Famous writer and painter Feng Jicai.
Feng Jicai's new book "A Cave in the Studio".
Feng Jicai's new book "Danube Gorge".
Feng Jicai studied a corner.
On March 11, 2022, Mr. Feng Jicai ushered in his 80th birthday.
Feng Jicai was born in Tianjin in 1942. He has been fond of Danqing since he was a child, and at the age of fourteen or fifteen, he began to learn painting with Yan Liufu and Hui Xiaoyi. After graduating from high school, he applied for the Central Academy of Fine Arts, but fell behind due to his family origin. He also went to work in the Tianjin Calligraphy and Painting Society, specializing in the production of ancient paintings. In the 1960s and 1970s, a lot of "secret" reading made him feel the urge to write. In 1977, he was "seconded" by the Humanities Society to revise the novel "Yihe Fist" in the society, thus "switching" from painting to literature.
The 1980s was a bumper harvest period for his literary creation, and masterpieces such as "Carved Pipes", "The Wrong Way of Laying Flowers", "Tall Woman and Her Short Husband", "Divine Whip", and "Three Inch Golden Lotus" came out one after another, and Feng Ji became famous in one fell swoop. Snowflakes of readership letters flew from all over the country to his tiny study. In the 1990s, he once published a picture album and held a painting exhibition, splashing ink and splashing it vigorously. Later, by chance, he devoted himself to the rescue protection of cultural heritage, "like plunging from the earth and mountains into the vast sea," and all purely personal artistic undertakings, such as writing and painting, were abandoned.
In recent years, due to his growing age, Feng Ji has returned to the study studio from the fields and mountains. He parted from literature for 20 years, raised his pen again, and the accumulation of many years burst out, like the moon rising from the mountain pass, like a big river rushing. "Strangers of the World", "Telescopes", "Artists"... One after another, with wonderful and condensed language, portrayed as a god, with all kinds of examination of life, all kinds of compassion, all kinds of understanding, all kinds of amazement, showing the writer's extraordinary creativity and inexhaustible love for life and literature.
"I'm actually back in a kind of aesthetically created joy." Feng Jicai said.
In early 2022, two of his new works, the collection of short and medium stories, Danube Gorge, and the collection of essays, Studio One Hole in the Sky, were published by Writers Press. The former includes five novels such as "Danube Canyon", "Dry Well", "Lame Cat", "Wooden Buddha", and "I Am Jason", which have both realistic brushwork and imagination and fantasy, which can be seen as a bold and new self-transcendence in Feng Jicai's novel style. The latter is a companion piece to the essay collection "A World in the Study", which is his reflection on his decades of artistic career and life trajectory, and to make a text "inquiry and record" with "half of his literary self" and "the other half of his painting self".
In his home, there was a corridor between the study and the studio. The corridors are verdant with flowers and trees, green vines, and vivid sunlight. And the owner here, with the impulse to write, enters the study, and the idea of painting enters the studio, and the words and Danqing stir each other, like a kind of "sweet round trip". Feng Jicai said, "This feeling is sometimes very happy, very happy."
On the occasion of Mr. Feng Jicai's 80th birthday, he was interviewed by reporters from Nandu.
The influence of parents and homeland is in the bones
Nandu: At the age of 80, you still have many new life insights, is it because you personally have a spirit of exploration, or because today's society has become too fast?
Feng Jicai: In the early 1980s, from a closed and relatively difficult era to the era of reform and opening up, I was full of creative passion at that time, writing hundreds of thousands of words a year. I couldn't bear it, and suddenly I fell seriously ill.
During my illness, Mr. Yan Wenjing, a famous writer of the previous generation, who was the president of the People's Literature Publishing House at the time, wrote me a letter with a sentence in it, saying that Feng Ji must live a long time, and only if you live long will your understanding of people and life be deeper and more thorough. Because at different ages, the understanding of life, fate, people, and many things is different, only if you live a long time, you look at all aspects of life, including the fate of your contemporaries, you have also experienced with him, and your own fate experience is too much, so that your feelings about life and life are different, it may be richer, it may be more profound.
Nandu: Your ancestral home is Cicheng, Ningbo, Zhejiang, born in Tianjin in 1942, and lived in Dali Road in the British Concession as a child, with six brothers and sisters. From a family perspective, what teachings do you think your parents have taught you for life?
Feng Jicai: My mother is from Jining, Shandong, and this place in Jining is the hometown of Mencius and Confucius in terms of literature and literature; on the side of Wu, Shuipo Liangshan is in my mother's hometown, and Wusong Lu Zhishen was active here. My father's family has been in Ningbo since the Tang Dynasty, and has been a literati or an official for generations, and there are still many family relics.
