In the early 20th century, a legion of young oil painters sprung up in Sichuan province. Not all of them were directly instructed by Du Yongqiao, yet all have been influenced by him considerably. No matter which direction their later artistic courses develop towards, they always regard him as their teacher. Suffering a frustrating life, Du Yongqiao had not been able to hold his individual exhibitions respectively in Chengdu and Chongqing until his twilight years thanks to his students’ vigorous support and assistance. The last retrospective exhibition held in haste right before his death was so amazing and astonishing as to be counted as an unprecedented milestone in Sichuan art community. Apart from his reverential personalities, moral quality, professional ethics and the longtime unfairness he received in the art world, his artistic achievements were particularly a defining factor for him to attract the public gaze. His thorough apprehension of the form and spirit of his works, sharp sense of natural light and colors and skillful application of oil painting materials and tools were sure to place him among the top both in Sichuan and among all contemporary painters throughout the country, especially among the so-called “the second-generation painters in China” in the 1950s. During the exhibitions, we found people reached a consensus on the evaluation on his artistic achievements in the interviews with numerous contemporary artists and in the panel discussions of the corresponding exhibitions.

　　Nevertheless, I still feel there is a great pity with regard to the comments on him from others, including his students. Earlier before in the interview with the media, I already expressed my point of view: When people compliment Du Yongqiao, they always attach such determiners as “historic era” or “the second-generation painters” ahead, which actually indicates that he was a quintessence only in the era of realistic painting or the painting system of the Soviet Union, the mainstream of that time. Apparently, people are, consciously or unconsciously, averting from judging whether or not his artistic works are contemporary or modern.

　　Mr. Lin Mu, a weighty critic who has an in-depth understanding of Du Yongqiao, has noticed that at a time when the ultimate goal of art was to imitate the reality, Mr. Du, not confined to the portrayal of natural features or inclined to realistic vulgar materialism, had continuously expressed his inner feelings while capturing the intrinsic spirit of the scenery. Moreover, Du incisively realized the unique expressiveness of colors and brushstrokes out of his intuition and further enriched and intensified them by the study of the brushwork of traditional Chinese painting.

　　Mr. Lin Mu, whose analysis hits the nail on the head, has put forward three points in response to people’s doubt about the “modernity” in Du Yongqiao’s artistic works. As I have witnessed Du Yongqiao’s artistic experiences, from each transitional period to the confusion period and then finally embarked on the road of modern art, I’m fully aware that it is exactly through the process from the natural expression of emotion to the self expression and then to the semiotic expression can he surpass the realistic tradition of the western Beaux Arts and step into modernity. In spite of Lin Mu’s penetrating interpretation of Du Yongqiao’s works, I believe it is still necessary for me to add more comments in this regard to supplement the general opinions.

　　(此处空行)

　　The “subject consciousness” and “ontology consciousness” of art are two important indicators to tell whether an artist is classical or modern. Although natural expression, self-expression and symbolic expression are different in nature and degree, an artist’s subject consciousness will awaken on condition that his art enters the field of “expression” without the confinement to the form and coloring of the subject. In this way, the artist’s ontology consciousness, namely, the consciousness of the artistic symbols is strengthened and then his art falls into the category of modern art. Accordingly, it seems to be well-reasoned that the word “expression” is in the norm these days. Almost all the artists bear in mind constantly that they are “expressing”: Some are those who virtually paint without emotions, and others are those who still follow the steps of imitating the realistic painting. Are these works really endowed with expressive nature? If so, does it mean their expression is successful and profound? Thus, it is imperative to further probe into the so-called “expression”.

　　“Expressiveness” is a concept of modern aesthetics, which specifically refers to the external manifestation of internal emotions. However, if we scrutinize it, a great discrepancy can be found in its connotation, which correspondingly reflects diverse expressional levels.

　　The foremost discrepancy lies in the cognition about the expressiveness of the visual styles.

