The art of growing old gracefully

Huang Yongyu's paintings can command huge prices, but at 91 his new found passion is writing

Living in Italy has left indelible marks on Huang Yongyu. From the time the artist held his first exhibition in the country to when his book Along the Seine River to Florence was translated into Italian recently, a lot of water has passed under many bridges.

In those 30 years or so Huang, now 91, has become a household name in China, and if you want to buy one of his paintings you had better be prepared to pay a pretty penny, in fact 600,000 yuan ($96,000; 90,000 euros) - per square meter.

Huang says he dislikes his works being pigeonholed, and indeed when he thinks of them he has other birds on his mind.

"I'm a hen that lays only eggs. I will leave it to others to criticize the eggs. Some hens like to cluck every time they lay an egg, but I'm not that kind of hen."

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that his works are influenced by Italy. He began living in the country 24 years ago, after traveling from Paris to Florence painting people and scenery. He noted down what he saw and experienced on the way and assembled the paintings and stories into the book, which became a best-seller in China when it was first published in 2006.

"The two countries are far from one another, but their attitudes to family, their traits and even their good points and bad points are surprisingly similar," Huang says.

His daughter and son both studied in Italy, and her daughter is now working there.

Asked what he thinks of Italy today, 20 years after he wrote the book, Huang replies: "Italy is the same, but I am old."

He bought a villa next door to the old residence of Leonardo da Vinci in Florence, and he calls it his second home.

"For me, going to Italy is like going home. What I like about Italians is that they have a sense of humor and are passionate about life. They are willing to befriend you and they remember you."

When the Italian version of his book was launched at the Italian embassy in Beijing, Huang told an anecdote to illustrate Italian wit.

One day, he said, he was wondering around a weekend open-air market in Vinci, Tuscany, and was chatting with someone selling wild mushrooms. A man arrived and demanded of the hawker: "Do you have any mushrooms that I can use to poison my wife?" His wife, right behind him, pinched his backside hard, and everyone burst out laughing.

"I just love Italians," Huang says. "They are willing to trust you and get very near you. These days I come to China to see my relatives, and go to Italy to see my friends."

Long before Huang first set foot in Italy, art was in his blood. He was born in Fenghuang county, Hunan province.

A river with crystal-clear water, one that is lined by wooden homes, runs through the town. It is a popular tourist destination, and two of its most famous sons are Huang and Shen Congwen, a writer who also happens to be Huang's uncle.

Huang says that even during the country's days of penury in the 1950s and 1960s, when you needed a voucher to buy anything, Huang and his family saved their vouchers for buying cloth before finally having enough to buy several meters of canvas to make a small tent so the family could go out camping on weekends.

His passion for art is reflected in the way his properties are decorated. In his garden in Beijing he grows lotus from all over the country, and calls it his "ten thousand lotus garden". The property, covering 4,000 sq m, is striking in its setting, a small suburban village of Beijing.

In the garden he has raised dozens of dogs and cats, two of the dogs basking in the names Kexue (Science) and Minzhu (Democracy).

Huang was born to a poor family and barely finished his secondary school. He repeated his second year five times, meaning he accrued hundreds of classmates.

During that lengthy stay, he says, he skipped classes and read a lot in the school library, mostly geography and meteorology books.

It was there that he started woodcarving. Later, after leaving school, he went to Fujian province to work as an apprentice in a small porcelain workshop.

He likes telling jokes, so he gained the nickname the Joker King, but says that name does not really reflect him accurately.

"From when I was very young I lived a hard and even dangerous life. I just learned to cope with everything with the help of a cheerful attitude.

"And I didn't leave my hometown with big ideals and ambitions, but purely to make a living. The alternative was to starve."

During food shortages of the 1960s, Huang says, he sometimes went out hunting rabbits to give meat to families.

Though he gained his fame in China because of his art, he says his big passion is writing novels. He is now writing one based on his own life. Even though he has only written about it until the point where he was 12, he has already written 800,000 words, he says.

Each morning he writes his novel and during the afternoon he paints or meets friends.

"I would like to be a novelist, but there is not enough money in it. That's why I do all these paintings: to support my writing," he jokes.

Looking back over his life, he concludes that the path to happiness lies in being free.

"Not only physically free, but mentally free as well."

He has pursued that freedom all his life, he says.

"I tried to adjust to hardship and I tried to find opportunities to paint. I have never regretted a thing."

That positive outlook is reflected in his views on religious beliefs. Huang says he respects all major religions because they teach people to be kind to one another.

In Huang's artistic career spanning many decades he has had many accomplished Chinese artistic peers, such as Zhang Daqian and Qi Baishi.

"Every era has its own peak moment. You cannot really compare arts in different eras. Art is not about how to beat the last generation. Even the most avant-garde paintings will become traditional in the future, and both traditional and avant-garde arts have good and bad proponents.

"Being new is not necessarily good, just like girls are not always good-looking just because they are wearing the latest clothes." The same rules apply to being old."

wangchao@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 03/13/2015 page29)