【Art Letters】
Author: Kang Ning (engraver, professor of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts)
For more than 40 years in the arts, my main creative work has never left print, more precisely, I have never left woodcut. I don’t value my identity as an engraver, engraving is just a choice of creative means, and it’s also a personal choice, just like a soldier chooses a certain weapon when he goes to the battlefield. For me, what I want is art. What is art? How to create art? Only practice is the path to acquiring true knowledge and printmaking has become the entry point for me to explore the art.
New Pine (print) Corning
In 1984 I created the black and white woodcut work “New Pine,” which was inspired by the small pine forest on the side of the roadside hill that swayed in the wind in the sun on the bus as I was driving home. creative desire. In terms of formal language, I try to break away from the traditional black and white layout with strong contrast and the realistic method of spatial perspective. In the picture, the dots and lines organized by knife marks make up a flat, seemingly random and intriguing scene, presenting a bright, lively and rich, full tonal level. “Xin Song” weakens the realistic depiction of realistic scenes and focuses on presenting the inner tension of formal language.
Art comes from life. The so-called black and white woodcut means that the creator must transform the colorful real world into a black and white image, and then transform it into the organization of knife techniques. Black and white are originally opposite to each other. If we combine the light and dark, depth and light in reality one by one in the picture, it will only make artistic creation stagnant and difficult. Therefore, I started from the elaboration of the contour lines of the objects and the spatial relationship of the image, trying to break the limits of the intrinsic colors and light sources, and grasping the scale of the translation of reality and choosing the artistic language in my hands, reinforcing the artist’s subjective elaboration and the realization of black and white Free conversion with white. For example, my series of “Bao Mi Yang Hua” is a nostalgia for the countryside, and it is also an experiment in artistic language, showing the tension of life. From this, I became more deeply aware that the organization of knife techniques is no longer aimed at one-way simulation of objective objects, but at forming a symbolic language full of personal characteristics.
Large Birds and Flowers (original woodcut part) Kang Ning
I advocate freehand woodcut and pursue the presentation of freehand spirit in woodcut creation. In the process of creation, improvisation, accidental, accidental or “false crossing of the sea” of mistakes can become the bright spot of the work. Art doesn’t need to be restored step by step, art pursues the “unforeseen” which is reasonable.
A curved pear board has been in the studio for a long time, but I haven’t figured out how to use it. Until one day, its shape suddenly triggered a certain nerve in me, which made my eyes sparkle: a small boat! So I engraved on the “boat” a group of people of various colors, each happy and helping each other. This is the origin of “Canoe Boat”. Actively seeking the maximum correspondence between the material’s own formal language and its expressive content, and finding a tacit understanding between the two, often makes people excited and full of motivation for creation.
After 2000, I created a series of works entitled “A horse and a horse in the sky”, which were presented directly in the original form of the logs. The medium is an important factor that contemporary artists pay attention to, and the medium of traditional printmaking is overshadowed by the indirectness of printmaking. Therefore, I pay attention to the existence of “wood” as a woodcut medium and strive to place it in linguistic expression and become part of the language of print. By integrating the beauty of the natural shape, holes, knots, bark and other materials of wood with the beauty of knife skills, it presents its own creative thinking, aesthetic concepts and spiritual world. Viewers can get a glimpse into the process creative and enter the creation .the heart of the reader.
Artists pursue maximum freedom of expression in creation, and this limitation depends on the creator’s knowledge and understanding of the laws of art itself. Created in 2022, “A Place of Freedom” is my latest and greatest work to date, also presented in original form. The artwork is 18 original wooden boards, depicting the prosperous scene of various trees and flowers growing in the dense forest, full of cheerful and upward vitality. In the process of etching, shoveling, cutting, peeling, collecting, digging, etc., I repeatedly asked myself: is it worth creating such a picture in such a primitive way and in such a clumsy technique? How is this work different from a mechanical reproduction or computer-generated image? Even so, I still believe that emotions, concepts and thoughts in creation can be gathered and transformed into the notch of a knife and shovel, and the pleasure of freely swinging and wielding the knife in creation is irreplaceable. A knife and a sign are transformed into a personalized symbolic language, just like jumping notes to form paragraphs and chapters, and finally build a visual “symphony”.
Tree of Life II (engraving) Corning
What the art ultimately presents is not only the work itself, but also the people behind the work, the creativity and spirit of the people. Artists should strive to pursue a greater space for individual expression in their creations and act as they please.
There are two words from the ancients that are my motto in creation: Confucius said, “Follow your heart and don’t go beyond the rules.”
“Guangming Daily” (version 09, November 13, 2022)
[
责编：张倩 ]