I feel like both cultures in my family have influenced me, both from my parents. One is the things of Kong Meng, especially the people of Shandong, who value righteousness, especially righteousness, and are thick, loyal, and simple. In addition, a kind of masculinity in Shandong culture is also brought from the mother's system. Zhejiang people are different. Ningbo is the hometown of Yue opera, the people in that place are more delicate, more affectionate, and the culture of filial piety is very developed. Therefore, Comrade Deng Xiaoping said, "Ningbo helps love Ningbo," and this place in Ningbo, because of the culture of filial piety, attaches importance to its hometown and loves its hometown, which also deeply affects me. The influence of parents is not a matter of a few words, the real influence on you is in the bones, in the spirit.
So when I was 50 years old, I held a painting exhibition in my hometown called "Respect for the Hometown Painting Exhibition". My first exhibition went to my hometown, and I respected my hometown, my hometown, which was the birthplace of my life. As a result, I have a close relationship with my hometown, and I have done a lot of things for my hometown.
I knew that He Zhizhang's ancestral hall was going to be demolished, so I gave it to Wenlian but Wenlian didn't have the money to repair it. The first time I sold paintings was in my hometown of Ningbo, I selected 5 of my favorite paintings in the exhibition and sold them, donated the money to the government, repaired the ancestral hall of He Zhizhang, or demolished it. Now it is still under the management of Ningbo Wenlian and has become a very important cultural tourist attraction in Ningbo.
I've done a lot of things like this. There is no utilitarianism, no other ideas, it is because of love, it is because it is the stuff of my hometown, and I feel very kind.
We pursue our own spiritual source, and we can find our own source. So until today, when I'm 80 years old, why should I study the relationship between an intellectual and the land? Because I have been in this place of Tianjin for 80 years, I have done a lot of protection of the old streets of Tianjin' old town, and I have a deep relationship with this land.
My literature and painting are influencing each other
Nandu: You once said that "writing for me is more of a way of responsibility to society, painting for me, more about the expression and expression of personal hearts", can you talk about how your painting and writing affect each other?
Feng Jicai: I was first a painter. I've been painting for 15 years, and of course I'm still painting, but not much. I feel that painting is more personal to me, more of a personal feeling of spiritual life, a kind of rehearsal, a kind of expression.
Literature takes on more social responsibilities, expounding the thinking of life, and understanding life with readers, which is my literary pursuit. Literature has influenced my paintings, such as the pursuit of literature, the pursuit of poetry, and the pursuit of artistic conception in painting, which is also the tradition of Chinese painting, especially the tradition of literati painting.
Then painting also affects my literature, because painting has something in common with literature, which must produce a visual image, to evoke an image imagination of the reader. In addition, we must create a visible space for the reader, the visible characters, the visible scenes, and the more vivid and concise the better. So when I'm writing a novel, I can see my characters, and I even see the details of a lot of character faces, but I don't necessarily have to write them down. This is important to me because I saw it and wrote this character again, which is different from what I didn't see.
Nandu: How do you allocate your time on the two things of writing and painting, and what do these two things mean to you at different stages of your life?
Feng Jicai: I don't need to allocate time. When I have literary ideas, when I have literary impulses, I must go to my study, and I bury my head in writing.
And when I had a feeling that I thought I could express with a painting, I went into the studio. So my studio and my study are at opposite ends of a porch in my house. I live in a duplex house, and the upper floor is where I write and where I paint. Sometimes I come up, and if there is an impulse to create literature for the sake of literary imagination, I go to the study. But sometimes writing and writing will produce the feeling of painting, a desire to express it artistically, and I will go into the studio again. It's a sweet round trip, and this feeling is sometimes very happy, very happy.
Nandu: "A World in the Study" and "A Cave in the Studio" are the most relaxed and happy works you have written? It's like talking to an old friend yourself, completely in a relaxed state.
Feng Jicai: "A World in the Study Room" and "A Cave in the Studio" are two books, although they are written about the things that I get along with every day, but I know the story in each thing, I know its memory, I know what things are worth writing, which are meaningful, and cannot be ignored.
So writing these things is like the Song people writing notes, it is indeed very relaxed, a kind of prose essay writing, but I also pay more attention to language, using some white, very simple, not carved, not deliberate language to write, but also write the meaning of ordinary life.
Nandu: The way the 5 novels in "Danube Canyon" are written is a new literary experiment for you. What makes you always have a passion for writing and dare to innovate?
Feng Jicai: I think the love of literature and art is a kind of nature. When he has a passion for life, he must express it in words, that is, the nature of a person who engages in literature; he must use pen and ink to express it with color, that is, the nature of a person who is engaged in painting.
