RE:FROM JIANG YUEHONG TO:JIANG HUAJUN

Q: Jiang Yuehong A: Jiang Huajun

Q:Can you describe the town where you spent your childhood?

A:The most part of my childhood I remember was spent in a small town about 30 km away from Hengyang. The place where my father worked was one of many mining areas in the town. There was a kind of hall-like cinema, a state-owned store run by the local supply and distribution society and noisy crowds on every fair day. I completed my elementary schooling in the primary school affiliated to the mining factory where my father worked. As I remember, I had to walk across certain railway sections, part of a national highway and the bazaar in the town, and then get over a hill before I reached the headquarter of the mining factory where the school was located.

Q:When did you “leave” there?

A:I didn’t really leave there until I went to the Technical Secondary School of Art in the provincial capital after my junior schooling. I remember I would always sit alone on that short bounding wall around the unit where my father worked, watching one train after another coming or going in a daze with no idea of where they were coming or going. Today I think such a doing of mine at that time might have implied certain kind of imagination or expectation about a world far away. It might be such a kind of imagination that has fostered my desire for leaving there. I haven’t been back there almost ten years long. If I back there, what I want most to do shall be to check if all those scenes still kept in my memory remain there. And probably I would go and sit on the cistern on the top of that mountain for a while as I used to in childhood.

Q:When did you start painting?

A:I first learnt to draw in an exclusive art class I took during the summer holiday after my first grade study in middle school.

Q:In your memory, what is the first book that you read related to painting?

A:The first book about painting shall be the textbook of traditional Chinese painting distributed by my school. The first book about art I read seriously shall be the one about the biography of Auguste Rodin. I read it in a rental room of a friend near Hengyang Normal School after my middle school. I don’t remember lots of its details in content now. However, it is this book that has consoled my persisting expectation of an artist’s life for a long time.

Q:Can you talk about your reading practice?

A:If we talk about keeping a reading practice as a habit, I think I must have kept it since 2001. Well, there is also a matter of time I should clarify. In Year 1997, I left Hunan Provincial Art School and went to Beijing. Then I girded myself for the admission of Central Academy of Fine Arts. The following four years saw me how to prepare and take its entrance exams. In Year 2001 I went to Beijing Youth University for Political Sciences (at the time our first grade study was taken in the Dong-fang University District of Langfang). I rented two wing-rooms of an old quadrangle outside the campus, of which the front one was used as my studio and the inner one for sleeping. I had been physically and mentally exhausted through my school leaving of Year 1997 to Year 2001. After that, the coming college life of one year and half seemed as a retreat to me. Since then, reading became a part of my daily life. Later on, I left the college in Year 2002 spring term. However, reading already became what I always need at the time.

Q:Do you read when you get in bed? If so, what have you read recently?

A:I’m reading mostly in bed. Because of it, I haven’t been used to turning off the reading lamps all these years. Well, I once got a sick psychology long time ago, fearing that I couldn’t wake up if I fell in sleeping. Reading with a lamp on was a kind of resistance to the fear, and it was also helpful for my insomnia. Well, since I have heard the term “light pollution” recently, I would turn off the lamp when I awake at midnight. I think such an “insignificant” reading or meditation to me is my extra greeting to that not-on-the-scene world. Recently I have re-read “Milosz’s ABC” by Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish American poet. It is a memoir-like one. It is by my bed now.

Q:When did you get known of Central Academy of Fine Arts?

A:I first heard a mention of its name during that summer holiday after my first grade study in middle school. The tutor of that exclusive art class was a repetitive returning student who had failed several times in his application for the academy’s admission. In Year 1995, I went to study in the High School Affiliated to the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou for the first time. In Year 1997, leaving Hunan Provincial Art School, I got a picture of Central Academy of Fine Arts in mind just from its physical address - “WanHongXiJie NanHuQuQiao(the West Street of Ten-thousand Colors by the Bridge over the South Lake Dyke)”- before I went there . When I was there, there were lots of vendors and peddlers outside it, with dusts flying upwards in the air. Such a view toppled over what I had imaged about it before. However, it didn’t really affect my mood in pilgrimage. That’s why I would have still loafed around the academy even till the time one painting pal of mine was quite close to his graduation there. We had once taken the exam together before…Perhaps at that time, it was much more natural for us to regard that there should be a given tie-up between studying in the academy and being an artist, regardless of that we know well lots of masters have been abandoned by the academies. Afterwards, I advanced my study in the academy for three years from 2004 to 2007.

