Story telling through brushwork—— Exhibition of He Youzhi`s Paintings Collected by Beijing Fine Art Academy

Foreword

“I’ve been fond of painting since childhood”. The special bond of He Youzhi with art started with opera decorations beside his bed and stories of the Three Kingdoms engraved in the folk Temple of Guandi.

In his youth, He Youzhi was living in poverty during the tumultuous years. And when the new era began, he found his way guided by the changed needs of society. In 1949, he finished his first comic strip Fu Gui. And in the following more than fifty years, he created over a hundred of comic books including ten of thousand and more paintings. He Youzhi, who turned the direction of his art career from commercial field towards professional creation, never ceased discovering and thinking in which way his skills developed for a living also transformed into foundation of art creation in the process of self-exploring. In 1980, He Youzhi was appointed as one of first batch of professional teachers of Department of New Year’s Paintings and Comics Strips in Central Academy of Fine Arts, achieving the integration of art practice and theory at a high level in higher education. In his later years, he focused on painting Shanghai and Ningbo in which social customs and urban culture were vividly unfolded.

Encouraged by the art policies of that time, comic strips thrived with an inclusive atmosphere full of pen drawings and brush drawings using the technique of chiaroscuro. As for He Youzhi, he found out the application of plain drawing out of traditional paintings and calligraphy and woodblock prints of Ming and Qing Dynasties, bringing a fresh visual effect for the creation of comic strips. Later, his work White Light adapted from Lu Xun’s novel of the same name broke the limit of style turning the real lines of plain drawing into the freehand brushwork of ink painting which were more succinct and implicit. The establishment of his artistic style and the subsequent innovation both demonstrated his steps taken forward bravely and resolution for never-ending creation.

He Youzhi applied the characteristics and artistic style of comic strip he drew for fifty years to the creation of cartoon and genre paintings, in which he could freely display his unique taste in humor and aesthetic preference, instead of being limited by the textual theme. He reproduced the appearance of the old time through his adept skill of “making stories”, recreated the details of history through his gentle and vivid brushwork and relived the memory of the experience of life through simple or sophisticated lines.

This exhibition is the second joint effort between Beijing Fine Art Academy and Suzhou Museum, co-exhibiting over 160 pieces of He Youzhi's manuscripts including comic strips, literary illustrations, cartoon paintings and casual drawings. We can appreciate not only the classic work using the technique of plain drawing, feeling the echo of the glorious era of comic strips through those smooth and clear lines, but also the scenes and plots conveyed together by the ink painting and line drawing, figuring out the process in which a scholarly painter interprets the literary implication by pictorial symbols.

Huang Yongyu once said that He Youzhi had an “almost religious devotion” to comic strips. This great artist, who telling stories through his brushwork, paied attention to the story-telling feature of comic strips throughout his lifelong art career. Hence, all of them tell stories for us to read, listen to and enjoy through drawing paper.