Mo Xiong's Social Evaluation

Testimonials

Shao Dazhen

China's art world has seen the emergence of a number of young artists, who are active in thought, diligent in exploration, courageous in innovation, and bold in presenting and shaping their own individual outlook. Mo Xiong is one of them.

Mo Xiong initially studied arts and crafts dyeing and weaving. After graduation, he gradually shifted his creative center to painting. Perhaps his training in pattern design, his study of the history of Chinese and foreign arts and crafts, and his research on traditional crafts of flowers and plumes also played some positive roles in his future path of painting. His focus on painting techniques and the process of craftsmanship may have benefited from this. Technique and production process, in the current Chinese painting is often ignored, some people mistakenly think that painting as long as there is genius and concept, as long as the hand can be painted, wrong! Looking back at the history of art, there is not a single painting master is to trivialize the technique and production. Of course, the reason why they became masters, not only by technique and production excellence, they have ideas, concepts, excellent modeling ability, they are excellent "craftsman".

Mo Xiong's paintings are not only characterized by outstanding technique and production skills, but also by the sincerity of his feelings. He has studied impressionism and modern western art, and he loves ancient Chinese poems and traditional Chinese paintings. In his studies, he has realized the most important fact that the secret of the achievements of all arts (paintings are no exception) lies in the sincerity and intensity of the artist's inner feelings. In the past few years, Mo Xiong has not so much studied the technique and external style of painting as he has studied how to cultivate true emotion and the way to express it. Over the past ten years, his art has made great progress. His individual style has gradually formed, the emotional color in his paintings has become stronger and stronger, and the "flavor" of his paintings has become stronger and stronger. The two factors in this "flavor" - "oil painting sense" and "spontaneity" of traditional Chinese painting - are organically blended to form the "flavor" of Mo Xiong's paintings. These two elements of "flavor" - the "sense of oil painting" and the "spontaneity" of traditional Chinese painting - are organically blended, forming a major feature of Mo Xiong's paintings.

Mo Xiong's works contain a sense of poignancy, and some people say that his flowers and landscapes have a "poignant beauty". In fact, all creations that can truly be called "art" contain a sense of poignancy, because life and nature, by their very nature, are bleak.

Biography in a trance

Lv Peng

Mo Xiong's paintings are first and foremost literary. Because readers can read "flowers", "porcelain vase", "brocade chicken", "curtain", "lady" and "lady" in the artist's works. and "ladies" as well as "fans". Not only that, but the artist's use and depiction of different objects is based on his own personal experience, even like a diary, recording what he sees and hears in the form of images, as if the importance of such a record is enough to prevent the artist from falling into the trap of abstract symbols. Those physical contents are presented in a subtle or partial way, so that the reader is also compelled to observe what they look like and even to think about their history. The painter tells us that those contents are an integral part of his life experience, that he cannot live without them and that he is fascinated by them. Through the literary description of the images, Mochon tells the reader that the details of the surroundings and the indirect historical experiences themselves are worth taking seriously, because they are the gateway to understanding nature and society - words like "decay" and "bleakness" come from Words like "decay" and "bleak" come from natural and social phenomena, and such phenomena are everywhere, even in the form of a small flower on the patio of a courtyard house.

Mo Xiong's paintings are also sound. Patches of color easily evoke feelings of musical notes and melodies. The Impressionists gave so many examples of visual understanding to posterity more than a hundred years ago that Kandinsky simply indicated the musical character of painting and claimed, "He who has no music within him is a man of darkness of mind." When we go to categorize, we can indeed see the notes of Monet, Renoir, Redon, as well as Symbolism and Expressionism. This situation shows that the painter's mind is not immune to the infection of the iconography of his predecessors. The experience of life is different, but the interpretation of life is dependent on the tools of history. The learning experience of decoration and craftsmanship is in fact the experience of summarizing and understanding patterns. It just so happens that the patterns that Mochon came into contact with, loved and was willing to understand were those patterns and compositions that give musicality. The painter loves these elements and wants us all to love them. However, when a cold-toned note or melody becomes dominant, it is easy to introduce the listener to the sadness of the reality of a broken flower.

Mochon's paintings are clearly pictorial. We are looking at the artist's work with our eyes, and we are witnessing the details of his past life that he offers us. The word "reminiscence" is the title of the artist's work, but those reminiscences of "Jiangnan" are the product of a personalized interpretation of historical images, and the physical reality is so blurred that those reminiscences become incomprehensible to viewers without the painter's experience. At this point, words like "landscape" and "landscape" may appear, and the personalized record becomes a general image concept. Mochon had an inextricable fascination with color, so even when he represented subjects and themes that were "melancholic," he maintained a splash of color. Expressionist painting has two main tendencies: French joy like Matisse and Nordic melancholy like Munch. Mo Xiong is Chinese, French joy is obviously not there and Scandinavian melancholy is hard to bear. Therefore, in the painter's works, the heavy mood is diluted by the color dots, just like when we read Guo Xi's "Early Spring", the atmosphere of spring is hard to experience, and the heavy concept of nature is not so heavy as to make the heart completely dead - such a state of mind and "far away", "sentimental", "dreamy", "drifting away", "trance" and so on.

