to take the money, for I understood how hard my mom was arranging the life of her family each month. I waved with my hands to my mom, carrying my quilt and other luggage to the railway station in a new leather shoes she bought for me several days ago. About five meters away, mother called me back, said: "Shutao, you must take the money in case you need, otherwise my heart will be painful! You are alone far away by yourself." I had to take the money from her hands and walked away, I knew her concern, I didn't want her to upset and to worry about her son. Mother was watching me until I disappeared from her sight. I never forgot that moment, the expressions of her eyes as well as face showing so much love, care, worry and anticipation, that image embodied in my heart as an implication of love. I received this emotional beauty from her, flourishing in my soul.
The next day, I was already in a dorm of Fine Arts College of Sichuan, in Chongqing city, eight hours away from my hometown by train. It was a morning, I remembered I was standing by myself alone, looking at the pale, gray sky through the panes of a window, drenched in tears, since I realized my new life was started, and I didn't know which direction would be led afterwards.
I had brought with me so many dreams and so much passion for art, not long, I found out nobody: teachers and classmates, could understand or cared about my mind. Every day was dull training, I lost myself in a misty land which I didn't understand its meaning. My passion for art was dripped into cold water, as a compensation, whenever I had time, I began to write poems and study literature to continue my passion. I bought myself a very bright pink bell-bottomed trousers, walking in the campus as a symbolic gesture of rebelliousness, refused to talk to anybody in classes all the time. Soon, I became a real weirdo among other students, but I was not the only one. There was another person from The Chinese Painting Department, whose name was Penjing. I could not remember when we began to talk to each other, I did remember one day I was in the classroom for completing a painting, he came in, watching the painting, and teased me: "This is nothing about art, it is a nonsense!." I was happy to find someone who was so different. Later I found out his mind was impressively brilliant, his thoughts were equally fascinating, we immediately became very good friends.
He told me he occasionally painted landscapes. One day he showed those paintings to me, one of them painted three green suns in the red sky, he explained: " it is no meaning to copy this world in art, the most important matter is to capture the spiritual value, for example, you can paint the sun in any colors, with any numbers in favor of a new emotional, psychological vision."
We discussed a lot about the true meaning of art, contemporary literature, philosophy and poetry. For poets, Our favorite talk was about Charles Pierre Baudelaire, Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Paul Valery, Walt Whitman, Rabindranath Tagore, Pablo Neruda and Thomas Stearns Eliot. We both agreed that the greatest literature as well as art should be from humanism, display the true value about human spiritual life.
Both of us had dual lives now. One was in classes, listening to the nonsense principles and rules for art, with meaningless drawings and paintings, impatiently waiting to escape the cage. Once we were off the classes, instead went out the campus from main door, we were prefer to climb the wall around the college to outside to avoid seeing any persons. We had several small restaurants nearby to have, usually a dish of cold flavored beef, oil fried peanuts and a small cup of wine, so the journey to the spiritual world began! Sometimes we could go far away for visiting scholars to the other side of Chongqing, it was a big city, we spent hours on the way and made changes for buses. In those cases, we did not come back to the college, stayed up for a night until daybreak, and we had to climb the wall of the college again to our dorms for the main door was not opened yet. I remembered one night, we spent 3 hours to visit a famous poet and editor of the magazine: The Red Cliff, we were sitting there half an hour without saying anything, then left, the poet was not willing to talk because of her painstaking life situation at that moment. Penjing was a very shy person, never felt easy in front of a female. When a time we saw a teenager girl with two big pigtails on the head, carried a school bag on her shoulders, jumping and running by, he declared to me, "When you see the purity of her spirit and the innocent looking, you are instantly in a sense of beauty!"
If a day we were not going to an inn, we would probably choose to stay by Jialing River, watching the yellowish water flowed down, listening to the long sound from the chimneys of the boats. "It reminds me of the nature and life itself and the meaning of this world!" Penjing sighed. One evening, when we were chatting on the bank, we saw a middle aged man around forty swimming in the river. Moments later, he greeted and approached to us, sitting by our side, asking why we were there, and began to talk about his life. Together we had a nice chat. He said: "Boys, life is short, enjoy life as much as you can, that is what I am doing right now." He invited us to visit his home and wrote the address on a piece of paper, it was in a factory near by the college. One evening , about one week after , we decided to pay a visit to that man. We knocked on the door of his home, in a moment, the door was opened, a woman appeared behind the door, who was just out of bath in a bathing tower with wet shining hair. She let us in and sat down on the stools, then disappeared in a room for dressing herself up. She was nice and good looking. After she reappeared, she told us her husband was never at home and asked how could we know her husband, what she said next startled us: " Do you know I am in a process of divorcing with him. He used to be a good husband, about two years ago he found a beautiful young girl and stayed with her, then, another one, and then, another. Since then, he got lost and could not stop himself. Because there were so many beautiful women, one was more pretty than the other, it kept him always busy in chasing the new ones." We felt very sad when we left there for that woman, and also for the man we had met.
One night after school, I came across with Penjing in the washing room. He stopped me, talked with me very seriously: " Shutao, I have made a decision for us." I inquired: " What's that?" He said: "Both of us are very sensitive persons, it is not good for us to stay together. We have to stop contacting each other which will be much better for each one of us." I replied: "If you think so, I agree."
From that night, we suddenly cut off, I respected his choice, understood his fragility as well as torture. Even we saw each other on the road, we did not greet to each other but silently passed by. I knew in our hearts, we cherished the time we had been together deeply. It was said the true friendship as plain as water. We had been very close to each other more than two years, the richness of those days with him was my emotional nutrition for the years to come, a light in the darkness for my lost soul, and one of the most valuable treasures in my life.
Seven years after, when I was studying Master Degree at Fine Arts College, South-West Teachers' University, one day, a classmate came to talk to me: "Do you know anything about Penjing?" I responded: "No". He told me that after Penjing graduated from the college, he was sent to Chongqing Iron & Steel Factory as an art worker: "He drank heavily, and has gone mad". Penjing had told me one day he would have gone crazy, unfortunately, it became true! He was the only genius in art I have met in my early life, who was born in the wrong place and wrong time, his thoughts, passion as well as understanding were simply amazing, his great soul was too beautiful and naive to adjust itself to this world. In the end, he intentionally chose to damage himself for staying away from this world in his spiritual refuge. His failure was a big blow and lesson to me.
Penjing told me: To be a great person as an artist, one needed to complete three steps: first: You needed to conquer the weaknesses of yourself; then: conquer your environment; finally show the world who you really are. For me, that was a great Revelation! It has taken more than thirty years to make a big cycle in my life for having a true courage to face myself with faith and purity and to do art.
He never realized his doctrine, which I did.
12/08/2015
A GREAT SURRENDER!
When we thinking about capturing the reality of inner existence in art, we need to understand the fact that there are two kinds of approach to reach that destination: THE INNER OBJECTIVE REALITY and THE INNER SUBJECTIVE REALITY. About The Inner Objective Reality, we can find in the works of Picasso, Kandinsky, Duchamp, not any less in the works of more recently, Bacon; About The Inner Subjective Reality, you can find in my art work series such as PASSING, A NEW BEING and also BETWEEN. Remember we are not talking about abstraction or abstract art, we are discussing on the inner reality.
Artists creating The Inner Objective Reality always need to think about some real existence in life, for example: people, creatures, plants or flowers, tables, chairs, cloths, buildings, sky, clouds and what so ever, in other words, they need a real thing in life to generate images to their brain, in a process of deforming as well as conforming, to reach their inner reality, in this way, we can see the perception changed according to their inner instinctive requirements.
