One Person, Two Pens

                Yang Fuyin has  two pens, to be more exact, a brush and a ball pen. He uses the brush to paint  and the ball 
                pen to write. (His son said Yang takes only ball pens to write  articles.) He is good at both. It is not hard to 
                imagine his free and easy  style. He is  hard-working at both painting and writing. He advised the students to
                paint  more when he gave lectures to the art majors in South China   Normal University,  because the painting
                process is also the process of exploration. Without  exploration, nothing new will emerge in the painting. 
                Without hard work, there  is no exploration. 
                That’s why Yang  Fuyin explores on the paper all day long. He adopts background color for one  moment, 
                but then he deserts it. For another moment he paints blue and white,  but later he will try the mountain, the
                water, the flowers, the bird, or the  figure painting. No matter how he changes, he is always focused on lines 
                for he  thinks lines are better at expression than anything else. 
                For many years  he works so and never stops even a single day. Song Yuan, Fuyin and I wrote a  dialogue
                between us with the title “You Always Shock Us”. Every time we meet  after we haven’t seen each other for 
                some days, he will show us his new  paintings, which really shocks us. His explorations are fruitful. 
                What he gets  from explorations is also written on paper. I really enjoy his articles,  because he is not confined
                by any theoretical systems and his words are full of  insights into art. His individuality, his independent 
                thinking, which shines in  the dark and illuminates the way ahead, are obviously more important than  systems.
                This book, a collection of his speeches and articles, can never be  given enough attention. Like what he often 
                quoted the poet Jia Dao, “I got two  verses in three years, and can’t help my tears when reciting them”. 
                The first  article I read written by Yang Fuyin was his The Red Bolt. He studies in Guangzhou, but he originated
                in Hunan. The article was about the  homesickness. Every word and every sentence are full of his strong 
                feeling for  his hometown. As a man residing in a place far away from home, he expects his  attachment and 
                devotion to his hometown to be read by his townsmen. I sighed  with emotion after completing the reading of 
                it, and I also held that such an  article, with the diction and the skillfulness, was beyond the reach of  ordinary
                writers. The deep love for his hometown and the deep loneliness  reflected are rare in this world. All excellent 
                traditional Chinese poems and  essays are against man’s normal feelings, not reasons. I also learned from that 
                article that one has to have in his heart an area that is warm, although it is  cold everywhere. 
                The first time  I appreciated Yang Fuyin’s writing was not because of his articles but because  of his couplets. 
                He also mentioned in this book that he wrote his very first  couplets for me. Back in the 1980s, I sent him my 
                novel collection Xiaocheng Wu Gushi (“No Stories in the  Small City”), which he liked very much, and wrote me
                a pair of couplets as his  opinion of the book, Pingping changshang  shiqing, suisui bianbian daolai (“Ordinary
                things, casually told.”) Looking  at his calligraphy, I was moved, and took him as my bosom friend for such a 
                conclusion revealed my style very well. I also thought he was really talented  in that he could easily express 
                what he thought in words. Great he is! 
                He later wrote  a column once a week for three years on Sanxiang City Express. Liu Riu, the  editor of this
                column, also an excellent writer, once said it was rare for a  painter to write articles as wonderful as Yang’s, 
                which, I think, is quite  right. Yang Fuyin reads quite extensively. As the ancient Chinese poet Su  Dongpo said, 
                one can improve his qualities by reading. I think Yang improves  the quality of his articles by reading. His 
                paintings are extremely particular  about the expression of lines, and in the same way, his articles stress the 
                joys and fun readers can get. He writes in a simple but unconstrained manner.  He is thrifty in words but deep 
                in meaning. From each article, the time and  energy he spent can easily be detected. 
                During my two  meetings with him in Guangzhou,  he talked with me about Hu Lancheng, Zhang Ailing, Shen
                Congwen, and the writer  Liu Liangcheng. He read their works and had many thoughts. He reads diligently 
                and  writes attentively. Writing was originally just a pastime for him, but it seems  to have become his full-time 
                job together with painting. He finds writing  joyful, and his readers find his articles joyful. He has written about 
                many  people and many events, which linger in his mind and take him back to the old  times. Every word in 
                these articles is a gentle warm touch upon the past life. “Warm”  is the word I’d like to use to describe his 
                writing. Another feature is that he  is always under the sway of his emotions when writing. 
                This is the  finest writing state: to write with his heart, with his feelings. That is why  this book is before us 
                now. He is not playing writing: he is, as his innocent  heart reveals, writing his thoughts with emotions, about
                the people, about the  events, about life and God.