Painting the Soul (short story) Zhang Baotong

In December 1976, Ding Shaoguang was anxious to fly back to China because he knew that his wife and family had been persecuted and tortured a lot because of him. Pen Fun Pavilion www.biquge.info and now he can repay them well.

After leaving Yujuan one day in May 1965, he left Jinghong by car early the next morning, sat all day, arrived in Mojiang in the evening, rested in Mojiang for a night, and transferred to Kunming at 7 a.m. on the third day until 9 p.m. After arriving in Kunming, he and several fellow students trained at Yunnan University for a week, then went to Beijing, stayed in Beijing for another two days, and then flew to Hong Kong, from which he flew to the United States. He studied Western painting at the Department of Fine Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was diligent and innovative, and he also reorganized and recreated the paintings of Yujuan that he had painted in Xishuangban in the past. His paintings are very ethnic, so they are very popular in the United States. The dean of the art department at UCLA advised him to stay in school after graduation, but he was so preoccupied with Yujuan that he said he had to go back to China because his wife was waiting for him. Moreover, he had not met his daughters yet, so he missed them very much.

However, soon, he received a letter from Yujuan. The letter said that she and her parents had been criticized and persecuted, and asked him not to come back. As a result, Ding Shaoguang had no choice but to find the head of the department again, saying that he could not return to China for the time being, and was willing to serve as a teacher in the Oriental Painting Department in the school. During this period, he wrote to Yujuan, but never received a reply from Yujuan, and he even wrote to his brother and sister in Beijing, because their situation was also very bad, so he never received a reply from them. It was only when he had returned to China that he received a letter from his brother in Beijing, asking him not to return to China. As a result, Ding Shaoguang had no choice but to remain incognito, continue to stay in the United States, cut off all contact with his family, and turned his thoughts about his hometown, relatives, and motherland into a picture of Danqing.

By the end of **********, he was the chair of the Department of Oriental Painting at the Department of Fine Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. Because he received a variety of inspirations from Chinese faience, bronzes, jade carvings, lacquer paintings, woodblock prints, paper-cutting, shadow puppetry, and other arts, and absorbed various genres and styles of Western painting, he organically blended the realm of heavy color Western painting and Chinese ink painting, and was unique in innovation and breakthroughs, forming his own unique style, which enjoys a high reputation in the United States. His exhibitions are very popular in the United States, and his paintings can fetch a high price. But there is only one person in all his paintings, and that is Yujuan, his lover and lover who haunts him day and night.

After he returned to Yunnan, he drove straight to Xishuangbanna, and then from Jinghong to Menghan Town, and in the evening he finally returned to the place where he used to live. However, the familiar bamboo building in my dreams and memories is no longer there, but in front of me is a burned ruin, and several carbonized black pillars stand sadly towards the sky, as if asking the sky about the incomprehensible changes. Between the large burned ruins and broken walls, there were wild grasses and wild trees that were as tall as a human being.

Ding Shaoguang was shocked by the sight in front of him, because it made him feel an unimaginable and terrible consequence. He wondered if Yujuan and her whole family had been killed in the fire? So, he went to ask the people in the village. The people in the village told him everything that happened in Yujuan's house. He heard that Yujuan's parents had been dead for many years, the child had died due to illness that could not be treated, and Yujuan herself had been insane for many years and was now seriously ill. Hearing this, he burst into tears, for he knew that it was all because of him.

At this time, the old village chief came over and asked him, "Why did you only come back now?"

"Yujuan is afraid that I will be imprisoned and will not let me come back," he said. Hearing this, the old village chief sighed, and while taking him to find Yujuan, he said to Ding Shaoguang, "Two years ago, Xie Guangrui and Yanlong came to me and asked me to find a way to build a bamboo building for Yujuan, settle her, and don't let her go out again, because her eyes are no longer good, and she is about to go blind." Therefore, I took the members of the team and built a bamboo building for her in the mountains and forests for her to live in. The villagers took turns to bring her some food, so that she could live like this. In the past two years, she has never been out again. However, she seems to be very sick, and has been in bed almost all these months. ”

Ding Shaoguang listened to this and expressed his gratitude to the village chief again and again.