At the time the artist creating The Inner Subjective Reality is totally different, there is nothing to reference in real life for this inner reality, instead, the artist has to purify self and merge into self with a right attitude, there is no other choices but totally trusts oneself, let the mind flow freely like water flows over the surface of the earth, and also, the artist has to believe in that all his scars, pain, torture, sorrow, sadness, joy, love, happiness and memories will find a way, transferring themselves into the lines and colors, finally images which showing their inner reality of existence exactly the way it is. Theoretically speaking, all your spiritual world can be very accurately molded into lines, colors, finally images as a whole.
Because The Inner Subjective Reality does not have a specific direction and location, a condition of nonobjective, which has reached the condition beyond any limitation; the East could be the West, the South and the North, joy could be pain, happiness could be sadness, the far away could be the nearby, and vice versa. That is WHY I stated: "In my art, I find nothing in everything and everything in nothing".
The Inner Subjective Reality has nothing to do with abstraction because there are always specific images appearing to coincide with the inner reality conditions, and those images are not abstracted from this world, nor they are simplified or reshaped from real life, but there are always specific images from the inner soul. It is all about how to reach yourself inner life of existence as a human being with zero distance, it is nowhere and it is everywhere, a process of being self, A GREAT SURRENDER!
02/13/2016
Art is all about the experiences of life as a human being, in which we inquire the true meaning of our existence.
11/19/2015
If we talk about happiness, we are actually talking about harmony with respect and understanding, basically, which is not depend on financial situations. No life could be in happiness without harmony.
11/24/2015
A MEMOIR FOR MY DEEPLY LOVED MOTHER
I WANT TO BE A TRUE FRIEND WITH MY OWN SOUL, IN THIS CONDITION, I AM BUILDING UP A PERMANENT SPIRITUAL TEMPLE FOR HUMAN EMOTIONS, Only because emotions, I can feel the beauty of life, its meaning, love and passion! Frankly speaking, I didn't like Picasso, I could not see his soul while enjoy his intelligence, he was only a half master, from this point, Van Gogh and Modigliani were much better.
Earlier this year, I was exposing myself in the extremely brutal cold in the night, 2 am of deep Winter, after hard work. I had received two invitations: one was the 56 VENICE BIENNIAL, the art organizer she received the Gold Lion Award of this Biennial later. another one was from a New York art organization to exhibit at the Musee du Louvre. I have deep emotional tie with Italy, a country which has given me all her honor and understanding to my art she could offer more than my motherland. After few talk with Annemie, the woman in this world I could truly feel love and we could fully understand each other without words. I told her I could not apply to the 56 VENICE BIENNIAL invitation. we discussed several minutes. my heart was broken for the big loss of my deeply loved mom. I wanted to see her, I wanted to see her!
I was about to leave next day, fly to China, half of the meaning of my life already has gone with the leaving of my mother. In all my life, her rich love was the source of my courage and the meaning of my struggle, I was so much wanted her to be truly proud of her son. If so, I would feel unbounded happiness.
I was drenched in pain, and got lost in the most painful, torturing journey of this life. At some moments, I would be happy to go with my mother and to stay with her in another world, but I understood it's against her intention and I had duty to accomplish in this world.
22 hours from New York to Chengdu, China, 3 am in the morning, out of the airport, I immediately hired a taxi to my hometown Zigong, I reached my hometown about 5:30 of the morning. I shouted in front of the building of my elder brother's apartment to announce my return. after 1 minute, my painter brother rushed out to receive me, gave me a big, tight hug which we never had before, we silently went in and upstairs, our elder brother opened the door. Here we were, three brothers together, with tears in the eyes and pain in the hearts, we shared the same pain, the same love, in the same flesh and the same bone, at that moment, we did not talk to each other, we hugged tightly together to give each other consolations, with so much understanding which we never had in this life.
Mother, I am back! I am back! we could never see each other in this life again, but I could feel you already knew I was back. From then on, we did not use words, did not use eyes to contact each other, instead, we used our hearts to keep in touch.
I was totally wrong, it has been 9 months since then, I still see my mother every day, she is still watching me, smiling to me, her kindest face filled with motherly love is so vivid in my heart, and forever!
11/09/2015
In my art, I find nothing in everything and everything in nothing.
10/26/2015
We can not emphasize too much on the importance of emotions, which are the basic nutrition for our life and art. Be a friend with your own emotions, otherwise. which could be poison too.
10/04/2015
HUMANKIND NEEDS A RE-CIVILIZATION REFORM!
This is a troubled time for mankind, we, all humankind, are falling into the trap of civilization, for this civilization trap, we are in deep conflicts with each other.
Up to now, all of our civilizations on this planet contain fatal poison because two obvious factors: the civilizations are self centered and based on power. I created a special term for these civilizations: The Singular Civilization, for these civilizations are immature civilization forms of humankind, some more powerful civilizations regarding themselves are superior to the others, step on weaker ones which are producing conflicts,sufferings,hunger,hatred,killings and wars.
We need to reform our human civilizations, which are not self centered, and not based on power, instead, the new civilizations are based on harmony, mutual respect of the differences, equally important because all the civilizations are the memories as well as the invaluable experiences of human being. They all are nutrition from our past for today's human society. I also created a special term for these new civilizations form: The Mutual Civilization.
If humankind wants to reach true prosperity and peace, we need have the wisdom to find a way to reshape our civilizations from The Singular Civilization to The Mutual Civilization as soon as possible, the process could take hundreds of years, but we need move forward now to that goal, this is a blue map of paradise on earth.
Art is a good example how different civilizations could be nutrition for each other, and make progress by understanding the others, in this case, art is a pioneer and foretell of the future structure of humankind.
Art is not about ideas, art is not about concepts, art is not about colors, art is not about forms, art is not about skills, art is not about creations, they are only means and stay as means. Art is about how we live emotionally and spiritually as a human being.
07/03/2016
Art is stories, and the most true stories about life, the hope, the pain, the struggle, the love, the passion, the regrets, the moments of beauty we never could forget, through which we found the meaning of why we are living and the reason who we are.
05/15/2016
I create art which is not for beauty, but for truth, only through truth, I can see the true beauty.
05/14/2016
When I am doing art, I am most cautious to make sure that the art work will not be pretty or beautiful. prettiness or beauty is a true poison for me. The last thing I want to do is to make my art beautiful, because I can not feed people's eyes while leave their souls hungry.
01/01/2016
A CRITICISM OVER CRITICISM - A RETROSPECT TO THE DECAY OF ART AS A MIRROR OF THE DECAY OF CONTEMPORARY HUMAN SOCIETY
It was declared by someone that everything could be art. This was a very misleading statement. Obviously, NOT EVERYTHING IS ART! Further, I have to say that the foundation of modern art theory was wrong, that was why time and time again, we discovered ourselves placed in a contradiction of complexity, a vague situation of dilemma.
Tracing back to the early period of the last century, an art theorist proclaimed that ART IS CREATION. Since then, it has become a guidline for the generations to come for doing art. To be understood in the circumstances, for the artists, which always meant you had to do something new, otherwise, it was not art; for the art organizers, they always wanted to find something surprising, something they never knew or saw before, otherwise it was not great. In this case, the "CREATION" was defined by the artist who did something which no one had done before, mostly this was confined in discovering new methods, new materials , new concepts to do art. If you did not do so, you were not in creation, at the same time, you did not make art too, and you were outside of the game already. In the end, CREATION has become art itself that dominated art, and slaved art.
