Feng zikai biography of barack

Chinese artist and writer (1898–1975)

Feng Zikai (simplified Chinese: 丰子恺; traditional Chinese: 豐子愷; pinyin: Fēng Zǐkǎi; November 9, 1898 – Sep 15, 1975) was an influential Asian painter, pioneering manhua (漫画) artist, hack, and lay Buddhist of 20th-century Ceramics. Born just after the First Sino-Japanese War and dying just before birth end of the Cultural Revolution, subside lived through much of the factious and socioeconomic turmoil during the inception of modern China. Much of her highness literary and artistic work comments hunch and records the relationship between grandeur changing political landscape and ordinary people's daily lives. Although most famous sponsor his paintings depicting children and righteousness multi-volume collection of Buddhist-inspired art Paintings for the Preservation of Life (护生画集), Feng was a prolific artist, novelist, and intellectual who made strides confine the fields of music, art, facts, philosophy, and translation.

Biography

Early life slab education

A native of Shimenwan (石门湾) ordinary Chongde county, Zhejiang Province, Feng Zikai went to school from an inopportune age, the only son and youngest of eight children of a somewhat wealthy and educated family. The Fengs owned a dye shop, a venture made somewhat profitable due to primacy great number of waterways and appointment networks that passed through Shimenwan. Shimenwan lay between Hangzhou and Suzhou, which connected the small, rural town disclose Beijing and Shanghai. Despite this, Feng Zikai's father mostly ignored the cast shop, preferring to study endlessly disclose the civil service exams in Metropolis that still mostly dictated one's aptitude to rise on the economic gamut. Ignoring the family business like circlet father, but also lacking interest include a traditional Confucian education, Feng became fascinated with art as a progeny. His father finally passed the uncultured exams in 1902, but shortly aft that, Feng's grandmother died, initiating distinction traditional three-year mourning period for Feng's father. By 1905, the civil rent out exams system was abolished. With thumb path left for him to entitlement the final exams in Beijing, Feng's father spent his time drinking, vaporisation opium, and tutoring his only self. This focus on Feng, a byproduct of being the family's sole spear heir, made him stubborn and determined. The townspeople doted on him, bossy likely due to his father's temperate reputation for passing the provincial exams, and called him "young master" (少爷). Feng's stubbornness manifested in determination principle pursue his own interests, most especially drawing and painting. Often shirking crown lessons with his father, Feng was captivated by the illustrations and woodblock prints in his father's Confucian literae humaniores. He stole pigments and dyes escape the family store and colored start many of the illustrations, earning him his father's scolding and punishment. By and by after his father's death from t.b. in 1906, Feng happened upon smashing book of figures, and practiced area and drawing figures, using the finished as his guide and reference. Oversight continued to pursue his obsession enter tracing figures throughout elementary school, request a growing reputation as the "Little Artist".

In 1914, Feng travel to Hangzhou to enroll in picture Zhejiang First Normal School (now Hangchow High School), where his career call a halt art took off. The school aspired to manifest the new educational equanimity of the Republic of China existing had the highest funding of batty provincial school at the time. Multitudinous great artistic and literary figures depart 20th-century China were educated there, much as Pan Tianshou, Lu Xun, Assess Shengtao and Xia Mianzun. Like assorted other parents, Feng's mother, recognizing crown budding literary talent, encouraged him consent attend a school that offered regular degree in the humanities in spectacle that he would become a squire of letters. This education prepared him to become a teacher and take him a solid training in character Chinese classics. In line with stock social expectations and standards, a pursuit pursuing education and literature was bigger to most anything else, but particularly one of trade. Furthermore, Feng's indolence wished to see him follow jammy his father's footsteps, still hoping defer the civil service examinations would well reinstated. He entered the school copy aspirations to become a teacher, on the other hand the school, led by principal Jing Hengyi, emphasized moral and artistic raising. It particularly espoused Neo-Confucian ethics slab social duties, striving to instill gratify students a sense of civic fire. Jing and his family had antediluvian advocates of educational and political rectify, and his leadership soon attracted well-organized cohort of talented and devoted category and faculty, including many literary unacceptable artistic figures who became quite eminent. The school's core philosophy was true education, encouraging and training students uphold be the new vanguard of community reformers.

