不论地理位置还是思想观念，东西方都存在着天壤之别，而这些差别无疑影响着我对东方艺术的观察理解。我认为，诗歌和绘画是中国文化所有艺术中最杰出的典范，这一典范长期以来在中国美学思想史上闪烁着灿烂的光辉。如果没有中国哲学的基础知识，就无法懂得中国诗歌和绘画?的真正意义和它所能达到的深远的境界。生活在西方，我们习惯于将事物的两个不同方面，比如黑与白，虚与实，生与死等，看成是对抗的关系。而中国的思想和哲学却认为它们是二元性的：阴和阳、天和地、虚和实，它们之间的关系相辅相成。尽管这些概念对我们西方人来说是那么陌生，却又让我们觉得是可以理解和激动人心的。
　　诗歌与绘画是共存的，一个是另一个的结果，它们之间没有主次，没有争执。这种特殊的二元关系，在冷冰川的作品中被淋漓尽致地体现出来，他的创作将这两种艺术形式的训练融合为一体。一方面，艺术家将个人的微观世界通过一幅画?投射出一个宏观世界，这是智慧的表现，这样的创作本身就是充满诗意的。另一方面，绘画?作为一种认识和理解世界的方式，首先面临的是「真实」一词的复杂性，因为世界上各种事物真与假、虚与实之间的界限是很难拿捏的，因此用绘画?来展示世界也只能是诗意化层面上的。正如法国哲学家让·鲍德里亚（Jean Baudrillard）所说：「绘画是盲目追求真理的一种写照。」冷冰川有他自己的思想，他用自己的记忆，向我们讲述着他的文化之根。他的各种经历和体验，被快乐地从记忆里呼唤出来，一下子跃然纸上，构成一幅幅生动的画面。这是他的过去，他如此熟悉这些过去，因为它们曾给过他强烈的感受。看冷冰川的画?，使我们看到了世界，一个艺术家个人的微观世界和画?面以外的宏观世界。他的画?带给我们欣赏，更带来观看和了解的体验。
　　正是思考和知识，才能使诗人或画?家，在面对白纸或画?布时，将自己情感和知觉的体验付诸于纸上或画?布上。感受是一种知识，直觉是一种欲望，一种要求将知识表现出来的欲望。绘画并不只服从于世间的一种认知，那只是一种肤浅的学术态度。绘画?应该是由艺术家自己从简单的视觉以外去寻找思想的升华，从而打破事物的表面现象，赋予事物以生命和呼吸。这就要求艺术家要懂得如何成为「山上的草，不怕风吹，又能去接受哪怕是最简朴的花朵。」还要懂得如何「去感受风吹，然后让风的痕迹慢慢消失。」「绘画?是漫漫石头路的远行。」  那是一种狭窄小道上的行走，我们要牺牲一切并一往无前地走上去。
　　我认识冷冰川已多年，有幸分享了他在绘画?创作上所经历的几个重要时期，从他早期的摸索、后来的发展演化，直到今天创作出如此充满生命力的作品。另一方面，作为他的博士论文导师，我有机会在相当长的一段时间里，阅读他的文章并与他多次长谈。正是通过这些阅读和谈话，我能了解到他的创作思路。他的论文标题为「中国画?的东方艺术精神」。阅读他的论文使我学到了许多重要的中国文化知识，否则今天我将无从谈起，也不可能详细地理解他的绘画?创作思路和发展。冷冰川近期作品中所体现出来的异常的强烈感受，依我的看法，并不是他远离了自己的文化之根，恰恰相反，他用自己的智慧将自己的创作与中国传统紧紧地勾连起来。他的作品中所具有的品质和特色充分体现出中国画?在漫长历史发展过程中一成不变的精髓：那就是虚与实的关系。虚实，这一无法规避的二元概念将他手中所有的绘画?表达形式和工具融合起来：笔，墨，形状，体积等等——画?家的精神和智慧主宰着这一切。
　　冷冰川的创作风格如同大师一般，他执着、严谨。他的画?室里堆满了作品，他不停地创作，将全部精力用于绘画?和阅读。他通常先将墨汁和茶汁?一层一层地涂在画?布上，直到获得理想的表面效果。在这个充满冥想的神秘空间，他再逐渐创造出具有厚实效果的形体，并一点一点地赋予其生命。流动的茶墨汁?和厚重的形象，形成自然的内在联系，给人一种轻与重，空与实的协?调关系。在我近期对冷冰川的一次访问中，他指着一幅未完成的作品对我说：「我不喜欢这幅画?，它看上去没有生命，我要毁掉它。他这里所说的「生命」、「活着的」正是他创作中所追求的根本和核心。冷冰川曾以诚实、严谨的口吻向我谈起对某些作品的看法，并提出自己的疑问。他这种对生命力的追求、对作品的质疑和严谨诚实的治学态度，都说明了他已具备一名杰出艺术家所应有的重要品质。冷冰川作品的颜色简朴适度，我想，这正是他本人朴素作风的写照。画?家本来就是与他的作品互相补充、互相完善的。冷冰川近期开始使用大尺寸的双联和三联画?，在这些作品中，我们不断看到艺术家个人图像主题：物象和人物，带着所有的荣光，不断地重生、显现；另一方面，上文所述的「实」的概念，通过令人敬畏的图像空间得以实现，以其充盈之美给予观者深刻的印象。