With the discovery of photography, some people were scared to announce that painting was dead, then Duchamp gave a deeper blow: Art was dead! He has tried to manage so by placing the toilet in museums, and it is still in a museum! Materially speaking, all the means and media had limitation. If we defined new media as new art, art was going to a wrong direction. The definition of new art must belong to the spiritual area instead of material methods. The most important understanding and fact are that only the development of the spiritual life is forever that is beyond any limitation. That was quite logical why Duchamp declared art was dead since he already saw the dead end of materially discovery, who successfully launched his propaganda to make himself well-known although the propaganda itself was meaningless and ridiculous. Who cared about the matter of fact? Duchamp has vandalized the art world without true understanding as well as by the short of true imagination. Instead of struggling hard to have the true vision of art and human culture for the future, he chose the easier way to insult people's intelligence, to be more precisely, to insult people's stupidity for establishing himself historically.
Let us take a glance of the modern material history in creating art. Talking about the pigments in doing art, if you had used paint to paint, in order to be different as new, we chose soy sauce, and then, cow shit, human blood, then fire, ash, female latex; talking about the tools, being revolutionary, you had used brush, we chose cloth, mop, tree branch, finger, human body, animal, machine, most recently, female breast and vagina. Every artist tried very hard to discover a new method to be "Revolutionary", pushing oneself to the extreme for "thinking out a great art" overnight. We, people, found us pretty in a gigantic circus, an animal kingdom with lots of fun. I have a question for you: If those methods had the power to transfer a nonsense into a great art or a great art would be less great because which did not use those new methods? The answer was absolutely "No"!
Then we are going to have a look at Performance art. Performance art was most likely began with Pollock's so called "Gesture painting" which he used female bodies to perform on large canvases from the 1940s. Harold Rosenberg, an American writer, educator, philosopher and art critic. coined the term Action painting in 1952 for what was later to be known as abstract expressionism. What was rooted on new psychoanalysis were beginning to flourish and were changing people's perception of the physical and psychological world and civilization’s understanding of the world through heightened self-consciousness, awareness of subconsciousness mind. It was a good start!
Performance art activity is not confined to European or American art traditions; notable practitioners can be found in Asia and Latin America. Performance art is a term usually reserved to refer to a Conceptual art which conveys a content-based meaning in a more drama-related sense, rather than being simple performance for its own sake for entertainment purposes.
On the process of the development, something began to change and going awful, instead of probing inter the true human spiritual value, performance artists were competing cruelty for breaking the boundary: placing self in cold water, in a bag out of air, in a dirty toilet, cutting self skin for dripping blood, cutting own penis in slices and sewing back again, making sex in the bright light of a gallery around by the public, eating human flesh. In short, to do whatever could be striking. A friend told me that he has found a "great artist", who was strongly against the idea of showing art to the public at anywhere because he said the matter of art is totally personal. His performance was to pump his own head inter hard surfaces such as a cement wall. However his greatest performance was not created yet because that performance would pump himself to die, but he had a problem to find anyone to record this greatest performance. He should be more revolutionary by just pumping himself to die, it was not his intention to show his art to this world anyway, why record?
Last we need to have a deeper understanding about so called Conceptual art. First, artists were showing actual paintings and installations, then they were advanced showing blank canvases, to be more conceptual, even a blank canvas is too much, they would announce a show without displaying anything but the empty room itself, but it was still too much for an announcement, it might be better to only talk to have a show, finally, even the talk was also too much, where they could go? The utmost Conceptual art only happened in a brain without doing anything. If a conceptual artist who was doing the extreme concept with zero doing, who finished being known as an artist but who wanted to be recognized as an artist. One artist put her dirty bed in a museum on which she wrote hundreds names of the people who had sex on the bed with her including a relative. She declared this bed was her art. One day she received an interview from a philosopher: " How can you define this bed is art?", she replied: "Because I think it is art, so it is art". The object was art only because she said was art, the definition of an art did not belong to that actual objective reality anymore, it only depended on whom announcing that. Thanks to Duchamp. we had an easy, terrific art game which did not need too much effort.
To be sure with no mistake, true art is not a game, which always requests a life time commitment, devotion, love, passion as well as purity.
Those so called "art" were based on insulting human dignity as a spiritual being replacing by cruelty and ugliness to the direction of inhumanity.
Life is life while art is art; Life is not art as art is not life. The same as a fish, shallot and condiments are not a delicious dish, you need to cook first to make them as a good dish.
The decay of art was not the fault of art itself, which was only a mirror. The fault rooted in our contemporary society, the sickness and brutality of a troubled world today. Those kinds of art had also some value only because they mirrored our troubled present world, showing us negative examples to be good again in human culture and society, reminding the weakest moment in the history of human culture, reflecting a complete failure in theory of modern art and a severe corruption of human value.
Tolstoy had fully believed that much of the art of his day was corrupt and that artists had been seriously misled in their paths. His view was that true art needed to connect the artist and the audiences through a special emotional bond, which would continue to live on within the observers. By relating a specific emotion through the work of art, a true artist could inspire that emotion within the others and by this virtue the act became true art.
ART IS A SPIRITUAL AND EMOTIONAL CREATION. The most magic part about human being is the ability to emotions, tear, not only is a reveal of pain, but also is a show of extreme happiness, a symbol of the complexity of emotions, when it is combined with the highest level of intelligent activity, with passion, love and imagination, this is the birth of art! Art will die only if we lose a certain part of those essential elements. The spiritual journey will be continued and refreshed from generations to generations as long as human still lives.
01/28/2016
If we don't appreciate the small, neither we can enjoy the big.
12/14/2015
A MEMOIR FOR A FRIEND IN A LIFE TIME
If no one loved you
god love you now
you died on a high mountain
you died in a wheat field
in an anonymous Summer.
You were sent to the battlefield
to kill your brothers
as a train followed its tracks roundabout blindly but strictly
joy in your Summer's naivety
you invented the war culture.
Nation trained you, church blessed you
old men always were there to increase your ignorance and naivety
in the period of change, it was not enough to have courage
bees were circling down the golden metal from the sun
timid rats died
you also died on your mountain
never understood the reasons behind.
You strawed people's braveness
set up and rotten away
someday in the future
we will come to remember you
and cut your names on a gravestone .
-- For the memory of my friend Penjing, and his endless passion!
We met so many people and friends in life, but few we can really remember, no to mention who could reach your heart , stay in your memory and influence you profoundly. I did have such a friend, the only one who has put his influence on me, the one never could be forgot after so many years.
Memories went back to the year when I was 18. I saw myself was departing with my mother near the railway station of my hometown Zigong, she was giving me twenty Yuan which was nearly half of her monthly salary at that time. I refused to take the money, for I understood how hard my mom was arranging the life of her family each month. I waved with my hands to my mom, carrying my quilt and other luggage to the railway station in a new leather shoes she bought for me several days ago. About five meters away, mother called me back, said: "Shutao, you must take the money in case you need, otherwise my heart will be painful! You are alone far away by yourself." I had to take the money from her hands and walked away, I knew her concern, I didn't want her to upset and to worry about her son. Mother was watching me until I disappeared from her sight. I never forgot that moment, the expressions of her eyes as well as face showing so much love, care, worry and anticipation, that image embodied in my heart as an implication of love. I received this emotional beauty from her, flourishing in my soul.
The next day, I was already in a dorm of Fine Arts College of Sichuan, in Chongqing city, eight hours away from my hometown by train. It was a morning, I remembered I was standing by myself alone, looking at the pale, gray sky through the panes of a window, drenched in tears, since I realized my new life was started, and I didn't know which direction would be led afterwards.
