week

Carrying a picture clip on his back, he wandered aimlessly around the city of Suzhou.

He was lazy, depressed, and in a terrible mood. The wide, long trench coat was unbuttoned, dangling casually over the shoulders and fanning against the legs.

Ever since he sold the painting last fall, he has been remorseful. A reward of $7,000 could not fill the void in his heart. The painting of the female body, in the famous gallery in Los Angeles, is arguably the most attractive work in the whole autumn, and it is simply the exhibition that fascinates those old beauties. Miss Shen, the female model in the painting, was the most tacit and outstanding one among Zhou You's many girlfriends. Now she is married to the young wealthy Chinese businessman who later crossed the ocean and followed the map.

Zhou You has always hated himself, he really shouldn't have introduced Miss Shen to meet the businessman in Beijing. It seems that he has sold not only his work and emotions, but also his girlfriend. Due to the lack of a lovely female model in the Beijing art scene, the painting friends scolded Zhou You for a winter.

When the spring breeze blew, Zhou You couldn't stay in Beijing anymore.

He felt almost like he had fled the city of Beijing in a panic.

Miss Shen is really a proud princess now. In the group photo of the whole family in front of a garden villa by the sea that Zhou You sent her, he really felt her heartfelt happiness and the status of the stars holding the moon. In the letter, she said that her honeymoon was spent in three beautiful countries, and that the wedding alone cost 200,000 dollars. The whole family is grateful to Zhou You for being a painting medium. Her painting of the human body has become the number one precious collection of paintings in the third generation of the family. Miss Shen felt that Zhou You's painting had been sold too cheaply, and she planned to send him another $3,000 bill of exchange as compensation. Zhou You couldn't laugh or cry. He thought that this was probably the marriage introduction fee that Miss Shen paid him. The painting of the female body actually has the function of a marriage matchmaker, which he never imagined. He found that he had unintentionally played a role in fueling the outflow of China's state-owned beauty resources, and he was so angry that he slapped the handsome young painter in the mirror.

What made him feel even more disappointed was that almost at the same time, his other beautiful girlfriend, Miss Shu Li, also left him and went to places like Shenzhen and Hainan to seek development. She walked resolutely, and he probably expected such a day. For a woman like Shu Li, no man can tame her in the studio, she does not belong to the studio but to all the bustling cities. It should be admitted that Shu Li is Zhou You's first lover, and she is also the one who has been with Zhou You for the most time among the intermittent lovers around him over the years. She is smart and pretty, quite sexy, and Zhou You still remembers the confusion and excitement when she first fell in love with Shu Li, as well as those artistic feelings and human impressions that can be bundled. Before she left, Zhou You once proposed to paint her a good picture of the human body as a souvenir. But Shu Li refused. She was reluctant to stay in the studio, and honestly modeled for him for a few weeks, which meant a lot of money to her, and she seemed to be unable to wait even a day. She hurriedly and perfunctorily stated to Zhou You that she still loved him, and when she earned enough money, she would come back to buy a house and a car and a big studio to marry him, at that time, he could paint as long as he wanted, and he could paint as much as he wanted, and one day, she would obediently be a good wife for him.

Zhou You didn't want to trust Shu Li anymore. That day he told her to fuck off.

After Shu Li left, she was so busy that she didn't even have a letter. A woman like Shu Li naturally knows how to play up her strengths and avoid her weaknesses. Zhou You has seen Shu Li write, in contrast, her font is really a great irony for her human body, even if she doesn't write. In the first few weeks, Shu Li occasionally called him with crazy and funny stories about the south side, and the same week she felt like she was in the studio. After that, the phone gradually fell silent, and Shu Li disappeared into the waves of the tide and the sea, and became without a trace. Once he occasionally heard from a friend that Shu Li had good fortune and had made a lot of money now, and there were several circles around her with big money from all walks of life, all of whom were eager to try her, and Shu Li was like a fish in water there, and she lived a good life.