In the collection "Danube Gorge", only "Danube Gorge" is written in a realistic way, and some of the others are more absurd, and some are more like a fable. The reason for the different ways of writing has a lot to do with my writing of "Artists". Because after "Artists" was written, there was a big problem, that is, I couldn't get out of this novel. Although I still want to write other long stories, occasionally impulsively, and imaginatively, I can't get out of that novel, from the inner atmosphere of the characters and the realm of the novel, because I have drilled too deeply into the experience of our generation of people who are engaged in art, our spiritual experience, our spiritual experience.
So I had to think of a way. What to do? I'm going to let go of my thoughts.
The first was to write the Wooden Buddha. I consciously change my perspective, use things to write about people, personify things, and become a person with spirit, thinking, and soul to write. After I wrote it, I delved into a special category of life. Because I like to collect, collecting must understand the collecting world and understand the industry. I was familiar with this line of antiques. When I entered the novel, especially when I entered this unique imagination, I unconsciously withdrew from The Artists little by little, which was a particularly good feeling.
After I quit, I felt particularly free, as if I had arrived in a space I had never been to before, and even the feeling of the air was different.
When the novel "Wooden Buddha" was finished, I felt free. Because I had a lot of ideas popping up in my head, a lot of life material, it became a different form, there were different stories that came out of my head. At that time, his thinking was particularly active, and he wrote several articles in one sitting, including "The Lame Cat".
Basically, these novels were written in this way. After the completion of the article "Danube Gorge", I was a bit unable to come out. But I think it's been good lately, because I've recently put all my fiction writing down. I'm doing a discipline-building thing, a purely disciplinary theoretical cultural thing. I had to get me out completely, into a state of complete freedom, before I could write the next one.
Nandu: The novel "Danube Gorge" involves many propositions in modern society, such as the fragility of love, human choice, human finiteness, etc., which is very relevant to the current era. I wonder what the inspiration for this novel is, and whether the characters and stories in it are real prototypes?
Feng Jicai: When an actual writer writes a novel, it does not necessarily come from a plot or from an archetype, but often from feelings and feelings about life.
Like me, an 80-year-old person, it should be said that I have come over in life, and I often feel a word you just said, vulnerability. The fragility of man, the fragility of fate, the fragility of the individual.
Individuals are often unknown about their future and often feel helpless and helpless. You can't choose life, although sometimes you can choose life, and when you choose, those proverbs that have been valuable and meaningful throughout the ages, some positive thinking of predecessors, can play a role. But sometimes you can't play your choice, you can't choose, you are passive, and then you feel your vulnerability.
I often feel the yin and yang of life, and the yin and yang of people in their destiny. I especially wanted to write this thing into a novel. After reading this novel, you will think that if the plot was not like this at that time, there were many links in the middle, if not, if anyone knew the truth of this matter first, or who did not know the truth, this novel may be another story entirely. But in the yin and yang, all my protagonists, they are innocent. None of them can change the course of such a story.
But there is one thing behind this story that is precious, and that is love, true love. These things are still the most valuable in their hearts, and they are still a starting point for their treatment of life. But they know what true love is and what one should hold on to.
For a lifetime, we will not be tied to the protection of cultural heritage
Nandu: From "The Strange Man of the World" to "Artists" last year, and then to this year's "Danube Gorge", has your focus in recent years shifted from cultural heritage protection to literature?
Feng Jicai: In the sense of writing, I have been separated from literature for 20 years. But I'm not going to leave literature, why? Because I love literature, when I do cultural heritage rescue, I often have literary impulses and literary imaginations, but I can't write because I don't have time.
I once said such an example. The most I imagined in my literature was when I was running on the earth, and it felt very deep from this place to that place, especially when I was sitting in a car. Driving a car at night to listen to music, it takes hours or even longer to walk from this province to that province. When I was running, I suddenly imagined it in literature, and suddenly a detail that I had thought about in the past popped up in my mind, and then I thought of a lot of plots, thinking about it and even very impulsive, but I didn't have time to write.
When the driver master said, Teacher Feng, we have arrived. It has been three hours, the novel is gone, it is interrupted, the power is cut off, there is none, and the imagination in the future cannot be connected with it. This was the literary life of my time.
Occasionally, when I watch a writer of my generation or a young person publish a new book, I am also a little bitter, feeling that I can't do what I love. One thing, but that's about it. Because I know that it is too important for me to do the protection of cultural heritage, and I must do it, I cannot choose.
When I now have time to write, these things come pouring in, sometimes several ideas coming at the same time. I'm a little different now than I used to be. In the past, I probably wanted to know life with my readers. Now, I think that writing also has a very important mission, that is, to leave an aesthetic image for literature, and your thinking about the times and your understanding of life, including various philosophies, must be reflected through the aesthetic image.
