内容提要
世界上很多伟大的民族都有一种高雅精致的表演艺术，深刻地表现出那个民族的精神与心声；希腊人有悲剧、意大利人有歌剧、俄罗斯人有芭蕾、英国人有莎士比亚戏剧，这些艺术往往是他们民族骄傲与自信的源泉。而中华民族则有被称为“百戏之祖”的昆曲。中国的传统戏曲过去也曾一度被称为“传奇”；是我们的祖先心中的“雅乐”，是他们的精神家园，是他们生活的一部分。并经历时间的变迁和社会转折的洗礼保存了下来，成为我们民族文化宝库中珍贵的文化遗产和财富。
脱胎于中国传统文化的戏曲和中国的传统绘画一样，有着浓重的写意色彩；戏曲表演的原理与中国画的画理在本质上是相通的，都是“以形写神”，重在“传神”；两者所追求的形似，都是写意的形似。戏曲融叙事、写景于一身，多种艺术手法水乳交融，集中于人物的塑造，扩大了表现生活的维度，在舞台这个特定的范围内浓缩了历史，浓缩了社会与人生，浓缩了时间和空间。而戏曲人物画则将舞台上的戏曲表演作为自己的表现对象，中国传统戏曲本身高度程式化带来的艺术形式美感，也给戏曲人物画的创作提供了不断创新的个性审美空间。
比较戏曲的图像与戏曲演出的差异，也很有意思。一般民间的戏曲图像通常是摘取戏曲中某一人物动作、对话的瞬间，然后加上较为繁复的背景空间，与真实的舞台表演并不相同。因为中国古典戏曲特有程式化的表现方式，从来就是表现而不是再现生活，剧中的背景甚至相应的行为，都可以凭借舞台动作和唱词来表现。可见民间的戏曲图像从一开始，就有着创作者重新的加工和改造。
至于戏曲人物画缘于何时，现在还难以定论，如果把仰韶彩陶的舞人算上，似嫌勉强。不过，将汉画像石的百戏视作戏画源头，应不为过。到了唐宋金元戏人石雕，就已和明清以来以年画、民间剪纸为载体的戏画颇为一致。作为一种民间喜闻乐见的绘画形式，年画对戏曲题材的表现与选择，给予了极大影响，甚至可以说直接影响到后来的戏曲水墨人物画；剪纸是我国民间最为普及的艺术表现形式，其相当一部分内容为戏曲人物题材，体现出民间的审美观念与戏曲题材的天然联系。可以包容在这一部分的，应该还有皮影和木偶。传统戏曲通过造型艺术的转换更直接地进入人们的日常生活环境，在一个相当长的历史阶段中，对中国民间底层的文化精神和智慧发挥着直接的影响。
戏曲人物画发展到当今，画家在戏曲中得到的启发已不仅仅是单纯的故事情节或是唱腔韵味，更多的是借用戏曲作为母题表达着关于审美的理念，哲学的思考；画家也往往只是视戏曲为一个特定的感悟对象，从而赋予自己以表现的自由。随着中国现代水墨艺术的日益发展，水墨戏曲人物画已经成为当代水墨的一种特殊现象并引起关注。
《戏墨·墨戏：中国水墨戏画作品展》无疑是很好地诠释了当下这一中国当代水墨画的特殊现象。展览集中展示现当代一些优秀的中国画家的戏曲人物画作品，他们的作品往往以对戏曲题材文化性的思考为主题，画戏曲也是在画自己对人生的感悟，如关良、林风眠、韩羽、程十发、丁立人；当然，借助戏曲的符号寻找现代水墨的图式变革也大有人在，如张桂铭、朱振庚、聂干因、周京新、沈虎等。对于画家来说，所谓传统，是先天性地存在于自身内部的，只有无意识地表现在作品里的民族特性，才是有价值的。而戏曲与水墨的结合不仅带给画家，也带给了观众更多情感和想象的自由度。
真实地再现我们所处的社会生活和自然环境，是艺术作品的重要内涵。在特定的时期，尤其是社会政治和经济生活发生巨大变化的时候；艺术的使命就是真实地反映这种变化给人们的精神生活带来的影响，真实地反映艺术与社会的互动、传统与现代、大众与主流等诸多关系。因此，从文化的视角来看待当代水墨戏曲人物画这一艺术现象，把研究当代水墨语境的民族性与传统和现代文化的对话结合起来，探索建立一种对传统民间艺术与当代艺术结构的新的认识角度，将传统文化中合理的诉求用当代视觉语言进行转化，从而服务于理想精神家园那种人与自然、社会和谐共生之境界的描绘和建构，这才是中国艺术的审美价值的所在。
诚然，“戏墨·墨戏”临世已有三年，期间也曾遍走国内外，屡受推崇，可谓历久弥新；今信笔匆匆，是为序。（文章来源：《戏墨·墨戏---中国水墨戏画作品集》）
Each great nation in the world has her own elegant and exquisite performing art, profoundly reflecting that nation's spirit and aspiration: the Greeks have tragedy, the Italian have opera, the Russian have ballet, the British have Shakespeare, and these arts are the sources of their national pride and confidences. The Chinese nation has Kunqu opera, which is called “the ancestor of variety shows”. Used to be called “legend”, traditional Chinese opera was our ancestors’ ceremonial classic music in their minds, their spiritual homeland, and a part of their lives. Having experienced the baptism of the vicissitudes and social changes, Chinese opera survived and becomes a precious legacy and treasure in our national cultural treasure house.
