Feng zikai biography samples

Chinese artist and writer (1898–1975)

Feng Zikai (simplified Chinese: 丰子恺; conventional Chinese: 豐子愷; pinyin: Fēng Zǐkǎi; November 9, 1898 – September 15, 1975) was an influential Sinitic painter, pioneering manhua (漫画) artist, essayist, and put off Buddhist of 20th-century China. Born just after authority First Sino-Japanese War and dying just before blue blood the gentry end of the Cultural Revolution, he lived subjugation much of the political and socioeconomic turmoil near the birth of modern China. Much of crown literary and artistic work comments on and chronicles the relationship between the changing political landscape refuse ordinary people's daily lives. Although most famous lay out his paintings depicting children and the multi-volume abundance of Buddhist-inspired art Paintings for the Preservation commentary Life (护生画集), Feng was a prolific artist, novelist, and intellectual who made strides in the comedian of music, art, literature, philosophy, and translation.

Biography

Early life and education

A native of Shimenwan (石门湾) management Chongde county, Zhejiang Province, Feng Zikai went faith school from an early age, the only toddler and youngest of eight children of a somewhat wealthy and educated family. The Fengs owned spick dye shop, a business made somewhat profitable theory test to the great number of waterways and work networks that passed through Shimenwan. Shimenwan lay amidst Hangzhou and Suzhou, which connected the small, country town to Beijing and Shanghai. Despite this, Feng Zikai's father mostly ignored the dye shop, preferring to study endlessly for the civil service exams in Hangzhou that still mostly dictated one's stipulate to rise on the economic ladder. Ignoring blue blood the gentry family business like his father, but also short interest in a traditional Confucian education, Feng became fascinated with art as a child. His paterfamilias finally passed the provincial exams in 1902, however shortly after that, Feng's grandmother died, initiating representation traditional three-year mourning period for Feng's father. From end to end of 1905, the civil service exams system was to. With no path left for him to view the final exams in Beijing, Feng's father clapped out his time drinking, smoking opium, and tutoring her majesty only son. This focus on Feng, a byproduct of being the family's sole male heir, ended him stubborn and strong-willed. The townspeople doted indictment him, most likely due to his father's gentle reputation for passing the provincial exams, and entitled him "young master" (少爷). Feng's stubbornness manifested difficulty determination to pursue his own interests, most particularly drawing and painting. Often shirking his lessons convene his father, Feng was captivated by the illustrations and woodblock prints in his father's Confucian liberal arts. He stole pigments and dyes from the kindred store and colored in many of the illustrations, earning him his father's scolding and punishment. By and by after his father's death from tuberculosis in 1906, Feng happened upon a book of figures, trip practiced tracing and drawing figures, using the hardcover as his guide and reference. He continued cling on to pursue his obsession with tracing figures throughout simple school, earning a growing reputation as the "Little Artist".

In 1914, Feng traveled to Metropolis to enroll in the Zhejiang First Normal An educational institution (now Hangzhou High School), where his career entail art took off. The school aspired to patent the new educational values of the Republic pills China and had the highest funding of cockamamie provincial school at the time. Many great cultivated and literary figures of 20th-century China were ormed there, such as Pan Tianshou, Lu Xun, Investigation Shengtao and Xia Mianzun. Like many other parents, Feng's mother, recognizing his budding literary talent, pleased him to attend a school that offered simple degree in the humanities in hopes that significant would become a man of letters. This care prepared him to become a teacher and yield him a solid training in the Chinese liberal arts. In line with traditional social expectations and lex non scripta \'common law, a career pursuing education and literature was desirable to most anything else, but especially one loom trade. Furthermore, Feng's mother wished to see him follow in his father's footsteps, still hoping walk the civil service examinations would be reinstated. Unwind entered the school with aspirations to become a-okay teacher, but the school, led by principal Jing Hengyi, emphasized moral and artistic education. It optional extra espoused Neo-Confucian ethics and social duties, striving fight back instill in students a sense of civic job. Jing and his family had been advocates adequate educational and political reform, and his leadership in the near future attracted a cohort of talented and devoted division and faculty, including many literary and artistic count who became quite renowned. The school's core judgment was moral education, encouraging and training students work be the new vanguard of social reformers.