Q:Have you sold your own pieces? What about that first deal?

A:It was at the beginning of 2007, in the Art Camp of SuoJiaCun(Suo-family Village). Two Israeli buyers bought my pieces. The interpreter introduced that they were from Tel Aviv Museum of Art. They bought two pieces. It is said they even held an exhibition in Israel afterwards. At the selling time, I felt fairly complicated in mind. I might have thought of Van Gogh’s exchanging his arts for breads. Before getting the pieces out of the frames, I remember, I had asked my friend to take a picture of me and the two sold pieces together.

Q:You have been to a zoo, right? Can you describe your experience in a zoo?

A:Yes, when I was a child. The zoo of that city where we lived was a zoo of several animals inside a park. It seems that I and the kids of my family relatives who lived in the city once climbed together over the wall of the zoo and went inside. I don’t remember how I felt at the time clearly. Later on, ’cause I pick up the subject of the century park, I always want to go to Beijing Zoo. However, I haven’t yet by now.

Q:Do you remember your first experience of losing your way?

A:In fact, I always think I have a pretty good sense of direction. Even when I went abroad for the first time, although the lanes among those isles of Venice easily cause one losing his way, I found myself still fine with the directions, never taking a wrong way at all. However, that I once lost my way in Tianjin in Year 1998 is very impressive to me. Since then, I frequently mentioned such an experience when I attended a pre-exam class. At the time, I went from Tianjin Art Academy to a friend’s rental house. He had once led me there before and I remembered clearly that bystreet and that court yard where he lived, but when I really went there, I hardly found a way to tell it out. That afternoon I spent was as in a dream. Because there was no phone by hand, I had to return at last.

Q: What kind of “waiting” experience do you remember impresses you most?

A:It is in the year that I took the entrance exams for the admission of the Technical Secondary School of Art (also known as Hunan Film Art School) after graduation from my junior school. Having taken the preliminary and retrial in Changsha, I returned to the school to prepare myself for the cultural exam. When I checked the result by phone, I got known that I passed it, but I said I didn’t get my permit card for the cultural exam, and my teacher thus said I might have failed. I remember making a call at that time is pretty expensive, so I didn’t double check it at all. However, I was still waiting for the convocation notice of the cultural exam in mind. At last there arrived no notice. I had to take part in the general exam for the high school admission. Afterwards, the tutor of that exclusive art class told me there was a letter from the film school to me. It was the letter bearing the notice of my professional qualification and my permit card for the cultural exam issued by the school. Several years later, when I read Kafka’s “the Castle”, the story reminds me of that experience of mine. The hero “K” in the novel might find his “modern copy” in me somehow.

Q:What about when you first felt in “danger”?

A:During my second grade study in middle school, my mum was seriously sick. I went from school to the hospital, where I found her suddenly unable to recognize me. At that moment, I did feel in “danger” extremely.

Q:What about when you first felt helpless?

A:That must be the time when my family member passed away.

Q:Can you talk about your first impression and awareness of “nudity”?

A:My first impression and awareness of the term “nudity” must be a sense of shyness. Now it turns to be of body or corporeity. Of cause, as for body or corporeity itself, it bears lots of implications and attributes.

Q:Do you dream often? Do you convert what you have dreamed into a painting?

A:The question lets me recall my childhood, when there were certain propaganda pictures such as the piece marked with a slogan “Dedicating Ourselves to Motherland via Science” pasted on the walls of my home. In that piece, there is a little astronaut driving an airship in the outer space. Such a dream of the scene turned up often in my childhood. If we need explore the possible link between what one paints and what he dreams, I think there are probably certain hints in what I paint, for instant, animals. I once dreamed of myself being run after by certain animals. When I woke up in the morning, I drew a tiny outline due to the dreaming scene slightly kept in mind. Perhaps whereas the dream has some other implication, the painting just shows a fragment or clip of that dream.

Jul 20, 2010