Mo Xiong's paintings are a kind of biography. This kind of biography is far from the epic of heroism, between anecdotes of life and the trajectory of the mind, and is also a kind of personal story. Painting is not like literature; a flat world tends to disperse the senses, especially in non-realistic paintings. Such characteristics were exploited by sensitive painters at an early age. Kandinsky found that sketching landscapes upside down evoked more beauty and imagination than viewing them head on, and later such a view became a tradition, leading to abstractionist painting. Most likely due to Moxon's experience, the abstract motifs were harmonized with a moderate melancholy, and the painter unconsciously maintained the habit of visual tradition, still concerned with the "beauty" and "effect" of the picture. On the other hand, he was well aware of the abyss of "abstraction" caused by the revolution, so he was always in a conflict between longing and leaving. It is not easy for a man to expose his fragile soul on the social level, but painting, as a biography of the soul, records this characteristic of the author. It may be a kind of deepest fear that the painter does not dare to touch the "miserable" darkness, and the bright and shining color spots become a kind of spiritual fence preventing the painter's soul from falling down.

Imagery, a cultural sentiment of Chinese oil painting

Shang Hui

The localization of oil painting is an important cultural transformation process that must be carried out after the transplantation of oil painting to China.

Since the 20th century, the practice and exploration of this cultural transformation process has led to the formation of two major schools of Chinese oil painting, the Realistic and the Imaginative, due to the differences between the nature and culture of the regions of northern and southern China. In the south, Liu Haisu, Lin Fengmian, and Wu Dayu were the pioneers, followed by Su Tianci, Zao Wuji, and Wu Guanzhong, while the younger generation of painters, such as Mo Xiong, attempted to expand the Southern School of Imaginative Oil Painting into a deeper and broader academic field. This school, in terms of ideology, directly connects the modernist oil painting after European Impressionism and traditional Chinese literati painting; in terms of creative style, it pursues the allegory, spirituality and cultural character of oil painting.

As a rising star of Chinese Southern School of Oil Painting, Mo Xiong's oil paintings try to interpret traditional Chinese literati paintings from a new perspective with modernist artistic concepts. The Chinese landscape painting and the folding flower and bird painting that we are familiar with have gained a different kind of surprise and aesthetic strangeness in his oil paintings. What is supposed to be a brush and ink writing with a single stroke is reintegrated into the variations and rhythms of colors and brush strokes in his pictures. He borrows directly from Chinese paintings, but makes arduous and profound changes in how to convert it into the language of oil paintings. Though he has changed the spontaneity and fluency of his predecessors' imaginative oil paintings, which were written with meaning, and appeared to be heavy, thick, and simple due to the skillful use of the oil painting language, he has emphasized the coolness, dispersion, and timelessness in the overall mood of the picture, which has never been seen in the history of oil paintings before. It can also be said that in the exploration of localization of oil painting, he pursues the expression of Chinese cultural character and Chinese cultural weather, trying to penetrate into the sticky oil and rough canvas a cultural sentiment and human attitude that the Chinese literati paintings sent to the taste of indifference, calmness and peace, and outside the painting. Therefore, Mo Xiong's seemingly careless brushstrokes and colors are actually full of the misery of his life and the bitterness of his emotions. As a result, Mo Xiong has become a representative of the young generation's artistic exploration of the fusion of East and West from a new perspective.

(The author is a director of the Chinese Art Association, a director of the Chinese Oil Painting Society, and the executive editor of Fine Art magazine)

Creating a realm of pure beauty

-Analysis of Mo Xiong's art

Yi Ying

There is a saying in Chinese painting, " Painting is like a person", or "the character of a painting is the character of a person". The traditional literati interpreted this to mean the consistency between the artist's artistic creation and his moral character, thus labeling the literati's superior spiritual and social status. From the perspective of modern psychology, "human" or "human character" does not refer to a person's moral personality, but rather the sum of a person's natural nature and social nature. In other words, an excellent work of art should be the most complete reflection of the artist's personality. A good artist, whether he adopts subjective or objective methods, is the embodiment of his personality and will. The artist does not need to illustrate his knowledge of life or society through his works; if his works are a true reflection of his self, then what he shows to the audience is his true personality. This is how we feel when we look at Mo Xiong's works. Most of his works are based on flowers, but they are not general still lifes or landscapes. He said, "Flowers, may be used as a symbol, may be my personal reflection, may be my feeling of looking at the world, may be the illusion of the world, may be the ineffable truth of the universe." Mo Xiong's works are not descriptive in any way, and the flower has gradually evolved into an abstract image under his pen, but we clearly feel a state of mind, an emotion, a view of the world, and an experience of life from it.

