I
Heidegger once said, "Language is the house of thought." By this he meant that language is the outer shell in relation to thought, and that this shell is analogous to a house. When the dwelling place changes, thought changes with it. Thus, language is untranslatable, in the sense that translating from one language to another is like trying to scoop something up with a strainer. Only a portion gets scooped up, while much more is likely to be left out. What has been scooped up often undergoes reconstruction because of the existence of a new "house" - the expressive capacity of the new language. This phenomenon is often referred to as "misreading." On the one hand, "misreading" represents our helplessness in the face of the impossibility of translation. On the other hand, it encourages us to leave errors uncorrected while making the best of them. It is precisely in this gap between impossibility and existence in and for itself that the creative capacity of intercultural exchange springs to life.
The Chinese translation of the word "modern" is perhaps the best example in this regard, where the English word has been rendered into Chinese as "mo deng" - a transliteration with two Chinese characters. The first character "mo" conveys a special sense of dynamic movement, while the second character "deng" has the meaning of leading upward. Once the term "mo deng" came into being, it transcended the meaning of "modern" and became rooted in the very foundation of Shanghai society, blending into the life of one or perhaps several eras. The notion of "mo deng" has evolved into a general mentality shared by the world citizens of this modern city. It has also evolved into a propensity for high achievement, dynamic movement and innovation - a quality unique to this city. Perhaps no other word beside "mo deng" can express more vividly and fully the Geist of Shanghai. Thus, in modern Chinese the word "mo deng" conveys the various facets of the city's spirit: its passion and imagination, its creativity and vitality, its open-mindedness and adaptability, its admiration for the fashionable and ability to set new trends, its acumen in calculation and courage that allows it to take risks. "Mo deng," a notion derived quite reasonably from a misreading, rides on modern life and its trends, monopolizes all things fashionable and shines in the limelight of the avant-garde. This type of misreading is not one that involves language alone. Rather, it involves life in society as a whole. Thus, "mo deng" has even become synonymous with that glorious era of the city's past, a linguistic monument of a history of creation.
In the "mo deng" era of Shanghai, the most modern event was the emergence of art education conceived in the modern sense. This emergence was not only rooted in the establishment of the first art academy in China, or the controversy about nude models, or the vividness and realism of such art forms as oil paintings, but also in the commune-like idealism developing within the still embryonic art schools, and a fascination with and a desperate misreading of the liberalism of Western art institutions. It attracted a significant following among the ambitious youth of the "mo deng" era. It brought about a period of intense unrest which was unique to the era, and powerfully shaped the synergy and creative vitality of this era.
Notable among the dynamic personalities of this modern era in Shanghai was a concentrated and conscientious man, Lin Fengmian, the founder of contemporary art education in China. Lin was born in 1900 and died in 1991. His artistic career spanned nearly a century. Among his achievements, two stand out most brilliantly: as an art educator, he established the first artistic institution with a clear academic philosophy offering undergraduate and graduate degrees - The National Academy of Art - and he led the institution during its fruitful first ten years. As an artist, he created a unique style which combined a touch of oriental poetry with an unemotional but intense sentiment. His works capture the deep conflict between the romantic temperament and life’s sense of tragedy, and have become a unique representation of the bitter journey of Chinese art in the 20th century. These two achievements were accomplished either in Shanghai or in nearby Hangzhou. The art academy he founded had numerous ties with Shanghai and was destined to take its place within the scope of modern Chinese art studies as a cultural entity. The art he created, with its poignant and beautiful colors, became the highlight of artistic modernity during the 1950s and 1960s in this "mo deng" city, and an important complement to the artistic spirit of Shanghai during that era. As the first artist to steal the fire of Western thought and culture, in realizing his achievements, Lin went through a long period of "misreading" and an even longer creative process of active misreading and hybridization.
II
During his lifelong career, Lin experienced two important periods of initiation. The first was before 1919, when he was immersed in traditional Chinese painting and influenced by the spirit of traditional culture. The second period was from 1920 to 1923, when he went from Marseille to the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, first in Dijon and then in Paris. There he received an education in Western art, culture and thought. According to currently available information, almost none of his works from these two periods have been preserved. We can only capture illusive shadows from stories and legends. Lin's true creative period began in 1923 when he completed his studies at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris and went on to Germany for further studies.
