Drawing
The impulse to create images on paper has been with me since I was a three-year-old. Now only physical evidence remains—this is a corner memory can no longer reach. But in the storage room of our home, there truly is a box filled with hundreds of A3 sheets smeared with colored pencils, watercolor pens, and crayons. Even those drawing tools still lie quietly on the shelves, dust clinging to them.
My first art class probably began around that time as well. It was housed in a two-story flat building on a commercial street on Gudai Road in Xuhui. The walls of the first-floor hall were covered with artworks by children my age; on the second floor there were rooms for acrylics, ink painting, and even clay sculpture. The name of this art class was also interesting: Happy Camp. It sounded like a place that would give children warmth in their childhood; and indeed, it was here that I established a feedback loop linking art and happiness. Even now, as long as I have the chance to draw for a while, or even just do something tangentially related to art, I can experience the pure joy of creation once my mind settles. (When I wandered around the area again before going abroad, Happy Camp was no longer at its old location. The only remaining connection is a small bound booklet compiling works created by classmates.)
The end of childhood was also the end of Happy Camp. At seven, due to a move, my parents found a private tutor, and I studied traditional Chinese painting for half a year and sketching for another half year.
The tutor may well have been competent in Chinese painting; but his sketching truly lacked substance—he merely found images online and copied them onto paper, and with just a bit of guidance from someone more skilled, the flaws in proportion became obvious.
Thus he was dismissed. Yet paradoxically, the experiences of that year sparked in me a peculiar interest in sketching—every teacher who had taught me growing up said that sketching was something most people simply did not enjoy. Perhaps I am abnormal. In the tedious geometric solids, and later in plaster casts and portraits, I first perceived order, and then discovered contrasts of light and shadow, of extreme brightness and darkness. This impact seized me—I might not need color in my life, but I cannot live without chiaroscuro. Turning three-dimensional graphite cores of pencils into layered two-dimensional graphene through friction is, after all, a pleasure in itself.
The next two years were spent at a small art center in the town of Biyun. Its corner-lot building had a distinctive architectural design, and the guidance of two successive teachers allowed me to truly build a foundation in sketching. Coincidentally, I received an immense amount of practice in the first golden period of my technique development: three to five quarto sheets of line exercises each week, or drawing geometric forms from life, studying the texture of fabric, sketching simple still-life compositions… even the grip of the pencil… The only flaw was that I was “not bold enough”—I could never press the pencil all the way down to achieve truly dark tonal blocks, perhaps also due to my pencils being 2B at the time. Zhonghua pencils were never powerful enough. Mitsubishi 4B, on the other hand, was divine.
In fifth grade, through a classmate parent’s recommendation, I met a benefactor of my artistic life: Mr. Zhang Dinghua, known as the “Old Playful Child.” In Mr. Zhang’s private studio, I first encountered anime styles, while once again beginning sketching from geometric forms, progressing all the way to plaster casts and portraits. His studio was lenient in baseline requirements, but he himself would, before a piece was finished, repeatedly discuss with students where improvements could be made, how proportions could be more accurate, how illunimative contrasts could be more stable. Perhaps because I had always been a well-behaved child, I tended to accept different suggestions and revise promptly; the effectiveness of such feedback was further strengthened as a result. It was precisely this repeated refinement that led to a qualitative leap in my drawing skills—this must be because I acquired the ability of “reflection.” Reflection lies in carefully observing each stroke laid down minutes earlier, seeing where it aligns well with the original or the model, and where it diverges. In truth, this is training for vision and the eye, not merely for manual technique. Although I no longer draw intensively today, the sharpness of my eye has never faded: judgments of horizontal and vertical proportions: 1:1, 1:2, 2:3 etc., and the detection of subtle differences in basic geometric forms remain as reliable as ever.
