Author: Li Li
This article was published in the "Writer's Digest" Issue 2490, 2nd edition
" The hair is like snow, and the farewell is beautiful." "Who is playing with a pipa, a song breaks the east wind"... These classically beautiful lyrics are the masterpieces of Fang Wenshan, the lyricist who once led the "Chinese style" of the Chinese music scene. It is also a youthful memory shared by a generation of fans. A few days ago, Fang Wenshan held a solo art exhibition in Beijing, telling about his source of inspiration.
Enter the record company with the dream of film
In 1969, Fang Wenshan was born in Hualien, a small city in eastern Taiwan. "Probably from junior high school, I started to like Song Ci. At that time, it was impossible to think that I would enter the society in the future. My job would be a lyricist, and I didn’t even know that writing lyricism could become a career. But these will invisibly become future creations. Nourishment."
After being discharged from the army, Fang Wenshan slowly developed the idea of taking the creative path, so he went to Taipei to work hard. He started to write lyrics while working. In order to earn a living, he worked as a mechanic repairman, a department store delivery driver, and an anti-theft system installer, but he never gave up his dream. In order to enter the music circle, Fang Wenshan used the dumbest method to compile more than 100 lyrics of his own creation and submit them everywhere. One day, he accidentally received a call from Wu Zongxian himself. In this way, he and Jay Chou joined Alfa Records in the same year.
As newcomers, Fang Wenshan and Jay Chou persevered in a round of comparisons and rejections, and because of their consistent musical tastes, they gradually became fixed partners. What’s interesting is that Jay Chou’s song writing is a visual thinking, and when he composes it, he has a sense of picture; Fang Wenshan is also like writing a script when he writes lyrics. This creative idea stems from his love for movies, Use words to express the elements."
I didn’t expect the Chinese style to be popular at the beginning
Fang Wenshan used to be Jay Chou, Jiang Hui, Jolin Tsai, 3 Jane Chen, 3 Eason Chan_span3 He has composed a large number of popular songs, among which the most widely spread is a series of "Chinese style" songs that he and Jay Chou collaborated with. "East Wind Break", " Chrysanthemum Terrace ", "A Thousand Miles Away", "Blue and White Porcelain", "Fireworks Are Easy to Cold"... These works combined the artistic beauty of traditional culture and classical literature with popular music, and shocked an era.
Actually, Fang Wenshan and Jay Chou did not expect that "Chinese style" would be loved by so many listeners when they first created it. They did not even realize that they were writing "Chinese style". Fang Wenshan recalled that when he first tried, he just thought that such a combination of lyrics and music was very interesting. "Like the early " 娘子", I used the vocabulary of the ancient poems like "Niangzi" outside the Great Wall and "Yangliu" with the western words. The combination of the music structure produced a special dialogue.” During that period, Jay Chou’s "Chinese style" almost hit one song, and the two more consciously put it in every album. One or two,Create continuously.
wrote so many classic lyrics, Fang Wenshan also began to "preach Taoism and education". Not long ago, he used a 30-day course to personally teach the unique secret recipe of lyrics creation in the form of online teaching for the first time. Fang Wenshan concluded that in the lyrics, someone must call the pronoun "you, me, or him", so that people who sing and listen to songs can empathize with each other; the creation should pay attention to the "largest common divisor of emotion", and the emotional state encountered by the most people is most suitable for writing. Popular music; the other is the use of rhyming. Lyrics are auditory text. To make the lyrics have a sense of rhythm and musicality, they must be rhyming.
Traditional culture becomes the nutrient of creation
This time he came to Beijing, what Fang Wenshan brought was not new songs, but three major series and more than 100 artworks he created during the epidemic. In the exhibition hall of 798 Soka Art, classic lyrics such as "East Wind Broken", "Chrysanthemum Terrace" and "A Thousand Miles Away" are used in bronze, ceramics, enamel characters, printed wood carvings, installation art, sculptures, prints, paper The above works and other forms are reborn.
""East Wind Broken" is a three-dimensional landscape that turns "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" into a mechanical structure, and "A Thousand Miles Beyond" turns the lyrics into a ceramic board. The font of "Outside" is italics with some cursive . Although they are all Chinese characters, they are written differently, and the visual rhythm is different. Cursive script is more like abstractionism. It is matched with italics, so the whole text is not easy to write. Reading it in a moment, it is like poetry, with a space for imagination."
Fang Wenshan carefully analyzed : "I think calligraphy is a very national artistic creation in the traditional field.For foreigners to learn calligraphy, they must first understand Chinese before they can truly appreciate the beauty of calligraphy, and appreciate its dry and wet ink colors, as well as the beauty of layout, structure, and white space written on rice paper. Calligraphy attracts me because of its high purity of national aesthetics. Many artists have tried to express calligraphy in different forms, and I have made many attempts this time. "
He also revealed that he is now conceiving a TV series with calligraphy as the theme. "Creation must have cultural background. Traditional Chinese culture, especially calligraphy, is creation for me." nutrient.
Fang Wenshan’s original trendy figure "Punker Cat Sting"
has also been popularizing Chinese calligraphy in recent years. Pay attention to the ancient singers on station B. Seeing that young people nowadays are more and more fond of "Chinese style" and "national tide", Fang Wenshan feels very happy : "This means that young people in this era have a sense of identity with Chinese culture. It is very important to have a sense of belonging and like the cultural nutrients of your own nation. ”
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