After reading your book "Love My China - General Fang Zuqi's Collection of Poetry, Calligraphy and Painting", my heart seems to enter a world of grandeur and cascading waterfalls... From the clouds swirling around Yellow Peak to the majestic Mount Tai, then from Mount Mengding to Changbai Mountain, Sun Moon Mountain, Altai Mountain, Wuyi Mountain... The famous mountains and rivers of our motherland all vividly appear in your paintings. The壶kou waterfall of the Yellow River with its flying sand and dancing waves, the mighty Three Gorges with their overwhelming grandeur... The breadth of vision and the grandeur of your album are truly breathtaking.
From the Tang Dynasty's "Emperor Minghuang's Tour of Shu" to the Five Dynasties' "Autumn Mountain Inquiry Figure" and then to the Song Dynasty, especially during the Northern Song Dynasty, many renowned artists left behind monumental works with various texture techniques, such as Li Cheng's "Cold Forest Level Field Figure", Fan Kuan's "Xishan Traveler Figure", Wang Shen's "Fish Village Snowflake Figure"... Since then, the Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties have also left behind a rich legacy of paintings for future generations. The world has long had fair evaluations of these masterpieces, so there is no need for me to elaborate further. However, I must comment on your masterpiece because I am genuinely in awe of this great collection! History will record that a general who devoted his entire life to military service has left behind such a massive scroll painting, what a marvel! What a marvel!
In your postscript, you quoted two lines from your own seven-character regulated verse: "Exploring life has no end, it's never too late to learn painting at seventy." This exactly reveals the spiritual foundation of your hundred paintings created at the age of seventy. Your rich experiences, your serious observation of life, and the hardships of documenting materials have made this great work inevitable. Life consists of two main elements: one is physical, the other is spiritual; one is objective, the other is subjective; one is external, the other is internal. When the accumulated objective world transforms into inner subjective emotions, artistic essence will inevitably burst forth, "People possess seven emotions, respond to things and feel them, express feelings through poetry, all of which are natural." It seems like we have similar experiences; the difference is that you are a general and I am a soldier. But we have both experienced warfare, done political work, and entered old age. We can confidently say "Each season has its own characteristics," so we have the conditions and ability to let "feelings follow the changes of things, words follow the feelings."
Let's return to your phrase "It's never too late to learn painting at seventy." This "never too late" essentially means that the inner subjective world has already transformed the external objective storms into the clear wind and bright moon, surging rivers, towering peaks, and blooming flowers in the paintings... The spirit resides in the chest, picking up the pen gathers pearls, poetry and painting are naturally integrated. This is probably what Confucius meant by "Do as one pleases without overstepping the boundaries." Thus, from your inner being flows out a vast volume of poems, freely creating hundreds of calligraphic and pictorial works, producing stunning works! This is the result of your "Exploring life has no end." This is an exploration of the philosophy of life, a search for truth, goodness, and beauty, the aesthetics of life, and a joyful achievement of exploring the path of cultural development within the five thousand years of Chinese cultural roots.
The integration of music, books, poetry, and painting has both commonalities and individualities. Music, books, poetry, and painting each have their own inherent rules, and artists each have their own personalities. Their artistic and life observations differ greatly, so the artistic individuality of their works is not entirely the same. Your great work takes "Love My China" as the theme. Your artistic observation of the external world inevitably leads to loving our beautiful homeland, loving the Chinese nation, loving our brilliant culture, loving our glorious history, loving our industrious and brave people, loving our fifty-six ethnic brothers and sisters... Thus love becomes the core of this great work. The thousands of mountains and valleys, rivers and lakes, the nine river rapids, the Taihang Grand Canyons, Jinggang Mountains, Ruijin, Zunyi, Yan'an, Xibaipo, the Yellow River's Hukou, the Yangtze River's Three Gorges, Yinchuan Sand Lake, the ancient city of Lhasa... Then jumping over a thousand years of our country's history, putting pen to paper at Lishan Hot Spring Pool, copying "Ten Thousand Valleys and Thousand Cliffs Picture", "Fuchun Mountain Dwelling Picture", "Clear Streams and Remote Mountains Picture"... The patriotic sentiment leaps off the page, magnificent! Beautiful!
In our interactions, I was deeply astonished by the rapid progress of your painting and calligraphy skills. The lofty artistic conception, the grand composition and layout, the strength of the mountain body texture strokes, the vividness of the figures... all moved me deeply. Among them, 5 paintings particularly captivated me: One is a copy of Huang Gongwang's "Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains". Unfolding the entire scroll, one can see Huang's style, meticulously imitated down to the fine texture strokes and subtle ink application. Another is "East Slope Chibi Picture". This painting fully demonstrates your superb skill in figure painting, Su Dongpo's elegant and spirited demeanor is vividly portrayed. The facial modeling, coloring, and clothing textures of the figures are lively and natural. The texture strokes on the rocks underfoot and the ochre coloring of the distant mountains highlight the Chibi characteristics, the distant water and small boats stretch endlessly, providing a broad geographical perspective for the characters, naturally enhancing the noble realm of the characters, portraying them with the posture of "a cup of wine offered to the river moon". The third is the two scrolls of "Eight Places of Western Hills Picture". Each scroll depicts four places, painted in a refined manner using the light ink technique of literati painters from the Ming and Qing Dynasties, creating a sense of distance and reality, integrating the "Eight Places" into one whole. The fourth is the hundred-meter-long scroll "Yellow Mountain Picture", this long scroll in the history of painting Huangshan is unprecedented. Its momentum gives a strong sense of cloud riding and mist driving, freehand texture strokes depict countless mountains, pines, mountains, clouds intertwined, resembling a fairyland. Various texture techniques are used together, constantly changing according to different rock formations, ink applied in varying degrees of intensity, cleverly interwoven, making the divine clouds and waterfalls reveal the great beauty of Huangshan. The fifth is a copy of Xia Gui's "Clear Streams and Remote Mountains Picture" from the Song Dynasty. This painting fully displays the grandeur of the northern great mountains, mainly using large axe-cut texture strokes, dry rubbing with heavy ink to highlight the beauty of solid rocks, the brushwork could be described as sharp and seasoned.
Comrade Zuqi, after reading your great work, my heart beats fast, I am delighted, congratulating, reciting poetry, singing praises. As a general's 104 great works, they will surely remain in posterity forever. I have pointed out my five favorite pieces among the hundred great works, aiming to attract the attention of the art world and share their beauty.
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