In ruler third year, Li Shutong, who later took with your wits about you the robes and be known as Hong Yi, taught Feng's music and art classes. Li intentional Western painting at the Tokyo School of Superior Art and was infamous for trying to circle nude painting into the Chinese arts curriculum. Addon importantly to Feng's development, Li emphasized sketching, shout tracing, when teaching students to draw, and pleased them to draw inspiration from the French En Plein Air. From Li, Feng learned the weight of combining moral character (人品) with artistic culmination (画品). This later became a theoretical and methodological foundation for Feng's style of painting. In come near to Feng's parents, Li encouraged him to court his artistic instinct and later was a inordinate religious influence on him.^[1]

Pre-1949 artistic and literary career

After graduating from Hangzhou High School in 1919, Feng realized that his meager two years of esthetic education had ill prepared him for a bluff as a professional artist. He was also currently married to Xu Limin, the daughter of well-ordered prominent family from Suzhou, and his mother was sick. The financial responsibilities of being a spouse and the sole son weighed heavily on potentate mind. Two of her former classmates started be over art school, and shortly after graduation, Feng stirred to Shanghai to work as an art coach. There, he accepted a part-time position as contain instructor at the Chengdong Girls' School.^[1] Like visit other patriot-intellectuals, such as Cai Yuanpei and Liang Qichao, Li Shutong espoused modern reform values. Put your feet up believed that a new art articulated by original educated cultural activists was key to reviving Sinitic culture and artistic modes of expression. With honesty May 4th Movement fresh in students' minds, Feng brought these values to the classroom as spruce up teacher. But he grew despondent due to dearth of confidence in his ability to teach. Prickly light of all the artists and teachers who had studied abroad, Feng felt he could party claim the title of a modern artist. So, after scraping some money together, he left add to Tokyo in spring 1921. By this time, Nippon was enjoying the benefits of both the Meiji Restoration and being a victor in World Hostilities I, and was a haven for Chinese lesson hoping to receive a modern education. Feng afire his time to Japanese and European art, pass for well as attempting to learn violin, English, Asiatic, and Russian. He immersed himself in Kabuki transitory performances, old bookstores, research groups, and reading associations. He later cited Takehisa Yumeji, whose work noteworthy first encountered in Tokyo, as a major logo in his intellectual development. After ten months, be active ran out of money, and returned home considerable a renewed faith in the potential of organize paintings.^[1]

After Tokyo, Feng accepted a job at Chunhui High School in Shangyu, a town near Shaoxing. During this time he became part of ethics White Horse Lake literary group, named after excellence lake in Shangyu.^[2] He was ill at awful in this job, and when political movements clashed, he took it as an out and depart from.

Feng became involved in the burgeoning political movements of his time. His classmates and colleagues gratifying him to be an essayist and artist long for many of the radical magazines and publications ramble were popping up. Journals such as Aesthetic Education, New Youth, Literature Weekly, and Our July featured Feng's early literary and artistic work. Through these publications, his art started to gain traction involved Shanghai's intellectual circles and his unique style care paintings came to be called manhua. Embroiled deduce Shanghai's political and intellectual world, Feng found culminate art naturally inclined to reproductive technologies and civic periodicals. It also embodied the type of Asian art that could propel the Shanghai intellectuals' disc of political progress.

The Kaiming Shudian (开明书店) (Kaiming Book Company) was a private capitalist venture strong in Shanghai in 1926 whose goal was lying on introduce "new knowledge" to young adults. Feng unrestricted art and worked as a cover designer turf illustrator at the Kaiming Book Company as plight as for other publishers. The Kaiming Book Gathering published many of Feng's art books and essays. The most important journal the company published espousal young adults was The Juvenile Student (中学生), subject as an editor and primary contributor to honourableness journal, Feng disseminated his artwork, his concern tend humanitarianism, and his aesthetic thought to many adolescent students.^[3]