The village chief led Ding Shaoguang to a bamboo building deep in the bamboo forest, and entered the bamboo building, which was very dark, empty, and silent, as if no one had ever lived there. In the corner of the bamboo building, in a place so dim that people can't see clearly, there is a tattered futon with a person lying on it. Ding Shaoguang took a closer look and saw that it was an old woman with gray hair, blindness, a dull expression, and tattered clothes.

The old village chief shouted to the woman, "Yujuan, who do you see coming?"

But the woman's eyes moved, but she couldn't see.

Ding Shaoguang didn't believe that this was Yujuan, he walked up to the person, squatted down, supported her with his hand, and called, "Yujuan, Yujuan, I'm Shaoguang, I'm your lover Ding Shaoguang." ”

Hearing his call, Yujuan seemed a little excited, she burst into tears, but she couldn't see anything, so she kept touching Ding Shaoguang's face with both hands, touching his body, and when she touched the jade Guanyin she gave him when she went abroad on his neck, she grabbed it hard, and then fell into Ding Shaoguang's arms, and left in a fit of rage.

Ding Shaoguang was stunned by this sudden everything and didn't know what to do. The old village chief told him that it was not easy for Yujuan to survive to this day and meet the two of them. It turned out that not long after Ding Shaoguang went to the United States, Yujuan gave birth to the crystallization of love with Ding Shaoguang, a lovely daughter, a family of three generations, and lived a very happy life, but after the **** began, Yujuan was repeatedly criticized for overseas relations, and her parents both died, but the child was less than two years old, because the fever was not treated in time, she unfortunately died, and one blow after another made Yujuan become insane and homeless. After knowing what happened to Yujuan, Ding Shaoguang was like a thousand arrows piercing his heart, kneeling beside Yujuan, and he couldn't afford it for a long time.

Later, when cleaning up Yujuan's relics, Ding Shaoguang found that the "Beauty Bathing Picture" painted for her back then was still neatly placed under the pillow and kept intact.

Ding Shaoguang looked up to the sky and sighed, he remembered that unforgettable rainy night again, in that heavenly silence, Yujuan walked for a day to send him to the county seat. However, that pure, beautiful, amiable and lovely Dai woman, her lover in this life and this life, died like this and left him. But her crystal transparent beauty and her pure and kind temperament have become his eternal nostalgia, the source of his creation, and the eternal soul in his countless works.

In his subsequent creations, Yujuan became the eternal theme of his paintings, and he used sapphire blue and sun gold as the colors in his paintings, because blue is tranquil and profound, and gold is passion and vitality. Moreover, he prefers to paint on a silent rainy night, when a wave of creative passion gushes in his chest, and unique pictures are born from his brush.

Today, Ding Shaoguang has become a well-known art master at home and abroad, and his works integrate the characteristics of Eastern and Western classical art and modern art, and are known as the "miracle of the Orient". In particular, his original craftsmanship and heavy color painting are the outstanding contribution of the Chinese nation to world art. However, in all the character paintings, Ding Shaoguang without exception takes Yujuan as the prototype, and he is always so pure, beautiful, dignified and beautiful. In the middle, in addition to integrating Ding Shaoguang's personal emotions, more importantly, Yujuan represents all the beauty of Chinese women and is the eternal "Mona Lisa" in China.

In 1979, he made a large-scale mural for the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, "Beautiful, Rich, and Magical Xishuangbanna", and in the same year, he published "Ding Shaoguang's Xishuangbanna White Sketches". In July 1980, he settled in the United States. Since 1986-96, he has held more than 400 solo exhibitions in various countries around the world, and his works have been collected in 50 countries and regions. In 1990, the Japan International Art Exhibition was selected by the "21st Century Printmaking" organization, and Ding Shaoguang was the only Chinese artist selected, and he was listed in the list of 100 world art masters from the 14th century to the 20th century. At the 1991 Autumn Auction in Hong Kong, Ding Shaoguang's White Night sold for the highest price ever recorded by a living Chinese painter.

Yujuan, the painter's eternal lover, and Xishuangbanna, the painter's eternal paradise.

2016.9.2 First draft

2016.9.4 Second draft (to be continued.) )