　　Scholars before the birth of contemporary psychology, such as G. Berkeley and C. R. Darwin, all assumed that the natural features themselves were emotionless, and the expressiveness of the nature was the outcome of the “empathy” and “personification” implemented by people through transplanting their feelings into sceneries and also the “objectification of the essential power of man (Marx)”. However, Chinese philosophy entertains a contrary idea that all things on the earth are intelligential. Extensive research in modern Gestalt psychology has testified the existence of “expressiveness” in natural visual styles which is caused by the movement of the natural features’ tension force: since the force is structurally different, natural features tend to show various emotional characteristics themselves, like rise and fall, advancement and recession, weakness and strength, etc. Therefore, a scene can stir up our feelings while we can embed our emotions in the object. That’s why we feel gloomy at the sight of the willow branches feebly dropping off and why we appreciate the noble and virtuous characters in face of the successively rise of bamboo.

　　One of the major contributions the contemporary psychology makes to the modern art rests in its impartation of the knowledge that the nature of the perceptive object or the natural object actually consists of three inherent building blocks: form, color, and expressiveness. Among the three features, man’s perception of the expressiveness of the perceptive object is the most essential and paramount feature due to the activeness of all the perceptive patterns. Thereupon, expressiveness possesses a dominant position in the visual perception process. Some artists, who have no idea of the expressive feature of an object, would uphold the realistic painting which emphasizes “the imitation of nature” and would spare no effort to observe, analyze and measure the form of an object in a scientific way. The Czeskachov (Павел Петрοвич Чистяков) system, a more mechanical, rational, and impassive system than the French Beaux Arts introduced by Xu Beihong, ruled the entire art education throughout China in the mid-1950s. As a realism that pushed the practice of imitation ahead to the extreme and sacrificed art for skill crafts, the system took “shaping ability” as its core theory. In 1999 when I returned to China to hold a “Ten-year Retrospective Exhibition”, I was really delighted to hear Du Yongqiao, a master of shaping, prudently mention to me that since the 1990s, he had begun to question the so-called value of “shaping ability” that was deemed as the basic capability of an artist all the time. And I told him that the concept of “morphology” in Chinese should be given more attention among such concepts as shaping, shape and form, as the notion of “morphology”, or mood, state and dynamism, all reflects the expressive feature of the object with both the visual identification and the psychological sensation. However, shaping and other concepts are akin to the walking dead as they merely contain the former feature, i.e. the visual identification. What is really needed in art is the capability of emotional expression and creativity rather than the ability to shape the object.

　　In the eyes of Susanne K. Langer, “concept” is the primary need for our thoughts and the starting point of cognition. Thus what artistic concept we choose or establish is the requisite to entrench aesthetic ideas. Du Yongqiao was not an artist conditioned to theoretical thinking, but with his subtle intuition, he still showed his talent by managing the form and coloring of the object, and in the meantime realizing the nature its own expressive tendency. He expressed his deep humanistic concern for the living environment and gradually established some new aesthetic ideas accordingly. His oil paintings then not only precede those of the contemporary painters in technical aspects, but surpass the Czeskachov system in terms of the mastery of the expressive feature. In fact, we can find in his numerous works in the 1980s, such as Wild flowers, Street Entrance, Old Street in the Southern Town, etc., that the shaping nature of forms has given way to the expressiveness of spirit. In this sense, he has already been well ahead of other painters who are still caged in “shaping”.

　　However, to achieve the expressiveness in way of natural features is still a way of re-presentation and belongs to the category of “natural expression” as the basic level (yet not a low level) of expression, no matter it aims to express the spirit of the nature itself or integrates the artist’s inner feelings, such as “a scene which arouses mixed memories”, “unity of form and spirit”, and “transplanting of one's feelings into sceneries”. On the one hand, all human emotions are the results of the state of their existence, and the natural expression is only a part of all emotional expressions. Even the self-expression, symbolic expression and pure geometrical or abstract expression all depend on the intuitive expression of the natural features. On the other hand, the natural expression is the beginning of all expressions. Though the subject consciousness is awakened, it is still subjected to the nature, not able to thoroughly reveal itself and unlikely to show people’s intricate inner feelings to the fullest. Any attempt to convey the artist’s individual feelings by means of a certain natural feature can only be found simple, primitive or even naïve, and in no way can it transfer the delicacy, richness, transience and variability embedded in the inner feelings, not to mention the complex structure in them.