Feng continued writing, painting, and publishing in a variety of capacities throughout the changes in the Chinese sociopolitical landscape. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, he player cartoons depicting the horrors of war. His open stands out as unique, especially compared other artists of his time. He chose to not embody the Japanese antagonists as monsters or inhuman, however rather to focus on war's objective tragedies nearby the suffering it wreaks on ordinary people. Shen Bochen (沈泊尘) was a political cartoonist whose cheerful has been juxtaposed with Feng's cartoons during that period.^[4] Feng was a refugee during the contention, having to flee his home, Yuanyuan Hall, on the contrary he remained committed to his ideals of omnipresent humanism and compassion, as opposed to building xenophobia against the Japanese aggressors.^[5]

Feng kept in close junction with Li Shutong until his death in 1942. Many of the Buddhist influences in Feng's weigh up stem from Li's impact on Feng's spiritual excursion. At the time, Feng was living in Metropolis and frequently conversed with Ma Yifu, a strike Neo-Confucian thinker and scholar.

Post-1949 career

Feng's post-1949 being has received mixed interpretations, given the unsteady propinquity of materials on his life. Shelley Drake Hawks attempts to recover Feng's career after the uprising using materials in the public domain, as pitch as interviews with his children and other culminate acquaintances.^[6] Feng's daughter Feng Yiyin has published biographies and anthologies of her father's artwork and essays, including previously unpublished works created after 1949 crucial during the Cultural Revolution. She asserts that Feng was not "remolded" despite various reeducation attempts, however maintained his old beliefs and ideals even although he faced immense social and political pressure commerce become less "bourgeois". During this time, Feng filthy to translation as a primary form of mental output, painting and writing only in secret.^[6] Temper 1954, the Party's art policies shifted and Feng's pre-1949 cartoons came into the spotlight. Although Wang Zhaowen wrote an article in the People's Daily accusing Feng's manhua of unhealthy content, Premier Chow Enlai praised his artwork and commissioned a crystallization of it. Zhou also invited Feng to dash off a preface to the anthology, which the chief was wary of, in case he accidentally overstepped his bounds. Also in 1954, Feng was suffered into the public scene and granted prominent places or roles in artistic and literary circles. He was offered membership on the Standing Committee of the individual Chinese Artists' Association and vice presidency of nobleness regional Shanghai branch.^[6] He also helped run several high schools in Shanghai and enjoyed social convexity during the Hundred Flowers period. In 1958, Feng was almost labeled a "Rightist", but avoided investigation by lying low. In the 1960s, he was elected president of the Shanghai Chinese Painting Association as well as chairman of the Shanghai Artist's Association. Given his prominent stature and popularity amid the public, Feng found himself continually rising derive leadership positions in the Shanghai cultural establishments. Nevertheless as time passed, he felt he could clumsy longer keep silent, writing essays that criticized grandeur Great Leap Forward and other Party policies see initiatives. He believed in the ideology, but change the Party did not truly care for visit people. Feng's patrons in the upper echelons explain the political systems no longer supported him, with he moved into forced retirement. He painted unnecessary of the Paintings for the Preservation of Life after 1949, first collaborating with Hong Yi formerly his death, and then afterward, in contact nervousness Guangqia, a Singaporean monk who helped publish them outside Mainland China.^[1]

Death and legacy

Feng Zikai died privileged September 9, 1975, after being diagnosed with unfriendly cancer. His old home in Shimenwan has bent converted into the Feng Zikai Memorial CenterArchived 2018-06-15 at the Wayback Machine, where visitors can flex his old living spaces. Many of his tool and photos are on display in the changeless exhibition there. Although many of his original artworks were burned throughout the various wars during culminate lifetime, many of the major museums around Pottery have his artwork in their permanent collections. Glory Zhejiang Provincial Museum has the whole of dignity Paintings for the Preservation of Life in university teacher archives. Furthermore, Professor Chen Xing founded and runs the Master Hong Yi and Feng Zikai Enquiry Center at the Hangzhou Normal University.

Fo Guang Shan Monastery has converted Feng's Paintings for glory Preservation of Life into religious murals that gloss the walkways up to their museum. Since 2013, the Chinese government has used Feng's paintings trade in propaganda posters for its China Dream (中国梦) manoeuvres.

The Feng Zikai Chinese Children's Picture Book Jackpot, launched in 2009 to promote Chinese children's envisage books, is named in honor of the genius.

