Reporter | Chen Jiajing
Edit | Yellow Moon
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"When we talk about 'beauty,' we're really talking about our lives." The sentence was born in 2000 in a magazine called "Aesthetic Beauty", which was edited by publisher Wang Jiaming and writer Zhang Wei, both of whom worked at the same publishing house. Unfortunately, due to Wang Jiaming's transfer of work, the magazine came to an end in only one issue. But in the hearts of some people, "Aesthetic Beauty" is always a seed, waiting for it to one day break through the soil.
At the salon event entitled "Talking About Beauty Is Talking About Our Lives", the new "Aesthetic Beauty" MOOK met with readers. The new "Aesthetic Beauty" is edited by artist Leng Glacier and co-edited by Wang Jiaming, and the inaugural issue has been launched into two volumes, left and right, bringing together 72 contemporary Chinese writers, artists or scientists of cross-border art, in the form of painting, photography, poetry, essays, novels, dialogues and other forms, eclectically talking about beauty. "Aesthetic" is intended to be aesthetic education for the public, but in terms of content, it does not coincide with the past "Aesthetic Beauty", but is a more ambitious expansion and continuation of "beauty". Leng Glacier said that "the flame that has not yet been born is the most beautiful", and this time he decided to create a new "Aesthetic Beauty" in order to "continue the fire".
After 22 years, the author lineup of "Aesthetic Beauty" is also more powerful, including writers Jin Yucheng and Ye Zhaoyan, artists Xu Bing, He Duoling, Huang Yongyu, and poets Han Dong, Yang Jian, Lan Lan and so on. At the event site, Leng Glacier and two of the authors, translator Dong Qiang and painter Xu Lei discussed "beauty", and Wang Jiaming, who was originally sitting in the audience, was also invited to join in the middle of the way, sharing with the audience the process of the founding of "Aesthetic Beauty" and talking about the relationship between beauty and art, life and the times.
The pursuit of purity, but also worried about the high and low
The inaugural issue of the two volumes of "Aesthetic Beauty" brings together more than 70 works, divided into five parts: "Viewpoint", "Artist", "Wenxin", "Poetry and Music" and "Information", covering all aspects of "literature" and "art", and aiming to cross time and space and break boundaries. For example, Jin Yucheng tells the story of his "casual painting" when he was a child to "crossing the line" to become a painter now, readers can see his self-selected paintings that have been popular for decades; Mao Yan, who paints oil paintings, takes out his latest poems from 2019 to 2020; Yang Jian, who is also a poet and artist, presents his unique aesthetics in 20 pages of poetry, literature and painting.
Cold Glacier provides ample space for authors to play, 72 authors are he one by one appointment, in addition to the selected theme of "aesthetic beauty", he almost no clear requirements for the content, genre, length and presentation of the work, the only requirement is that the submitted work must be pure, extreme, is a heartfelt creation. Wang Jiaming said that when the issue of "Aesthetic Beauty" was published in 2000, it was a lively time in the entire publishing industry, and the reason why it was called "Aesthetic" was to break the noise and calm down to look at some beautiful things. From this point of view, the new "Aesthetic Beauty" maintains the same pure spirit, but Wang Jiaming is also worried that this will lead to a situation of high and low, "beauty is the most difficult to talk about," everyone has their own growth environment and preferences, and may not agree with the views in the book.