I had brought with me so many dreams and so much passion for art, not long, I found out nobody: teachers and classmates, could understand or cared about my mind. Every day was dull training, I lost myself in a misty land which I didn't understand its meaning. My passion for art was dripped into cold water, as a compensation, whenever I had time, I began to write poems and study literature to continue my passion. I bought myself a very bright pink bell-bottomed trousers, walking in the campus as a symbolic gesture of rebelliousness, refused to talk to anybody in classes all the time. Soon, I became a real weirdo among other students, but I was not the only one. There was another person from The Chinese Painting Department, whose name was Penjing. I could not remember when we began to talk to each other, I did remember one day I was in the classroom for completing a painting, he came in, watching the painting, and teased me: "This is nothing about art, it is a nonsense!." I was happy to find someone who was so different. Later I found out his mind was impressively brilliant, his thoughts were equally fascinating, we immediately became very good friends.
He told me he occasionally painted landscapes. One day he showed those paintings to me, one of them painted three green suns in the red sky, he explained: " it is no meaning to copy this world in art, the most important matter is to capture the spiritual value, for example, you can paint the sun in any colors, with any numbers in favor of a new emotional, psychological vision."
We discussed a lot about the true meaning of art, contemporary literature, philosophy and poetry. For poets, Our favorite talk was about Charles Pierre Baudelaire, Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Paul Valery, Walt Whitman, Rabindranath Tagore, Pablo Neruda and Thomas Stearns Eliot. We both agreed that the greatest literature as well as art should be from humanism, display the true value about human spiritual life.
Both of us had dual lives now. One was in classes, listening to the nonsense principles and rules for art, with meaningless drawings and paintings, impatiently waiting to escape the cage. Once we were off the classes, instead went out the campus from main door, we were prefer to climb the wall around the college to outside to avoid seeing any persons. We had several small restaurants nearby to have, usually a dish of cold flavored beef, oil fried peanuts and a small cup of wine, so the journey to the spiritual world began! Sometimes we could go far away for visiting scholars to the other side of Chongqing, it was a big city, we spent hours on the way and made changes for buses. In those cases, we did not come back to the college, stayed up for a night until daybreak, and we had to climb the wall of the college again to our dorms for the main door was not opened yet. I remembered one night, we spent 3 hours to visit a famous poet and editor of the magazine: The Red Cliff, we were sitting there half an hour without saying anything, then left, the poet was not willing to talk because of her painstaking life situation at that moment. Penjing was a very shy person, never felt easy in front of a female. When a time we saw a teenager girl with two big pigtails on the head, carried a school bag on her shoulders, jumping and running by, he declared to me, "When you see the purity of her spirit and the innocent looking, you are instantly in a sense of beauty!"
If a day we were not going to an inn, we would probably choose to stay by Jialing River, watching the yellowish water flowed down, listening to the long sound from the chimneys of the boats. "It reminds me of the nature and life itself and the meaning of this world!" Penjing sighed. One evening, when we were chatting on the bank, we saw a middle aged man around forty swimming in the river. Moments later, he greeted and approached to us, sitting by our side, asking why we were there, and began to talk about his life. Together we had a nice chat. He said: "Boys, life is short, enjoy life as much as you can, that is what I am doing right now." He invited us to visit his home and wrote the address on a piece of paper, it was in a factory near by the college. One evening , about one week after , we decided to pay a visit to that man. We knocked on the door of his home, in a moment, the door was opened, a woman appeared behind the door, who was just out of bath in a bathing tower with wet shining hair. She let us in and sat down on the stools, then disappeared in a room for dressing herself up. She was nice and good looking. After she reappeared, she told us her husband was never at home and asked how could we know her husband, what she said next startled us: " Do you know I am in a process of divorcing with him. He used to be a good husband, about two years ago he found a beautiful young girl and stayed with her, then, another one, and then, another. Since then, he got lost and could not stop himself. Because there were so many beautiful women, one was more pretty than the other, it kept him always busy in chasing the new ones." We felt very sad when we left there for that woman, and also for the man we had met.
One night after school, I came across with Penjing in the washing room. He stopped me, talked with me very seriously: " Shutao, I have made a decision for us." I inquired: " What's that?" He said: "Both of us are very sensitive persons, it is not good for us to stay together. We have to stop contacting each other which will be much better for each one of us." I replied: "If you think so, I agree."
From that night, we suddenly cut off, I respected his choice, understood his fragility as well as torture. Even we saw each other on the road, we did not greet to each other but silently passed by. I knew in our hearts, we cherished the time we had been together deeply. It was said the true friendship as plain as water. We had been very close to each other more than two years, the richness of those days with him was my emotional nutrition for the years to come, a light in the darkness for my lost soul, and one of the most valuable treasures in my life.
Seven years after, when I was studying Master Degree at Fine Arts College, South-West Teachers' University, one day, a classmate came to talk to me: "Do you know anything about Penjing?" I responded: "No". He told me that after Penjing graduated from the college, he was sent to Chongqing Iron & Steel Factory as an art worker: "He drank heavily, and has gone mad". Penjing had told me one day he would have gone crazy, unfortunately, it became true! He was the only genius in art I have met in my early life, who was born in the wrong place and wrong time, his thoughts, passion as well as understanding were simply amazing, his great soul was too beautiful and naive to adjust itself to this world. In the end, he intentionally chose to damage himself for staying away from this world in his spiritual refuge. His failure was a big blow and lesson to me.
Penjing told me: To be a great person as an artist, one needed to complete three steps: first: You needed to conquer the weaknesses of yourself; then: conquer your environment; finally show the world who you really are. For me, that was a great Revelation! It has taken more than thirty years to make a big cycle in my life for having a true courage to face myself with faith and purity and to do art.
He never realized his doctrine, which I did.
12/08/2015
A GREAT SURRENDER!
When we thinking about capturing the reality of inner existence in art, we need to understand the fact that there are two kinds of approach to reach that destination: THE INNER OBJECTIVE REALITY and THE INNER SUBJECTIVE REALITY. About The Inner Objective Reality, we can find in the works of Picasso, Kandinsky, Duchamp, not any less in the works of more recently, Bacon; About The Inner Subjective Reality, you can find in my art work series such as PASSING, A NEW BEING and also BETWEEN. Remember we are not talking about abstraction or abstract art, we are discussing on the inner reality.
Artists creating The Inner Objective Reality always need to think about some real existence in life, for example: people, creatures, plants or flowers, tables, chairs, cloths, buildings, sky, clouds and what so ever, in other words, they need a real thing in life to generate images to their brain, in a process of deforming as well as conforming, to reach their inner reality, in this way, we can see the perception changed according to their inner instinctive requirements.
At the time the artist creating The Inner Subjective Reality is totally different, there is nothing to reference in real life for this inner reality, instead, the artist has to purify self and merge into self with a right attitude, there is no other choices but totally trusts oneself, let the mind flow freely like water flows over the surface of the earth, and also, the artist has to believe in that all his scars, pain, torture, sorrow, sadness, joy, love, happiness and memories will find a way, transferring themselves into the lines and colors, finally images which showing their inner reality of existence exactly the way it is. Theoretically speaking, all your spiritual world can be very accurately molded into lines, colors, finally images as a whole.
Because The Inner Subjective Reality does not have a specific direction and location, a condition of nonobjective, which has reached the condition beyond any limitation; the East could be the West, the South and the North, joy could be pain, happiness could be sadness, the far away could be the nearby, and vice versa. That is WHY I stated: "In my art, I find nothing in everything and everything in nothing".
The Inner Subjective Reality has nothing to do with abstraction because there are always specific images appearing to coincide with the inner reality conditions, and those images are not abstracted from this world, nor they are simplified or reshaped from real life, but there are always specific images from the inner soul. It is all about how to reach yourself inner life of existence as a human being with zero distance, it is nowhere and it is everywhere, a process of being self, A GREAT SURRENDER!