　　冷冰川在巴塞罗那生活创作多年，这座充满活力、文化活动层出不穷的城市，为他提供了认识和了解西方艺术家作品的机会。尽管他个性孤独，并一直保持着独立的姿态，他还是能将自己的作品与其它艺术家的作品进行比较，从而丰富了他个人的造型语言。比如曾经?生活在巴塞罗那、对国际艺术界作出重大贡献的西班牙画家米罗（Joan Miró），还有七十年代以塔皮艾斯（Tapiais）为首的画?家们，无疑地都对冷冰川的创作思路产生过不同的影响。艺术家越来越成为知识丰富的人，他要学习从艺术史到人文史和科学史的各种知识。正是求知的欲望使艺术家能继续个人的奋斗，使他的艺术能够反映世界，能够述说自己对世界的认识。巴塞罗那是冷冰川寻找到的理想之地，在这里他获得了为自己理想而奋斗的必要条件，他不停地创作，用绘画将内心积累的文化底蕴表达出来。毫无疑问，正是与东方截然不同的文化和地理位置，为他提供了必要的背景和条件，使他能够用画?布留存个人的体验和多年的文化积淀。另外，我还想特别关注冷冰川的纸上作品，那是他布上创作的一个很好的补充。他的线绘作品是如此的清澈精妙，黑墨白线，形成强烈的对比。凝韵的线条构成了画面，述说着各种日常生活情景。那是想象与再现的结合。整个画?面好像一块织物，一根线将所有内容编织在一起。这使我们想起一张照片的负像，冲洗的目的就是要将黑色所隐匿的部分呈现出来。这就如同减法，将黑色减去，将白色收回。而油画?的创作是加法，将物体和颜色不断添加到画?布上。
　　几个世纪以来，西方艺术一直希望能够创作出一种幻想中的真实，试图通过透视或空间表现给绘画?以更深刻的真实意义。其基本理论可以用视觉金字塔来解释：塔尖和塔尖以外是一个可以延伸的焦点，而塔的最底层作为透视的第一层，这种审视的方法就好比用一把尺去丈量画面，是以数学和几何为基础的概念。这一理念主导了从乔托（Giotto）到文艺复兴时期的所有艺术家的作品。相反地，我觉得中国画?的透视法更加广泛和丰富，那是一种内心的组织，提炼成内外和远近的二重性，内部的向外展开，再通过远近的感觉来建立画?面的和谐或对比效果，随时随地都可以将事物的对立面同时表现出来。中国画?家的视觉在画面中无规则地、不停地从一个角度移到另一个角度。这时，绘画成了一种欲望，或更准确地说，绘画?唤起画?家的欲望，使他最终要将这一欲望落实到纸上或布上，形成自己心灵的图画?。从地理位置上讲，我远离东方，但在审美认识上的相似又使我如此接近东方，我认为冷冰川的绘画继承了中国绘画中以「性灵」表述的方式构思画?面的传统。在将自己的微观世界展现给大众的宏观世界过程中，画?家所追求的是将一个可观赏的有限画?面扩展成一个具有独特生命力的无限空间。
　　当前，西方绘画？不是在革新，而是处在反省阶段。画家们认识到图像的复杂性，以及要寻找新的表现形式的困难性。正是因为这一点，人们在反复思索，如何能将自己的思想更加准确地通过图像反映出来，并为这一图像在画?面上选定适宜的空间和理想的位置。传统为我们提供了必要的标准，使我们能够在充满未知的小道上继续前进，去了解未知，去超越未知。传统是重要的，但我们却不能停留在传统上。我们今天所面临的时间和空间都是前所未有的，我们的将来是未知的、不可预测的。冷冰川了解传统，他的思想、文章都证明了他具有丰富的传统知识。但他生活的时间和空间已不同于传统时代，新时代的欲望、疑问、快乐、悲哀，都将敦促他继续在创作中探索。他与绘画？结盟，他为绘画?而活，他将不断反省，以更强烈的创作唤起我们的激情。
注释：
①华金·詹切（Joan Chancho），画家，巴塞罗那大学教授。
②《绘画笔记》，伊夫·伯内佛易著，希望出版社于1999年在Canarias出版。

Painting and Poetry

　　There exist some huge differences between East and West in both geographical location and ideological concepts, which no doubt influence my understanding and observation of the Oriental art. In my opinion, poetry and painting are the outstanding models in all Chinese culture and art. All along the history of Chinese aesthetic thinking, they have been shining brilliantly with great glory. People cannot understand their true meaning and their profound as well as far-reaching concept without the knowledge of the Chinese philosophy. Living in the West, we are quite used to take the two sides of one thing as two opposing elements resisting against each other, such as black and white, emptiness