Almighty painter

Chapter 696: Letter from Mr. Cao

Liu Ziming is fine.

Their ancestors lived in Guangdong and Guangxi.

Not long after Gu Weijing's ancestors followed the diplomatic mission, crossing the winding mountain roads of Yunnan and Yunnan, holding the three wooden boxes they had exchanged for the large courtyard house in Baishun Hutong in the capital, which always made his chest ache and he could hardly breathe, and with imaginations of peach blossom miasma under the trees and pig-dragons in the water.

Liu Ziming's ancestors also set sail and went to the South Seas, and crashed into the blue waves of the Strait of Malacca.

someone said.

No matter where the Dongxia people go or where they go throughout their lives, the shadow of their homeland is always in their character.

The north has four distinct seasons.

There are hundreds of flowers in spring, moon in autumn, cool breeze in summer and snow in winter. Therefore, northern men are bold and unrestrained, and their likes and dislikes are also clear.

In the south, there is the soft Wu dialect, green trees and banks, and flowing water under small bridges.

Therefore, the South is rich in legendary stories about talented men and beautiful women, which are delicate and graceful, and make people cry every time they read them.

The Dongxia people traveled all over the country, to the west, to Guandong, and to Southeast Asia throughout their lives. No matter where they went, they were like the leaves of a dandelion blown away by the wind, carrying the scent of the soil, clouds, and raindrops of their hometown.

The accent and folk customs of my hometown can’t be gotten rid of.

There are endless local accents to speak, endless couplets to post, and endless firecrackers to set off.

It was as if they were carrying a part of their hometown with them.

The history of the family's life in Guangdong and Guangxi is a memory from a long time ago. Liu Ziming was born in Malaysia when he was a child.

The richest family, the best teachers, and the most favorable educational conditions.

He originally thought that this kind of rural temperament and sentiment would no longer be reflected in his generation.

After all, it's been too long.

After all, his life is too "international".

Of course he can speak Chinese, Malaysia has a complete Chinese education system.

He can pronounce both Mandarin and Cantonese, but he still pronounces Cantonese like the native Cantonese, with a Xiguan-style nasal tone, and pronounces "ding" as "dang".

But he can also speak English like a Londoner, communicate fluently with foreign artists in Spanish, and order baked snails in a restaurant in standard French accent.

He felt that his "internationality" had completely replaced his "locality".

He is from Guangdong.

He is Malaysian.

But if he wants, he can also be a Londoner, a Barcelonan, a Lyonnais, a New Yorker, or even a Buenos Aires.

It was like when he was a kid, standing at the harbor and watching the ocean-going ships owned and leased by his family’s trading company coming and going.

Some of these ships fly the flag of Panama, some fly the flag of the Bahamas, some fly the flag of Britain, some fly the flag of Liberia, the Marshall Islands, or the flag of Dongxia Xiangjiang.

The flag itself has lost its meaning.

A ship in the Bahamas may not return to the Bahamas for a long time until it is scrapped and dismantled. For the sailors, the flag flying on the ship no longer represents their hometown.

It is just a collection of some vague notions of maritime law, registration fees, trade rates and jurisdiction.

Hometown is nothing more than a few lines of text on a survey column and a passport that can be changed at any time.

It was not until that year that I went to eastern Guangdong with my elders for the first time during the Spring Festival.

A "young master" like him sits in a nanny car driven by a driver, traveling through the city's increasingly prosperous and busy streets as the year draws to a close.

I heard a mother chasing her child on the street corner, waving her hands and shouting, "Son, run slower."

that moment.

Young Liu Ziming suddenly felt like he was hit by something.

It's like the impossible challenge in ancient Greek mythology - let the arrow pass through twelve small rings on the axe stuck in the ground, and finally hit a golden apple placed on the target.

Liu Ziming is the golden apple on the target.

And that "Ah Zi" was the arrow in the archer's hand that pierced through the ring, as fast as lightning.

He thought this was impossible.

But that arrow still passed through generation after generation, layer after layer of fog, and layers of wind and waves between the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean.

Finally, Liu Ziming was nailed to the seat of the luxury Lexus car by an arrow.

Hot, bright red blood gushed out from the chest.

Liu Ziming remembered every moment that happened in the next ten seconds as clearly as if it happened yesterday.

He rolled down his window and leaned over to look, ignoring the driver's question as to what was wrong.

Just kept watching.

Watching the mother in the blue dress turn around from a stall and take small steps to chase the child in front of her who was holding a can of orange pineapple beer. They slowly went away and disappeared in the crowd on the corner of the street.

