Playing with Insects in Childhood and Painting Them in Old Age
By Ding Liren
Often, I turn the clock back more than 80 years. Back then, what could be seen during the day were clear sky, brilliant sunshine and shining air as if sprinkled with gold dust. In the air sounded the buzz and hiss. The buzz came from the wing flap of slowly flying insects, while the hiss came when the fast flying insects rubbed against the air as they flied like bullets. Bees and butterflies are slowly flying insects, and the most common is the mosquito. Fast flying insects are in large quantity. They are small and weak but in face of many enemies, so they have to fly fast to survive. The most common fast flying insects are the flies, which are in wide variety.
The insects can fly long and short distance. Locusts, squat and heavy, can only fly in a stop-and-go manner--after flying a certain distance, they stop for a rest. The dragonflies, however, are lightweight with large and thin wings, allowing them to hang in the air without touching the ground at all. As for the beetles, they are strong and powerful enough to fly, though they were large in shape. They can fly extremely fast: small beetles fly over like bullets, and big beetles like cannonballs...In short, the air, especially in the countryside, was full of flying insects, buzzing and hissing from morning till night. How boisterous they were!
More than eight decades ago in the 1930s when I was about five or six years old, I had my best years of childhood. I spent my days in the glittering, buzzing and hissing air, with “bullets and cannonballs” flying around. Childhood is always so long and impressive that it has been deeply imprinted into my blood, marrow, chromosomes and genes. It is stamped indelibly on my memory.
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I went to school as I grew older. Sitting in the classroom, I could not help thinking about insects. Fortunately, the classroom window was open, outside which were the fields. I could hear the sound of flying insects.
There were a lot of insects at home and in the garden. My mother also kept silkworms indoors. Silkworms belong to worms, which have been cultivated in China for thousands of years.
We, the pupils, raised insects ourselves as well. There is a small beetle whose armor is shiny black. It was put in a little wooden box filled with red dates and cheap Korean ginseng. It loves to eat Korean ginseng, so it is called Korean beetle. Small wooden boxes could be placed in pockets, and we hid the beetle in the underwear pocket in winter, in order to warm it with our body heat. Insects are cold-blooded arthropods, also known as ectotherm. They cannot warm themselves and will be frozen to death in winter. So we had to keep them warm with body heat.
With appropriate temperature and adequate food, it could live normally in winter. The beetle was extremely fertile, and reproduced a full box of babies. What if the space in the wooden box was not enough to hold them? Give them to the classmates. As a result, many children in our primary school kept Korean beetles.
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My middle school was in the countryside. Around the school were lots of camphor trees. At the beginning of winter, many broken branches dropped down from the trees. They were about 6-7cm long, each of which hid a worm. It was the worm that gnawed and broke these branches. This camphor tree worm lived on the juice of the tree. When it grew to maturity and was ready to pupate, it would gnaw through the branch, falling to the ground. That is what we picked up under the trees.
Broken branches were of different length and thickness, with varied twists and turns. The multicolored bark had different texture. Those varied branches were beautiful in our eyes, all of which were worthy of collection. This kind of collection did not require money, and we just needed to spend some time picking the branches up. Some students also collected camphor tree worms. The collection could be in large or small scale. Some students collected as many as a thousand branches with worms. Ample space was needed, but for a boarding student, it was impossible to have a collection cabinet. He had to empty the only suitcase to hide the camphor tree worms. This was his precious collection. I was once concerned with his collection: if he brought back home a case of camphor tree worms at the end of the semester, how should he explain to his parents?
We also communicated on camphor tree worms from time to time. Together, each collector would show his/her collection, and we appreciated and evaluated the worms and exchanged experience. Sometimes, we exchanged worm with each other. These activities added much fun to the lonely and monotonous middle school life in the countryside.
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In the first year of high school, Mr. LU Fuchuan taught us biology. Teacher LU is the outstanding student of ZHU Xi, a famous biologist in China. Mr. ZHU was dedicated to the research of asexual reproduction and he invented “the toad without grandfather”. Without sperm, an egg can developed into a frog by pricking with a glass fiber to enable egg cell division. In his early days, Mr. ZHU had written a set of books on popularization of science, such as Egg to Human and Human to Egg and The Change of the Male and Female, which made me fascinated.
Mr. ZHU is the student of great international biologist Batarllon. An accomplished disciple owes his accomplishment to his great teacher. Hence, teacher LU had solid foundation of biology due to knowledge inheritance. We were so lucky to be his students. A lecture on genetics was the most impressive. The animated narrative of Mendel’s pea experiment was delivered as if we were guided to a vegetable field in the back yard of a small church in Austria and saw Mendel moving the pea vines in front of a pea shed.
