Back to the Original Form

Back to the Original Form is a collection of essays by Zhu Xinjian (1953–2014), a leading figure of the New Literati Painting movement. Published in 2015 by Guangxi Normal University Press, it gathers writings scattered across various places during his lifetime, compiled into book form by his son Zhu Sha. The title comes from a seal Zhu Xinjian carved for himself, "Back to the Original Form"; the author said that, compared with his paintings, these texts are a kind of "original form," reflecting, deeply or lightly, the meanings his paintings left unsaid. Nearly 300,000 characters long and over four hundred pages, the book collects Zhu's articles, notes, transcribed conversations, university lectures, and forum posts, many of the latter compiled by the writer Chen Cun from the former "Small Vegetable Garden" forum. It is arranged roughly in five parts, with titles such as "Stopping a Child's Crying," "Nothing Is Impermissible," "An Owl Is an Owl, a Hawk Is a Hawk," and "A Blur on the River," chosen at random without fixed rule. The contents range across a thousand years of painting history and literati anecdotes and also address the present: New Literati Painting; Qi Baishi, Lin Fengmian, Wu Guanzhong, and the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou; figure, landscape, and bird-and-flower painting and calligraphy copying; as well as Confucianism and Zen, reading and film, the art market and artistic cultivation, and sex, desire, and women. The writing is mostly conversational, going wherever the thought leads—closer to "freehand" than "meticulous brushwork," mixing short phrases and fragments with long disquisitions, and its strength lies in being blunt, clear-eyed, and unpretentious. The book can be read as a way into looking at paintings, or leafed through as the sayings of an old rascal.