A Research On Huang Zhou’s Figure Painting

Huang Zhou has provided a successful case for the exploration of pen and ink,theme creation and art education of figure painting on the subject of the contemporary transformation of Chinese painting.Therefore,the research about him still has great academic significance.Huang Zhou’s artistic exploration was founded in the Period of the Republic of China and matured in the "Seventeen-Years",which means the time that is 17 years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.His artistic exploration and achievements were wrapped in the historical tide of great changes in China’s modern society.Thus,it is very necessary to do the research on the generation of Huang Zhou’s unique artistic style,because it has great importance in the subject of discussing the inner texture of the modern transformation of Chinese painting.Intercepting Huang Zhou’s artistic life in the specific period of "Seventeen-Years",this paper focused on the question of the generation of Huang Zhou’s artistic style and analyzed it from the aspects of Huang Zhou’s social situation,artistic concept and artistic exploration,which involved the dimensions of both the external context of artistic style generation and the ontological characteristics of artistic language.Huang Zhou’s social situation and the construction of his artistic concept were closely related to the special historical background,thus politics has become an unavoidable context during the "Seventeen-Years".Therefore,the paper sorted out the necessity and contingency of Huang Zhou’s attachment to the western region and establishment of its artistic ideal,from the historical details of the war which caused social changes.The paper analyzed the external context of Huang Zhou’s artistic style generation mechanism by extracting the underlying discourse logic of system and policy from classical literature,sorting out his various social relations revealing the influence of social factors including system,policy and communication on his artistic psychology,artistic concept and artistic creation.These external problems can affect artists and the uniqueness of their internal artistic style,such as the artistic material field,art schema,ink language and other aspects of Huang Zhou’s artistic characteristics.The analysis of the external context of Huang Zhou’s artistic style is mainly observed from the perspective of art psychology and art sociology.Believing that childhood has established a person’s disposition,temperament and perspective,art psychology attaches great importance to the life experience of artists in their childhood.Art sociology regards artists as particles in a whole and attaches importance to various social relations and the process of artists’ growth and transformation.Imagology is good at both fishing for artistic motifs in the long river of history and conveying the changes of artistic concepts through the motifs in images.The transmission of such ideas is not limited to artistic ideas,but extends to universal cultural ideas,so it has some characteristics of cultural construction.By analyzing the motif of "feast" in Huang Zhou’s works from the perspective of imagology,the cultural construction characteristics of the theme art creation in the "Seventeen-Years" could be felt more directly.In order to present the particularity of Huang Zhou’s artistic style,the ontological analysis of Huang Zhou’s figure painting was done both by the way of comparison between different periods and techniques in the work and the way of a moderate comparison with other artists’ brush and ink language.Huang Zhou’s early experiences laid the foundation for the formation and practical exploration of his artistic concept.From the perspective of the transformation of artistic concept,Huang Zhou’s transformation from a exile to an editor in the difficult situation not only strengthened his artistic ambition,but also made him to combine art with social livelihood of the people,painter and the times,which eventually made his artistic concept tend to highlight the social value of art.The transformation of Huang Zhou’s artistic conception was discussed from the macroscopic,mesoscopic and microscopic levels.From a macro perspective,"the old and the new dualism" and "revolutionary utilitarianism" constituted the underlying logic of the macro context of the "Seventeen-Years" period.From a mesoscopic perspective,the disappearance of customers and the loosening of status that Chinese painting faced in the early days of the founding of the People’s Republic of China objectively prompted Chinese painters to explore the path of modern transformation of Chinese painting.From a microscopic level,Huang Zhou’s social interaction and his transfer from many teachers were the more direct sources of his artistic concept construction.The following were the specific manifestations : when he was in Xi’an,he accepted Zhao Wangyun’s concept of "life is culture".And when he was in Lanzhou,he again accepted Xu Beihong’s concept of "drawing is the foundation of all plastic arts".After being transferred to Beijing,his contacts with mainstream ideological figures such as Deng Tuo prompted him to pay more attention to the close connection between art and politics.The above conceptual resources at multiple levels finally prompted Huang Zhou to fully accepted the mainstream expression "life is the source of creation" in his artistic concept.Judging from the course of practical exploration,it was Huang Zhou’s family structure in childhood and his early experience of moving westward with his mother caused by the war that made his creation more concerned with social livelihood of the people.From the period of the Anti-Japanese War to the "Seventeen-Years " after the founding of the People’s Republic of China,it was the continuity of the old and new regimes’ strategies of developing the northwest that ensured him to continue to focus on the social livelihood of the people in the northwest.All of the above had a direct impact on the formation of Huang Zhou’s artistic material field and prompted him to take the Northwest as the creative base to conduct in-depth excavation.Starting from the interactive relationship between the times context and the subject practice,this paper observed the changes of Huang Zhou in three aspects: theme exploration,genre exploration,and pen and ink exploration.Although influenced by the external contexts such as systems,policies,and artistic concepts,it was found that Huang Zhou’s practice exploration exhibited the following dual characteristics.On the one hand,his practical exploration insisted on paying attention to social livelihood of the people and continuously excavating the unchanging characteristics of life.On the other hand,his practical exploration showed changes in the aspects of expanding the research field,seeking integration and innovation.The specific manifestations were as follows: in the new discourse environment,Huang Zhou further changed the material of "mother and child" which was commonly used in the early days to the level of the construction of female images in New China.The theme of the "home" of the exiles was also improved to the level of "nation" and "country" by some symbolic material images such as war-horses,donkeys,and national costumes.While grasping the new life,it enhanced the meaning of cultural construction which was contained in the works,and responded to the collectivist spiritual map of the "Seventeen-Years" period.As a literary warrior and an art editor,Huang Zhou tried different types of New Year pictures,prints,comic strips,and sketches.The knowledge structure formed by these types of exploration laid the foundation for his exploration of the integration of brush and ink.After Huang Zhou’s transferring to Beijing,the cultural context has changed.While expressing his new life,he focued on the study of traditional brush and ink.Using skilled sketching techniques to incorporate splashing ink,boneless and other freehand techniques,he deconstructed traditional brush and ink.And in the process of deconstrucion,he created a personalized artistic language that can take both modeling and brush and ink into account.His exploration of brush and ink showed the fusion characteristics,including the combination of sketching techniques and freehand brush and ink,the combination of traditional schema and folk aesthetic elements,and the combination of realistic modeling and traditional brush and ink.