A Study On Chen Hongshou's Male Figure Paintings With Flowers In Hairpin

A hairpin is a way of decorating a bun,sideburns,turban or crown by placing seasonal flowers or flowers like raw flowers on the hair.In ancient China,women wore hairpins as a form of beauty,and so did men.The practice of hairpins for men has been practised since ancient times,and arose during the Northern and Southern Dynasties,flourished during the Song Dynasty,and declined in subsequent dynasties until it disappeared.The development and evolution of the male flower pin is documented in ancient sources,and paintings are a visual reproduction of the style,showing the aesthetics of the different eras,which has become an important source of evidence for the study of the practice in later times.During the Ming and Qing dynasties,the phenomenon of men pinning flowers in everyday life was not common and existed only on specific social occasions,but at this time the number of paintings of men pinning flowers was increasing and their content was becoming richer.Chen Hongshou is represented by more than twenty of these works,in which he paints figures of Taoist gods and goddesses,heroes and heroines,and literary scholars in a wide variety of shapes and forms.Chen Hongshou’s figure paintings were the best of their time,and his paintings of male flower-haired figures were even more so,displaying individual characteristics in terms of their portrayal,stylistic language and artistic style.Artistic creation is a reflection of a particular historical era.The creation of Chen Hongxiao’s male figure paintings was related to the political and economic,ideological and cultural,and customary and fashionable conditions of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties,as well as to the painter’s life experiences,artistic qualities,and ideological perceptions.Unlike the beauty of women’s hairpins,men’s hairpins were given a more subjective colour,becoming a symbol of status and having a strong utilitarian character.The process of creating male flower-hair paintings reflects Chen Hongshou’s acceptance and recognition of this custom,as well as his strong subjective consciousness.The male hairpin figures in Chen Hongshou’s paintings are not a realistic reproduction of the aesthetic style of the time,but appear as a pictorial symbol,carrying his artistic pursuits and aesthetic ideals and hoping to use them to express his realistic aspirations,his patriotic feelings,his self-consciousness,his personal ambitions,his spiritual aspirations and his emotional expressions.By combining the development of the male flower pin with the artistic image,and analysing the correspondence between the two,we are able to explore the deeper meaning behind the practice of the male flower pin from a new perspective.