Mr. LU said that genetics is not only about heredity, but also variation, both of which are equally important. The heredity is traditional and conservative, without which there will be no species. Variation means change and alienation, and no new species will appear without variation and evolution. He pointed out that the best method of variation is hybridization. Good parent plants should be selected for hybridization, and two parent plants should be as far as possible in terms of consanguinity.
This discipline can be applied not just in biology, but also in art. A typical example in art is Picasso, whose art is the result of hybridization between Spanish art and African black art. Such hybridization is a distant one, so Picasso’s art is particularly vigorous.
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In the third year of high school, Mr. YIN Guangde, a professor from the Department of Biology of Shandong University began to teach us. He went back home to recuperate and had nothing to do. So he wanted to make contributions to the high school in his hometown and served as a teacher in several biology classes. Biology class was not available in the third year of high school, but I was a biology lover and had read some biology books. So, I had a common interest with Mr. YIN and we often observed the slides under the microscope and chatted about biology. In this way, I got closer to biology. Grade three in high school was the last semester, when we were going to take the college entrance exam. It was moment to making choice. At such critical moment, these two teachers played a significant role in my choice of biology. Of course, it was only a recent factor; indeed, my love for insects also played a major role. Although I was very fond of painting, an interest cultivated since I was 6 years old, I finally chose biology.
I took part in the unified examination that year and was admitted to the Department of Biology of Nanjing University, which is a famous university with excellent teachers and equipment. My teacher Mr. CHEN Yi studied earthworm, and he held the rare doctor’s degree in earthworm. Native in Linhai, we are fellow-townsmen. This relationship brought us closer. Earthworms are lower creatures, and Mr. CHEN’s lectures focused on lower animals, especially the rich content of protozoa, which broadened my horizon in this aspect and led me into this extremely mysterious microscopic world with multiple perspectives. I came to understand the richness of this microscopic world, which is as colorful as the world of higher animals.
For art, the same is true--raw art is not interior to derivative art at all. On the contrary, high-quality raw art is superior to secondary art.
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At the end of 1950s, I joined East China Institute of Applied Entomology, Shanghai Academy of Science & Technology, where I worked with a pool of experts on various insects. I saw a variety of insects, as if I was wandering in the world of insects. I also painted all kinds of insects, with so many objects for painting.
A small insect could be magnified as big as a helicopter, and a small grasshopper could be as large as an aircraft carrier. I was also able to see their internal part, and observed the organs, systems and tissues like wandering in a museum. An insect also has the digestive system, circulatory system, nervous system and muscular system. It has everything that are possessed by the higher animals. Despite its small body, it has complete functions.
In the institute, I studied insects every day and stayed in the world of insects for five years.
As time passed by, I had been busy with lots of things all the time. Trivial matters such as insects were laid aside and I have almost forgotten it.
The cranial nerve cells behave mysteriously and unpredictably. One day in last year, I suddenly thought of insects. It came uninvited, without any reason. Blocks of insects flied in, unstoppable and overwhelming. The only thing I can do is to paint them.
How to paint insects? To my surprise, with five years of experience in painting insects, I was a little rusty and at a loss. Has the era changed or my mindset changed? In fact, I’m no longer a painter creating specimen drawings, or a stage personage painter depicting the drama actors. Previously, I just painted mechanically following the subjects, lack of creation and naturalism.
The painting should not be like this, and the real painting is never like this.
Painting should reflect the experience of objects. It’s about the experience, rather than the shape and form.
This experience is not someone else’s, and it’s yours, unique and exclusive.
The essential meaning of painting has changed, so has the techniques and methods. Besides, tools and materials also need to be changed. A change leads to changes in all fronts, completely and thoroughly.
So what technique shall I take? Disintegration-rearrangement. --It sounds kind of trendy, similar to a term in design. In fact, disintegration-rearrangement is nothing new. It has existed not only in the small circle of art, but also in various schools and subjects for a long time. Let’s take examples from the clothing, food, house and transportation, which are most closely related to people’s life. First, clothing. A bolt of cloth is a whole, cutting into pieces is the disintegration, and then sewing into clothes is the rearrangement. Second, food. Take the staple food for example. The rice and wheat field is the whole, harvesting, threshing and grinding stand for disintegration, and then making the rice and wheat flour into cakes means rearrangement. Third, house. The mountain is the whole, blasting into rocks, rolling into pieces, grounding into powder and burning into cement constitute disintegration, and building into house is rearrangement. Fourth, transportation. The same is true of means of transportation like cars.
The things needed by human life as well as changes of wind and cloud, mountains and rivers, land and sea on the earth cannot be divorced from the disintegration-rearrangement. Disintegration-rearrangement even applies in the changes of the nebulae in the universe.
It can be seen that disintegration-rearrangement is the universal principle for the morphological change of the whole material world. Cutting and pasting with a pair of scissors and a few pieces of paper can be regarded as my work of disintegration-rearrangement. It is really an activity with a minimal degree of disintegration-rearrangement.
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