Chapter 6 Chapter Six

Zha Jianying: Alas, if the head is not opened properly, it will be difficult for a lifetime.The old complex plus the new complex can twist a good person into a mess. Liu Suola: In this kind of atmosphere, whether you are successful or not, you have to have psychological problems.You see, there are many people who are already quite successful, but talking to them is very uncomfortable, as if talking to a mentally handicapped person.Maybe it can't be blamed on the 1980s?Now I meet some young people who are also twisted like this.In our education, we don’t enjoy work, and we only think about big names, so there must be something wrong with our brains.I have heard that some successful writers dare not write their handwriting or write notes for fear of being kept.Chen Danqing is good at this. He writes letters by hand all day long.

Zha Jianying: Not only the brain, but also the body has problems.Now you can see all kinds of signs of excessive fire, disorder, and overdraft. Either you only struggle without enjoying, or you will die if you enjoy it-drugs, alcohol, prostitution... Such enjoyment is not connected with work or spiritual life, but with emptiness, decadence, and corruption.This is not a problem in the 1980s, when people did not have so many conflicting desires in their hearts. Liu Suola: The exciting big names in the 1980s have now been changed to exciting banknote numbers.Now there will be exciting headlines on the cover of magazines: How to earn 10 million a year!When writers discussed how to win the Nobel Prize, it made people cynical. Nowadays, people are faced with the challenge of earning 10 million yuan a year. Is there any other way besides robbing banks?It reminds me that the era of "a thousand catties per mu" has come.

Zha Jianying: However, we are focusing on talking about problems and picking faults. In fact, in many ways, China is still making progress or improving.Compared with the past, this country is much more open, material life has improved, information and personnel are more circulated than before, some new and interesting spaces have emerged, and the system is more flexible than before.What do you think of young artists today? Liu Suola: I hope that the current students and young artists are the hope of China, but they need a richer cultural soil to grow.Young people are very curious, and now they have the conditions to obtain a lot of information, but the sensitive judgment of this information needs an active cultural atmosphere to cultivate.Students from the Academy of Fine Arts, the Academy of Music, and young writers, they are richer in material than in the past, and they are not lacking in information. If there is a social environment that values ​​culture, everything will happen naturally, and there is no need to discuss mainstream Or business big talk, live, do things, enjoy life and culture.If a society does not have a rich cultural background, there will only be low-level tastes such as arguing about winning or losing in art, playing tricks, caring about who is better than whom, and so on.This is a public education issue throughout China for many years.To be a soldier is to be Napoleon, and to play sports is to participate in the Olympics.If I lose, I will not admit it.If I'm not good, no one will think about it.This is not just a problem of the 1980s, so don't be stuck with the 1980s. The 1980s was also an era of simple people who didn't know how to make money, so they didn't care about the consequences, and they were very enthusiastic...

Zha Jianying: Yes, there are many people who make art for art's sake. Liu Suola: At that time, there were quite a lot of people who made art for art's sake.But it was not so simple in the end, because after going out, they encountered a setback and encountered the most practical survival problems, so the artists were transformed.Chatting with them, they began to talk about how to be successful, how to be rich, how to win prizes, and it became a trend.In fact, there is nothing wrong with being successful and making money. Artists should live well.There is no need to discuss these boring money issues and competitions all day long, just enjoy the results.

Zha Jianying: Yes, an artist wants to live a good life like everyone else, and there is no need to bear a signboard of "otherworldly" or "extraordinary", but the main feature that distinguishes an artist from others is of course his/her art Talent and pursuit, rather than fighting for trophies and making money, the former is about art, and the latter is about fame and fortune. Isn't this the most basic common sense.The atmosphere you mentioned can also be seen among domestic cultural people after the 1990s. Liu Suola: Cultural people in China may have benefited a lot from the 1990s, I don't know.I only know that people in foreign countries are more challenged by the way of survival, so they must learn to survive, and the environment in foreign countries is more confusing. You are facing the material civilization established by generations of Westerners.I remember meeting some Chinese artists who liked to brag that they were "No. 1" when I was abroad, otherwise I wouldn't know what I was doing.However, the artists who went abroad in the 1980s were the first group of people who went out to make art from China, rather than those who went out to study art and came back to work.The difficulty lies here. Without the psychological preparation of foreign art students, everyone has the energy of going abroad as a delegation.

Zha Jianying: In the 1980s it was not possible to make a fortune doing literature and art, and everyone was still eating from the state within the system, but in the 1990s it was suddenly possible to make money doing literature and art. Liu Suola: It is a good thing that artists can make money.I remember that the earliest small upstarts may have existed since the mid-1980s. At that time, music producers began to make commercial recordings and performances, photographers began to shoot commercial advertisements, and the film industry was the most lucrative.I remember that in the 1980s, Ah Cheng said that he wrote books to sell money, and I was even more of a studio bug. I didn't like the high-mindedness of artists, but I liked making pop music records to make money.At that time, I had a kind of rebellion against the intellectual world, unwilling to be an artistic elite, and liked to use frivolous material concepts to fight against heavy cultural struggles.At that time, everything was a kind of real resistance, and it was not a show.But then I went abroad, and all these acts of resistance were the most meaningless—the art form of fetishism has long been developed to the extreme, and the knowledge of commercial music we know in China is useless at all, even for modern Music, as we know it, is by no means modern.So we have to learn too many things, from material to spiritual.If one does not understand the development process of material civilization, one cannot understand the development process of modern art.The conjoined culture of material and art is as elegant and chic as the same body. It’s not that when you have money, you forget your last name, and you can’t wait to walk down the street. You only recognize money but not art aesthetics.It is a good thing that cultural people have money, they can do culture with peace of mind and make the aesthetics of culture to the fullest, but for many Asian colonies, culture is entertainment, and nouveau riche are everywhere.There are so many cultures in China, China is not a colony, I am not afraid to have some self-denial, correct my attitude towards success...