……

This is different from Tang Ning, who won the gold medal at the Shanghai Biennale at the age of 20 with a painting called "Hundred Flowers" that depicts "one tree with hundreds of flowers, and hundreds of meanings of the flowers."

Throughout his life, Liu Ziming hated painting subjects such as chrysanthemums, peonies, roses, and peonies.

Or.

He hated the concept of "imagery". He hated using chrysanthemum to represent a gentleman, rose to represent love, and peony to represent grace and wealth...

I hate all the conventional rules and regulations in the art field.

Liu Ziming thinks.

Throughout the ages, there have been too many paintings, sculptures, literature, or poetry, and countless creators have done the same thing.

again and again.

A hundred times and a hundred times.

Ten thousand times and ten thousand times.

This endless and limitless repetition of using symbolic objects to express some kind of sublime concept on paper ultimately results in not making the "symbol" sublime, but symbolizing and abstracting the "sublime".

Spring rain, autumn water, lotus.

These are all good and beautiful things, especially when they first appear on paper and are given different meanings by artists.

That must have been a landmark moment in the history of art.

But when all the works are filled with such images, it is like stuffing hundreds of bouquets of flowers into a thin-necked vase with a mouth the size of a coin.

finally.

There will be no real concept left in the entire work.

There are only abstract impressions pressing and colliding with each other.

finally.

Liu Ziming believes that they are like painting on water, born from illusory concepts and disappearing into the illusion.

Poetry is the most refined text in the world.

It is the extraction of beauty and emotions.

However, if we extract the whole article, it is composed of abstract words such as love, hate, pain, regret, joy, kindness, evil...

Then there will be no beauty at all.

The heart-wrenching cries and ecstasy became as vulgar and boring as the slogans shouted out from the loudspeakers of the betel nut stalls: "No spitting, no spitting"

The same is true for painting.

In Liu Ziming's eyes, there are many avant-garde art works nowadays.

When the painters created their works, they were very ambitious and believed that their paintings would contain the entire world, and that they had picked the moon and put it into their works.

result.

To outsiders, they were just looking at a teacup, trying to scoop up the phantom of moonlight with a spoon.

They were ecstatic that they had caught the moon with a spoon.

There was a crash.

After taking it out.

But there was nothing left, only a few turbid tea leaves left after being chewed.

He hated being a boring person like the withered tea leaves, and he also hated drawing boring paintings like the withered tea leaves.

Like.

He also didn't like Gu Weijing's painting "Wisteria Flowers" very much.

Nice painting.

not bad.

Perhaps such a painter can ultimately achieve great success.

But in the end, they were just boring works... just as uninteresting and boring as my junior sister Tang Ning's.

Even "harmless".

In a sense, harmlessness can be worse than being boring, like those British talk show hosts on TV.

The easiest way to tell whether a stand-up comedian performing on stage is British or American is that if he likes to play hell jokes, satirize Trump, and make child pornography jokes on stage, then he is probably American.

If he starts his talk on stage by talking about the weather, and talks about harmless, boring and uninteresting things all day, you will forget about him three minutes after the show ends.

Then he is most likely British.

Liu Ziming just couldn't understand what that feeling of being struck by lightning was like when he was young.

Why does he still remember the scene of that day after so many years?

Why close your eyes.

As long as he wants.

Then, the face of the mother in a blue dress, chasing her little son holding a soda in the crowd, will appear in front of him.

He never knew who the other person was in his entire life.

Except for that brief glimpse of more than ten seconds in the vast crowd, he never saw the other person again.

But in my memory, that face is so clear.

Liu Ziming seemed to be looking back through a telephoto lens with a very, very, very long focal length, long enough to penetrate more than twenty years.

In that shot.

The bustling crowd was blurred and smeared into blurry, mottled spots of light. The only clear thing was the face of the running mother, the not-so-good lipstick between her lips, the slight wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and the red word "Fu" hanging upside down on the vendor's cart behind her, swaying in the wind.

Time flies, things and people are no longer the same.

There is only that face and that upside-down Chinese character “Fu”.

In Liu Ziming's life over the years, it is still as clear as before.

Liu Ziming even had reason to believe that it was impossible for him to notice so many clear details when he took a quick glance at the passing car across the crowd.

This should be a face that was painted again by his brain under the combined effect of memory, recollection, and imagination, using that fleeting shadow as a template and after reconciling fantasy and reality.