02/13/2016
Art is all about the experiences of life as a human being, in which we inquire the true meaning of our existence.
11/19/2015
If we talk about happiness, we are actually talking about harmony with respect and understanding, basically, which is not depend on financial situations. No life could be in happiness without harmony.
11/24/2015
A MEMOIR FOR MY DEEPLY LOVED MOTHER
I WANT TO BE A TRUE FRIEND WITH MY OWN SOUL, IN THIS CONDITION, I AM BUILDING UP A PERMANENT SPIRITUAL TEMPLE FOR HUMAN EMOTIONS, Only because emotions, I can feel the beauty of life, its meaning, love and passion! Frankly speaking, I didn't like Picasso, I could not see his soul while enjoy his intelligence, he was only a half master, from this point, Van Gogh and Modigliani were much better.
Earlier this year, I was exposing myself in the extremely brutal cold in the night, 2 am of deep Winter, after hard work. I had received two invitations: one was the 56 VENICE BIENNIAL, the art organizer she received the Gold Lion Award of this Biennial later. another one was from a New York art organization to exhibit at the Musee du Louvre. I have deep emotional tie with Italy, a country which has given me all her honor and understanding to my art she could offer more than my motherland. After few talk with Annemie, the woman in this world I could truly feel love and we could fully understand each other without words. I told her I could not apply to the 56 VENICE BIENNIAL invitation. we discussed several minutes. my heart was broken for the big loss of my deeply loved mom. I wanted to see her, I wanted to see her!
I was about to leave next day, fly to China, half of the meaning of my life already has gone with the leaving of my mother. In all my life, her rich love was the source of my courage and the meaning of my struggle, I was so much wanted her to be truly proud of her son. If so, I would feel unbounded happiness.
I was drenched in pain, and got lost in the most painful, torturing journey of this life. At some moments, I would be happy to go with my mother and to stay with her in another world, but I understood it's against her intention and I had duty to accomplish in this world.
22 hours from New York to Chengdu, China, 3 am in the morning, out of the airport, I immediately hired a taxi to my hometown Zigong, I reached my hometown about 5:30 of the morning. I shouted in front of the building of my elder brother's apartment to announce my return. after 1 minute, my painter brother rushed out to receive me, gave me a big, tight hug which we never had before, we silently went in and upstairs, our elder brother opened the door. Here we were, three brothers together, with tears in the eyes and pain in the hearts, we shared the same pain, the same love, in the same flesh and the same bone, at that moment, we did not talk to each other, we hugged tightly together to give each other consolations, with so much understanding which we never had in this life.
Mother, I am back! I am back! we could never see each other in this life again, but I could feel you already knew I was back. From then on, we did not use words, did not use eyes to contact each other, instead, we used our hearts to keep in touch.
I was totally wrong, it has been 9 months since then, I still see my mother every day, she is still watching me, smiling to me, her kindest face filled with motherly love is so vivid in my heart, and forever!
11/09/2015
In my art, I find nothing in everything and everything in nothing.
10/26/2015
We can not emphasize too much on the importance of emotions, which are the basic nutrition for our life and art. Be a friend with your own emotions, otherwise. which could be poison too.
10/04/2015
HUMANKIND NEEDS A RE-CIVILIZATION REFORM!
This is a troubled time for mankind, we, all humankind, are falling into the trap of civilization, for this civilization trap, we are in deep conflicts with each other.
Up to now, all of our civilizations on this planet contain fatal poison because two obvious factors: the civilizations are self centered and based on power. I created a special term for these civilizations: The Singular Civilization, for these civilizations are immature civilization forms of humankind, some more powerful civilizations regarding themselves are superior to the others, step on weaker ones which are producing conflicts,sufferings,hunger,hatred,killings and wars.
We need to reform our human civilizations, which are not self centered, and not based on power, instead, the new civilizations are based on harmony, mutual respect of the differences, equally important because all the civilizations are the memories as well as the invaluable experiences of human being. They all are nutrition from our past for today's human society. I also created a special term for these new civilizations form: The Mutual Civilization.
If humankind wants to reach true prosperity and peace, we need have the wisdom to find a way to reshape our civilizations from The Singular Civilization to The Mutual Civilization as soon as possible, the process could take hundreds of years, but we need move forward now to that goal, this is a blue map of paradise on earth.
Art is a good example how different civilizations could be nutrition for each other, and make progress by understanding the others, in this case, art is a pioneer and foretell of the future structure of humankind.
09/30/2015
Life is short, fragile and precious, we are feeling our losses each day, each moment, we saw our loved ones passed away, we cherish those we truly love in our hearts, feeling the beauty as well as the pain at the same time, the only thing you really should do is to treasure your life, as much as you can.
05/23/2015
If you love yourself, which means you are psychologically fine, if you love your family, which means you are fundamentally in good condition, if you love your own race and nothing beyond that, which means you are a racist, if you love your own country and limited to that, which means you are a nationalist, if you love all people of the world regardless of where they come from, which means you are a humanist, and your love is truly a greatest one of all;
If you don't love yourself, I don't believe you can love other people, if you don't love your family, I don't believe you are in good condition, if you don't love your own people, I don't believe you will love the others who are different from you, if you don't love your own country, I don't believe you can love anywhere else in the world, love has to generate from somewhere nearby and then can go beyond that limitation.
Life is short, fragile and precious, we are feeling our losses each day, each moment, we saw our loved ones passed away, we cherish those we truly love in our hearts, feeling the beauty as well as the pain at the same time, the only thing you really should do is to treasure your life, as much as you can.
05/23/2015
If you love yourself, which means you are psychologically fine, if you love your family, which means you are fundamentally in good condition, if you love your own race and nothing beyond that, which means you are a racist, if you love your own country and limited to that, which means you are a nationalist, if you love all people of the world regardless of where they come from, which means you are a humanist, and your love is truly a greatest one of all;
If you don't love yourself, I don't believe you can love other people, if you don't love your family, I don't believe you are in good condition, if you don't love your own people, I don't believe you will love the others who are different from you, if you don't love your own country, I don't believe you can love anywhere else in the world, love has to generate from somewhere nearby and then can go beyond that limitation.
March 14, 2015, 11:25 pm (China time), is a very unique time in my life!
In the memory of my deeply loved mom, you nurtured my heart, you nurtured my soul, you nurtured my courage, you nurtured my life! Your great love to your children is flourishing in this world. My love to you will always stay in the deepest corner of my heart, ever and forever!
"If a person is living on, the one he truly loved will never die"
--- Vincent Van Gogh
04/30/2015
In an era of losing value as human being, our individual value as a person is replaced by the creation of science and technology, and the common sense of society. We are being driven by the tension and the hardship of contemporary life. In this case, we are forgetting who we really are as persons of human being, kindness was replaced by harshness, understanding was replaced by hatred, generosity was replaced by greediness, as a result, human being is in big conflicts to each other and misunderstanding. In art, guiding by wrong thoughts, real art gave ways to the fake one which was merely concepts and ideas that have nothing to do with the true human value. We need understand that we are people with rich emotions and spiritual life. We can never emphasize too much on the importance of the value of emotions and feelings of our spiritual world, simply because we all are humankind. Only from this point, we can fully understand who we really are and we can understand the need of others. Remember that art is the only way to touch and feel the true nature of a person as a human being, which has to go BACK TO HUMANITY.
01/05/2015
Great art has to be impacted with the colour of soul.
06/08/2014
If you go, go all the way, no matter what, in life, in art.
05/29/2014
Great people are fighting for values while the others are fighting for interests
05/05/2014
Darkness is another description of light.
04/21/2014
My art is a close description of the moments of inner conditions of mind.
