Chapter 724: Wisteria Flower Painting (2)

Old Master Gu Tongxiang wouldn’t resort to such performance art, but to prevent Gu Weijing from forgetting his hometown, losing his cultural roots and historical soul.

Since childhood, he found many stories and biographies about those great painters in history for him to read.

The Gu family is originally from Wuxi.

They claim to be descendants of Gu Kaizhi of the Wuxi Gu Family, whether this is flattery is untraceable, but many of his childhood reading materials were indeed about this great painter.

Gu Tongxiang hopes his grandson can learn some qualities, possessing a noble and romantic scholarly sentiment.

He still remembers a story from the “Records of the World: Clever Deeds,” about “the neighbor girl piercing the needle to capture the spirit,” to praise Gu Kaizhi’s extraordinary artistry to an unimaginable degree.

According to legend, there was a girl next door to Gu Kaizhi, who was “beautiful and graceful,” a pretty girl whom Gu fell in love with at first glance. He tried many times to woo her, but she wasn’t interested.

So, Gu painted her image on the wall and pinned thorns onto the heart of the image.

Because his painting was too lifelike, the girl’s spirit seemed to have been captured by the portrait on the wall.

As a result, the girl suffered from heartache.

Gu expressed his love, and this time the pretty girl accepted him, and Gu Kaizhi quietly pulled out the needle, since then the girl’s heart illness was cured, and people regarded this as the painter’s legend.

Little Gu Weijing, as a child reading the vernacular phonetic version of “Records of the World,” didn’t understand.

Whatever Grandpa said was what it was.

He only felt that in this story, Gu Kaizhi is truly like an immortal or Mao Mountain Daoist, just how lifelike must his painting be to capture someone’s spirit?

Reflecting on this story when grown-up, Gu Weijing almost spat out a mouthful of old blood.

Unbelievable.

The pretty girl isn’t interested in you, and you go home and manically stab a doll, making her obedient.

Where in this story is “noble and ethical,” or “romantic and elegant”?!!!

How does this differ in essence from those Japanese erotic comics circulated among boys, with the bald perverted uncle hiding at home, laughing and pressing buttons on a hypnosis remote?

If this is considered romantic.

Then those perverted uncles in the comics should be considered pure love, wouldn’t they.

This memory cast considerable psychological shadow over Gu Weijing for a long time, leaving him perplexed about what the so-called “scholarly sentiment” really is.

Even though Gu himself belongs to the Gu family, he internally prefers the descriptions about Wu Daozi’s Eighty-Seven Immortals in the “Tang Dynasty Famous Painting Record,” which are much more objective.

It describes Wu Daozi’s painting to an exquisite degree, with sounds of “meteors in heaven,” “phoenix singing,” and “dragon roaring in the marsh,” also notes the painting boy serving tea and water while intense dialogues were heard from outside.

He hurriedly ran indoors, finding no one but Wu Daozi painting with a brush in the vast hall.

Wu Daozi frowned and questioned the rushing boy what was up, the boy replied, the painting master likes quiet, hearing sounds indoors he feared a thief, so he came to check.

Wu Daozi sternly and angrily tossed the brush at the boy’s head, chastising, there’s no thief. Evidently, the immortals in the painting came alive to converse with me, reaching profound discussions were disrupted by your foolishness.

During the Republic era, an American sinologist read this story, using it as academic evidence, speculating whether Wu Daozi suffered from the same congenital schizophrenic illnesses as the contemporary Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch, and the later Japanese lady Yayoi Kusama.

Seeing many hallucinations while painting.

If not, it’s Wu Daozi deeply understanding the art world’s prevalent self-promotional strategies of staging peculiar noises while painting and spreading them through the boy, to gain fame in Chang’an City, a master of art self-marketing.

Sinologists made convincing assertions, claiming that Wu Daozi from the Tang Dynasty could therefore be considered the ancestor of the entire art promotion industry.

Gu Weijing once firmly believed in this thesis, considered it a model.

But now, he acknowledges that the sinologist perhaps had some research in psychology, good literary skills but was certainly not a successful art expert.

He definitely has never painted like Wu Daozi.

Nor has he experienced the unspeakable joy experienced by painters when emotions reach an exquisite level, allowing the brush to guide the painter’s spirit, indulging freely over the paper.

A painter can indeed be led into the artistic world within the brush strokes.

At this moment Gu Weijing holds the brush, his mind seems to stand on a boundless grassland, with only one soaring wisteria tree before him.

Its posture like the Queen Mother’s fairy tree, graceful, and like the world tree in Northern European myths, magnificent.

As rain falls outside the studio window, the wisteria in Gu Weijing’s mind also starts raining.

Millions of purple flower petals fall gently from swaying branches.

Like a purple mist descending slowly from above, enveloping the entire land, between the earth and sky, all are tinged with purple frost.

Since time immemorial, such a spectacular flower rain never exists in the human world but descends within Gu Weijing’s mind.

What he does isn’t simply painting but catching a petal from the flower rain above, throwing it onto the rice paper, rendering the flower leaf incredibly lively and endearing.

That’s all there is to it.

Like a blend of reality and fantasy.

Even the wisteria tree in the Royal Botanical Garden in Yangon has been cut, Gu Weijing possibly has never truly seen a real wisteria tree throughout his life, yet he sees such a flower rain in his heart.

Thus, when Wu Daozi painted the Immortals and heard the harmonious cries of divine birds, engaging deeply in the creation, experiencing the sensation of immortals emerging from the brush to converse with him.

It may not necessarily be false.

Lady Tang Ning’s techniques once made Gu Weijing look up to her.

Yet with insight, Gu Weijing realized that her emotional designs in her paintings included clever elements.

Grand but not precise, broad but not deep.

Each emotion lacks depth.

Peony’s grandeur, plum’s purity, wisteria’s essence, hibiscus’s snowy brightness… each emotion is but lightly touched.

Like a fruit tea adjusted from expired fragrances, it does have a fruity taste but isn’t plentiful.

Before Gu Weijing could only imitate Lady Tang Ning’s “Hundred Flowers Painting” superficially, and compared to those stunning masterpieces.

It’s just a shallow imitation.

Of every flower’s color, she at most captures only a fraction.

Otherwise, it wouldn’t just bloom repeatedly, only receiving a “Heartfelt” rating on the system panel, not even achieving perfection.

To catch such a degree of emotions, Gu Weijing can likewise accomplish.

When his heart is calm enough, ripples of every emotion will become clearly detectable, everyone lives within seven emotions and six desires at every moment.

Whether it be Li Bai’s splendor, Xu Wei’s vicissitudes, or Tang Ning’s luxury, all exist within Gu Weijing’s mindset, only differing in depth, based on the magnitude of the resonance.

If he captures these ripples into his brushstroke, painting a “Heartfelt” like Tang Ning isn’t difficult.

Gu Weijing already overlooks this mimicry-like sensation.

Having gone through so much, he intends to engrave the pattern of his psychological porcelain onto the rice paper, bringing the array of wisteria petals descending within his heart onto the paper.

As Gu Weijing continues painting, he no longer looks at Tang Ning’s original work on the wall.

He isn’t imitating the “Hundred Flowers Painting,” but painting his own wisteria.

In a moment.

His final stroke falls.

The flower cloud in his heart dissipates, while a glorious purple flower tree appears on the rice paper, purple tinged almost red, tree planted like ink, seemingly with heart’s blood flowing within.

System panel displays an alert.

[Artwork Title: “Wisteria Flower Painting”]

[Chinese Painting Techniques: Lv.5 Tier Two Professional (5056/10000)]

[Emotion: Sweat and Blood]