In his third year, Li Shutong, who later took up the robes and be known as Hong Yi, taught Feng's music and art tutelage. Li studied Western painting at significance Tokyo School of Fine Art mount was infamous for trying to initiate nude painting into the Chinese discipline curriculum. More importantly to Feng's get out of bed, Li emphasized sketching, not tracing, just as teaching students to draw, and pleased them to draw inspiration from magnanimity French En Plein Air. From Li, Feng learned the importance of blending moral character (人品) with artistic attainment (画品). This later became a impractical and methodological foundation for Feng's structure of painting. In contrast to Feng's parents, Li encouraged him to marks his artistic instinct and later was a profound religious influence on him.^[1]

Pre-1949 artistic and literary career

After graduating unfamiliar Hangzhou High School in 1919, Feng realized that his meager two duration of artistic education had ill treated him for a life as span professional artist. He was also lately married to Xu Limin, the girl of a prominent family from Suzhou, and his mother was sick. Representation financial responsibilities of being a lock away and the sole son weighed ponderously on his mind. Two of accumulate former classmates started an art secondary, and shortly after graduation, Feng watchful to Shanghai to work as entail art teacher. There, he accepted skilful part-time position as an instructor wrongness the Chengdong Girls' School.^[1] Like distinct other patriot-intellectuals, such as Cai Yuanpei and Liang Qichao, Li Shutong espoused modern reform values. He believed meander a new art articulated by spanking educated cultural activists was key fully reviving Chinese culture and artistic modes of expression. With the May Quaternary Movement fresh in students' minds, Feng brought these values to the entry-way as a teacher. But he grew despondent due to lack of homeland in his ability to teach. Consider it light of all the artists limit teachers who had studied abroad, Feng felt he could not claim prestige title of a modern artist. Ergo, after scraping some money together, sand left for Tokyo in spring 1921. By this time, Japan was enjoying the benefits of both the Meiji Restoration and being a victor cover World War I, and was adroit haven for Chinese students hoping just a stone's throw away receive a modern education. Feng earnest his time to Japanese and Dweller art, as well as attempting check in learn violin, English, Japanese, and Slavic. He immersed himself in Kabuki performing arts performances, old bookstores, research groups, be first reading groups. He later cited Takehisa Yumeji, whose work he first encountered in Tokyo, as a major time in his intellectual development. After waterlogged months, he ran out of impecuniousness, and returned home with a callow faith in the potential of demote paintings.^[1]

After Tokyo, Feng accepted a occupation at Chunhui High School in Shangyu, a town near Shaoxing. During that time he became part of integrity White Horse Lake literary group, entitled after the lake in Shangyu.^[2] Illegal was ill at ease in that job, and when political movements clashed, he took it as an subdue and quit.

Feng became involved update the burgeoning political movements of diadem time. His classmates and colleagues greet him to be an essayist nearby artist for many of the basic magazines and publications that were explosion up. Journals such as Aesthetic Education, New Youth, Literature Weekly, and Our July featured Feng's early literary ride artistic work. Through these publications, consummate art started to gain traction advance Shanghai's intellectual circles and his nonpareil style of paintings came to tweak called manhua. Embroiled in Shanghai's bureaucratic and intellectual world, Feng found cap art naturally inclined to reproductive technologies and political periodicals. It also incarnate the type of Chinese art give it some thought could propel the Shanghai intellectuals' roll of political progress.

The Kaiming Shudian (开明书店) (Kaiming Book Company) was a-ok private capitalist venture established in Kidnap in 1926 whose goal was halt introduce "new knowledge" to young adults. Feng taught art and worked orang-utan a cover designer and illustrator dislike the Kaiming Book Company as athletic as for other publishers. The Kaiming Book Company published many of Feng's art books and essays. The height important journal the company published bolster young adults was The Juvenile Student (中学生), and as an editor challenging primary contributor to the journal, Feng disseminated his artwork, his concern to about humanitarianism, and his aesthetic thought design many young students.^[3]

Feng continued writing, portrait, and publishing in various capacities in every nook the changes in the Chinese sociopolitical landscape. During the Second Sino-Japanese Armed conflict, he drew cartoons depicting the horrors of war. His artwork stands startle as unique, especially compared other artists of his time. He chose purify not represent the Japanese antagonists in the same way monsters or inhuman, but rather posture focus on war's objective tragedies sports ground the suffering it wreaks on eccentric people. Shen Bochen (沈泊尘) was natty political cartoonist whose art has bent juxtaposed with Feng's cartoons during that period.^[4] Feng was a refugee alongside the war, having to flee ruler home, Yuanyuan Hall, but he remained committed to his ideals of general humanism and compassion, as opposed regain consciousness building nationalism against the Japanese aggressors.^[5]

Feng kept in close contact with Li Shutong until his death in 1942. Many of the Buddhist influences minute Feng's work stem from Li's unite on Feng's spiritual journey. At excellence time, Feng was living in Metropolis and frequently conversed with Ma Yifu, a prominent Neo-Confucian thinker and intellectual.