Since Shu Li is no longer happy, she must not come back. Zhou You must try to completely forget Shu Li, which may be an important reason for Zhou You to leave Kyoto.

On that cold April day, Zhou You walked on the streets of a small town in the south of the Yangtze River that he was very unfamiliar with, thinking of a lot of messy things about women, and even he felt inexplicable, how could he buy a train ticket to Suzhou by mistake.

Suzhou seems to give him a worse feeling than Beijing.

Zhou You carried a Nikon *** camera, walked around the streets of Suzhou for two days, like an idle tourist, browsed the Lion Grove, Humble Administrator's Garden, Yiyuan, Tiger Hill Mountain, Tianping Mountain, and took a "motorcycle" to see the Hanshan Temple in Fengqiao Town, outside Gusu City. It is the peak season of spring tourism, noisy and noisy, and tourists are weaving. For the fine and elegant garden scenery everywhere, Zhou You is clear and insensitive. His anxious and greedy gaze crossed the half-moon arches and deep winding paths of the garden, searching for the woman in the crowd who might be able to enter the painting.

The colorful and pretentious women, like colorful goldfish in a fish tank, floated in front of Zhou You, and the fish swam over and over.

But Zhou You always squinted slightly. In the past two days, he has not even bothered to open the oil painting box once.

In recent years, Zhou You has found that in Beijing's art salons, there are almost no girls who make his eyes shine. He even had to search the streets, but the streets were deserted, with crowded and cold high-rise buildings and men and women whom he had turned a blind eye to. What the hell is going on, have all those beautiful women become call girls who come out by day, or have they gotten headlong into a golden wire cage and never seen on the branches again?

Thinking of those girlfriends who had left beautiful body paintings for him, waving to him in the big car, making a gesture of saying goodbye to life and death, Zhou You's heart was covered with an inky black mockery, and he thought that it was probably the real life tribute in today's society.

Before leaving Beijing, a feeling of sadness and pain hit him from time to time and overwhelmed him.

In the years since graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Zhou You has been experimenting with various genres and styles of body painting. When he was a fledgling, he was very concerned about what experts in the art world said about him, and he knew that most of the professors at the Academy of Fine Arts considered him one of the most promising young painters in China. His oil paintings of the human body have long been rid of the common disease of rigidity and sluggishness of the academic school, and almost from the beginning of his appearance in the art world, Zhou You's body paintings have already had the melody of sports beauty, and several of his works have the charm of modern oriental women. What some painters and professors even more appreciated is that Zhou You worships the beauty of the human body as the spirit of all things, the human body is dynamic and free, the human body curves are smooth and stretched, and the colors are poured into his understanding and admiration of flesh and blood, human nature and youth. His painting language and techniques are all hot expressions of the value of human life, and the inner spiritual freedom that human beings have regained after being freed from the prison of civilized world clothing.

But some New Wave art critics disagreed with this assessment. They believe that humanism can never summarize the artistic connotation of Zhou You. There are also many complex and grotesque intentions in his paintings, which are the composite of the painter's concept and feeling, vision and dream, abstraction and figuration. His painting style has caused a lot of discussion in the art world, and it is difficult for people to classify him into any genre, and no one knows what Zhou You is pursuing. Later, some critics asserted that Zhou You's pursuit may be change and creation. In Zhou You's own words, he does not pursue style at all, but rather "style"—a dissipative form of non-form thoughts that are constantly changing and drifting. In addition to his artistic talent and personality being recognized by the art world, the strange effects he creates with color on the canvas have always been unpredictable in the art world.

Zhou You's sudden southward movement must have left an alarmist topic for painting friends in Beijing.