and realness, life and death, and so on. However, Chinese thinking and philosophy take them as binary in their relationship, supplementing each other, for example, Yin and Yang, heaven and earth, emptiness and realness. Although these ideas are so strange to us westerners, they are understandable and exciting to us at the same time.
　　Poetry and painting are coexistent, one being the other’s result, while none of them being the other’s superior. There is no dispute between them. This kind of special binary relationship is thoroughly shown in Leng Bingchuan’s works. He combines the performance of the two art types into a whole unity in his art creation. On the one hand, the artist’s personal micro-world is shown through his painting in which a macro-world view is revealed, which is the embodiment of his wisdom. The artistic creation in this way is so full of poetic sense. On the other hand, doing a painting as a way of knowing and understanding the world will first of all face the complexity of the meaning of the word“realness”. This is because in the world, it is very difficult to define the distinction between truth and false, as well as the emptiness and realness of so many things. Thus, painting should only present the world on the poetic level. Just as the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard said:“The painting is a kind of blind pursuit of the truth of the portrayal.”Leng Bingchuan has his own thoughts and he is telling us his cultural roots with his own cultural memory. All that he has come through and all of his various life experiences have been happily called out from his memory, appearing all of a sudden on the paper, making one vivid painting after another. This shows his past, and he is so familiar with those in the past, because they impressed him so strongly. While appreciating the paintings of Leng Bingchuan, we can see the whole world, the individual micro-world of the artist and the macro-world beyond the paintings. His paintings have brought us enjoyment, further more, the observation and the experience of knowing.