Both originating from traditional Chinese culture, opera and traditional Chinese painting have a strong touch of expressionism with almost the same theories between opera performance and Chinese painting – paying more attention to spirit than image, both pursuing expressionistic similarity. Opera integrates narration and description, combining various art means, concentrating on figure's molding, extending the dimension of representing life, and condensing history, society, life, time and space in the specific scope of a stage. Opera figure painting takes opera performance on stage as its themes, and the formal beauty brought by traditional Chinese opera's high routinization provides the space of individual aesthetics for incessant innovation of opera figure painting's creation.
It's quite interesting to compare the differences between opera painting and opera performance. Folk opera paintings usually depict the moments of a certain figure's movement or conversation with relatively complicated backgrounds, not exactly the same as the real stage performance. As the special way of traditional Chinese opera's high routinization always represents life instead of reproducing it, the backgrounds and even the corresponding behaviors could be represented by actions and lines. Therefore, we may conclude, right from the beginning, folk opera painting was reprocessed and renovated by the creators.
Now, there is still no conclusion about the problem – when did opera figure painting originate? It seems a little reluctant to count the dancing figures on the colored pottery in Yangshao. However, it's quite reasonable to regard the paintings of variety shows on painted stones in the Han Dynasty as the source of opera painting. Till the Tang, Song, Jin and Yuan dynasties, the opera stone figurines were quite similar with the opera paintings in the forms of new-year painting and folk paper-cut in the Ming and Qing dynasties. As a popular folk painting form, new-year painting greatly influenced the representation and selection of opera themes, even directly influenced the later opera figure ink painting; paper-cut is the most popular art representation form in the folk in China, with quite a part on the themes of opera figures, reflecting the spontaneous connection between aesthetic concepts and opera themes in the folk. Shadow play and puppet show could also be included in this part. Through the transformation of molding art, traditional Chinese opera directly entered people's daily living environment, and directly exerted influence on the cultural spirit and intelligence in the folk during quite a long period in the history.
As for today's opera figure painting, artists prefer expressing their aesthetic concepts and philosophic thoughts through the themes of opera to merely getting inspirations from opera's plot or music; artists also take opera as a specific object of sentiment, and bestow it with freedom of expression. With the development of modern Chinese ink art, ink opera figure painting has become a special phenomenon in contemporary ink art and caused attention.
“Play Ink & Ink Play: Chinese Ink Opera Painting Exhibition” undoubtedly explains this special phenomenon of modern Chinese ink painting in a quite reasonable way. This exhibition displays the opera figure paintings created by some outstanding Chinese painters, and their works usually take consideration about cultural elements of opera as themes to express themselves and their thoughts about life, such as Guan Liang, Lin Fengmian, Han Yu, Cheng Shifa and Ding Liren; certainly, there are also quite some artists using opera's symbols to pursue renovation of modern ink painting's patterns, such as Zhang Guiming, Zhu Zhengeng, Nie Ganyin, Zhou Jingxin, Shen Hu, and etc. For the artists, so-called tradition congenitally exists inside themselves, and only unintentional representation of national characteristics is valuable. The combination of opera and ink art brings more freedom of emotion and imagination not only to the painters but also to the audience.
Art works’ important connotation is to realistically represent our social life and natural environment. In a specific era, especially the times of enormous changes happening in social political and economic lives, art's mission is to faithfully reflect the influence upon people's spiritual life brought by these changes, and to truthfully reflect the interaction between art and society and various relations among the traditional, the modern, the public and the mainstream. Therefore, there lies the aesthetic value of Chinese art – to treat the art phenomenon of contemporary ink opera figure painting from the perspective of culture, to integrate researches on contemporary ink context's nationality with the conversation between traditional and modern cultures, and to explore and establish a new cognitive perspective about the structures of traditional folk art and contemporary art, to transform the reasonable appeals among traditional culture in a contemporary visual language, thus to serve the depiction and construction of the harmonious realm of human, nature and society coexisting in the ideal spiritual homeland.
Indeed, “Play Ink and Ink Play” has existed for three years, and received lots of compliments when being exhibited at home and abroad with lasting charms. Today, I write this article as the preface.
Written in Shanghai at the beginning of autumn, 2009
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