dc.description.abstract | Abstract
Feng Zikai (1898-1975) is the father of Chinese cartoon, and he had devoted all his life to art creation. The style of his cartoon works is so unique that distinguishes from the mainstream of the cartoon from the same period. In the field of modern Chinese cartoon, by using “mao bi’ (Chinese writing brush) and painting in one column, Feng Zikai created his work, both in form and in style, with a characteristic of extremely personal color and Chinese traditional culture. It is his traditional character that makes his creativity so original. This study is going to probe and interpret “Feng’s Cartoon” on the basis of Chinese traditional culture.
“Wen ren” means Chinese literatus Feng’s disposition and character, his plentiful cultural cultivation and long-term engagement of literature, Buddhism and other arts are the source which provide without fail the inspiration and landscape that he needs for painting cartoon. Traditionally, Chinese painters views that “Paintings are what one’s character presents”, i.e., a person’s work is the reflection of his the character, disposition, and thought. This study would like to take such perspective of aesthetics as one of the key observations.
On the other hand, “lyric” is the mainstream of Chinese cultural aesthetics, and this is also the major manifestation of Feng’s work. Feng’s cartoon style lies between “traditional Chinese painting” and “cartoon”. His stroke and brush-wielding inherits the trend of simplicity among Chinese scholars. This trend of simplicity appears relaxed and natural style, pithy and smooth skeleton, and scattered and genial lines and these are also what composes the so called “Chinese fancy” in which lies the focus of Feng’s cartoon aesthetics. Feng Zikai’s Chinese cartoon fully represents and develops which are exclusive to Chinese painting, i.e., the aroma of brush-wielding, poetic rhythm, Chinese philosophy, literature, and the manifestation of simplification, symbol, distortion, etc..
The first chapter of this thesis discusses the process of how Feng Zikai cultivated as a literatus, including the very important opportunity and learning objects that influenced his work very much. On the basis of the development of cartoon, the second chapter starts with a brief summary of the general situation of cartoon developed in early years of the Republic to serve for contrast the Feng’s cartoon‘s unusualness. It goes on to analyze the motivation which inspired Feng Zikai to work on cartoon and the source of his painting style. Japanese painter 竹久夢二 (Yumeji Takehisa, 1884-1934) and 陳師曾(Shizheng Chen, 1876-1923) are both Feng’s respectable learning objects, and Chen’s “the value of literati’s painting” is a considerable reference for Fen Zikai. The third section discusses the evolution of Feng’s cartoon in three stages.
The third chapter elaborates the definition and essence of “literati lyric” and analyzes with the assistant of plenty of pictures. In this chapter, we are going to discuss “lyric” from the two standpoints, topic and manifestation. Further to discuss Feng Zikai’s “ topic of painting” in which the observation is made that how well he introduces words into paintings. Finally, the thesis ends with the comment of “Cartoon of the True Story of Ah Q”, Feng’s work, where much more color of “literati lyric” is seen. In this work, Feng got closer to the motif of Lu Xun’s creation (魯迅, 1881~ 1936) by his passion and compassion for the society as a scholar.
The following three phrases may fully depict the main characters of Feng Zikai’s work: cartoon infused with literature, art achievement admired by scholars and laymen alike, aesthetics of literati lyric. This thesis is also to prove the particular style of Chinese cartoon as well as to bring up a brand new interpretation to Feng Zikai’s cartoon. | en_US |