Imperishable Affection the Art of Feng Zikai Creating a World of Compassion
The Art of Feng Zikai
Feng Zikai
the Hong Kong Museum of Art
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With "Imperishable Amore: The Art of Feng Zikai," the Hong Kong Museum of Art quietly pulled off something of a coup in assembling a comprehensive choice of work by Feng Zikai (1898–1975), the artist recognized in his lifetime equally the "father of Chinese cartoons." This presentation besides signaled the potential for Feng's work to entreatment to audiences beyond the Chinese-speaking world, spreading a humanistic bulletin of pity and humility.
Split into two discretely themed sections, the exhibition revolved around a distilled presentation of Feng's lifelong project, titled "Paintings on the Preservation of Life" (1929–69). Published in 6 volumes, this series consists of hundreds of individual manhua ("cartoon") illustrations with accompanying inscriptions. After the first volume, Feng was encouraged to continue by his mentor, Li Shutong, a seminal modernistic artist and musician in the 1910s who then became a Buddhist monk known as Chief Hongyi. Feng had agreed to produce another anthology every decade, to exist inscribed by Hongyi until the monk's 100th birthday; however, only the first two volumes were completed before his mentor passed away, leading Feng to seek others to complete subsequent inscriptions.
The first section of the exhibition, titled "Cultivating Life and Soul," on the second level of the museum, featured 100 black-and-white paintings, largely from the two earliest volumes in the serial, seen as the all-time. Many of these works are straightforward messages most the virtues of not killing animals for nutrient, or of nurturing a humble respect for living things. In an image similar Life (c. 1929), Feng'south powerfully restrained aesthetic shines: a single sprig of vegetation springs from a patch of brick wall, symbolizing nature's resistance to the destructive advance of industrial or urban society. In other works, Feng's ascertainment is more specifically gimmicky. Father and Son (c. 1929) shows a Japanese man and his son, in a mix of traditional and Western wear, walking into a Japanese eating house specializing in oyako don—significant "bowl of parent and child rice," so named because the dish includes egg and chicken meat on a basin of rice. Feng'due south circuitous image—a memory of life in Nihon, or fifty-fifty semi-colonial Shanghai—is inscribed by Hongyi with an historical verse form, and an caption of the dish'southward macabre symbolism of this "vicious cycle" of killing.
The exhibition's 2nd section, "Creating a World of Compassion," featured another 200 works that showed an even greater variety of themes, some executed on hanging scrolls and fans. Most were afterwards works, done in color and greater item (sometimes later versions of earlier works), suggesting Feng's proximity to traditional painting circles. Near striking, withal, were the pointed observations on the human price of conflict, punctuated by simple, ironic titles. An Honourable Soldier (c. 1938–45) depicts a maimed war veteran hauling his limbless trunk along the ground, watched ambivalently by two dapper passing gentlemen who were obviously spared the obligation to fight. This could be a critique of the forgotten costs of war amid "progress," yet every bit a comment on the futility of nationalistic self-sacrifice, which confronted Feng throughout his life.
If the progressiveness of Feng's aesthetic is difficult to grasp today, this is due in part to its very success. His restrained palette and swift line-work, conscious of ink painting traditions, also reflects the print magazine boom and his knowledge of modern woodblock printing. In Japan, in 1921, Feng discovered the work of Takehisa Yumeji, which elegantly combined modernistic and traditional aesthetic sensibilities with trenchant social observation, and was to remain a lasting influence on him. Back home, Feng readily acknowledged that some Chinese painters—notably Chen Shizeng—had pioneered a casual, socially aware ink painting fashion a decade before.
In 1966, at the onset of the Cultural Revolution, Feng was denounced, and made an case of up to his death in 1975. Yet, even during his political persecution, he connected to produce works extolling humanity and compassion. His reputation was posthumously rehabilitated in 1978 by Communist regime in Shanghai, and now he is rightly appreciated as an artistic pioneer. Untroubled past issues of "E or W," much of his creative subtlety and political ambivalence remains challenging in the People's Republic today, as does his unabashed faith in an ethics beyond politics or the market.
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Source: http://96.126.110.91/Magazine/80/TheArtOfFengZikaiFengZikai/