　　The self-expression of emotions refers to the process of clarifying and straightening out various messy and ambiguous emotions of the artist about the nature—a process to be image-oriented. To determine an image is to discover the emotions of one’s own. According to the theory of Benedetto Croce and R.G. Collingwood, the image of the forms of feelings derives from the intuitive experience and is created after natural features have been selected, modified, reorganized and changed by inner self-emotions. Therefore, the most important thing of an image lies not in the superficial expressive feelings of a specific natural feature, but in the discovery of the intrinsic nature of one’s inner emotions. Gestalt psychological study further demonstrates that intuition is caused by the simultaneous effect of physiology and psychology, for which the image produced from intuition also possess the nature of the “psychological image”. Considering the function of emotions, all the factors, including the individual living experiences, pre-schematism, aesthetic orientation, cultural cultivation and value judgment, are generally imprinted into the image. Consequently, “self-expression” of the subject can only be accomplished after the emergence of the “image”. And just against such backdrop can we say the expressiveness of art is completely differentiated from that in Beaux Arts to be authentically called “the modern art”.

　　Since Chinese art sets stores by the performance of subjective personalities, it has developed with the belief in “imagery”. Chinese aesthetics subscribes to the idea that the artistic depiction is the product of combining the artist with the essence of nature rather than that of reproducing and imitating the external world based on the observation. Natural images cannot be artistically expressive via the visual sense, and only after being filtered, selected and assimilated by the subject is the visual modality likely to be artistic. Therefore, the artist is required to rebuild the “world” resting on his own thoughts so as to present art. And in such artistic thinking, the mental power outweighs the authority of natural existence, pointing to three things—emotional selection, mental assimilation and reconstruction—which are the processing and upgrading of the natural modality as well as natural expression. The three different imagery thinking patterns mentioned above illustrate the fundamental characteristics of art. We can see clearly that these thinking patterns concerning the nature of art run counter to all realistic arts from Renaissance to Beaux Arts, yet are of the same significance as western modernism in the exploration and study of the ontology of art after it shook off the fetters of science.

　　Du Yongqiao had never stopped learning the Chinese paintings since an early age although it was temporarily set aside during his stay in the Institute when he specialized in oil paintings. In the mid-1980s when I wrote an article in Jiangsu Art Monthly to discuss the isomorphism between the anti-traditional thoughts in western modernism and classical Chinese aesthetics and also the modernization of Chinese paintings and oil paintings, Du Yongqiao told me that he picked up traditional Chinese paintings again in an attempt to apply something in it to oil paintings. I replied that for western oil paintings, Chinese art could act as a reference, while for Chinese oil paintings, it was a localization of exotic culture. Since the Oriental art, a driving force for western modern art at the end of the last century, catalyzed the disintegration of western realistic oil paintings at that time, on what ground do some Chinese artists still value and treasure those ideas abandoned in the western art field? So I am tenacious in the belief that the merits for Chinese oil painters to learn from traditional Chinese paintings are: firstly, to retrieve the subjective personalities of Chinese culture lost due to the impact of western realism; secondly, to propel the modernization of Chinese paintings, which is just illustrated by the works of Du Yongqiao in his later period.

　　For various kinds of Chinese art, the transformation toward modernism has become an inevitable trend since the 1990s. They are vigorous and thriving, yet a confused mixture of truth and falsehood. Chinese artists, especially those of the second and third generation like Du Yongqiao, who just got rid of the constraint of the western classical realism, are facing some new perplexity and choices.

　　In the fledgling years of western modernism, the universal view, which advocated that art was an artist’s self-expression of his own will without caring about others’ feelings, nor deliberately pursuing the expressive form, was sharply refuted and criticized in the fields of structural linguistics, semiology, phenomenology, etc. in the middle of the last century with its underlying theory being shaken. The viewpoint has also given rise to two extremes in the art field: on the one hand, with regard to the artistic appreciation and criticism, it diverts the attention from the works themselves to the factors beyond art, such as the emotional experiences, life background or status and fame of the artist; on the other hand, in terms of artistic creation, it leads the artist to concentrate on searching some unfamiliar, weird, excessive, or even an imaginary “self” which is fundamentally opposite to people’s general nature, rather than seeking artistic symbols in response to feelings. For the lack of isomorphic symbols, such emotions can hardly acquire the “profound expression” which some artists claim their work possesses. It is a shame that a large crowd of contemporary artists in China repeat the mistake once made by Xu Beihong, a famous Chinese painter who introduced the foreign culture which he thought was advanced but was actually abandoned by the natives, and popularize those so-called self-venting-emotions theories which were virtually exposed to severe criticism. They make fools of themselves, as they neglect the symbolic value of art ontology, or might be ignorant of it from the very beginning or cannot do anything about it even if they are well aware of it.