　　It is just with the thinking and knowledge that a poet in facing a piece of blank paper or a painter in facing the canvas can pour his emotion and perception right upon the paper or the canvas. Feeling is a kind of knowledge, while intuition is a desire, a desire that requests the representation of knowledge. Painting does not subject to a kind of recognition or knowledge in the world, which is only a superficial academic attitude. Painting should be the artist’s searching for the sublimity of the thought beyond the simple visual sight, so that the superficial phenomena will be broken while life and breath can be endowed. This requires the artist to know how to be the“mountain grass, not being afraid of the strong wind, while getting ready to accept the simplest flower.”Besides, the artist should know how to“experience the blowing of the wind, and then let the trace of the wind fade away gradually.”“Painting is to go into the far distance slowly on the stony road.”② That is a kind of walk on the narrow path. We should be brave enough to sacrifice all in order to go forward with indomitable will.
　　I have known Leng Bingchuan for years and I am very lucky to have shared with him the experiences he has got in several of his important periods in the artistic creation, the early period in exploration, the development and changes in the later time, and the present period when he can create those works with such great vitality. Further more, as his doctoral supervisor, for a long period of time in the past I had the chance to read his articles and to have long-time talks with him. It is only through reading his articles and talking with him I got to know his ideas in creation. The title of his dissertation is“The Oriental Artistic Spirit in Chinese Painting”. I have learned a lot of important ideas about traditional Chinese culture in reading his dissertation. Without these ideas I will have nothing to say here and it will also be impossible for me to understand in details his way of thinking and development in his artistic creation. In my opinion, the especially intense feeling expressed in his paintings in the recent time shows that he hasn’t been away from his cultural root. On the contrary, he connects his own artistic creation to the traditional Chinese culture with his own wisdom. The characteristics and the special features in his paintings fully reveal the everlasting spirit of the Chinese paintings in the long history of development. That is the relationship between emptiness and realness. The binary relationship of emptiness and realness, which can never be paid no attention to, unites the way of expression and the instruments in his paintings all-together: brush, ink, shape, size, etc. All these are dominated by the spirit and the wisdom of the artist.
　　The style of Leng Bingchuan’s creation is like that of a master. He is so persistent and strict in his creation. His studio is full of his works and he does his creation all the time. He devotes his whole life to the artistic creation and reading. In doing painting, he would firstly put the ink and the tea liquid onto the canvas layer by layer, and wait till the surface of the canvas may get the ideal artistic effect. In such a mysterious space of meditation he gradually creates the shapes with the effect of solidity, endowing them with life bit by bit. The fluid liquid of the ink and the tea with the solid shapes form a kind of natural interior connection with each other in a harmony of lightness and heaviness as well as the emptiness and realness. In a recent visit to Leng Bingchuan, he said to me in pointing to one of his uncompleted works:“I don’t like this work because it looks lifeless, and I will destroy it.”Here, what he refers to as“life”or“being alive”is the essence and the core of his creation. Leng Bingchuan once told me his comments on some artistic works honestly and seriously and put forward his suspicion about them. His pursuit for the force of life, his skeptical spirit toward the art work as well as his strict and honest academic attitude, all means he has already got those necessary qualities that an outstanding artist must have. The color of Leng Bingchuan’s works is simple and moderate. In my view, it is just the reflection of his simple personality. Painters and their works may supplement each other and benefit from each other in order to be perfect. At the present time, 　　Leng Bingchuan begins to use large size of canvas to make his paintings, having two or three of them being put together. In these works, we can see the individual image subjects of the artist continuously: the images of things and of human figures, appearing and being reproduced with all the glory again and again. Besides, the idea of“realness”mentioned above has been realized with the formidable image space and impresses people strongly with its beauty of fullness.