It's like artificial intelligence filling in information in a blurry old photo, making it clear and real. But Liu Ziming didn't understand.

Why did his heart and his subconscious mind do this?

Why would we repair it into a face that is so ordinary and plain?
of course.

This can be simply explained as a local sentiment.

Using the image of a running mother chasing her child to symbolize a certain metaphor of hometown, isn't this the most symbolic, stereotyped and common thing in the world?

Isn’t this the most “vulgar” image that Liu Ziming hates the most?

It has been used time and again by countless people.

It was like an old, rusty arrow that had been shot a million times and left for a million years, almost as long as the history of mankind, and could break at any time.

It shouldn't be able to penetrate even a piece of rice paper that's thin enough to be translucent.

But he passed through the crowd on the long street and shot him accurately.

But it ran through Liu Ziming's life for more than forty years, piercing him again and again, and nailing him to the back seat of the Lexus car he drove in his youth.

Like light and lightning.

Liu Ziming once asked his teacher for help with this question.

"There are some questions in the world that teachers can answer, and there are some questions that teachers cannot answer—"

Cao Xuan said softly after hearing Liu Ziming's story.

Just when Liu Ziming was shaking his head in disappointment, thinking that he would return empty-handed.

He saw the old man narrow his eyes and smile cunningly.

"Of course, as far as art is concerned, I don't think there are many questions of yours that I can't answer. At least, this question is not one of them."

Cao Xuan is such a man who looks extremely majestic and stern, and makes people intimidated. But if one is lucky enough to really get close to him, they will find that he is an old gentleman with a childlike sense of humor.

"but."

"I should tell you this. There are some questions in the world that teachers can answer, and some questions that teachers cannot answer. Some questions should be answered by teachers, and some questions should be understood by students themselves."

"Exactly. This kind of identity-related question is exactly the latter. I can answer you, but you should answer yourself."

"Instead of me being condescending and telling you who you are, why don't you tell yourself who you are."

A master is a master.

Just a few words made Master Liu's mood so tense that it felt like fifteen buckets of water were beating up and down.

"stop."

Cao Xuan did not let go of Liu Ziming, whose head was about to boil, and called him from behind.

"If I let you go like this, what if you, Ziming, secretly feel that the teacher doesn't have an answer in his heart and is just pretending to be arrogant in front of you? What should I do?"

The old man has a very cute smile.

He took out letter paper and a pen and asked Liu Ziming to wait outside the study.

A few minutes later, Cao Xuan came out of the study holding an envelope, acting very mysterious.

Liu Ziming reached out to take it.

But Mr. Cao did not let go, but just looked into Liu Ziming's eyes.

"My answer is here, but I hope that you will open this envelope after you have the answer in your heart. What hometown is in the eyes of outsiders and what hometown is in your eyes are mutually confirmed. Maybe——"

"That will give you a clearer answer."

"Who am I? This is one of the most complex questions in philosophy. It may take three years, five years, or ten years... I will slowly think about the answer and slowly find the answer."

Cao Xuan loosened his hand and handed the envelope to Liu Ziming.

"Some people can't really figure this out in their entire lives. I'm not in a hurry, and I hope you, Ziming, won't be in a hurry either."

"I don't want me to give you any extra guidance. You have to feel it yourself. As for the rest - about the face you saw when you were young, about your unforgettable deep memory of her, I recommend you to look at the works of French photographer Cartier-Bresson. Perhaps... it will help you figure out this problem."

This envelope seems to contain some answers about the meaning of "existence" and life.

Putting "meaning" into the "envelope" is another overly classic and overly abstract behavior of symbolizing concepts, which Liu Ziming does not like, just like the face that can be seen when closing the eyes.

Also like that woman's face.

This envelope also gave Liu Ziming a sense of security that he couldn't explain.

these years.

No matter where Liu Ziming went, he always carried the envelope containing the "answers" handed to him by the teacher in his pocket.

It’s like those ocean-going ships, no matter where they drift, they always carry an anchor that can be nailed into the sea.

But every time Liu Ziming felt that he was ready and wanted to open the envelope.

He will feel hesitant again.

Inserting this envelope is the process of lowering the anchor into the water.

Liu Ziming was afraid that the answer in his mind was different from the answer given by Mr. Cao, and they were not firmly connected.

It's like the long anchor chain on the ship has been lowered to the end, but it has not sunk into the sand or hooked on the reef.

Beneath the rolling water.

There is only endless emptiness.

Mr. Cao said that it might take three years, five years, or even ten years to figure out this problem.

It has been ten years since Liu Ziming received this envelope.