　　The arousal of the “subjective consciousness”, signifying man’s entry into “modernism”, is an important, yet not a unique, indication for an artist to be a modern one. What basically differentiates a modern artist from an average modern person and art from non-art is the “ontological consciousness” of art, or the consciousness of the unique language form of art. As for artists, no matter how unique they are, how emotional they are, how profound their spirit is or how strong the desire for expression is, they will be in the state of “aphasia” or “monologue”, or even be figuratively described as wearing “an emperor's new clothes” if they can’t materialize the feelings into corresponding symbolic patterns.

　　So the problem besetting us today is whether the modernization of self-expression signifies the achievement of artistic expression. Even if so, does it mean the artistic expression is universal and profound? In our opinion, the acquirement of the image of self-expression is not the ultimate yardstick to assess the works of the artist, and an in-depth analysis is required even for the works of master Du Yongqiao. The expressiveness of an artist’s work should be appraised more by the analysis of the language structure of the work than by the personalities, experiences, and emotional life of the artist. Daniel Jones, a modern linguist, thinks that once the emotional image nestles in art, it becomes something beyond oneself, i.e., it will turn into a common, tangible, and communicative emotional symbol shared by all human beings from the emotional self-expression. The significance of those symbols lies not in the objects they represent, i.e. it is for the purpose not of monologue, but of the outpouring and understanding of emotions. Besides, the Taoist school in China holds the view that not all the expressions of personal emotions are significant and successful expressions should be united with the universal spirit—the unity in “Taoism”. Only in this condition can the self of the artist be elevated to the Taoist spirit. Hence, for an artist, when his individual feelings need to be vented, he is obliged to station his personal emotions in the midst of the common sensation of human and figure out a way to exhibit the structural form of the emotion, which is described by Clive Bell as special syntagmatic relations of lines and colors. As Susanne K. Langer said, such structural form, a pattern that reveals the vitality, emotions, and thoughts of life in a clear and concrete manner instead of an abstract one, is labeled the “symbolic expression”.

　　Since the mid-1990s, my return to China to

live for a while every year created more opportunities for me to communicate with Du Yongqiao that enabled me to appreciate all his works from the 1990s, including some unfinished ones which he felt not worthy being publicized, and also to listen to his ideas surging in the process of the artistic creation. I had a feeling that he was then in a period of confusion, a phase no artist would skip on the way of exploration. Du Yongqiao, no expert in theoretical thinking, showed a strong desire to seek the theoretical solutions to those confusing problems. Many theoretical or practical problems pertaining to the ontological language of art were the spotlights in our discussions. An important reason for Du Yongqiao to comprehend the significance of the ontological language of art relies on his complicated feelings of colors and intrinsic experience while painting after he developed some knowledge about impressionism. The western history of modern art verifies the fact that all those modernist masters, such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, Matisse, Derain, Braque, Picasso, Kandinsky, Munch, Marc and Soutine, achieved the modern art after experiencing and surpassing impressionism (most of the realistic painters in China can hardly manage to leap into the phase of modernism, because they classify their works into the type of academic realism without any influence of impressionism), which is because impressionism provides the most direct and resourceful evidence in the study of colors and brushstrokes for modern expressionism to sublate the shaping system of realistic oil paintings and finally materialize their own two major systems of language forms in colors and lines.

　　Hegel presaged early in the eighteenth century when he criticized the “mimetic theory” that paintings would finally free themselves from the bounds of forms when the expression of colors developed into the “magic of colors”, and the substantiality of the object would seem to evaporate in this process. Apparently, colors in this condition are not attached to the object any more, but are sublimated into spirit. From the perspective of the western history of art, we realize that the awakening of the expression of colors during the self-constrained development of art will usher in the history of realistic patterns being challenged. In the light of brushstrokes, “indirect techniques of drawing”, a painting skill employed in most of the oil paintings in Renaissance, conducted shading layer after layer by spreading the colors, just like “cosmetology” which is exquisite without any trace of cuts. In fact, Rubens and Rembrandt in the Baroque period already paid heed to the techniques of strokes. But despite a certain degree of shaping power development of strokes in the subsequent two hundred odd years, the function of strokes only lied in shaping the form and structure without any independent aesthetic values. To project a quick feeling of colors, impressionism has no choice but utilize strokes at a fast pace, so that the strokes look more lively and such aesthetic features as rhythm, strength and vitality can all be emancipated from the fetters of the form and structure and thus achieve distinctive expressions. Other brushstrokes, developing towards the morphological direction of linear image in the works of Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, especially in the works of Monet in his declining years, were upgraded from a mere descriptive skill to an expressive language as they were more dynamic and emotion-oriented. So the significance of impressionism is that it leads to the disintegration of the classical shaping systems of realistic oil paintings and paves a way for modern artistic language to take shape.