So this kind of writing is the joy of creation. I actually returned to the joy of an aesthetic creation. So now I can't stop myself, and I'm still writing one by one. When some reporters ask me what I have plans, it seems that there are no plans. It came rushing in, because there was too much time to suppress in the past, too much accumulated in 20 years of life, too much to see, too much to know.
But since I have been tied to cultural heritage in my life, I will never let go. If I were to go back to my 60-year-old physical strength now, I would still have to put down the novel or do cultural heritage rescue. I am still anxious about some of the new problems and even dilemmas that are constantly emerging in the field of cultural heritage protection, and there is still a lot that has not been done.
In addition, there is another specific thing, that is, one of our ideas has received the attention and support of the state: to establish the discipline of intangible cultural heritage in colleges and universities, and to cultivate more professionals in the field of cultural heritage protection and inheritance for the country. The establishment of this discipline was approved by the state. This year, we began to recruit the first batch of non-heritage students. We want to recruit students, to establish this discipline, I am afraid that I will go deeper in the protection of cultural heritage.
Nandu: As a writer and painter, what makes you so active in the protection of cultural heritage?
Feng Jicai: A reporter once asked me, some people encounter the problem of the endangerment of cultural heritage, that is, to appeal for it, to shout, why do you want to devote yourself to it? I think of a saying, when your loved ones and children, a car suddenly knocked him down, do you just shout? You're going to pounce on it, that's my mood.
Tianjin Old Town is a 600-year-old city. The city I live in is a very interesting city, it is the only city in China that has a anniversary of its completion. On December 23, 1404, it was a city with a date of completion, and the fabric of the city was all there. In the 1990s, there was a sudden notice that the old city was about to be demolished. At that time, there was also an advertising slogan, saying that in the future, you would not think that this place would be Tianjin, but that it would be Causeway Bay in Hong Kong. I was in a hurry, but I couldn't just scream and start doing rescue.
At the beginning, I did the rescue of Tianjin Old Street. At that time, an agreement was reached with a competent authority to preserve several historical buildings in the old street. During this period, a French Humanities Foundation invited me to France for an exchange, and I mainly wanted to study what forces are protected in Paris, France, who and what ideas are at work. I know writers like Hugo played a big role.
When I went to France to do research, I was suddenly told that this street had been demolished, and the one that had been decided not to be demolished was also demolished. I rushed back from Paris, the next day I went to the old street to see, a look at the old street completely demolished, the historical building is like this, once demolished, there is no way, reconstruction is not history at all. So I was standing on the street and suddenly I was crying. Later, a reporter from Beijing Youth Daily wrote an article entitled "Feng Jicai Cries Old Street." I don't know how he could have been there, but because my rescue of the old street had become a focal point, so I would go and there would be some people going. At that time, the word "demolition" was written on the walls everywhere in the city, and after the publication of this article, it had a great impact on the whole country.
Nandu: During your work in the rescue of cultural and folk cultural heritage, you used to sell paintings for money and raise funds, please talk about the difficulties and achievements. You also said that "the last major thing I have taken on in my life is education", can you talk about it in detail?
Feng Jicai: I can't solve the problem of rescue of folk cultural heritage by selling paintings, and I remember telling this sentence to reporters at that time, and I said that with the money I sold paintings, I couldn't solve the problem of thousands of cultural heritages that were endangered on the land.
Now we know that the national 4-level cultural heritage list we have sorted out, including a total of about 100,000 items at the county level, the city level, the provincial level, and the national level, and our traditional villages are now sorted out 6819, and the number of folk cultural heritage is so large, what role can you sell a little painting? But it plays a role, some people must think, why did Feng Jicai sell his own paintings? Why does he sell paintings? I think it will awaken people's thinking about this problem.
When I sold out of the Suzhou Museum, I had a feeling of four walls of home, and there was also a sense of tragedy, and then I said a word, I said that there is a little sense of tragedy in what I like to do, men, things always want to have a little bit of grandeur. In this sense of tragedy, I gave my heart to the earth. It inspired myself.
The other is the issue of education. If the first 20 years I mainly did was the rescue protection of cultural heritage, what I want to do today is scientific protection. When we rescued the cultural heritage, just now I said 100,000 items of intangible cultural heritage, 6819 traditional villages, through the efforts of this generation of 20 years to rescue the cultural heritage, but we do not have the standards for protection, there is no norms, there are no professional talents, we are still not at ease with it.
Therefore, we must open this kind of intangible cultural heritage education in the university, that is to say, this kind of professional education of intangible cultural heritage must enter our higher education system, which is in line with the protection of cultural heritage, so I still insist on doing it.
Written by: Nandu reporter Huang Qian