Gradually emerging from the darkness of the First World War, Germany was currently under the Weimar Republic, boasting of its democracy and freedom. The philosophy of the Weimar Republic seeped into every facet of German society crystallizing into an entire cultural outlook. It was a time where the sudden rise of the romantic spirit replaced the declining traditional pessimism. It was a time when Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter expressed the Zeitgeist through Expressionism. It was a time when the ideals of the Bauhaus School challenged all the corrupt traditional customs. An address by Walter Gropius at the first student exhibition of the Bauhaus School in July 1919 gives us a glimpse of the inner spiritual undercurrents of the era: "We are living in a horrible, cataclysmic period of history. We are living in a time when life and our whole inner world are undergoing a complete transformation... Those who have experienced war abroad have now returned as entirely different individuals. They have discovered that the world cannot go on as before…However, whereas material opportunities have shrunk presently, the possibility for thought has drastically expanded. Prior to the war, we had it upside down in trying to popularize the art through organized means…Now, we must adopt a new method. We will no longer develop large intellectual organizations, but form small, confidential and closed collaborative units, small societies, guilds and small groups. These groups will always constitute...the secret core for certain beliefs. Then, one day, from these individual groups will emerge an idea that is universal, grand, creative, intellectual and religious. Eventually, this idea will seek to clearly express itself, and will have to call for an art work that embodies greatness and totality."1 It was precisely within this historical context that Lin came to Germany. A year later, he went back to Paris and organized the Hopes Society with such artists as Lin Winching and Wu Dayu. "In a brief talk given at the Hopes Society, [he] issued a call to defend the high ideals and autonomy of art, to uphold the belief in creating vibrant art works for the Chinese and world people, and to promote artistic movements."2 In 1924, he organized a Chinese fine art exhibition at the Parlays due Rhino in Strasbourg. We do not know for certain whether Lin was aware of or influenced by Gropes' ideas while he was in Berlin. Through the cultural and spiritual totality of Berlin, however, Lin and other young students studying overseas were definitely influenced by the revolutionary ideas of the day and the Expressionist attitudes - in particular, the idea of social reform and the communal spirit of the Bauhaus School in the early years of the Weimar Republic, all of which were prevalent in Europe, especially in Germany, at this time. In the summer of 1928, when the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou was first established, Lin himself founded the Art Movement Society and selected a venue in Shanghai in which to hold its first public exhibition. According to Lin's plan, the society would be the center in leading the social trend of bringing to fruition the ideals of "substituting art education for religion" and "promoting the emerging art of the Orient."
We can also compare Gropius' Bauhaus Manifesto with Lin's "Letter to China's Artistic Community," which he wrote in 1927 while serving as chair of the art education committee in the Department of Higher Learning. In comparing the two, we feel certain similarities running through them: a shared sensibility and tone, a call for duty and responsibility, an outcry of profound urgency and crisis, all of which were uniquely characteristic of the young master standing at the cutting-edge of an era against the entrenched powers of their time. Although the issues each had to face were somewhat different (misreading being active and necessary), their profound sense of urgency and crisis as well as their sense of duty were richly reflective of the messianic flavor unique to Expressionism and the view of society advocated by the Bauhaus School.
During his year-long stay in Germany, Lin was also profoundly influenced by the vitality of German culture, which served to bring out his artistic temperament and shape his life of suffering. Lin spent his childhood in a picturesque rural community in southern China. A descendant of a stonemason, Lin had a naturally romantic temperament and an agile mind. From early childhood, he experienced the severe religious oppression of the old social order. His romantic sensibility and his precocious awareness of suffering contributed to a rather melancholic disposition. It is precisely this disposition that came into contact with the pervasive pessimism and messianic ethos of post-war Germany and the contemplative, melancholic character of the German tradition. Both the German ethos and character shaped Lin profoundly. His classic painting, "Groping," created while he was studying abroad, presents the most striking example of this influence. "Groping," a 2 x 4.5-meter piece, was also the painting that Yang Zheng, a journalist from the Chinese magazine Art Review, had the opportunity to preview during an interview with Lin before an art exhibition. Following the interview, Yang wrote a feature article on this work and sent it back to China. "The painting featured many great thinkers of the past and the present," he said. "It is not only the appearance of each that is vividly portrayed. The spirit, character and personality of each were also subtly captured with the strokes of the brush... This large painting only took one day to complete; its continuity and the speed in which it was painted were amazing. It is indeed comparable to Rubens' works."3 From this description, we may gather two things: firstly, the theme of this painting is expressed through the reflective poses of various great thinkers, imbued with a deeply melancholic, romantic sentiment. Secondly, the fact that it took Lin only one day to complete such a large painting indicates that it must have been a highly expressive work. Today, even from a blurry photocopy, one can still feel the somber and solemn mood of this painting. The rich composition in the foreground fully conveys the abruptness and boldness of Expressionism.
