Understand the beauty of Chinese painting from the Beijing Fine Art Academy——"Hello, New Era" series of live activities: entering the Beijing Fine Art Academy

Published on : 07 November 2019

How to appreciate the beauty of the landscape in Chinese painting? How to understand the feeling and the concept in the figure paintings of Ming and Qing Dynasties? On 5th November, under the guidance of the Mobile Network Management Bureau of China Central Cyberspace Administration, GMW.CN and Scienjoy jointly organized a large series of live activities: "Hello, New Era - promoting cultural treasures, building the confidence of a great country", which was held in the Beijing Fine Art Academy and aimed to interpret the two major exhibitions "walking in search of seclusion" and "drawing from scratch to describe the misty shadow" for netizens, and to help them appreciate the beauty of traditional culture.

Beijing Fine Art Academy is the first and the largest professional painting academy established in China. At the founding ceremony of the Academy, Prime Minister Zhou Enlai defined "creation, research and teaching" as the three major tasks of the Academy. Over the past 60 years, more than 120 painters have gathered there, who ranged from the young to the old and showed the outstanding creative power.

The Art Museum of Beijing Fine Art Academy is a modern art museum displaying the works of Qi Baishi, with the direction of collecting and studying modern Beijing school paintings, and with the function of collection, research, display, exhibition, communication and leisure. According to Xue Liang, the director of the exhibition department, Qi Baishi has many origins with Beijing Fine Art Academy. When Beijing Chinese Fine Art Academy (now Beijing Fine Art Academy) was founded on 14th May 1957, Qi Baishi became the first honorary president, which was also the last social position held by him. After Qi Baishi passed away, all his works were denoted by his family to the state and were then collected by Beijing Fine Art Academy. Beijing Fine Art Academy is the organization which has the largest collection of Qi Baishi's works, with more than 2,000 paintings.

When entering the Art Museum, the poster of "walking in search of seclusion -- He Jinghan's Freehand Pavilion Art" comes into view. This exhibition is also the best interpretation of "inheritance and innovation" of Beijing Fine Art Academy. According to Lin Jiabin, the editor of the exhibition, Mr. He Jinghan is good at using traditional expression methods to describe daily life. The 60 works displayed here show the pavilion landscape and characters created by He Jinghan since the 1960s, and also indicate his creative transformation. This exhibition focuses on the "freehand pavilion" and presents the prosperous landscape described by He Jinghan in three parts: “Drunken in The Yulou”, "Understand The Essence" and "Get Close Regardless of The Long Distance". One netizens said that he likes this kind of live activity since it lets people not only feel the art power of painting, but also feel the pulse of the times. Many netizens also asked about the opening time and visiting journey of Beijing Fine Art Academy during the live activities and decided to visit this exhibition.

Another exhibition in the Art Museum is "drawing from scratch to describe the misty shadow -- the image and spirit of freehand figure painting in Ming and Qing Dynasties. The research on the figure painting in Ming and Qing Dynasties is based on the concept of style school, which is also a continuation of research on the Qi Baishi's figure painting. The exhibition collects masterpieces from eight museums, including the Palace Museum, Zhejiang Provincial Museum and Guangdong Provincial Museum etc., and attracts frequent praise from painting fans. During the live activity, the host and the exhibition editor Wu Jiaojiao also helped netizens to understand the charm and classical stories depicted in paintings.

Director Xue Liang said that with the improvement of technology, Beijing Fine Art Academy will try to hold some exhibitions related to Song and Yuan Dynasties. However, the longer the history is, the less the surviving works are, which makes it harder to hold the exhibition of Song and Yuan Dynasties. Netizens in the studio said that "cultural treasure protection is very important", "thanks to experts” efforts to preserve ancient paintings" and "look forward to more such live activities". It is believed that with more and more netizens' attention, the charm of Chinese painting can be demonstrated, and we can better enhance our cultural confidence.

 

This live activity is the last session of “Hello, New Era”. Under the guidance of the Mobile Network Management Bureau of China Central Cyberspace Administration, GMW.CN and Scienjoy jointly hold 20 live activities, which take netizens into Shaanxi, Fujian, Hubei, Shandong etc.; cover two major areas of culture and science and technology; show the gratifying achievements made in Chinese opera art and other intangible cultural Heritage; and let the majority of netizens feel the spiritual power of inheritance and innovation. According to statistics, more than one million audience participated in each live activity.

 

(This article is published by GMW.CN and edited by Zhang Zhang)