Yang Xin’s Hutong
Yang Xin is a painter who paints Beijing”s local culture. He was born in Beijing in 1962 and graduated from the Art Department of Heibei Normal University, major in oil painting. Now, he works as an editor and reporter for Beijing Youth Daily. In these years, he concentrats on the study of Beijing”s Hutong culture and history. He devotes himself to exploring, preserving and developing the local life and culture. He has published several painting books including “Reading Hutong”, “Old Trades of Beijing” and “Outside the Front Gate”. He has also held a number of his own art exhibitions.
My book “Read Hutong” has just been published with the fragrance of the ink. I expressed my feelings which accumulated in the last 40 years on Hutong in this book and thus to show my love on Hutong.Some people prefer the “Modern Art” and foreign art, and they think Hutong is just some worthless relics from several hundreds years ago. For many years, I always talk about hutong with friends about its past, present and future. I still hold traditional value of life since I have grown up in the Hutong. I miss Hutong very much not only for the reason that I grew up there but also it has showed me a mixture of the Hutong culture in ancient history with the culture in new century. those different sizes of door, compoung, door rings bring people happiness and also worries. If the nex generations point the photos and albums and ask us the Hutong that we live now, and how can we give them a real meaning of Hutong? Perhaps they will laugh at us if we are not able to five them a reasonable answer. The things we have experienced, missedfand gotten are relevant with these “broken bricks and poor tiles”. How to express the Hutong culture and life about natives in Beijing has always made me puzzle for a long time. When many friends in the Arts field realize that shey should find something from hutong culture, I suddenly find that Huong culuture will disappear with the orchestra for the new century. It makes me have the sense to pick up a pen and draw the Hutong natually.
Unprecedented changes have taken place in the pattern of this famous historical city of Beijing and the way of life of the people living in it. But there are more and more people who are beginning to seek the traces of the years gone by from among the splendor of the city in the modern times. The culture and arts of the particular Beijing flavor I fervently love and have painstaking pursued have aroused growing interests from a growing number of people and even from the whole globe – this is a message conveyed by both the exhibition of the 81 old Beijing photos brought to China by the Albert Kahn Museum of France and the host of best-selling publications that can be found everywhere in the city. The ceaseless and long-enduring pursuit and love for Beijing culture by Chinese and foreign personages have inspired creative passion and responsibility in me as a native of Beijing.
“Culture of particular Beijing flavor”, which people take delight in talking about, records the episodes of life that passed down in history in a gradual process of the development over the past nearly 1000 years and they can be recaptured systematically and carried forward only by careful sort-out. History advances, many things have become memory of the past. The number of people who experienced and knew about the past is becoming smaller and smaller. If the episodes are not recorded and sorted out in good time, they would drop out of the memory of the people for ever.
“Wedding sedan-chair rental”, “Water delivery house”, “Big saddle cart” and “Minor teahouse” – all these words sound very strange to modern people. But they were essential part of the life of the Yuan, Ming, Qing and National Repeblic periods. Many things could only be what were experienced by the fathers of our fathers and sound quite obscure, yet they still attract a large number of followers. What I am trying to do in writing the book “Old Trades of Beijing” is to systematically relive the past so that people would know and bear in mind the life of our ancestors.
But in what way can the charm of the culture of Beijing flavor be brought out to the full – that is what I have been seeking painstakingly from the very beginning. What art advocates for is beijng natural, realistic and true. Only by bringing out to the full contents, illustrating an idea, a feature and by developing a unique way of expression instead of following the beaten path, making things clear and accurate, is it possible to make it lovable and acceptable. That is the essence of the skills of my “painting” tingled with the local flavor of Beijing
During those sleepless nights, I seemed to have passed the Zhengyang Gate, walked on the streets at the Dashilan, witnessed the ups and downs of the old stores like Tongrentang, Neiliansheng and Ruifuxiang, enjoyed the Ping Play at Tianqiao, the comic dialog and the Peking Opera, loitered in the chess teahouses at Tianqiao, the south city amusement park and the lantern workshops, had the sesame seed cakes and fried dough twists with the performers of tricks in the Big Wine Vats, shucked the sweet roast chestnuts and started a conversation about the airs of the local tyrant ant the rise of the Fuliancheng Play School, with a ringing in my ears the peddlers resounding hawking far and near. Among them, I felt the load weighing on my mind and my emotions going up and down. Yet what I learned more in the people was their sincere self-contentedness and the sprit of striving for the better, which moved me and guided me, that the pen in my hand began to draw lines involuntarily.Readers familiar with the creation style of the Beijing flavor will easilly notice that this new book, in addition to my former manipulation of the humorous exaggeration lines, is facilitated with thick solemn colors, the detailed realistic method, and the magnificient scenes with sense of realness, which enable me to demonstrate more the profoundness in real history behind the light humorous figures. That is the content embodied with the rich and mellow culture. It can be safely said that, thanks to such culture, my paintings are given more expressiveness and gifted with conspicuous development, enabling me to achieve the pursuit for novelty, change and inprovement of my style in the process of completing the The Trilogy of the Old Peking
