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Venus de Milo, 1955
pencil on paper
Zhu works at night
Qinghai Province
Old Mill, circa 1961
watercolor on paper
Tibetan Young Man, 1960
pencil on paper
Quyuan, the Patriot, 1984
oil on canvas
Land, 2001
Chinese ink on rice paper
Zigzag Road Makes a Painter
by Xu Ke
Zhu Naizheng, vice-president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, has a reputation as a versatile artist. He is good at oil painting, traditional Chinese painting and at calligraphy. However, few know that his life has taken a zigzag course.
Born in 1935 in Haiyan, Zhejiang Province, Zhu spent his childhood in Shanghai and finished middle school in Beijing, where in 1953 he entered the best art school in China, the Central Academy of Fine Arts, He had studied diligently and systematically in the academy’s newly-established Oil Painting Department for five years when this bright enthusiast began to wind along his artistic road.
The Central Academy of Fine Arts grew out of the National Arts School of Beijing, whose president was Xu Being (1895-1953), one of the originators of Chinese art teaching.
In the fifties the Central Academy of Fine Arts adopted all Soviet teaching methods, as happened in many other fields in China. These were characterized by strict training in realism and the ability to represent the subject vividly and emotionally. The artists creative zest was overborne by the subject matter, a fact which undeniably fettered some talented students’ artistic perceptions, however ell they may have grasped certain techniques.
But dogma had not prevented Zhu from displaying a fine sense of beauty in his work. His teachers liked what he did, and he kept surpassing himself. Sketches he did when a student are preserved as models by the academy today.
Yet the political climate of 1957 stamped out all hope for his future. He was denounced as a “Rightist,” and he was banished for 21 years, from 1959 to 1980, to remote and desolate Qinghai Province.
He was oily 23 when all this started. But instead of giving up hope, he endured and overcame all the miseries and hardships. Twenty years of sufferings purified his character, leaving him with a more subtle understanding of life and art.
For a real artist, 20 years of unusual experience and meditation is quite enough. During that time he painted many successful works, taking most of his subject matter from the northwest. His work, rarely didactic but brimming with vivacity and beauty, began to earn him fame all over the country.
When the 10 disastrous years were over and a fresh air was blowing over China, the Central Academy of Fine Art eventually called Zhu back to teach in its Oil Painting Department. That was in 1980, and now he enjoys fame in Chinese artistic circles for his experience, achievements and open-mindedness.
A distinctive oil painter, Zhu has that fine sense of color harmony and form which is Indispensable for an artist. He is adept at reproducing deep impressions from memory.
In 1963, he finished “The Golden Season” on veneer board: against a very low horizon two young Tibetan women are winnowing highland barley, making a vivid picture under the sky. With well-arranged figures, rich colors and smooth yet graceful strokes, it is undoubtedly a masterpiece. It vanished during the “cultural revolution” (1966.76), and it was not until the late l970s that it was recovered from the wall of a temporary earthquake shelter, already badly nail-damaged. It was well reviewed at a 1981 Hong Kong exhibition and later at the Salon de Printemps.
Many of Zhu’s works are about the Tibetans of the northwest, whom he remembers as simple and honest people who helped him brave all his humiliations and retain human dignity; the earnest entreaties of even white-haired old family elders encouraging him to drink have given alcohol new meaning in his life.
After returning to Beijing in 1980, Zhu started a new artistic life, and ideals began to crystallize. He is not content to represent objective beauty but wishes to break through the settled format forced on him by the education he received from the fifties on.
He turns to life, history and reality in search of inspiration through subjective image, imagination and his own mind, and this has produced many touching pictures of the Qinghai Plateau-In “Snow and Sun,” a delicate Tibetan girl, front-lit and hazy-featured, paces towards the riverside with a heavy’ barrel on her back and snow-covered mountains in the distance, a beautiful’ combination of humanity, nature and toil.
“Spring Breeze” is quite a different picture: here are the wide grasslands, the slender willow branches, singing birds and a Tibetan girl beveling in the spring breeze, a landscape common on the plateau reveals the whole nation’s yearning for spring and a new life after a long-drawn-out winter.
“Spirit of a Nation’ (1984) concerns the ancient Chinese romantic poet Qu Yuan is deeper meditation on life and history; Two thousand years ago, Qu drowned himself in the Miluo River in Hunan in a last bid to rid his country of tyranny and himself of slander,
Unlike other artists, who have painted the poet chanting his lines by the lake or venting his indignation, Zhu uses both realistic technique and free-hand brushwork to show the poet’s bitter, sorrowful resolution, Its rich colors contribute movingly to the tragic impact, which, I believe, only artists of Zhu’s generation who have experienced misery in a historic context could grasp.
Zhu has tried his hands at traditional Chinese ink and wash, which is so totally different from Western-style watercolor and prints that few — alas! — in the West appreciate it fully. The Chinese brush and ink of differing density achieve various line effects on the absorbent “xuan” paper. This delicate sense of vision — what we call “allure” — is admirably suited to capture flashes of imagination,
Instead of being bound by his concrete subjects, the painter is free to apply the brushstrokes as he sees fit. Like other great artists, Zhu likes it. His ink-and-brush paintings excite as much domestic and foreign interest as those by older artists.
Zhu is also a noteworthy calligrapher; collected not only in China but also in Japan and elsewhere, this typical abstract art of the East needs a comprehensive knowledge of literature and art, as well as years of practice to excel in, and here again Zhu has succeeded