高名潞
终极关怀问题仍然是中国当代艺术的主要问题。八十年代的终极关怀被九十年代以来的犬儒主义和重商主义所抛弃，但是，不等于它没有意义，也不等于中国当代艺术中没有保持渴望终极关怀的有识之士和保持终极关怀的艺术。在过去三十年，出现了一些坚持在日常冥想、创作和书写中追索终级关怀的文人艺术家，他们的共同特点是，不加入时尚，始终默默地在如何书写和视觉化这个终极关怀方面双向探索。胡志颖就是其中的一位。
书写和视觉语言的结合并不一定说明艺术家的思想深刻，书写也不一定等于证明艺术家的文人素质，但是，艺术家，作为现代知识分子的一部分，应当是文化创造的智者和思想者，这已经被中国几千年的书画艺术创作所证明。书写和冥想的深度创作思维之所以在现代社会受到怀疑，一方面是因为工业复制（以及它的衍生品——现成品和波普）在艺术样式方面所带来的冲击，另一方面，精神/物质二元对立的现代性话语强烈冲击了非西方包括中国的现当代艺术创作。启蒙主义以来，康德、黑格尔的以精神理念主导世界的哲学被西方后现代主义所颠覆，并走到了反面。物质与精神，人与自然的和谐被几个世纪人类征服外部世界的“宏伟”工程所破坏。个体的书写和冥想不再被认为是艺术创作的源泉，相反，时尚和复制等公众舆论被视为艺术品价值的判断标准。
但是，文人性和深度性创作必将在21世纪浴火重生。它有待当代的知识分子艺术家去建树。因为终极关怀是人类的永恒课题，特别是当全球化把物质主义和都市主义带到了世界各个角落以后，精神的自我放逐已经成为文化领域的有识之士所遵奉的信仰。
胡志颖是艺术理论的博士，也是有才气的艺术家，更是一位特立独行的冥想者。他的博士论文的内容是关于终极关怀的探究，即我们通常所说的“形而上”问题的思考。在他的书中，胡志颖用了“彼岸”的概念去概括的理念。他在书中充分地讨论了东方的哲学和文艺理论中的形而上的问题。尽管我认为彼岸的概念太容易让我们想到基督教精神和西方古典哲学的终极关怀，同时也很难摆脱西方的现实和彼岸二元对立的旧思维模式，但是，胡志颖把它放到东方文化的系统中进行解读和比较，我认为是非常有意义的。特别是在当代中国缺少形而上热情的时候，提出对“彼岸”的新解更是当务之急。
无论是形而上，终极关怀还是彼岸，其实在东方传统中，它们的文化属性要远远大于宗教属性和社会属性。中国人讲文化，其中已经包含了宗教和政治的意味。“文”对于中国人而言，有太多的意思，它不仅仅指那些具有物质外观的文化形态。它更是一种精神和终极关怀。南宋邓椿说，“画者文之极也！”文人画之所以能在中国诞生必定和中国人所理解的文化内涵有关。
胡志颖的艺术创作大体走过三个阶段。八十年代的水墨画是大山大水，和这个时代的学者水墨，也就是那种我称之为“宇宙流”水墨的风格是一脉相承的。其特点是追求宏伟气势。胡志颖九十年代的绘画是符号的集成。想超越山水对表现文化象征性的局限性，转而直接融入文化符号，多种符号的拼合造成多义性，甚至山水的峰回路转也被改造为某种寓意性符号。近年来，胡志颖把符号和培根的画风结合，其实，胡志颖主要地运用了培根的“体积”形式，而扬弃了培根的“身心”主题。他把主题置换为终极思考的文化主题。胡志颖的“个人宗教”倾向导致对培根的执著追寻的崇敬，同时，胡志颖本能所具有的文化信念决定了他选取的形象资源更加自由和多样。
当代艺术走到今天，最需要的是自由。可是这个自由既不是那种标榜政治身份的意识形态的陈词滥调，因为它已经被历史证明很多是假的。也不是犬儒主义的跟风飘移，因为它终究是醉生梦死。自由来源于个人的慧根、定力和良心（社会良心和人性良心），这决定了具有自由的人永远无法被标签化和面具化。正是这个个体的深度性和独立性才能真正地表现自由，因为自由永远不是从外部来的，它是内在的生成，它来自自由的品质本身。所以，从这个意义上讲，自由永远不属于流行大众，而只属于孤独的行者。
（原载《胡志颖作品集》，海风出版社，2011）
Freedom of a Lonely Passenger
By Gao Minglu
Ultimate concern remains a main problem of Chinese contemporary art. Ultimate concern of the 1980s has been abandoned by Cynicism and mercantilism of the 1990s, but it does not mean that it is no longer meaningful or that there are no men of insight who keep longing for ultimate concern or art that maintains ultimate concern in the field of Chinese contemporary art. In the past 30 years there have appeared some scholar artists who have persisted in seeking ultimate concern in their everyday meditation, creation and writing and who have the common characteristic of keeping away from fashion and making two way exploration in writing about and visualizing ultimate concern. Hu Zhiying is one of them.
