The Versatile Master Artist

Different cultural environments.

Different artists.

Whether they are Western artists or those influenced by the Eastern cultural sphere, they all appear to paint, but each person is different, and the state of mind they pursue can be quite different.

Of course, Western artists also include figures like Van Gogh and Gauguin who burn their lives, fiercely battling against the world.

Similar to John Lennon, there are also those whose artistic concepts transcend social reality, pursuing more compassionate, peaceful, and universal ideas of love and peace, which are quite mainstream.

Anger and sadness—in the hearts of some artists, might be considered negative emotions.

Many Chinese paintings appear leisurely with landscapes, the artistic conception is remote, a simple scene of serenity with mountains and fields.

However, Gu Weijing also feels that besides those ink paintings that seem “peaceful in artistic conception,” the mindset the artist pursues while painting, whether in life or in art, is very intense and powerful.

Love and peace… these should certainly be the highest ideals and pursuits of artists throughout the ages, one of the most beautiful things in the world.

It represents the ultimate ideal of happiness.

The problem is.

What is true, heartfelt love and peace?

Elder Cao says, an artist should sustain a certain spirit in their heart.

It is the righteous spirit that desires to draw the sword to help when seeing injustice in the world.

It is the anger upon seeing the country broken, and people displaced.

It is the joy upon achieving fame, and in the wedding candlelight, but it can also be the desolation seen in withered vines, old trees, and lean horses in the west wind…

The anger burning in the chest is precisely one of the spirits that need to be sustained.

Gu Weijing is angry seeing Brother Hao commit many evils yet live gloriously. Seeing European tourists with rented local beauties, sitting in palanquins being carried down the Yangon River embankment. In their country, they are lazy nobodies, dirty old men, relying only on exchange rate differences and social welfare to come here to lord over others, which makes him very angry.

Even being extorted by local patrol police this morning made him very angry.

At his core, Gu Weijing is an angry person, not a peaceful and tranquil person.

The unrest biting inside him, the surging discontent, is precisely what Gu Weijing truly wants to express.

This restless flame is the source of his empathy with the world.

His grandfather, Gu Tongxiang’s idol was a painter named Zheng Sixiao.

A representative of the remnant people painting school after the fall of the Southern Song. In ancient times, “Xiao” in his name was a homophonous variant of Zhao in the Zhao Song dynasty.

This guy’s life practically epitomizes what the opposite of “serenity and peace” is.

Old Zheng was the most famous floral painter in Dongxia’s history, especially good at painting plum blossoms.

This guy often compared himself to rootless ink plums under his brush, drifting and lost after their country was broken.

After Suzhou’s fall, he cried and laughed every day, madly, reportedly often weeping blood while painting, and the plum blossoms under his brush were as deep as dried bloodstains.

Even in life, he had many eccentricities, always sitting facing south to avoid forgetting his homeland. Even as he was dying of illness, he insisted on instructing them to set up a plaque inscribed with the words “Southern Song’s Unfaithful and Unfilial Zheng Sixiao” before passing away.

When young.

Gu Weijing always envisioned an old madman like Mi Heng from the old version of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms TV series whenever his grandfather told this story about Old Zheng.

His robe clinging to his skinny frame, every time he arrived somewhere, he would first tilt his head back with hands behind him, circling like a human compass to determine where the south was, then patting his buttocks to sit down, painting while coughing blood.

In Gu Weijing’s heart, immersed in cartoons at that time.

The plum blossoms under Zheng Sixiao’s brush were never drawn with a brush but had a cartoon-like vitality, akin to Bodhisattva Guanyin flicking talismanic water from the Jade Purification Bottle onto vibrant willow branches in the world.

The painter’s blood sprayed onto the paper, from which dots of ink plum blossoms grew.

At that time, Gu Weijing didn’t understand that his grandfather’s story was likely the distillation of “integrity and spirit” that generations of Dongxia literati had sought.

But he found the Old Zheng in the story very cool, very stylish, or rather…

Very artistic.

The bloody coughs and the ink plum blossoms emerging on the white paper were Gu Weijing’s first professional impression of the artist’s vocation in his life.

Even today.

Gu Weijing still feels that this crying Zheng Sixiao is more stylish, more performance art than the promiscuous Picasso or the collecting maniac Andy Warhol, those drawing masters and the “artist’s peculiarities” in their lives celebrated by countless media.

Completely artistic, how about it!

Though Old Zheng never achieved a moment of peace in his life, far from it.

His state of mind was almost always as chaotic and fragmented as if eighteen bronze gongs were being wildly struck simultaneously.

In the story told by his grandfather, the plum blossom master despised this world so much, and loved it just as deeply.

But in Gu Weijing’s heart, he feels such traditional Dongxia painters are more vivid, intimate, and real than the spiritual cultivation masters sitting serenely on the lotus platform.

It’s not that Gu Weijing is brave enough to want to become Zheng Sixiao.

This kind of struggling conflicted life is unavoidably a bit too performative art.