03/19/2014
Sighed about the birth, sighed about the death, and the beauties, emotions, desires, sufferings, loves, memories we called life expands between them, an artist placed himself in the wrong side of a philosopher, and believed in that: art has to be a philosophy of life.
01/24/2014
I don't go to a total abstraction simply because I really need some important information to be carried on, for the same reason, I don't trust a surface appearance to the eyes, I need to touch and feel something far behind that appearance: the essence of existence.
01/21/2014
In history, truth and beauty will prevail over interest, whatever interest it might be from a particular person, group as well as a nation, unfortunately for a short period of time, interest will step over truth and beauty in most cases as we know.
This reveals that how precious and how difficult to stay with the truth we believe.
10/29/2013
Truth is the essence of beauty, without truth, art is a life without heart.
07/22/2013
One has to think about his art historically if one wants to be great in order to be remembered by history.
06/22/2013
Once upon a time, I dreamed about living in a better world, a perfect one, with only the same good, beautiful people and places. Sometime ago, I received a revelation from god: if we live in a world with the same thing, even very beautiful one, the world must be very dull as well as boring, we will lose the sense of travelling, adventure, and wonderful encounter, do you want to see a same face everywhere across the world? There is a meaning why god create everyone and everything is different from outside to inside, from shape to colour, from good to bad. I learnt to appreciate the differences and everything in my life, even the worst one for that showed us at least what is the definition of the worst is.
This world is perfect exactly because which is imperfect, full of differences in every way.
This is a perfect world in a process.
06/19/2013
An art work is an unknown thing in stead of a known one, like an artist struggles to create it, Viewers also need struggling to capture its meaning as well as mysteries.
05/31/2013
Soul needs to be washed each day as our bodies.
So called civilization of humanity is a process of love, kindness and understanding that overcomes the selfishness from our blood, the selfishness of self, self family, self group, self community, self class, self race, self nationality, self country, to reach the ultimate understanding of human as two persons: a man and a woman. Judge yourself what is your definition from your heart, you will find the answer.
May 1, 2013
Never, never let the darkness cover your eyes as well as heart!
04/15/2013
The greatest power of art comes from two major sources: imagination and love. When stay together, they can produce a true miracle of creativity!
Art, is a purified existence of nature.
We can feel the beauty and the meaning of our lives because there are someone or something in this world we really miss and care about, those touched our hearts deeply and we are cherishing and keeping them in our bodies as well as our souls, never willing or have the ability to forget, out of this condition, we are only walking fleshes with a human form, meaninglessly wandering around the world.
12/24/2012
The maximum disharmony is the best harmony, in other words, they are the same thing.
Simplicity is not only a requirement, but also a major source of strength.
12/23/2012
Great art has to close to the effect of god-making, yet with a strong human impact.
12/21/2012
The most precious gift god may give you in your life is just inside of you, but before you get that gift, you have to prove that you are worthy of the treasure!
We all are passengers of this world. The meanings and the beauties of life lay on the landscapes and experiences of the process, how we perceive and receive the world, how we think and how we feel, not the result and what we have. What we have will leave us on the end of the day, but what we experienced will stay with us from this life to another life, and forever!
The agitation, disturbance of life, I am struggling to capture that through my art. The memories I experienced, the feelings I have, the dreams to come, all transformed in lines and colours, going beyond the surface, to the inner side of the soul, and the world.
I paint my dream, my experience, my love, my satisfaction, my hope, my despairing, my torture, my desire, my understanding and the state which lacks of understanding, my consciousness and unconsciousness. My art is a whole scope of me as a human being.
Recent days, I am thinking about love -- Love is the essence and meaning of life, not only the love between a man and a woman, but also the love of everything. The highest love is the completeness of love for itself, for instance: love a stone because it is a stone, love a leaf because it is a leaf, love a colour because it is a colour, love a cup of tea because it is a cup of tea. The purest and simplicity in love itself will accomplish a highest sense of meaning: the completeness of love, which can produce most positive forces and greatest sense of well being as well as creativity.
Very interested in the distance between lives, their forever shaping, and also the happenings of the evolution process.
My images are not abstract, I created them as the possible life forms and their energy in development.
If I don't completely have myself, I don't have the world!
Only great minds can understand great minds, you never can please everyone and you shouldn't do so, misunderstanding is a necessary test to your courage as well as belief!
I make great effort to be more powerful, more accurate in expressing myself.
I have deep respect to the unknown life possibilities.
The curiosity about life, opened a boundless possibility of an unknown world, ignited my imagination of the impossible creativity!
Art is the skin of the soul; Passion and understanding are the net of blood veins from the skin to the soul; Truthfulness and belief make the tunnels clear in transforming and lasting long.
Without faith, we can accomplish nothing but chaos, faith automatically give us power, trust, belief, calmness, enduring and assuring, which we absolutely need when facing the most difficult time with love and art, guiding us pass through the darkest periods of our lives.
In art I am looking for challenge; In life I am looking for harmony.
I have a permanent enemy -- myself. Everyday, I have to fight to the weaknesses of self to be a better person as well as a better artist!
To me, there is only one real success in life -- For a life time, to be absolutely loyalty to myself as the real person I am, and be what I really want to be; do what I really want to do in whatever condition: rich or poor, glorious or ignored, and never torture my wishes and dreams.
We always stay in the area between two points, past and future, loves, desires, dreams, hopes, tortures, feelings, struggles, memories, too many things in our minds, too much emotion in our hearts. As an artist, I am always lost in words to state, choosing to stay in a distance to describe life experiences, surrendering to possibilities to come into my art world.
My art is the reconciliation of consciousness to sub consciousness, or the sub consciousness being driven by consciousness to reach the true self creation. I finally touch the true self being through the driven sub consciousness.
Every new work is a challenge to the last one, like everyday one should be renewed as a better person.
Concerning in creating art, attitude is the most important matter of all, which means how to approach to art is much more important than how to do it!
To my understanding, the greatness comes from truthfulness, honesty, clearness, simplicity, courage and the openness as well as the freedom of mind, to reach the true basic nature of a human as a person.
I feel life is great because I feel it, I feel art is great because I feel it, I feel love is great because I feel it, I feel pain is great because I feel it, I feel torture is great because I feel it.
The purer the feeling is, the greater the feeling will be, even the pain should be felt properly, otherwise, you will lose your pain and the chance to be cured which is a much worse condition. The road of saints is the process of self purification of the heart and the mind, both in life as well as in art.
I felt shame so I was closer to dignity, I felt dignity so I was closer to humbleness, Because I understand nothing is everlasting except spirit.
In art, truth is always beautiful in whatever condition. The ultimate truth is the truth of self. It is all about what is the real self being and how to reach it and merge into it.
As an artist, you should never struggle for finding great thoughts, instead, great thoughts will come to find you with all kinds of power in the condition that if you are totally opened and surrendered to the true self being.
What I am doing is to find a way to be really close to the deepest, most original nature of myself, giving up the dusted will as a totally surrender to the basic essence of living spiritual being, and to reveal that through art.
I tried my best to create great art to reach my deepest self: the naked being or the naked soul, which I believe is the meaning of art: to reach the true nature of mankind.
05/01/2012
An important message
Several years ago, I attended a museum art lecture, topic: The Present Situation of Painting After Its Death. Well learned critics, curators, art historians got together to examine the corpse of painting. It was a most ridiculous, yet serious lecture in art history itself. I had hoped that they would have found some valuable diamonds inside the corpse.
Still many years before that lecture, some powerful, famous, influential, confident people in art world had declared that painting was dead. Their issue might be very bold and revolutionary, but they were obviously short of imagination. Unfortunately, new masters and masterpieces in painting still kept appearing after their valuable declaration. More ridiculously, people were still listening to their voices all the time!