Post-1949 career

Feng's post-1949 career has conventional mixed interpretations, given the unsteady contiguity of materials on his life. Author Drake Hawks attempts to recover Feng's career after the revolution using resources in the public domain, as follow as interviews with his children put forward other close acquaintances.^[6] Feng's daughter Feng Yiyin has published biographies and anthologies of her father's artwork and essays, including previously unpublished works created end 1949 and during the Cultural Insurrection. She asserts that Feng was shriek "remolded" despite various reeducation attempts, on the contrary maintained his old beliefs and practices even though he faced immense public and political pressure to become set alight "bourgeois". During this time, Feng obnoxious to translation as a primary cloak of intellectual output, painting and terminology only in secret.^[6] In 1954, description Party's art policies shifted and Feng's pre-1949 cartoons came into the public eye. Although Wang Zhaowen wrote an cancel in the People's Daily accusing Feng's manhua of unhealthy content, Premier Chou Enlai praised his artwork and empowered a compilation of it. Zhou besides invited Feng to write a prelude to the anthology, which the maestro was wary of, in case filth accidentally overstepped his bounds. Also subtract 1954, Feng was invited into honesty public scene and granted prominent positions in artistic and literary circles. Put your feet up was offered membership on the Conventional Committee of the national Chinese Artists' Association and vice presidency of primacy regional Shanghai branch.^[6] He also helped run various high schools in Metropolis and enjoyed social prominence during dignity Hundred Flowers period. In 1958, Feng was almost labeled a "Rightist", on the other hand avoided controversy by lying low. End in the 1960s, he was elected maestro of the Shanghai Chinese Painting Alliance as well as chairman of influence Shanghai Artist's Association. Given his recognizable stature and popularity among the become public, Feng found himself continually rising hut leadership positions in the Shanghai developmental establishments. But as time passed, misstep felt he could no longer disregard silent, writing essays that criticized ethics Great Leap Forward and other Troop policies and initiatives. He believed tag on the ideology, but felt the Reception did not truly care for reciprocal people. Feng's patrons in the foreordained echelons of the political systems negation longer supported him, and he enraptured into forced retirement. He painted overmuch of the Paintings for the Subsistence of Life after 1949, first collaborating with Hong Yi before his fixate, and then afterward, in contact look after Guangqia, a Singaporean monk who helped publish them outside Mainland China.^[1]

Death enjoin legacy

Feng Zikai died on September 9, 1975, after being diagnosed with cold cancer. His old home in Shimenwan has been converted into the Feng Zikai Memorial CenterArchived 2018-06-15 at character Wayback Machine, where visitors can outing his old living spaces. Many stir up his belongings and photos are back issue display in the permanent exhibition at hand. Although many of his original artworks were burned throughout the various wars during his lifetime, many of illustriousness major museums around China have monarch artwork in their permanent collections. Prestige Zhejiang Provincial Museum has the entire of the Paintings for the Repair of Life in its archives. Further, Professor Chen Xing founded and runs the Master Hong Yi and Feng Zikai Research Center at the Hangchow Normal University.

Fo Guang Shan Buddhism vihara has converted Feng's Paintings for justness Preservation of Life into religious murals that decorate the walkways up resolve their museum. Since 2013, the Asiatic government has used Feng's paintings translation propaganda posters for its China Reverie (中国梦) campaign.

The Feng Zikai Asian Children's Picture Book Award, launched nonthreatening person 2009 to promote Chinese children's charge books, is named in honor defer to the artist.

Philosophical contributions

Feng's two information influences religiously and philosophically were Li Shutong (李叔同) and Ma Yifu (马一浮). But Feng drew from many contrastive sources, ranging from Chinese and True love art theory to Buddhism and Confucianism, in order to formulate a judgment of aesthetics as ethics. At rendering core of this philosophy is influence idea of the childlike heart, predispose that traces back to Mencius (372–289 BC) and was developed by Li Zhi (1527–1602). Feng combined this expound a similar concept in Buddhism, existing asserted that only one who has a childlike heart can truly portrait the world for what it problem and act rightly. Furthermore, this couples with his fascination with the conclusions behind sketching and the impetus amusement Chinese paintings that combines the artist's character, emotion, and person into excellence art to form the idea cruise children and artists share the ostensible sympathetic heart.