In fact, Zhou You has long been not very interested in the style of painting. Over the past many years, he has religiously studied and speculated on the themes and essences of various modern and postmodern schools. But his enthusiasm quickly cooled and cooled. In the world, the abstract painting school that has developed for a hundred years seems to have passed the vigorous youth years, aging from youth to decay from vigor to vigor; Nowadays, even trademarks, monograms, advertising posters, and clothing fabrics are indiscriminately abstracted. Abstraction is impoverished in language due to lack of updating, mediocre customs, and to put it harshly, it is still overstocked and unsalable. Zhou You has a heartfelt respect for this "old handsome" who was rich in the subversive role of revolution in his early years and opened up a new space for the survival and development of art, but he can't help the bleak evening scene when he is about to "retire".

In this age of goods and packaging, what will dominate art?

In the delicate and exquisite city of Suzhou in the past, the central street has been erected with tile mosaics or modern buildings veneered with glass curtain walls, and colorful advertisements are like rockeries and strange stones in the garden. The small bridges and old houses in the old city are being demolished, and the gray-black dust is flying, like a clumsy splash of ink, and it spreads out uncontrollably. Suzhou Cheng indifferently put on a look that had nothing to do with him, and didn't want to pay attention to Zhou You's question.

The sun was stingy, the sky was gloomy, and there was still a bit of chill. Under Zhou You's eyelids, there were several girls in extremely thin clothes, with short skirts and long clothes, revealing almost bare thighs in flesh-colored skirt stockings and bra lace looming under the open neckline. is like Zhou You's girlfriends in the capital, who exude the aura of sexual temptation all over their bodies, and they are full of madness. But it's a pity that their beautiful bodies still can't pass through Zhou You's aesthetic vision that was "smoked" by body art masters such as Titian, Ingres, Renoir, and Modigliani. Zhou You shook his head in disappointment, he really wanted to drag the useless painting box off his shoulders and simply throw it into the small rivers on the edge of the city that were about to disappear with the beauties.

That night, Zhou You walked into a song and dance hall and KTV bar, but unfortunately, the capital of Wu Yue, where the sound of pipa and the sound of playing and commenting was in the past, is now extinct and soft. Stepping into the cabaret, the pop songs are deafening. The lighting is dim, the decoration style is almost exactly the same, "the mountains and rivers of the country are red"? Zhou You was a little confused, and he couldn't figure out which city he was in at the moment.

At first glance, the service ladies are quite beautiful. Talking loudly, like glutinous rice cakes laid out early on the street. If you get closer, you can't see the beauty of their original clothes, and they are all smeared by the national beauty and makeup standards. Zhou You grinned, he thought that if he used this kind of girl as a model, it seemed that he would have to change the oil paint to lipstick and nail polish, and the brushes would be redundant, as long as he used eyebrow pencil and lip liner.

Zhou You stood for a while, then turned his head and left. Occasionally, a young lady glanced at him, and the content of that gaze was also complicated and ambiguous. In fact, Zhou You is very familiar with that kind of gaze, many beautiful girls look at Zhou You with this kind of eyes, Zhou You was almost drowned in the sweet but empty eyes of the girls.

Zhou You knows that his tall stature, well-defined face and natural romantic temperament as an artist have always attracted girls. If he wants to provoke any girl, he usually always hits at least the nine rings or more. He is absolutely confident in this. In fact, he has no shortage of girlfriends, and those who go to bed and those who don't have nothing to do with those mundane things that don't have money. What he lacks is a mannequin, a truly good mannequin, a mannequin whose face and body are lifelike, and who contains infinitely rich and vivid human body language. They lie or lie down, sit or stand, and that posture is always full of connotation and unfinished. In the past few years, when Zhou You's body painting has become better, perhaps half of his success is due to the few mannequins who sit quietly and patiently in the room light in front of his easel every day.

