The Trip to Sanya
Previously I have mysterious feelings towards the sea, and luxurious feeling towards sunshine. Both of them are so attractive to people who live in cloudy inland areas. Even the air becomes precious as time goes by. A place with fresh air also has people over 100 years old living there. Only one place has premiurr sunshine, air and sea, and it is Sanya. I cannot forqet my first trip to Sanya. Zhou Chunya.
Work in brush and ink on xuan paper (70x140)
Gradually, pink peach blossoms began to appear in his paintings, one by one. To begin with, in 1997, peach blossoms had served as contrastive embellishments, their gentle beauty providing a strong contrast with the wolfhound as the subject which the painter says fascinated him. Flowers serve as sexual and erotic symbols in China's traditional culture, but Zhou Chunya's method of narrating an erotic tale is to contrast gentleness with rigidity, in order to heighten the sexual appeal. The red human figure is a sexual leitmotif that appears frequently in Zhou Chunya's work, but to intensify the desire of sexual attraction, the artist again applies another ancient technique based on the traditional understanding that violence is concealed within tender emotions or has tenderness as its object, violence always being directed against tender feelings. The painter said: 'Once I moved from the wolfhound to the peach blossoms, I then began to make the transformation from violence to gentleness'. But Zhou Chunya had in fact adopted the traditional exquisite attitude by exhausting the possible 'gentleness' through the intensification of the beautiful 'violence':
I had collected a pair of hanging scrolls bearing a couplet of calligraphy by the late-Qing sage Gong Qinggao. His inscription read: 'On the lake plucking eyebrows of the distant mountain color; before the wind the thinning petals of the small peach blossoms', The words are extremely romantic, revealing the exquisite and refined taste of the classical scholar-painter, and there is a feeling of cherishing spring that is ambiguous and sexual. My personality requires that I am more direct. I did not have the means to express things in the concealed and indirect manner of the classical scholar-painter, but what I was describing were 'colors and desire' and the passion for life. So I juxtaposed the exquisite peach blossom with the male and female figures coupling in the wilds. These associations dissolved the divide between humans and nature, blurring the boundaries between transgression and ethics and, in an emotional mood of flowing color, a sincere but instinctive illusion was created and in a single mighty scene natural human impulses were thoroughly released, the catalyst being provided by tenderness and violence! (6]
Zhou Chunya painted the Peach Blossoms (Taohua) series at the same time as the series Green Dog (Lugou) and even Human Figures (Renti). Lu Xun used the following expression to encapsulate ancient Chinese erotic aesthetics: 'In the place that is excessively ripe, the gaudiness resembles peaches and plums'. In psychology every form of behavior has its latent motivation, and even if we do not understand the painter's everyday experiences and unique encounters, we can see the particularity of the language of his paintings which creates the life of the paintings. We may not know the sources of anxiety, sorrow, fear and injury, and it is only through the images in his most recent work that an artist can demonstrate the unique changes that have taken place in his inner being. Thus, an artist's 'meanings' can only be dispelled and his 'explanations' rejected when a new painting appears, allowing one to realize from the visual evidence that one was earlier deceived. Philosophical concepts can only open up the painter's programming and it is image that forms the ultimate basis on which we can judge concepts. By the end of the 1990s, the individual images beginning to emerge from Cynical Realism and Political Pop were impressive, and it was very easy for people to build up memories of the signifiers of the various painters.
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In fact, conceptual freedom and painterly interest encouraged the expansion of 'new painting' and, at the turn of the century, Zhou Chunya's art provides a casebook study for understanding the new art. Zhou Chunya's painting went through the spiritual baptism of Van Gogh, Modigliani, de Chirico and a number of German painters, and such a spiritual history is identical to the process of transition undergone by China's modern art from the 1980s to the 1990s. Zhou therefore spent more time and effort attempting to understand the meaning of civilization and tradition but, unlike the new scholar-painters who only used traditional tools and materials, he acknowledged that a civilization and tradition must be re-interpreted, explained, realized and recollected using new tools and new concepts. At the same time, Zhou was also well aware that there is no unalterable individuality and an individual character is always growing through change. All concepts, such as revolution and reform, tradition and modernity, contemporaneousness and globalization, may possibly obscure the evolution of civilization itself, but intuition can tell us what artistic attitude is appropriate for today:
I believe that history is a gradual progression full of individuality and its real charm does not lie in those 'inexorable laws' used to later summarize all that has happened, but in those seemingly accidental things that convey more emotion to us than any laws of the inevitable and which are therefore much more important in our lives. And yet it is only in that pursuit that tradition will exert its charm and only such a tradition will be a tradition replete with artistic quality. [7]
Artists in Art History. Lü Peng.