Flowing Text:A Study Of Chen Shizeng’s Beijing Customs

As a relatively mature artist and art educator in terms of thought and style,Chen Shizeng was not only a mainstay of the Beijing painting scene in the early 20 th century,but also an indispensable spiritual leader in the wave of transformation of Chinese painting.As a representative of the reformist school,Chen Shizeng’s ideology,which is generally regarded as culturally conservative,seems at odds with the experimentalism and values expressed in Beijing Customs.This contradiction is not due to a change in Chen’s successive conceptions,but rather reflects his consistent thought and practice of innovation within tradition.Therefore,the various discussions based on Beijing Customs are strictly speaking a re-examination of this work as a fluid ’text’,placed in its historical context.From image to text,Beijing Customs has undergone a long process of fluidity.The viewer adds to the meaning of the work so that Beijing Customs is no longer a single image,but a text composed of images and inscriptions that span time and space.The style and folklore of the images focus our attention on the trajectory and artistic tendencies of Chen Shizeng,while the writing of the inscriptions and the flow of the text turn our attention to a group of artists represented by Yao Hua.Chen Shizeng was undoubtedly one of the early painters to enter the world in this quagmire of tradition and modernity,politics and culture,East and West.The literati concern he embodied in Beijing Customs contributed to the transformation of traditional literati painting,and his pioneering techniques broadened the path for the development of realist figure painting in the mid-to-late 20 th century.