However, in the past six months, Zhou You has no shocking good works to show off his skills to his painting friends. He lost a good model like Miss Shen, and at the same time lost his passion for painting human bodies. The National Body Art Painting Exhibition, which was given a cold reception in Shanghai, has foreshadowed the potential crisis of Chinese body painting art. Even young painters like Zhou You, who rose into the sky like a new star, could not find the carrier of beauty, and it seemed that the painters had to paint those cheap, ugly, bland and boring models. But Zhou You would rather leave the canvas blank than waste his oil paints.

In fact, after Miss Shen left, Zhou You also saw one or two lovely people who suited his taste in star-rated hotels and hotels in Beijing. Slim figure and elegant temperament. It's a pity that Miss is accompanied by well-dressed men, and you can see at a glance what kind of big money it is, and the Miss is tightly "wrapped", so that there is not even a trace of gaps, Zhou You can only stop, feeling their ethereal beauty from afar. Don't talk about being mannequins, you just want to invite them to his studio to be portrait models for a few hours, and you can't even say it. People would think he was a scoundrel or a madman. They may lack cultural accomplishment and artistic sense, but in short, they do not lack the meager salary they earn as models. Although mannequins are a noble profession, the appearance fee per hour is only 15 to 20 yuan, which is more than ten times or even dozens of times different from the service fees of the "chickens" in big hotels. Painting friends joked that it was natural that "chickens fly to high places and paintings flow to low places". Models in the 90s are hard to find, not a question of openness or not, but a question of efficiency or not. The market economy has long since broken away the 5,000-year-old feudal tradition, and now it is the turn of the painters to be embarrassed.

Zhou You also deceived and deceived a call girl who still had a little innocence to go to his studio. Along the way, she was very happy to scratch her head and pose, but as soon as she walked into his studio, she suddenly became panicked, facing his easel, her eyes wandered away from doubt, and she couldn't even match the focal length. She insisted on paying for her usual services, and bargained with him unrelentingly, so angry that she had to send her away. After she left, Zhou You was very annoyed, and angrily squeezed a tube of paint onto the canvas, and it took a lot of effort to scrape it off the next day. Can this street of roast chicken, fried chicken, and KFC prepared with uniform seasonings be compatible with his dreamy oriental feminine charm? It's better to use those red, red, yellow and yellow seasonings to paint a "shutdown (chicken) flat" or "chicken farm" scenery.

Zhou You felt helpless as a painter in the 90s. Maybe he was not a proletarian, he had some money from selling paintings, but this little money completely lost the possibility of competing with the big money in front of beautiful women. Sometimes he thinks calmly that women may be just as helpless as he is. A woman's puberty is too short, and the beauty that they cannot retain forever certainly makes it impossible for a woman's gaze and behavior not to be short-sighted. Today, China's pretty girls line up to take a bath like he did when he was a teenager, lining up to undress the rich and powerful, but refusing to show off their physical beauty to artists. Maybe when a group of real multimillionaires emerge among the painters, the best mannequins will be delivered to their homes and uninvited?

Zhou You was frustrated again in Suzhou, which was actually expected by him. But he still didn't want to go to Jiangnan, he found a few local painting friends, looked at the female models they introduced, and felt that it was still a lot worse than Beijing girls. Although Suzhou girls have delicate skin and soft bodies, it is a pity that most of their legs are not slender enough; The eyebrows are delicate but the eyes lack of thought, the charm is too much and the strength is insufficient, which always makes people feel that there is a small jasper atmosphere. He remembers that someone once told him that in the past, ballet companies and dance schools recruited boys mainly from Changchun and Dalian, and girls were mainly from the Taihu Lake area. Historically, Suzhou is the main production area of Chinese beauties, and its reputation is abroad, so as soon as it was opened in the early eighties, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwanese, foreign businessmen, plus foreign Chinese and domestic nouveau riche, came to the beauty pageant to pan for gold, fine net fishing, digging three feet, as long as there is a beauty to marry ceremoniously, it will attract a group of mermaids to take the initiative to bite the hook and drill the net. Even if it is a thousand-year-old rich mine, after more than ten years of continuous concentrated and indiscriminate bombing, I am afraid that it will have long been full of bomb craters and has a vain reputation. Nowadays, colored diamonds over six carats have long been extinct, and even small carats are hard to find. It can be inferred from this that the fate of several famous cities in the south of the Yangtze River is probably similar - so Zhou You canceled the plan to take a boat to Hangzhou, and prepared to buy a train ticket to return to Beijing the next day.