　　The “shaping system” is a “technical system” pertaining to reproduction. Colors and strokes only serve as a descriptive method in classical realistic art, while the “language system” acts as an “expressive system” about emotions. In modern art, both colors and strokes are symbols to convey the spirit. Therefore, the concept of “artistic language” is another modern concept concerning art ontology.

　　The strokes and colors in western oil paintings, similar to the brushstrokes and water-ink in traditional Chinese paintings, have their entire value only on techniques when attached to the object or becoming the stylized routine approaches. Without the object, all colors, strokes, as well as water-ink will be reduced to nothing; but if displayed as an artistic language, they will carry a cultural feature and intrinsic spirit, in which condition, the language itself possesses its own aesthetical value and meanwhile, the colors, strokes and water-ink serve as the pillar of all the factors of art. As C. Bell put it, “Without it (the artistic language), the artistic works can never exist as real artistic works.” On the one hand, the great power of artistic language is to directly show the form and tension of colors, lines, and ink and to present the feelings and emotions of man by means of the skillful managing of color tint, the exact handling of strength and speed in wielding brush, and the ingenious using of techniques, such as dotting, finger-brushing and ink-splashing. On the other hand, the power possesses a more subtle structure that appeals the soul more than the eye and can reflect the complicated and changing emotions of human, called the “Versteckte Konstruktion” by Kandinsky. In structuralism, since the factors hidden in art play a significant role, the multi-layered structural relations between the explicitness and implicitness of artistic language will make it possible to “create a new motif”. In this way, we can enrich the profound meanings of the relations between strokes and colors and between strokes and ink set by the artist. These “profound meanings”, called the “artistic spirit” or “inner sound” in western modern art, are referred to as “realm” in Chinese art.

　　The language enchantment of colors, strokes and ink Du Yongqiao realized right from both impressionism and traditional Chinese paintings enabled him to sublimate and elevate his techniques and to put an end to his perplexities in regard to the “state of aphasia” or “monologue” of some “contemporary art”. In 1997, he accomplished two great pieces of works named Blue Brush Verve and Narrow Lane, a landmark of his transformation from lingering between the natural expression and self-expression to pushing ahead with the search for the symbolic expression. In this century, Du Yongqiao produced several series of works, such as The Series of Old Town and Cockscomb Series, which blend subjectivity of the painter perfectly with the ontology of art. And the pure artistic quality, the strength of the existential consciousness, the charm of the artistic realm and the Chinese cultural spirit mirrored in the integration are all the results yielded by a subtle understanding and thorough comprehension of the multi-layered relations between the explicit pattern and the complicated implicit structure of the artistic language. I am well aware that such works can highlight its contemporary values with its own unique characteristics in any conditions in the current world of art.

　　Since 1980s, the Chinese oil painting has begun to stride forward to modernization by leaps and bounds just like the Chinese economy by pluralistic economic means, such as material processing, BTO production, OEM production, transit trade and international agency, that may be counted as a “shortcut” for Chinese art to make its voice heard in the world. Certainly, some artists have, ahead of others, accomplished the primitive accumulation of modern art, taken the lead in registering famous brands for their products and dwarfed Beaux Arts which once dominated the painting world in China. From the angle of the art history, we should admit that the leapfrog development of Chinese oil paintings is inevitable and even necessary for us to apprehend modernism, seek after new trends and understand the world. At the same time, some other artists keep asking about the original point, source point and meta-point of art and also endeavor to explore self-creation while figuring out their own cultural features. Without a shadow of doubt, Mr. Du Yongqiao was an extraordinary artist among the latter ones.

Lion Mountain in Chengdu,

August 2009