He still didn't have the courage to actually open it.

Maybe... there are some questions that the teacher did not teach you in class, and you really need a lifetime to truly figure them out.

who am I?
——A philosophical question that comes from deep in the blood.

Among the disciples Cao Xuan originally accepted, only Liu Ziming was an overseas Chinese.

From the geographical origin, from the identity.

Liu Ziming and Gu Weijing are very similar.

They are all overseas Chinese whose families do business in Southeast Asia.

Although the difference in scale between the two businesses is "a bit" big, the money the old shipping tycoon earns in one day is enough for Mr. Gu to work hard on the banks of the Yangon River for a lifetime.

After all, their family backgrounds are similar, so Liu Ziming should have a natural sense of closeness to Gu Weijing.

But he wasn't very approachable.

on the one hand.

With a family background like Liu Ziming's, it would be very difficult for him to get close to you unless you conquer him and gain his recognition like your teacher Cao Xuan did.

at this point.

Liu Ziming is a bit like Miss Elena.

They are more accustomed to subordinates, men, or even “servants” rather than friends.

The Irina family has tens of thousands of employees around the world serving Miss Anna alone. She not only owns the "Oil Painting" magazine, but also real estate, ranches, and wineries.

But probably no one here would think that Anna is an easy person to get along with.

Even Secretary Elliot.

Deep down in her heart, she probably would not or "dared not" really consider herself as Anna's friend.

The wind blew away Miss Elena's hat and you picked it up for her.

She will nod to you and whisper thank you to you, but no one will think that you are friends from now on.

She would say hello to every editor and intern at the magazine, but no one felt qualified to invite Anna to their birthday.

She sat there, always the unattainable count.

Who can be friends with the stars in the sky? Who can invite the stars in the sky to the bar and have a beer together?

Liu Ziming's appearance is far from being as unattainable as Anna's. His arrogance is arrogance in another sense.

Among Mr. Cao’s disciples.

Tang Ning became famous at a young age and enjoyed great glory. Her pride was written all over her face.

Liu Ziming was born into a wealthy family and had everything he wanted, but his arrogance was deep in his bones.

Tang Ning seemed to often criticize Lao Yang and scold him by pointing at his nose, but she could also accurately call out his name and tell him his ideals when Lao Yang thought she definitely didn't care about him. She wanted to take Lao Yang to London to open a gallery and make money.

Liu Ziming would joke with Lao Yang at the airport, hug him, want to introduce designers to him, and give him a thumbs up.

The middle-aged man seemed to be completely humble and treated Lao Yang like an ordinary good friend.

But both of them should be clear.

The relationship between Lao Yang and "Brother Liu", whom he calls "each other's brother", is actually more distant than that between Lao Yang and Tang Ning, whom he respectfully calls "Miss Tang" or "Teacher Tang" every time they meet.

Liu Ziming had a gentle smile on his face.

But maybe in her heart she has never even looked at Lao Yang straight in the eye.

Tangning would be upset if she found Lao Yang smiling greasyly and doing Tai Chi with her. She would glare at Lao Yang and say, "Yang Dekang, you are not being honest."

Liu Ziming found that Lao Yang wanted to change the topic he brought up, but Liu Ziming didn't care.

Let me be mad at you.

Are you worthy?
When Liu Ziming first met Miss Elena, he immediately invited her to his cocktail party.

Lao Yang is right next to him, but he may never receive the same invitation as Liu Ziming.

If Old Yang could persuade Mr. Cao on his behalf and really try his best to please him, Mr. Liu would be happy and the yacht and the villa that Old Yang had always dreamed of might be given to him.

But he would definitely not open a gallery with Lao Yang or become a co-partner.

Gu Weijing is uninteresting, boring, and harmless.

Liu Ziming was too lazy to even look at such a person.

But Cao Xuan likes it.

So he had to watch it.

If Mr. Cao really wanted to accept him as his last disciple, then whether Liu Ziming liked it or not, he would have to admit that the other party was qualified to be in his circle.

You are Cao Xuan's disciple.

Even if you can only draw flowers and plants and do these boring creations all your life, I, Liu Ziming, still want you to sit with me, even if it's just as a follower.

Don't worry, I will give you a good future.

This is not respect for Gu Weijing, this is respect for his teacher.

"The premise is... that you can worship this master."

Liu Ziming had a thought in his mind.

Another reason why he couldn't get close to Gu Weijing was that he had evidence that the article published in Asian Art -

something wrong.

(End of this chapter)