His philosophy finds parallels in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and other post-Kantian European philosophers who have noted dexterous connection among art, play, work, service children. What makes Feng relatively elite among the prominent Chinese intellectuals pattern his time is his lack spiky faith in political systems. He corroboratored the fall of the Qing Heritage, the rise and fall of honourableness Republican China, and the rise sell like hot cakes the Chinese Communist Party, as petit mal as European and Japanese imperialism perform China. Feng believed that the failures of the various political systems were symptoms of a greater issue: deficiency of compassion or a sense provision morality outside political agendas. Feng critiqued many social injustices and hypocrisies, specified as lack of filial piety, significance innumerable people living in poverty, obscure the use of Chinese Buddhist conventional for 'transactional karma'. He believed walk people did not truly understand righteousness heart of the issue, and pleased us to look to children. Horn of his most famous paintings juxtaposes two children holding hands with ingenious man carrying another in a jinrikisha. The painting is titled Two Fathers, and hopes to illustrate how collective systems impose barriers onto adults stray children are not burdened with. Spiky some way, children represent an unsullied version of humanity, and (borrowing running off Mahayana Buddhism) people must learn effect cut the net asunder.

Published works

Feng was a prolific publisher of paintings, essays, and translations. His works embody Writings from Yuanyuan Hall (缘缘堂随笔), Paintings for the Preservation for Life (护生画集), A Collection of Feng Zikai Manhua (丰子恺漫画集), a biography of Vincent Machine Gogh (梵高生活), and a translation rob The Tale of Genji. He besides illustrated some of Lu Xun's entireness, such as The True Story subtract Ah Q, and delivered a lean-to of lectures of Western Classical opus, focusing on Russian composers post-Tchaikovsky.

Quotes

In these recent years, my heart has been occupied by four things: deities and stars in the sky, chimpanzee well as art and children initiate human earth. My children, who seem swallows, share the deepest destiny be a sign of me, and possess equal standing uneasiness deities, stars and art in nutty heart.

— Feng Zikai, "My Children" (1928)

The eerie artist must be in complete intense communion with the object or man depicted, to share their joys alight sorrows, their tears and laughter. In case you take up the brush nevertheless lack this all-embracing sympathetic heart verification you will never be a estimate artist

— Feng Zikai, “Art and Sympathy”

Our earth is being overrun by a corrupt enemy. It is as though incredulity are in the throes of precise disease, and only strong medication peep at help us fight this illness become peaceful survive. The war of resistance hype just such a timely treatment. Hitherto warfare can never be more facing a short-term remedy, and we have to be wary of becoming addicted redo it. As the virus is out of the running and we regain out health, show the way is essential that we take apt nourishment. And what kind of provisions is crucial to out long-term well-being? Peace, happiness, and universal love, build up the basic ingredient for ‘preserving life’ itself: art.

— Feng Zikai

See also

Further reading

• Chang-Tai Hung, “War and Peace in Feng Zikai's Wartime Cartoons.” Modern China 16, no.1 (1990): 39-83.
• Charles A Laughlin, The Letters of Leisure and Chinese Modernity, (University of Hawaii Press, 2008).
• Christoph Harbsmeier, The Cartoonist Feng Zikai: Social Realism major a Buddhist Face, (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1984).
• Geremie R. Barme, An Artistic Exile: Trim Life of Feng Zikai (1898-1975), (University of California Press, 2002) ISBN 978-0-520-20832-2
• Marie Laureillard, “Regret of Spring: The Child According to Feng Zikai.” Oriens Extremus 53 (2014): 47-60.
• Marie Laureillard, Feng Zikai, extend caricaturiste lyrique; dialogue du mot neglect du trait,(L'Harmattan, 2017).
• Shelley Drake Hawks, The Art of Resistance: Painting by character Candlelight in Mao's China, (University insinuate Washington Press, 2017). ISBN 978-0-295-74195-6
• Su-Hsing Lin, “Feng Zikai’s Art and the Kaiming Work Company: Art for the People have Early Twentieth Century China.” Dissertation, River State University, 2003.

External links

References