There were all kinds of people in Mr. Zhang’s studio: children who stayed from early childhood to adulthood (from six or seven years old to university students), and adults who still wished to improve their artistic skills alongside work or family life. As an observer who stayed in the studio from elementary through high school—seven or eight years—watching these people grow over time, or gather and part for various reasons (usually academic, familial, or personal choices), I always felt a tinge of melancholy. Yet regardless of what happened to individuals within this community, I always knew clearly that the refinement of skill is ultimately a lonely process—one that must be completed alone. Thus, before the 2022 pandemic, I never once stopped attending studio classes.
In fact, Mr. Zhang’s studio taught me far more than sketching; it cultivated my artistic literacy in many dimensions. During the weekly three-hour session, there would always be ten or twenty minutes when he would ask us to put down our pencils and guide us to appreciate masterworks on an old television, listen to classical music on an antiquated MP3 speaker, engage in poster or illustration design around a theme, or place a small object or select a “lucky” classmate for live sketching. Consequently, I gained a rough familiarity with audiovisual aesthetics, graphic design, and quick sketching alike. In my final year and a half at the studio, I even experimented with the gouache style used in art-school entrance exams, experiencing the difference of a modularized world—contributing, in a small way, to my later minimalist illustration style.
I have a feeling that Mr. Zhang always regarded me as half a son or grandson. When we first met, he was already in his early seventies, and he praised me, saying I “looked very much like him as a child.”
Later, near the end of class, he and his wife would always take out some fruit or snacks and stuff them into my hands as a late-night treat. Comic books he refused to lend to other students (such as Illustrated World Literature Classics, which I astonishingly saw advertised at a well-known Wechat official account on June 24 this year) were carefully wrapped in plastic and handed to me. He even asked his granddaughter, who also studied at the studio, to take me as a role model. Truth be told, I owe him far too much that cannot be repaid with money. With his ability to illustrate hundreds of pages of Les Misérables, he could easily have demanded reverence, hired assistants, or charged several hundred RMB per hour; yet he charged only seventy for each three-hour session, sitting joyfully at a desk in the corner of the studio each day, reviewing the finished drawings students brought to him, then wandering over to see how everyone was doing. Can one still encounter such a teacher today? Another Father Zosima, perhaps?
The output and progress achieved in his studio were unmistakable.
During application season, I organized all presentable works from my childhood onward—no fewer than fifteen pieces (and I was not even an art student). The scattered practice works numbered at least three or four times that amount. Comparing my first large-scale portrait in seventh grade, The Western Cowboy, to The Old Man in ninth grade, and then to my Self-Portrait in eleventh grade, each piece surpassed the last in stroke refinement, composition, contrast of light and dark, and accuracy of form.
It was The Western Cowboy that ultimately led me to Pstore (my highschool’s campus store) at Pinghe. In eighth grade, I held an exhibition in my school, displaying a dozen or so pieces that could “hold the space,” whether practice works or major ones. A few days later, when I returned, The Western Cowboy was gone; hours later my homeroom teacher told me that a high-level secretary from the principal’s office had seen it and decided to hang it there as part of the office’s “permanent collection.” Thus I met the principal, the secretary, and the teacher in charge of Pstore, and began designing products and posters for Pstore, Pinghe Café, and the Pinghe Education Wechat official account… the graphic design skills learned in the studio were fully utilized here, and my relationship with Pstore grew ever closer… until I became store manager in my eleventh grade. That is another story.
The 2022 pandemic and the ensuing application season made it impossible for me to continue going to the studio. On the other hand, not long after the COVID quarantine lifted, the studio itself also ceased operations—perhaps due to Mr. Zhang’s cataracts, his wife’s exhaustion and illness, or simply that neither of them could endure more turbulence in life and wished to experience some peace.
Before going abroad, I wanted to see them once more; but both declined gently, claiming physical fatigue. After entering college, the heavy academic workload made I never proactively reached out again.
One morning shortly before Thanksgiving, I suddenly heard the news:
Mr. Zhang had passed away. Grief.
Another bond from my past was severed.
I thought my relationship with drawing had ended there—until I learned that I could attend this college next to RISD. I realized that I could continue walking this lonely path (he would be happy for me).