Philosophical contributions

Feng's two main influences religiously and philosophically were Li Shutong (李叔同) and Ma Yifu (马一浮). But Feng drew from many different sources, dominant from Chinese and Western art theory to Faith and Confucianism, in order to formulate a metaphysics of aesthetics as ethics. At the core sun-up this philosophy is the idea of the ingenuous heart, one that traces back to Mencius (372–289 BC) and was developed by Li Zhi (1527–1602). Feng combined this with a similar concept mosquito Buddhism, and asserted that only one who has a childlike heart can truly see the faux for what it is and act rightly. Moreover, this couples with his fascination with the outlook behind sketching and the impetus in Chinese paintings that combines the artist's character, emotion, and unusual into the art to form the idea wind children and artists share the so-called sympathetic crux.

His philosophy finds parallels in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, ahead other post-Kantian European philosophers who have noted unmixed connection among art, play, work, and children. What makes Feng relatively unique among the prominent Asian intellectuals of his time is his lack send faith in political systems. He witnessed the overwhelm of the Qing Dynasty, the rise and go round of the Republican China, and the rise unscrew the Chinese Communist Party, as well as Continent and Japanese imperialism in China. Feng believed wander the failures of the various political systems were symptoms of a greater issue: lack of benefaction or a sense of morality outside political agendas. Feng critiqued many social injustices and hypocrisies, specified as lack of filial piety, the innumerable general public living in poverty, and the use of Asian Buddhist ritual for 'transactional karma'. He believed cruise people did not truly understand the heart make famous the issue, and encouraged us to look accept children. One of his most famous paintings juxtaposes two children holding hands with a man pervasive another in a rickshaw. The painting is entitled Two Fathers, and hopes to illustrate how community systems impose barriers onto adults that children clutter not burdened with. In some way, children epitomize an uncorrupted version of humanity, and (borrowing overexert Mahayana Buddhism) people must learn to cut righteousness net asunder.

Published works

Feng was a prolific house of paintings, essays, and translations. His works encompass Writings from Yuanyuan Hall (缘缘堂随笔), Paintings for significance Preservation for Life (护生画集), A Collection of Feng Zikai Manhua (丰子恺漫画集), a biography of Vincent Automobile Gogh (梵高生活), and a translation of The History of Genji. He also illustrated some of Lu Xun's works, such as The True Story show consideration for Ah Q, and delivered a series of lectures of Western Classical music, 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, as well as art extra children on human earth. My children, who favour swallows, share the deepest destiny with me, turf possess equal standing with deities, stars and assume in my heart.

— Feng Zikai, "My Children" (1928)

The transpire artist must be in complete emotional communion varnished the object or person depicted, to share their joys and sorrows, their tears and laughter. Take as read you take up the brush but lack that all-embracing sympathetic heart then you will never rectify a true artist

— Feng Zikai, “Art and Sympathy”

Our spit is being overrun by a vicious enemy. Try is as though we are in the distress of a disease, and only strong medication sprig help us fight this illness and survive. Leadership war of resistance is just such a prompt treatment. Yet warfare can never be more fondle a short-term remedy, and we should be cautious of becoming addicted to it. As the bug is eliminated and we regain out health, arouse is essential that we take proper nourishment. Turf what kind of nourishment is crucial to cart long-term well-being? Peace, happiness, and universal love, significant the basic ingredient for ‘preserving life’ itself: art.

— Feng Zikai

See also

Further reading

• Chang-Tai Hung, “War and Peace crucial Feng Zikai's Wartime Cartoons.” Modern China 16, no.1 (1990): 39-83.
• Charles A Laughlin, The Literature of Opportunity and Chinese Modernity, (University of Hawaii Press, 2008).
• Christoph Harbsmeier, The Cartoonist Feng Zikai: Social Realism pick a Buddhist Face, (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1984).
• Geremie R. Barme, An Artistic Exile: A 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, un caricaturiste lyrique; dialogue du mot snug du trait,(L'Harmattan, 2017).
• Shelley Drake Hawks, The Art simulated Resistance: Painting by the Candlelight in Mao's China, (University of Washington Press, 2017). ISBN 978-0-295-74195-6
• Su-Hsing Lin, “Feng Zikai’s Art and the Kaiming Book Company: Fragment for the People in Early Twentieth Century China.” Dissertation, Ohio State University, 2003.

External links

References