　　Leng Bingchuan has been living and creating in Barcelona for years. This city with vitality and various kinds of cultural activities provides him with the opportunity of knowing and understanding the art works of western artists. Though he is secluded in his personality and keeps his independence all these years, he can compare his own works with that of the other artists, which enriches his artistic language. For example, the Spanish artist Joan Miro, who once lived in Barcelona and contributed greatly to the international art, and those painters represented by Tapiais in 1970s no doubt influence Leng Bingchuan’s way of thinking in his creation in various ways. The artist becomes more and more knowledgeable, and learns all kinds of lore from the history of art, the history of humanities to the history of sciences. It is this desire of learning that makes the artist to continue his independent struggle, makes his art to reflect the world and makes him to render his understanding of the world. Barcelona is an ideal place that Leng Bingchuan has found out, where he has got the necessary conditions for him to struggle for his ideals. He creates all day ceaselessly, expressing his rich cultural deposits in his inner heart in a way of painting. No doubt, it is just this culture and location totally different from those of Oriental world that provide him with the necessary background and condition to enable him to keep his personal experience and years’of cultural accumulation on his canvas. Besides, I would like to pay a special attention to especially is his paintings on paper which are very good complementation of his paintings on cloth. The pictures of lines are so clean and delicate, with black ink and white lines, which form such an intense contrast. The steady lines with charm organize the pictures, showing the scenes of various kinds of daily life. That is the combination of imagination and representation. The whole picture is just like the texture of a piece of cloth with a line weaving all the ideas together. It makes us think of the negative of a photo. The printing of the photo is to show the part that is covered by the black. This can be understood by doing subtraction: the blackness is subtracted and what is left is the whiteness. However, the doing of the oil paintings is similar to that of the adding, with the materials and colors being added onto the canvas.
　　For centuries, western artists have been expecting to create a kind of realness in fantasy in their art, and they have intended to endow their paintings with some more profound meanings of realness by adopting perspective and spatial expression. Its basic theory can be explicated by visual pyramid: the top of the pyramid and the space beyond the top of the pyramid form a kind of focus that can be extended, while the bottom of the pyramid can be regarded as the first layer of perspective. This way of surveying is like that of measuring the picture with a scale, which is a way based on math and geometry. This idea of creation dominates all the artists’works from that of Giotto to that of the artists in the Renaissance period of time. On the contrary, I think the perspective in Chinese paintings is much broader and rich, which is of an inner heart organization, being refined as a binary relation of the inside and the outside, as well as the far distance and the close nearness. What is inside can be extended toward the outside, and then with the feeling roused by the far distance and the close nearness, a harmonious or a contrast effect of the picture can be established. Thus, the opposite sides of the thing can be shown at the same time anywhere. The visual focus of the Chinese painters will move randomly and ceaselessly from one point to another. At this moment, doing painting turns to be a desire. To be more exact, the action of painting itself arouses the painter’s desire, and enables him to fulfill this desire on the paper or the cloth, forming the picture of his inner heart. In a geographic sense, I am so far way from the East, yet, the similarity of my aesthetic understanding to that of the East makes me so close to it. In my view, Leng Bingchuan inherits the traditional way of conceiving in Chinese Painting in his creation, which lies in the way of“spiritual”expression. In the process of showing his own micro-world to people in a macro world, the artist pursues to extend his enjoyable and limited scene in the picture to an unlimited space with the special and great life force.
　　At present, western art is not under the way of reforming but self-examining. Painters have realized the complexity of the images, and got to know that it is very difficult to find a new artistic form. It is just because of this, people ponder again and again in searching how to express their thoughts more exactly through the images, and then choose a proper space and location on the picture for the images. The traditional way of painting has provided us with the necessary criterion which enables us to go on continuously on the roads being full of unknown elements, and to get to know the unknown world and go beyond it at last. The tradition is very important, yet we should not remain in the tradition. Today, we are now facing the unprecedented time and space, and the future is unknown and unpredicted. Leng Bingchuan understands the tradition. His thoughts and articles both show that he is so rich in the traditional knowledge. However, the time and the space he is facing are quite different from that of the tradition. The desire, doubt, happiness, sorrow in this new age will all urge him to explore further in his creation. He has been allied with his painting; he is living for his painting, and he will always have the self-examination in his painting. He will rouse our passion with his more forceful creation.
Notes:
①Joan Chancho: artist and professor of the University of Barcelona.
②Yves Bonnefoy, The Notes of Painting, The Hope, Canarias, 1999.