It is during the peak period of spring outing, and people who buy sleeper tickets line up at the ticket office in the middle of the night with small benches. Zhou You had no choice but to ask a friend to find a way. In the last few days of stranding in Suzhou, it seems that he can only sketch the scenery in the water alleys of the old city of Suzhou.

It was the morning of the fourth day of Zhou You's stay in Suzhou. From early in the morning, the sky was foggy, as if it was going to rain. He walked down the alleys soaked in the wet spring mist of the southern part of the Yangtze River, crossed several stone bridges entwined with ivy and moss, and finally stopped in front of a teahouse by a small river.

The narrow and clear river flows slowly and quietly, like an antique Suzhou satin. The river was woven into solidified silver silk silk, which trembled slightly under the bridge. The smoke and rain gently floated on the surface of the river, and then quietly diffused, like a woman's sigh near the window, lingering in the mist for a long time......

Gradually, the distant and moving bodies of Su Xiaoxiao, Li Xiangjun, Dong Xiaowan, and Liu Ru appeared vaguely from the misty river. They fluttered and fluttered away, and in Zhou You's daydreams, they had trysts with him again and again. They are beautiful gods for a while, and ** for a while; They are proficient in stroking the piano and reciting poems, painting with ink, and orchestrating silk and bamboo. If they love you, they give you love, art, and sex. If you don't love, you will leave your love behind, and you will only dedicate yourself to singing and dancing. This is probably the freest, most open, and most beautiful woman in Chinese history. Zhou You was tormented by his own hallucinations and imaginations, and he felt that the Jiangnan geisha of the year were really more respectable than modern women. Today's self-proclaimed and open-minded women are greedy and poor, and women's emancipation, if it only means exchanging bodies for material things, is far less modern and chic than the lifestyle of the geisha who painted the Qinglou in the past. If a beauty has no talent, not only will she not have the soul of painting, but even her skin will be wrinkled.

It's a pity that Zhou You couldn't paint for those beautiful, chivalrous, and fierce Jiangnan prostitutes back then. The beauty of their bodies has faded and cannot be reproduced. More than 2,000 years ago, Greece created an incomparably beautiful statue of Venus de Milos; For hundreds of years, painters and sculptors in Europe have created masterpieces of the human body that can cover countless art museums. In ancient China, except for the statue of a lady and the picture of the Spring Palace, there was not even a shadow of a real artistic beauty of the human body. Is this civilization or ignorance? Is it noble or vulgar? Zhou You's distressed questions were neither echoed nor answered. In several controversies in the painting world, Zhou You could only insist that human nature, which had been purified and suppressed by Confucianism for too long, lacked the genes of beauty culture and beauty civilization from the origin of life, and once the ban was lifted, it was the sexual instinct gene that was first activated when seeing body art. The proliferation of sex has turned to modern civilization. This kind of civilization, which has never been baptized and nurtured by the art of physical beauty, is in essence a weak and hypocritical civilization. If the Chinese nation had had its own splendid body art for thousands of years, then China would not have been so weak and vulnerable in the process of receiving the spread and penetration of Western modern civilization. Zhou Youzhen wants to work with more painting friends to fill the shortcomings of thousands of years of body art. When Chinese can frankly and innocently appreciate the human oil paintings hanging on the walls of their living rooms, the nation will probably be able to truly face spiritual liberation and freedom.

Zhou You found a stone pier under the bridge, put down his wide and heavy oil painting box, and then sat down by the small river on the stone barge.