If a professionally trained artist wants to realize the full expression of himself in his works, there must be a process of transforming objective subjects or professional skills. Mo Xiong originally studied dyeing and weaving design, and has a foundation in decorative painting. Moreover, dyeing and weaving art has a close relationship with flowers, which may have had a potential influence on Mo Xiong's choice of flowers as his main subject matter. There are generally three types of flower representations, namely, landscape, still life and decorative. Due to the influence of his professional training, Mo Xiong may have favored the third type, i.e., decorative. Decorative style has become almost synonymous with aestheticism in modern painting, but modern painting, especially the Symbolist and Expressionist styles, has a close relationship with the decorative arts. From Pre-Raphaelite to French Symbolist painting, and from the Vienna Secession to German Expressionism, all used decorative techniques to varying degrees or were directly trained in the Arts and Crafts, not to mention the Arts and Crafts movement in England and the Art Nouveau movement in Germany. The natural relationship between decorative arts and modern art is mainly reflected in three aspects: firstly, the Arts and Crafts movement that took place in the second half of the 19th century is a product of the occurrence and development of modern industry, which reflects the direct influence of modern industrial civilization on human aesthetic concepts; modern industry provides new design concepts and new materials for Arts and Crafts, so modern Arts and Crafts is always at the forefront of visual concepts. Secondly, the decorative nature of arts and crafts is more characterized by pure art, and the creation of paintings or sculptures with decorative style is a reaction to academism. Thirdly, Arts and Crafts has a broader social function, which liberates art from the aristocratic academism and opens it up to the public, better reflecting the emotions of ordinary people, and therefore a bridge to self-expression. From these aspects, Moxiong's decorative nature is indeed characterized by aesthetics, but aesthetics is only a visual appearance, and appearance is the channel that leads the audience into the emotional and spiritual world of the artist. Even realism, which realistically reproduces nature and social life, can only be a simple imitation of reality if it is not infused with thought and spirit. Both realistic and decorative techniques are only means of expression, and for the artist it depends both on early artistic training and on the artist's choice, which is often determined by the artist's intrinsic personality, temperament, and artistic predilections. Mo Xiong's good fortune lies in the fact that both have been organically combined, and it is in this decorative language that he has found his place. His memories of the past, his emotions, and the sadness in the depths of his subconscious that he doesn't even notice for himself all cover his pictures with a layer of colorful and bleak softness. He combines beauty and sadness into one, not only thanks to the formal language provided by decorative arts, but also because he gradually found a path to his inner depth from the language of pure beauty.

Analysis of Mo Xiong's work is also inseparable from his environment, which is not a large cultural context, but rather a very unique and personal one that relates to his upbringing, personal experience and living conditions. No matter what subjects Mo Xiong paints, still lifes, landscapes (which can be interpreted as still lifes in nature) and figures (figures embellished in landscapes), they all have a feeling of drifting away, both like hazy memories of the past and a faint sadness like looking at flowers in a fog. Although he uses very bright colors in some of his works, they are also like thick clouds that cannot be erased and weigh heavily on the viewer's mind. The titles of a few paintings seem to annotate this mood of his: looking out over the barrenness, memories of the south, falling leaves without sound, the valley of loneliness, the last remnants of the lotus-collecting era ...... The painter seems to be in touch with the feelings, a leaf knows the autumn, and sends out infinite feelings about life from the brush and the scenery. These scenes are both the subject matter of Mo Xiong, but also the medium of his emotions, in his double meaning. On the one hand, the choice of subject matter is conscious, such as broken lotus, fallen leaves, barrenness, loneliness, and so on, from which the artist finds a kind of emotional support, or subconsciously uses it as an emotional link to a part of his life that has already passed away. On the other hand, there is no direct reference to the subject matter, the painter only uses them as a medium to show the language of painting, the symbolic meaning and emotional connection are all contained in the language of painting. This is the case with Cézanne in the history of art, who repeatedly used his hometown of St. Victor's Hill as his subject matter. Although the subject matter contains attachment to his hometown, the geometrical structure dissolves the emotional association, and the object becomes purely a carrier of the language of painting. To a certain extent, Moxiong's subjects have the same tendency, in addition to borrowing scenes from the past, there is also a certain correspondence between the form and the subject matter. His preference for decorative language leads him to seek out subjects that are compatible with it, while the feminine, cool mood of the paintings blends the form with his emotions. Therefore, Mo Xiong's paintings are actually a style of symbolism, but this symbolism has a more complex connotation; it is both directly using certain objects to symbolize a certain emotion, and at the same time using the form itself as a carrier for the emotion; from the line, to the color, to the composition, all of them have a kind of interactive relationship with the euphonious and deep emotion, and the form is smeared with a layer of symbolic color. The combination of these factors makes Mo Xiong's paintings full of gravity and lyrical poetry, which wanders like an enigma between the inside and outside of the painting.