The scene of the salon activity, from left to right, are: Zhang Lixian, Xu Lei, Dong Qiang, Leng Glacier Published by the publisher
In Xu Lei's view, "beauty" is the blind person touching the elephant, and everyone touches what is what it is. From a personal point of view, he believes that the most important criterion for beauty is "accuracy", a word that is a bit like "the will of Heaven" in artistic creation. There is a balanced beauty everywhere in nature, such as the beauty of a shell spiral, accurate, but not human to create. "I paint a picture, this picture is not bad, I think it is not me who painted, it was made by God's hand, I am a mortal, I can't do it so well." 」
Dong Qiang noticed that with the change of the times, the discussion of "beauty" seemed to become more and more out of place, and to some extent "beauty" had fallen from the temple. Dong Qiang remembers that when he was still studying at school in the 1980s, Li Zehou's "The Course of Beauty" was one of the most influential works at that time, when aesthetics was a prominent study; today, no one in the school studies aesthetics anymore. Today, when people see beautiful things in daily life, they often say that it is "great" and "beautiful", and that contemporary art will use words such as "touch" and "strong" instead of "beauty". People talk less and less about beauty, as if it had belonged to another era. Dong Qiang believes that in this case, Leng Glacier's willingness to use "aesthetic beauty" as the name of the top publication in his mind requires a lot of courage in itself, and this courage is also a gesture - to call for beauty to today's readers, even if it is a debate around beauty.
Chinese it is difficult to distinguish between beauty and ugliness and truth from goodness
The change in people's understanding of beauty is also related to the change of artistic concepts. Dong Qiang saw that in the past, people still had basic judgment standards for modern art, and now they are more into a small circle of people defending their tastes. Kant once proposed that beauty has universal significance, but contemporary people no longer accept beauty in the universal sense. Dong Qiang believes that this is both good and bad, the good thing is that it emphasizes the individual and liberates the spirit of the individual, and the bad thing is that it is difficult for us to calmly discuss beauty on the same platform. "After a long time, you will find that there are so many conflicts in the world today because we constantly deny this universal thing and overemphasize the feelings of individuals."
Although "beauty" has been less and less mentioned, there are still standards for judging beauty and ugliness in the public mind. Dong Qiang found that Chinese it is difficult to distinguish between beauty and ugliness and truth and goodness, and it is difficult to judge beauty and ugliness purely from the perspective of form or art. Especially in today's era, we often say that an act is beautiful, which is actually judged from an ethical and moral point of view; when we comment on an inappropriate thing, it is also based on standards other than aesthetics. From this point of view, today's "beauty" has developed into a very complex concept, which is difficult to analyze from a purely artistic point of view. "In the past, beauty may have been the patent of art, but now it is certainly not a patent," Dong Qiang said.
It also means that today's people are more likely to find beauty and art in life. The discipline of "aesthetics" was created because it was found that it was impossible to express something purely by intelligence, and that "aesthetics" could teach people to express themselves with feelings. Great artists are often able to discover things that are difficult for ordinary people to detect from the subtleties of daily life, forming their creative sources. The same is true of the most outstanding literature and art of ancient China: the Tang poems of Li Bai and Du Fu are full of details of life, and the "Map of the Upper River of the Qingming Dynasty" is full of the breath of life. As Dong Qiang said, the fusion of art and life is the embodiment of a civilization, which can transcend life and connect with life. In a way, an art that can't connect to life is likely not to last.
"Qingming River Map" (partial), image source: Visual China
We may all agree that beauty in life is everywhere, depending on whether you can find it, but Wang Jiaming has noticed that today's young people do not feel beauty as strongly as they did in the past. "Xu Lei (young) didn't have a few publications at that time, he just looked at those things; Leng Glacier found a painter's painting and copied it, as if he had a great joy, is there now?" In Wang Jiaming's view, today's world is too prosperous, especially under the influence of the Internet, most people just walk around and see the flowers, and it is more and more difficult to calmly experience and understand beauty.
The change of times will also put a new test on the creation of artists or writers. From the perspective of art history, in every era, there will be a dominant force that temporarily obscures the light of other things, but after a certain period of time, the things that were originally marginalized may be recognized again. Therefore, how to respond to the new questions raised by the times through works is crucial for creators. In Xu Lei's view, this is also part of the artist's struggle in this era, "If you talk about the problems that have been solved in the past now, without putting forward even a little new point of view, this topic is meaningless." In this regard, the works in "Aesthetic Beauty" also help us to understand the subjects of the times, not idle texts, but reflect the creators' thinking about the times.