Fact is: the value of art is decided by the true revelation of human nature, and its impact on human society, in whatever medium, including painting.
It is the time to fill out the hole of that dark declaration of logic. If not, some part of our culture will be still remained in darkness. Painting will never die as long as human still exists. This will be proved by human history, not us.
It is the time to make an adjustment officially to say that the idea of painting is dead is totally wrong, and let the sun shine evenly over all parts of our culture!
It is the time to stop to be fooled by some art game players!
Something must be wrong in the logic of the basic art theory!
07/29/2012
A BEAUTIFUL PERSON
It was a fully crowded subway. An old man was struggling for standing, who had a prominent belly, with few white hairs dancing on his nearly bold head. He was pushed in front of a lady, barely standing. Saw the difficulty of him, the lady wanted to offer her seat to him.“No, thanks!“ He said. “Are you sure?” the lady insisted. “I am sure.” He answered. After the train was crackling passed several stations, the lady was standing up and left the subway. Old man got a chance to seat himself down, sighed and relaxed. In a moment, a woman with a baby sitting on a carriage pushed in. It was a very difficult situation for her inside the crowded car. Old man managed to stand up to let the woman sit down. Immediately, he was pushed in front of a young man who felt a little bit shame by sitting beside the old man, trying to offer his seat. Old man refused to take the chance to sit down. About thirty minutes later, most people left the subway car, the old man finally found a seat, truly relaxed, sitting on the bench with satisfaction.
To my surprise, the old man and I got off at the same station. There was a lonely musician singing on the subway passage. Old man joined the musical feast without hesitation, singing and dancing. His dancing was ridiculously awkward and his voice was off the beats, but on his face, I could not find out any traces of the struggle about a moment before. It was like a child’s face, full of joy as well as happy feelings. “A beautiful person!” the thought was across of my mind.
It was a foggy midnight after rain outside, with heavy shadows of trees and the dim light from roadside lamps. I felt refreshed. A beautiful feeling moved up silently from my heart. On the top of my head, a few stars were shining brightly against the deep blue sky.
“a wonderful night!” I murmured to myself.
______ I have to feel the good side of life and humanity in order to feel beauty.
04/25/2012
Walking alone, under the sky, over the stars, to the deepest universe.
Felt extreme beauty and pain, I thought I was responsible to reveal that beauty to the world, and let the pain keep staying in my soul: the nest of art. People call it creation, I say it nirvana
Genuine art, a deed among god, devil and artist, paradise and hell guaranteed. one has to pass the fire of purgatory to reach the land of paradise.
It is all about life and the meaning of life, I don't have any answer, so I keep inquiring.
To gain the true essence of existential experience of life, art has to pass over knowledge to reach the instinctive irrational power of creativity, fascination and imagination, embracing the freedom of making.
My art is an overview, destruct and reconstruction of human consciousness through symbolic depiction.
I am testing the possibilities of imagination and consciousness compared with reality. I am not in control, imagination leads me to go wherever it wants, meanwhile, I only use a blink of consciousness.
In the memory of my deeply loved mom, you nurtured my heart, you nurtured my soul, you nurtured my courage, you nurtured my life! Your great love to your children is flourishing in this world. My love to you will always stay in the deepest corner of my heart, ever and forever!
"If a person is living on, the one he truly loved will never die"
--- Vincent Van Gogh
04/30/2015
In an era of losing value as human being, our individual value as a person is replaced by the creation of science and technology, and the common sense of society. We are being driven by the tension and the hardship of contemporary life. In this case, we are forgetting who we really are as persons of human being, kindness was replaced by harshness, understanding was replaced by hatred, generosity was replaced by greediness, as a result, human being is in big conflicts to each other and misunderstanding. In art, guiding by wrong thoughts, real art gave ways to the fake one which was merely concepts and ideas that have nothing to do with the true human value. We need understand that we are people with rich emotions and spiritual life. We can never emphasize too much on the importance of the value of emotions and feelings of our spiritual world, simply because we all are humankind. Only from this point, we can fully understand who we really are and we can understand the need of others. Remember that art is the only way to touch and feel the true nature of a person as a human being, which has to go BACK TO HUMANITY.
01/05/2015
Great art has to be impacted with the colour of soul.
06/08/2014
If you go, go all the way, no matter what, in life, in art.
05/29/2014
Great people are fighting for values while the others are fighting for interests
05/05/2014
Darkness is another description of light.
04/21/2014
My art is a close description of the moments of inner conditions of mind.
03/19/2014
Sighed about the birth, sighed about the death, and the beauties, emotions, desires, sufferings, loves, memories we called life expands between them, an artist placed himself in the wrong side of a philosopher, and believed in that: art has to be a philosophy of life.
01/24/2014
I don't go to a total abstraction simply because I really need some important information to be carried on, for the same reason, I don't trust a surface appearance to the eyes, I need to touch and feel something far behind that appearance: the essence of existence.
01/21/2014
In history, truth and beauty will prevail over interest, whatever interest it might be from a particular person, group as well as a nation, unfortunately for a short period of time, interest will step over truth and beauty in most cases as we know.
This reveals that how precious and how difficult to stay with the truth we believe.
10/29/2013
Truth is the essence of beauty, without truth, art is a life without heart.
07/22/2013
One has to think about his art historically if one wants to be great in order to be remembered by history.
06/22/2013
Once upon a time, I dreamed about living in a better world, a perfect one, with only the same good, beautiful people and places. Sometime ago, I received a revelation from god: if we live in a world with the same thing, even very beautiful one, the world must be very dull as well as boring, we will lose the sense of travelling, adventure, and wonderful encounter, do you want to see a same face everywhere across the world? There is a meaning why god create everyone and everything is different from outside to inside, from shape to colour, from good to bad. I learnt to appreciate the differences and everything in my life, even the worst one for that showed us at least what is the definition of the worst is.
This world is perfect exactly because which is imperfect, full of differences in every way.
This is a perfect world in a process.
06/19/2013
An art work is an unknown thing in stead of a known one, like an artist struggles to create it, Viewers also need struggling to capture its meaning as well as mysteries.
05/31/2013
Soul needs to be washed each day as our bodies.
So called civilization of humanity is a process of love, kindness and understanding that overcomes the selfishness from our blood, the selfishness of self, self family, self group, self community, self class, self race, self nationality, self country, to reach the ultimate understanding of human as two persons: a man and a woman. Judge yourself what is your definition from your heart, you will find the answer.
May 1, 2013
Never, never let the darkness cover your eyes as well as heart!
04/15/2013
The greatest power of art comes from two major sources: imagination and love. When stay together, they can produce a true miracle of creativity!
Art, is a purified existence of nature.
We can feel the beauty and the meaning of our lives because there are someone or something in this world we really miss and care about, those touched our hearts deeply and we are cherishing and keeping them in our bodies as well as our souls, never willing or have the ability to forget, out of this condition, we are only walking fleshes with a human form, meaninglessly wandering around the world.
12/24/2012
The maximum disharmony is the best harmony, in other words, they are the same thing.
Simplicity is not only a requirement, but also a major source of strength.
12/23/2012
Great art has to close to the effect of god-making, yet with a strong human impact.
12/21/2012
The most precious gift god may give you in your life is just inside of you, but before you get that gift, you have to prove that you are worthy of the treasure!
We all are passengers of this world. The meanings and the beauties of life lay on the landscapes and experiences of the process, how we perceive and receive the world, how we think and how we feel, not the result and what we have. What we have will leave us on the end of the day, but what we experienced will stay with us from this life to another life, and forever!
