The Contemporary Representative of Animal Landscapes

　　— An Appreciation of Silence in the Sky NO.1(a series)

　　By Hu Jiujiu (edt. of New Weekly)

　　“Throws its shadow on the grass;

　　But by the act of giving it a name,

　　By trying to fix the limits of its world,

　　It becomes a fiction.”1

　　The tiger Borges glorified and pursued in The Other Tiger is eternal. The poem, composed in 1958, is echoed 50 years later by the Chinese contemporary artist Fu YUxiang’s oil painting Silence is the Sky NO.1. The poem, prophetic and allegorical, may be the best interpretation of the oil painting. Interpretation precedes creation. Borges’s spirit, bathed in the poetic brilliance, flies from a bizarre South America into the rising belly of Asia, landing in mountainous Chongqing and then endowing Fu Yuxiang a transcendental inspiration.

　　Such attempt to depict animal’s innermost and history is not rare to masters: Chuang Tzu’s description of Kun (a kind of gigantic fish) and fluttering butterflies, Li He’s poem on horses and Pu Songlin’s stories of foxes. It’s the same in the western world: the hero changing into a beetle in Franz Kafka’s fiction, birds flying away and disappearing in Maurice Maeterlinck’s verses, Melville’s whale, Faulkner’s bear, Jack London’s wolf, Fabre’s insect, Allan Poe’s crow and cat, Stevens’s black bird and Andersen’s mermaid, too numerous to mention. Besides, the ancient Homer had ever eulogized the mermaid and even considered her sweet singing over his harp.

　　Fu Yuxiang must have got his inspiration of painting from his insight into death, then he creates a huge duck permeating the universe: vivid while dying an unnatural death, with not a single feather left — a glimpse of a duck waiting for check-up before catering the appetite.

　　The last glimpse, by the expression in its half-open eyes, is inviting an interaction, from which the animal’s humanitarian bosom has been vividly portrayed on paper. Such devoting spirit is just a mirror of the artist’s own inner heart. The same style can be found in Beijing-ballad singer Zhou Yunpeng’s song, though the latter is more of remorse, a repeated singing of “ a cooked duck is flying away(what’s sure to gain is lost) , a depressed heart in the capital”.2

　　Communication between human beings and animals goes critical in this oil painting. Who comes into the paradise when human is confronted with an animal naked in the universe? No answer is presented by the painter who only names it “Silence is the Sky.” Then the inner vibrating notes suddenly suspend in the missioned “unreligious artist”, like the tranquility and nihility after a severe blow.

　　Life of creature lies in flowing while that of art in fiction. The verisimilitude captured in fictive painting appears more mighty and introspective. The fictive narrative aesthetics approaches directly into the essence of verisimilitude. It is verisimilitude not reality, as the approaching reality is closer to truth and more persuasive than superficial one. As the Australia Sinologist Simon Leese says “Truth itself provides nothing but senseless chaos, and only art, with form and rhythm, can endow it significance.” “Imagination does not only function aesthetically- also ethically. Exactly speaking, reality is creation.”3

　　In the painting of an over-dimensioned animal landscape, Fu Yuxiang finds a form consistent with his own inner criteria. Such form is not upsetting but the same as Kafka’s “keeping absolute tranquility and solitude”, the same as Chen Bin’s (a poet in Si Chuan province) simile “the tranquility of a drip of water remote from secular world”. 4 Kafka also has it like this “It’s unnecessary to go outside. Sit down at your table and listen. Even listening is unnecessary, just wait. Nor waiting is needed. It’s enough to keep absolute quietness and solitude. The world will remove its disguise in front of you. It’s capable of nothing but dancing for you.5

　　It’s clear that Fu Yuxiang’s outlook of animal and world are consistent. They co-exist in the same spiritual dimension: the animal (the world) sloughs its skin in front of him. It does nothing but dancing for the spectator.

　　It is by no means my personal conclusion. His spirit has flied further away while the ordinary considers him as an animal preserver, vegetarian or environmentalist. A Chinese saying goes like this “If the land could tell, those Feng Shui masters (Feng Shui, a practice in China. Feng Shui masters carefully map the nature and flow of energy through buildings and spaces to achieve a good balance of energy for the inhabitants.) would be redundant.”6 It is out of the silence of land that Fu Yuxiang’s “animal landscapes” attain a fugue of death in whose rhyme we are unconsciously carried away by its sorrow and pity.

　　“He shouts play sweeter death's music,

　　Death comes as a master from Germany.

　　He shouts stroke darker the strings,

　　and as smoke you shall climb to the sky.

　　Then you'll have a grave in the clouds it is ample to lie there.” 7

　　The appreciation of Silence is the Sky NO.1 reminds me of Paul Celan’s poem Fugue of Death, by which the inner heart of Fu Yuxiang is too clearly revealed.

　　In fact, the work is still echoed by the world artistic history. It borrows heavily from superrealism and applies it to the conventional structure of Chinese landscape images. In technique, it approaches layer upon layer, combining stippling and dyeing together and taking ink as the foil for scrolls. Therefore, it becomes the model of Fu Yuxiang’s animal landscapes: creating serenity out of loftiness, and pressure out of silence in appreciation.

　　It will never be forgotten what poet Aragon and artist Ernst, etc. claimed in the superrealism declaration in 1925, “We do not intend to change the social ethics but to prove the fragility of thoughts, so as to predict the consequence of constructing upon such bases.” 8

　　Fu Yuxiang is shown by the painting to have reached an admirable level in artistic creation and ideology, and in virtue of that, he has been outstanding among the contemporary artists.

　　Mar. 2nd, 2008

　　In Beijing

　　Notes:

　　1. The tiger was a pervasive image for the Argentine poet Borges. Tiger has been repeatedly mentioned in his poems and novels. From the earliest The Other Tiger, The Golden of Tiger, The Blue Tiger to The Last Tiger, the adorer of American tiger-totem has devoted much.

　　2. Zhou Yunpeng. Album Chinese Children. 2007.

　　3. George Orwell (1903-1950). Prelude of Why I Write. Dong Leshan. trans. Shanghai Translation Press. 2007.

　　4. Letters between Chen Bin and His Friends. from a folk magazine Han Jiang Chao. 2000.

　　5. Franz Kafka. Essays on Paradox. Shaanxi University Press. 2002.

　　6. A Collection of Chinese Ancient Poetry

　　7. Paul Celan. Fugue of Death (1945). in which the ancient Greek rhyme and sentence structure are combined unanimously, is composed of fluent verses in dactyl rhyme.

　　8. Fan Di’an. A History of World Art. Nan Fang Press. 2002.

【Editor：Jen】