Looking at most of Mo Xiong's works, there are not many works that really have a clear symbolic meaning, but in these few works, the nostalgic meaning is very clear, and these meanings are expressed through specific images, such as the vase, the lady on the vase, and the urchin in ancient costume, etc. However, Mo Xiong's use of these images is not an allusion to the tradition, but rather an alternative to the symbols of personal memory. It cannot be ruled out that Mo Xiong's initial motivation for employing these images was to blend the natural landscape with the characteristics of Jiangnan with the humanistic symbols of Jiangnan culture, so as to give his landscape paintings a certain historical and cultural style. However, the setting of the subject matter and the unconsciousness of the creative process shifted the inner theme of the work, and the objective factors were gradually diluted in the process of form, and finally, both the scenery and the "artifacts" merged into the overall form, forming a completely subjective mood. The memories of collective experience here evolve into the unconscious manifestation of personal experience. On the surface, the maiden hidden in the broken lotus seems to be a symbol of the loss of her home, while the emotional language of the form suggests a never-returning childhood memory. We can imagine the painter's childhood life, the misty rain in the Jiangnan stone road, the small town suburbs of the pool in the remnants of the lotus, the bank of the willow, the wind came from the laughter of the urchins, the distance is the color of the water and the sky. ...... The migration of time accompanied by the process of the society, in the memory of the disappeared in the reality never exist, the modern city not only makes us far away from nature, but also makes us far away from the life that we once had. Modern cities not only take us away from nature, but also take us away from the life we once had. Therefore, the emotion conveyed by Mo Xiong's art has gone beyond personal experience, it is a symbol of the relationship between man and nature, especially today when this relationship is in crisis.

Mo Xiong's paintings are full of formal meanings, and even without those figurative hints, we can still feel the symbolic emotions in the paintings, that kind of inexpressible nostalgia. Mo Xiong's forms have a deep power, which is inseparable from his unique formal language. The language of Mo Xiong's paintings is expressed in three characteristics. One is composition. Purely in terms of type, his paintings are between still life and landscape in the mainstream, but in fact, he pushes the still life to landscape through the treatment of composition, and pulls the landscape to the localization. This shows that he is not sketching still life or landscape, for he has alienated himself from the real space, but uses flowers as a medium of imagination and intention, filling the whole picture with a dreamlike feeling. It is this dreamy tone that enables the potential theme of nostalgia to be hidden in the scenery, giving symbolic meaning to the scenery that does not conform to its meaning. It is also under the domination of this subconscious that his compositions exclude dramatic elements and are generally "full frame" compositions, which seem to be randomly arranged without prior thought. This approach is consistent with the dream effect, as he is not confronted with an objective scene, but captures the fleeting inspiration or hallucination that occurs at the bottom of his memory, and this unconventional composition preserves the ambiguity of memory to a certain extent. Similarly, Mo Xiong's colors and brushstrokes also reinforce this subjective feeling of the picture. His colors are intensely subjective, and the sense of realism is further alienated through heavy black violet or dark blue on top of a color relationship based on adjacent colors. Mo Xiong's colors are mild, but the relationship of colors is quite subjective, not dominated by natural blue-green tones or brownish-gray tones, but mostly by decorative yellowish-purple tones, which is certainly related to his training in the decorative arts, but accentuates a kind of unrealistic and dreamy effect in his paintings, suggesting that he has already succeeded in converting his familiar way of speaking into an intuitive expression, and merging it with his underlying self. In terms of brushwork, Mo Xiong is abstracting objective imagery to form a functionalized language that similarly expresses a dreamlike mood. For example, in the representation of the lotus flower, the broad brushstrokes are derived from the lotus leaves, while the twisting and meandering lines come from the stems interspersed in the lotus leaves, and this combination of flowing curves is like a blurred image in a dream world. It reminds us of the lines in the Norwegian painter Munch's paintings, the kind of vague and uncertain curved edges, as if in a nightmare of recurring images. The combination of curves is indeed intrinsically linked to dreams.

But Moxon's paintings are beautiful, and in this way he seeks to reproduce the memory of something beautiful, even though the memory is already hazy. Mo Xiong is using the language of beauty to create a realm of pure beauty, but this realm is tinged with a few hints of sentimentality, probably because his memories are based on associations with reality. What is lost in reality may be the very thing that remains in memory forever.