M87 Ding Fang

Red Brigade Precept (1987)

The Red Brigade (Hongse lu) were a Surrealist painting group founded by the artist Ding Fang (b. 1956) in 1986 in the Chinese city of Nanjing after the Jiangsu Youth Art Week’s Modern Art Exhibition. They formed part of the ’85 Art Movement (M84) – the nationwide wave of artistic activity that swept China in the mid-1980s in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door policy.

Ding wrote the group’s manifesto to coincide with their first exhibition, Vanguard (Xinfeng), in 1987. The ‘Red Brigade Precept’ is strong stuff, in which Ding argues that the ordinary artist must find inspiration in the act of creation, rather than in grand schemes and ideologies which have done nothing to aid humanity’s progress. Using the Greek myth of Sisyphus pushing his boulder up a hill as an analogy, Ding writes of the artist’s search for the sublime, and the spiritual consolation that can be found in simple creativity. As a result of these ideas, many of the paintings associated with the Red Brigade focus on mystical or religious themes.

The ‘Red Brigade Precept’ (‘Hongse lu zhenyan’) was originally published in the bi-monthly magazine The Trend of Art Thought (Meishu sichao) in January–February 1987. This journal was devoted to articles on Western and Chinese art, with a particular emphasis on artists of the ’85 Art Movement.

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Red Brigade Preceptfn1

On that mountaintop, while the flame propelled us to continue on the path toward rebirth, it also never ceased in diverting our steel hammer to the rocks.

One can conceive of how wise and intelligent the Earth is within the Universe; but at the same time, one can also imagine its loneliness. For humans, this loneliness is innate, for, in the end, there is nothing that can engage with it in a ‘final’ dialogue.

Everyone on Earth is shrouded in loneliness. Because of this lack of a ‘possibility for a final dialogue,’ history can only become a ‘process.’ In the eternity of space and time, they [these processes of history] ‘accumulate’ and ‘regenerate,’ without beginning and without end.

When we pursue the sublime, we feel the aforementioned ‘accumulation.’ This not only indicates to us the paths of human creativity that have already been laid out in this infinite time and space, but also makes clear our mission in this eternal existence.

The various things described above accumulate in the deepest reaches of our spirit and cohere in a tragic consciousness. This consciousness not only encompasses the specific temporal and cultural orbits in which we find ourselves, but also embraces those feelings of difference between cultures, times and places that are necessarily produced when we encounter another great cultural formation. Consequently, long before performing an action, we realize, a priori, the ‘meaninglessness’ of that ‘action’ within history itself.

This sense of tragedy is also manifested as a ‘tragic consciousness in painting.’ It involves not only our concern for the fate of common ‘people,’ but also a profound concern for their orbiting, without beginning or end, as destined through this eternal existence. It makes visible this kind of fate. Even ‘life,’ which [seems] so permanent, is also a mere ‘process,’ for it eternally lacks a ‘goal.’ Its course merely involves a certain ‘superposition’ over the ‘tracks of past courses’; thus, any of its essential meaning that [might seem to constitute an] ‘advance forward’ is in actuality a ‘superposition’ of the ‘common,’ ‘great dreams’ [shared across] ‘dissimilar’ space-times.

Our ‘astonishing imagination’ today is also a flame that recalls ‘the originary flame.’ This is a soul that roams forever in nighttime musings. It is like an intense wind that blows across the lowlands, chasing a brilliance that can never be attained. In spite of this, our innate will still chooses to ‘push rocks up the mountain.’fn2 Such an action originates in this kind of hope – in the hope that one gazes up to from the abysses of despair.

The essence of this ‘act of climbing the mountain’ could be described as ‘using art forms to rebuild a vital creation.’ Because of the light that it gives off when it is being composed, it also becomes a new ‘religion.’ At the same time, this great ‘vital creation’ is necessarily structured from every angle. It is not that one’s ‘choice can be free’ but that it ‘must be free.’ Because the fate of ‘people’s creative behavior’ is a refusal of the will of ‘existing gods,’ when ‘he’ is reborn like a phoenix from the ashes of history, a ‘new god’ is also born following him; and he says: ‘You must raise up the “newly born” will of the “newly born” man.’

We tread along our journey, and in the darkness we thirst for the brilliance of fire. When it burns brightest, we unexpectedly discover that this flame is actually ourselves. That color like blood is smeared on the emergent will in the fire of the self.fn3