It is part of Lin's nature to be inquisitive - to be "groping." Germany, with its intellectual climate of inquisition, had a profound influence upon Lin. However, what truly transformed him for the rest of his life - and traumatized him to the core of his being - was his first almost surreal romantic relationship and the sudden death of his wife, von Roda, and their infant child. The tragedies took place almost simultaneously, buffeting him like a sudden blast of wind. Radically, it drew forth his romantic and melancholic sensibilities. This explains the strong sense of grief and suffering underlying Lin's works, a quality rarely seen in other Chinese artists, but typical of the art of the romantics and expressionists. After his return to China, despite his important position at the art academy, the motif of his creative works, or perhaps the reality as he perceived it, was still the suffering of humanity. In the 1929 Art Movement Society Exhibition, Lin exhibited his oil painting "Suffering," which expresses profound depression upon a horizontal canvas. The dark gray background reinforces the cries of a struggling crowd, whose heart-wrenching cries can almost be heard. It is thought by some that the work was painted when Lin learned that his good friend, Xiong Junrui, had been gunned down in Guangzhou. It was Xiong who had initially invited Lin to study in Germany. In his anguish, Lin must have brought to this painting a remembrance of the dream of his life; he must have poured into it the pain he experienced at the death of von Roda and the disappearance of his hope.
III
Like many young students studying abroad, Lin was influenced by Kant and Schopenhauer during his student days in Europe. Some of the artists who studied in the Hangzhou Academy of Art in the 1930s still remember Lin's fondness for quoting Kant and Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer called himself "a despiser of humanity." His contempt for humanity stemmed from his pessimism, which was particularly deep and pervasive, and was reflected within his Angst that human existence was unsalvageable. To a man who had suffered much, the irony of life as both comic and tragic and the feeling of having been fooled by hope and death were experiences with which Lin was well acquainted. For all that, Lin did not become cynical and bitter. Instead, he transformed his melancholy into a direct and bold examination of human suffering and evil. In 1929, he completed the painting "Humanity." In his introduction to the painting, Lin Wenzheng wrote: "The 'Humanity' is not a depiction of suffering caused by the destructiveness of nature. It is a candid portrayal of the evil of mutual destruction done by men." In 1925, while he was still in Paris, Lin painted "Life Desire," which was named after Schopenhauer's famous words: "All have a desire for life." The painting vividly expresses Schopenhauer's idea of "desire and will for life." In this painting, Lin employed the techniques of traditional Chinese painting as the base and added to it the use of color found in Western painting. Lin was a lifelong advocate for the integration of Chinese and Western art; the painting "Life Desire" was the first fruit of this labor. Lin's "Suffering" and "Humanity" were both exhibited in Shanghai. In the romantic and sentimental city of Shanghai, the power of "Suffering" definitely had a perceivable impact.
Suffering had a way of following Lin. After he resigned from his position at the National Academy of Art, he led the solitary life of a "wanderer." After several decades of isolated existence, his natural melancholy merged gradually with his being, becoming a sort of sorrow combined with extreme indifference. He stopped painting large works directly expressive of pain and suffering. No matter where he was, whether leading the arduous life of a wanderer in a remote village by the bank of the River Jialingjiang, or on the Nanchang Road in Shanghai during those long, lonely nights, Lin always preserved, to the depths of his very being, the “desire and will to live.” He always managed to transform his experiences with his palette into singular portrayals of the world. Lin had distanced himself from "suffering," so that he was able to experience the serenity of self-transcendence in the midst of hardship and thus arrive at a quiet state of pure thought. Lin did not merely learn of suffering firsthand, but experienced suffering through his unique way of painting, such that he could achieve a certain form of self-realization. Throughout his long, solitary wandering, Lin was quietly cultivating "a clear and eternal vision of the world." One might say that some of Schopenhauer's philosophy was incorporated into Lin's artistic practice. This statement does not address whether or not Lin was a Schopenhauer scholar, but rather is concerned with the way that type of "misreading" in life had opened up different paths of pursuits and produced different results as shaped by one's own life. Aspects of the Zeitgeist reflected in Schopenhauer's ideas were always present in Lin's life. This Zeitgeist manifested itself in the exceptionally determined "desire and will for life" of this descendent of a stonemason, who turned it into a world of moving works of fine art.
Let us now return to the theme of this article, which is how a misreading of culture edifies a whole generation and a whole era. Indeed, inherent to this type of misreading are certain profound opportunities — some that can even affect the life of misreaders.
This article is dedicated to Mr. Lin Fengmian in celebration of his 103rd birthday.
Xu Jiang
Jade Emperor Hotel
1. Whitford, Frank (translation). Bauhaus. Joint Publishing Company, p. 221.
2. Zheng, Chao. Modern Chinese Fine Artists - Lin Fengmian: A Master of his Time. Shaanxi Fine Arts Publishing House, pp. 11-12.
3. Idid.