彼温此存
--The Response of Today's Art to Hans Christian Andersen
For the worldwide celebration of the 200 th Anniversary of Hans Christian Andersen's birth, the Organizational Committee has selected an exhibit comprised of Chinese contemporary art as the sole visual arts exhibit for the celebration. The exhibit will open in China before traveling to Denmark to join the celebration festivities there, and the committee formation, planning and organization has been entrusted to a number of experts from the Chinese art world. On behalf of the Art Committee, let me express sincere gratitude. I would like to thank the Organizational Committee for their confidence in us and even more for their appreciation and support of Chinese contemporary art. Today, the whole world watches the maturation of contemporary Chinese art with great interest, paying attention to its vigor and vitality. In this vein, Chinese contemporary art still needs to occupy a greater space in the global arena, and still needs to undertake even more extensive international communication and exchange.
Consciously and subconsciously, we feel Andersen's presence. His name has an eternal place in the hearts of the people of the world. Though his accomplishments were mainly in the realm of literature, the spirit of his work transcends the literary, providing a powerful creative impetus for artists of all kinds. After receiving the invitation of the Art Committee, all the artists participating in this exhibit—including Chinese artists living in China and those sojourning abroad—expressed tremendous enthusiasm. Everyone believes that there is a tacit understanding and mutual motive force, feeling and implicit meaning shared between their art and the world of Hans Christian Anderson.
Although this exhibit only represents a tiny fragment of today's Chinese art, but it prompts Chinese artists to perceive today's world's from a contemplative perspective. Just as the central enchantment in Andersen's fairytales derives from his extremely vast field of vision and extremely keen mode of perception, today's Chinese artists have been deeply affected with respect to ideals and reality, society and the individual, common experience and personal experience, from their individual positions, they each express their yearning to move towards a greater world. For example, in Anderson's fairy tales, there is always some kind of unexpected woe that suddenly befalls the characters in his stories, destroying their once happy lives or crushing their dreams and ideals, and making them fall into the fickle hands of a changeling fate. We are with the characters as they soar and crash, which shapes the intensity of our compassion for humanity and its culture. Through the work of these Chinese artists, we can see the continuation of this same compassion, namely examination of the concern for humanity in the conditions of today. If one can say that Andersen's fairy tales are prophecies about the fate of humanity, then many of the works on display at this exhibit present the artists' prophecy-like reflections on the state of human existence, along with the complex moods attendant to this kind of contemplation, and even raise pressing questions with a tone of foreboding warning. Andersen's fairy tales contain poems expressing a great universal love for human life. For the sake of a harmonious world, and coexistence between people and nature, Andersen constructed a beautiful and idealistic homeland that transcends national boundaries, and at the same time, in the work of Chinese artists, this same sort of childlike innocence can be seen everywhere, some of which draw on direct experience of the wondrous and moving aspects of life, and also express the simplicity and forthrightness of nature.
I have no intention of trying to interpret these artists' works as directly connected to the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. What I want to stress, however, is the rapid and tremendous transformation of the life of today's Chinese society. China is developing side by side with the world , different cultures collide and co-mingle, creating abundant and diverse conditions for the creation and unfolding of Chinese art, and raising new questions. The use of the words "body temperature" as the theme of this exhibit may accurately convey the rich perceptions of Chinese artists' hearts and minds as they experience, observe and evaluate the external world. As the world passes through time and crosses cultural borders to pay tribute to Anderson's work and life, Chinese artists and Andersen—or, to be precise—to connect Chinese artists with Anderson's spiritual legacy and respond to the soul of this great personage.
Fan Di'an
HCA -2005 (China) Eternal Commemoration of Hans Christian Andersen 活动
Art Committee Chair
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