Distant perfection

Author: Tie Ning
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-01-01
Features: The Distant Perfection is one of the "Iris Series." As the author, I appreciate the concept of the series' curator: it's a book about painting by someone who isn't an insider, discussing painting. The author's selection of artworks is free—what you choose doesn't have to be a "world-famous painting" in the conventional sense, as long as it has evoked some feeling in you—even if it includes works you don't particularly like. The author's writing style is also free, ranging from a few hundred words to thousands or even tens of thousands. This creativity is liberating, and such an open-minded approach is astonishing—it allows me to shed the pressure of "fumbling" in front of art historians and critics, and I don't feel obligated to rank painters from ancient times to the present. My knowledge isn't sufficient to give technical analyses of painting in the book, and my intention is also to avoid turning these words into a "product manual." Now, my mind is simple and clear, and I'm willing to think what I want to think, write what I want to write. I walk between painting and painters, my heart filled with gratitude. I sense the vast differences between painting and literature: things that cannot happen in a writer's work can happen in a good painter's. Yet I also sense the similarities between art and literature: their shared restlessness and solitude in essence, and the countless demanding training and rehearsals behind the scenes, the countless passionate or tedious processes. However, perfection remains always strange and distant from us. Because of its strangeness, we are all the more eager to get close; because of its distance, we are all the more willing to chase after it. I see that in the history of art development, there have never been geniuses or geniuses who fell from the sky. When we seriously examine the history of good painters, we'll find none who have escaped the influence of predecessors. The excellence of a good painter doesn't lie in admiring the past but in boldly abandoning timely inheritance after loud inheritance. It's painful, but it's also joyful; it's "cruel," yet it gives birth to new life. The process of writing this book has allowed me to glimpse the "origins" of some great masters. While admiring them, I also constantly recall the virtue of humility. True humility is not easy—it may bring us closer to the distant perfection, but true arrival remains unreachable.