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Old Buddhist tale brought light to illustrator
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A Persian merchant gets lost in the barren and bleak Gobi Desert when suddenly a spiritual deer of nine colors emerges to guide him. Later, the deer saves a second man who is drowning in a river and asks him not to reveal anything.
The king learns from the merchant about his experience in the desert and insists on hunting the deer down to make clothes out its skin. He offers a substantial reward. For money, the second man leads an army of warriors to the same spot and enters the river again, hoping the deer will show up to rescue him. But this time, when the deer comes up, all the warriors’ arrows turn into dust and the man drowns.
This animated short film, “The Nine-Colored Deer” (1981), is based on a Buddhist tale discovered in the cave paintings from the famed Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang of northwestern China’s Gansu Province. For most of the generation born in the 1970s and 1980s, it is a common memory.
Not only did the animation tell about greed and karma, the meticulous illustrations with vivid colors in ethnic Dunhuang fresco style are too sumptuous to be forgotten. The tale was also made into an illustration book years later.
“China has great culture and art history and we once created so many wonderful animations, which influenced generations. Sadly, what we do today is merely imitating Japanese and Disney cartoons,” Feng Jiannan tells Shanghai Daily.
Feng was one of the main crew members working on “The Nine-Colored Deer” and was in charge of the scene design. Now the 74-year-old man sits on a wooden chair in his humble illustration workshop hidden in a residential area of the Pudong New Area.
Surrounded by a wall of art books and artists’ brushes and pigments, he is listening to Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony” and re-reading a collection of Henri Matisse’s theory of art.
It was the summer of 1980 when Feng and four other crew members of “The Nine-Colored Deer” embarked on a 2-month journey following the Silk Road from east China to the western part.
“We stayed in one cave of Mogao Grottoes with hundreds of Buddhist sculptures for 23 days for inspiration,” he recalls.
They recorded each impressive scene by sketching them. Then they polished and perfected the images when they came back to Shanghai.
For people of Kate Wu’s generation, the memories are powerful.
“I remember as a child, every time I saw this deer fly away until it was a tiny lighted dot in the sky full of beautiful floating clouds,” says Wu, 28. “Then the camera moved to the entrance of the cave in Dunhuang Grottoes, and you could actually see the cave number on it.”
For Feng, painting is far more than a way to make a living and become famous, but he derives positive energy from it, and it’s become his life passion.
“I had a nickname, ‘Cannon Feng,’ since I always spoke in a straightforward way about my thoughts in art creation no matter who I was talking to or might offend that may sabotage my career,” he says.
“I may not be very successful or rich right now, but it is also the ‘cannon’ spirit that makes me insist on my art aspiration,” he adds.
Born in a little village in Jiangsu Province, Feng was fascinated by folk culture as a child, such as the ceremony of worship, puppet shows and more. If something captured his interest, little Feng would doodle it with a pen or carve it onto wood.
After graduating from high school, Feng was assigned to an agriculture department in Zhejiang Province as a technician diagnosing the health of plants.
“I went around the towns to check the condition of plants and as soon as I finished working, I took out the pen and sketched the things around me,” he says, adding that it was this experience that gave him great perceptual skills in color and nature.
At the age of 20, an offer from Nanjing University changed his life. He was admitted as a student in oil painting — a dream come true.
“I remember walking into the corridor of the teaching building, I had never seen so many plaster statues,” he says, still with an excited smile on his wrinkled face. “They were brought by (great Chinese artists) Yan Wenliang and Liu Haisu when they were studying abroad in Paris.”
Some of the statues had cracks.
“They were too big to carry out, so they had to break them and piece them together when they returned to China. You could see the bronze seal on the statues in French — all too good to express with words,” he recalls.
In college, Feng learned about art and culture. Tuition and accommodation were free but he still could not afford to buy all the painting tools.
“During the late 1950s, we only had 500 grams of food one day and 100 grams of meat a month. But every day I had to leave one-third of my steamed bun as rubber in sketching class,” he recalls.
Feng had to sell his only cotton-padded trousers for painting paper, brushes and pigments. “When the shop assistant told me ‘Young man, do you know how cold it is in Nanjing during winter?’ I replied, ‘It’s okay, I am young’,” Feng says.
However, the excitement for preparing all the tools for painting class didn’t last long, as the “cultural revolution” (1966-76) started. Soon members of the educational administration came to scold his action as “insulting to socialism.”
“Hard as that condemnation hurt me, it never shook my passion for art, though I learned about the darkness of humanity,” he says.
“That’s why I like children — they are pure and bright,” Feng adds.
He went on to illustrate about 50 books for children. Now enjoying his retirement, he dedicates himself to combining Chinese philosophy with his paintings.
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