The combination of writing and visual language is not necessarily an indication of the profoundness of an artist’s thinking, and writing is not necessarily a testimony of an artist’s literati quality. However, as part of modern intellectuals, artists should be wise men and thinkers in the creation of culture, as is proved by painting and calligraphy creation in the past thousands of years in China. The reason why the profound creative thinking embodied in writing and meditation is questioned in modern society is that industrial duplication (and its derivatives — ready-made and pop art) has affected art forms on the one hand and that the modern discourse characterized by binary opposition between spirit and material has a strong impact on non-western (including Chinese) modern and contemporary artistic creation on the other. After the advent of didacticism, the philosophy of Kant and Hegel according to which the world is dominated by the idea of spirit was subverted by Western postmodernism and went to its opposite. The harmony between material and spirit and between man and nature was destroyed by mankind’s centuries-long “magnificent” project to conquer the external world. Writing and meditation by individuals are no longer considered to be the source of artistic creation; on the contrary, the public opinions such as fashion and duplication are regarded as the standard for judging the value of a work of art.
However, scholarly and profound creation will surely revive in the 21st Century and its revival is to be promoted by contemporary intellectual artists. Because ultimate concern is an eternal subject of mankind, especially after globalization brings materialism and urbanism to all corners of the world, spiritual self-exile has become the belief followed by men of insight in the field of culture.
Hu Zhiying is not only a doctor in art theory but also a talented artist and an independent meditator. His doctoral dissertation is an exploration of ultimate concern, that is, reflections on what we usually call “metaphysical” problems. In his book, Hu Zhiying sums up his ideas in the concept of “Paramita”. There he gives a full discussion of the metaphysical problems in Oriental philosophy and theory of art and literature. Although we think that the concept of Paramita (the other shore) too readily suggests to us Christianity and ultimate concern in Western classical philosophy and that, at the same time, it is hard for this concept to break away from the old Western mode of thinking about the binary opposition between reality and the other shore, I think it is of great significance that Hu Zhiying attempts to expound it and to make some comparisons within the system of Oriental culture. Especially when there is a lack of enthusiasm for metaphysical thinking, it is an urgent matter to put forward a new explanation of “Paramita”.
Whether it is metaphysics, ultimate concern or Paramita, as a matter of fact, in Oriental tradition, its cultural attribute far outweighs its religious and social attribute. Culture, as the Chinese understand it, already includes religious and political implication. For the Chinese, “culture” has too many meanings. It is a kind of spirit and ultimate concern, rather than merely those cultural forms with material appearance. Deng Chun of the Southern Song Dynasty said, “Painting is an extreme form of culture.” The appearance of literati painting in China necessarily had something to do with the connotation of culture as the Chinese understand it.
Hu Zhiying’s artistic creation, on the whole, has experienced three stages. His ink and wash paintings of the 1980s depict grand mountains and rivers. They and the scholarly ink and wash paintings of that era, that is, the style of what I call ink and wash paintings of “flow of universe”, can be traced to the same origin. They are characterized by the pursuit of tremendous momentum. His paintings of the 1990s are integration of symbols. He tried to surpass the limitation of landscape painting in expressing cultural symbolism and to incorporate cultural symbols directly instead. The piecing together of various symbols leads to ambiguity and even the twists and turns of mountain paths in his landscape paintings are transformed into some symbols with implications. In recent years, Hu Zhiying has combined symbols with Francis Bacon’s style of painting, but in fact, he has mainly made use of Bacon’s form of “volume” and abandoned his theme of “body and mind”. He has substituted the cultural theme of ultimate thinking for Bacon’s original theme. Hu Zhiying’s personal religious tendency leads to his reverence for Bacon’s persevering pursuit, and at the same time Hu’s inherent cultural conviction has determined the freedom and diversity of his choice of resources of image.
What contemporary art needs most today is freedom. This freedom, however, is neither the ideological cliché used to advertise one’s political identity, for it has been proved to be false in many cases by history, nor the Cynical attitude of following the herd, for it means, after all, leading a befuddled life. Freedom comes from a person’s root of wisdom, perseverance and conscience (social conscience and human conscience). This determines that a man with freedom will never be labelized or stereotyped. It is an individual’s profoundness and independence of this kind that make it possible to truly express freedom, for freedom never comes from external things but instead it comes from within, and from free quality itself. In this sense, therefore, freedom never belongs to common people who follow the trend but only belongs to lonely passengers.
(Originally published in A Collection of Works by Hu Zhiying, published by Haifeng Publishing House, 2011)
高名潞：
批评家，策展人，“意派”理论创立者。哈佛大学博士，美国
匹兹堡大学艺术和建筑史系研究教授
Gao Minglu: critic, curator, founder of the “Yi Pai” theory. Harvard Ph.D.
and currently is a research professor at the Department of History of Art
& Architecture at University of Pittsburgh in the USA
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