The agitation, disturbance of life, I am struggling to capture that through my art. The memories I experienced, the feelings I have, the dreams to come, all transformed in lines and colours, going beyond the surface, to the inner side of the soul, and the world.
I paint my dream, my experience, my love, my satisfaction, my hope, my despairing, my torture, my desire, my understanding and the state which lacks of understanding, my consciousness and unconsciousness. My art is a whole scope of me as a human being.
Recent days, I am thinking about love -- Love is the essence and meaning of life, not only the love between a man and a woman, but also the love of everything. The highest love is the completeness of love for itself, for instance: love a stone because it is a stone, love a leaf because it is a leaf, love a colour because it is a colour, love a cup of tea because it is a cup of tea. The purest and simplicity in love itself will accomplish a highest sense of meaning: the completeness of love, which can produce most positive forces and greatest sense of well being as well as creativity.
Very interested in the distance between lives, their forever shaping, and also the happenings of the evolution process.
My images are not abstract, I created them as the possible life forms and their energy in development.
If I don't completely have myself, I don't have the world!
Only great minds can understand great minds, you never can please everyone and you shouldn't do so, misunderstanding is a necessary test to your courage as well as belief!
I make great effort to be more powerful, more accurate in expressing myself.
I have deep respect to the unknown life possibilities.
The curiosity about life, opened a boundless possibility of an unknown world, ignited my imagination of the impossible creativity!
Art is the skin of the soul; Passion and understanding are the net of blood veins from the skin to the soul; Truthfulness and belief make the tunnels clear in transforming and lasting long.
Without faith, we can accomplish nothing but chaos, faith automatically give us power, trust, belief, calmness, enduring and assuring, which we absolutely need when facing the most difficult time with love and art, guiding us pass through the darkest periods of our lives.
In art I am looking for challenge; In life I am looking for harmony.
I have a permanent enemy -- myself. Everyday, I have to fight to the weaknesses of self to be a better person as well as a better artist!
To me, there is only one real success in life -- For a life time, to be absolutely loyalty to myself as the real person I am, and be what I really want to be; do what I really want to do in whatever condition: rich or poor, glorious or ignored, and never torture my wishes and dreams.
We always stay in the area between two points, past and future, loves, desires, dreams, hopes, tortures, feelings, struggles, memories, too many things in our minds, too much emotion in our hearts. As an artist, I am always lost in words to state, choosing to stay in a distance to describe life experiences, surrendering to possibilities to come into my art world.
My art is the reconciliation of consciousness to sub consciousness, or the sub consciousness being driven by consciousness to reach the true self creation. I finally touch the true self being through the driven sub consciousness.
Every new work is a challenge to the last one, like everyday one should be renewed as a better person.
Concerning in creating art, attitude is the most important matter of all, which means how to approach to art is much more important than how to do it!
To my understanding, the greatness comes from truthfulness, honesty, clearness, simplicity, courage and the openness as well as the freedom of mind, to reach the true basic nature of a human as a person.
I feel life is great because I feel it, I feel art is great because I feel it, I feel love is great because I feel it, I feel pain is great because I feel it, I feel torture is great because I feel it.
The purer the feeling is, the greater the feeling will be, even the pain should be felt properly, otherwise, you will lose your pain and the chance to be cured which is a much worse condition. The road of saints is the process of self purification of the heart and the mind, both in life as well as in art.
I felt shame so I was closer to dignity, I felt dignity so I was closer to humbleness, Because I understand nothing is everlasting except spirit.
In art, truth is always beautiful in whatever condition. The ultimate truth is the truth of self. It is all about what is the real self being and how to reach it and merge into it.
As an artist, you should never struggle for finding great thoughts, instead, great thoughts will come to find you with all kinds of power in the condition that if you are totally opened and surrendered to the true self being.
What I am doing is to find a way to be really close to the deepest, most original nature of myself, giving up the dusted will as a totally surrender to the basic essence of living spiritual being, and to reveal that through art.
I tried my best to create great art to reach my deepest self: the naked being or the naked soul, which I believe is the meaning of art: to reach the true nature of mankind.
05/01/2012
An important message
Several years ago, I attended a museum art lecture, topic: The Present Situation of Painting After Its Death. Well learned critics, curators, art historians got together to examine the corpse of painting. It was a most ridiculous, yet serious lecture in art history itself. I had hoped that they would have found some valuable diamonds inside the corpse.
Still many years before that lecture, some powerful, famous, influential, confident people in art world had declared that painting was dead. Their issue might be very bold and revolutionary, but they were obviously short of imagination. Unfortunately, new masters and masterpieces in painting still kept appearing after their valuable declaration. More ridiculously, people were still listening to their voices all the time!
Fact is: the value of art is decided by the true revelation of human nature, and its impact on human society, in whatever medium, including painting.
It is the time to fill out the hole of that dark declaration of logic. If not, some part of our culture will be still remained in darkness. Painting will never die as long as human still exists. This will be proved by human history, not us.
It is the time to make an adjustment officially to say that the idea of painting is dead is totally wrong, and let the sun shine evenly over all parts of our culture!
It is the time to stop to be fooled by some art game players!
Something must be wrong in the logic of the basic art theory!
07/29/2012
A BEAUTIFUL PERSON
It was a fully crowded subway. An old man was struggling for standing, who had a prominent belly, with few white hairs dancing on his nearly bold head. He was pushed in front of a lady, barely standing. Saw the difficulty of him, the lady wanted to offer her seat to him.“No, thanks!“ He said. “Are you sure?” the lady insisted. “I am sure.” He answered. After the train was crackling passed several stations, the lady was standing up and left the subway. Old man got a chance to seat himself down, sighed and relaxed. In a moment, a woman with a baby sitting on a carriage pushed in. It was a very difficult situation for her inside the crowded car. Old man managed to stand up to let the woman sit down. Immediately, he was pushed in front of a young man who felt a little bit shame by sitting beside the old man, trying to offer his seat. Old man refused to take the chance to sit down. About thirty minutes later, most people left the subway car, the old man finally found a seat, truly relaxed, sitting on the bench with satisfaction.
To my surprise, the old man and I got off at the same station. There was a lonely musician singing on the subway passage. Old man joined the musical feast without hesitation, singing and dancing. His dancing was ridiculously awkward and his voice was off the beats, but on his face, I could not find out any traces of the struggle about a moment before. It was like a child’s face, full of joy as well as happy feelings. “A beautiful person!” the thought was across of my mind.
It was a foggy midnight after rain outside, with heavy shadows of trees and the dim light from roadside lamps. I felt refreshed. A beautiful feeling moved up silently from my heart. On the top of my head, a few stars were shining brightly against the deep blue sky.
“a wonderful night!” I murmured to myself.
______ I have to feel the good side of life and humanity in order to feel beauty.
04/25/2012
Walking alone, under the sky, over the stars, to the deepest universe.
Felt extreme beauty and pain, I thought I was responsible to reveal that beauty to the world, and let the pain keep staying in my soul: the nest of art. People call it creation, I say it nirvana
Genuine art, a deed among god, devil and artist, paradise and hell guaranteed. one has to pass the fire of purgatory to reach the land of paradise.
It is all about life and the meaning of life, I don't have any answer, so I keep inquiring.
To gain the true essence of existential experience of life, art has to pass over knowledge to reach the instinctive irrational power of creativity, fascination and imagination, embracing the freedom of making.
My art is an overview, destruct and reconstruction of human consciousness through symbolic depiction.
I am testing the possibilities of imagination and consciousness compared with reality. I am not in control, imagination leads me to go wherever it wants, meanwhile, I only use a blink of consciousness.
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