Something Chinese | Zhu Da: the mad monk painterZhu Da or Bada Shanren (1626–1705), a noted eccentric, 'had been an immortal genius who disguised himself as a calligrapherand a painter’. However madness was usually associated with genius, his contemporary, Chen Ding (born c. 1658) recounted him in the late 1680s:
朱耷，也叫八大山人（1626-1705），是一位著名但颇为古怪的人物，是一名“伪装成书法家和画家的不朽天才”。然而，疯狂往往是天才的征象之一，同时代的人陈鼎（生于1658年）在十九世纪八十年代后期这么描述他：
Shanren [Bada Shanren] was crazy! But how then can his brush has such strength? I have asked people from his village, and they all said: 'He accomplished it while he was drunk.’ Alas! Alas! One can get as drunk as he was, but not crazy as he was.
山人（八大山人）是个疯子！但他的毛笔怎么能有这样的力量呢？我问他村里的人，他们都说：'这是他喝醉的时候完成的作品。’唉！唉!一个人可以像他似的醉成那样，但做不到像他那样疯狂。
As a child prodigy, Zhu Da began painting and writing poetry in his early childhood. After the collapse of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Da became a Buddhist monk in 1648. Possibly the fall of that dynasty and the death of his father at about the same time caused him some psychic disturbance, and he may have hovered between real insanity and impassioned creativity.
作为一个神童，朱耷在很小时就开始绘画和写诗。明朝灭亡后，朱耷于1648年成为一名僧侣。王朝堕落，大约同时父亲去世，为他带来了不小的冲击；自此他一直在真正的疯狂和慷慨激昂的创造力之间徘徊。
He eventually left the Buddhist cloisterand exhibited wildly erratic behavior – such as writing the character for“dumb” (ya, 哑) and attaching it to his door and then refusing to speak.
他最终离开了佛教修道院，变得恣肆乖张——他曾经在门上挂了副“哑”字，然后就拒绝说话。
His paintings are usually in inkmonochrome, creatures as birds and fishes are given a curious, glowering, sometimes even perverse personality. He used an abbreviated, wet style that, while deceptively simple, captures the very essence of the flowers, plants, and creatures he portrayed. His flower-and-bird paintings, executed in the “sketchingideas (xieyi, 寫意)” style, were influenced by Chen Chun(陳淳) and Xu Wei (徐渭) of the Ming dynasty.
在他的画作中——通常是水墨单色画——像鸟和鱼这样的动物被赋予了充满好奇的，眩目的，有时甚至是乖张的个性。他的风格虽然看似简单甚或有些朦胧，但却捕捉到了所描绘的植物和动物的本质。他用写意笔法作花鸟画，是受到了陈淳和徐渭的影响。
He also painted landscapes in a dashing shorthand inspired by the 10th-century masters Dong Yuan (董源) and Juran (巨然). Unlike most Chinese painters, he does not easily fit into any traditional category; in characterand personality he was a complete eccentric and “individualist.”
他还以10世纪的大师董源和巨然为灵感，以挥毫短促的笔法画了许多风景画。与大多数中国画家不同，他无法被纳入任何传统类别之中；在性格和个性方面，他完全是个古怪的“个人主义者”。
Because he was a Ming prince, the dynastic upheaval created a great amount of uncertainty for his position in society. As years passed and the Manchurian court became more firmly established, there wasless and less insecurity among the Qing regime about remaining Ming loyalties and possible future rebellions. Due to these more stable circumstances, after 40 years, Bada Shanren deemed it acceptable to leave the monastery and tore-enter day-to-day life among society.
由于他是明朝遗孙，王朝的动荡为他在社会中的地位造成了很大的不确定性。随着岁月的流逝，满洲皇室的地位越来越稳固，清朝政权不在那么忌惮明朝残余势力和未来可能发生的叛乱。外部环境日渐稳定，40年过去了，八大山人终于有意离开修道院，重入社会，过起寻常日子。
He was said to have screamed and made weird sounds while painting. The stylized vertical writing of his pseudonym BadaShanren (八大山人) looks like the characters for laugh (笑) and cry (哭), thus by signing his paintings he implied his confusion and feelings of grief for the fate of his country and home.
据说他在绘画时曾尖叫并发出奇怪的声音。他署其化名“八大山人”时用极具艺术感的竖式笔法，乍看起来像“笑”字和“哭”字；因此，在给他的画作落款时，他也是也将他对国家，对家族命运沉浮的混乱悲伤之感暗藏其中。
His paintings feature sharp brush strokes which are attributed to the sideways manner by which he held his brush. In the 1930s, Chinese painter Zhang Daqian produced several forgeries of Bada Shanren's works but they are easily spotted by the trained eye, because the modern copieswere softer and rounder. Yale University scholar Fred Fangyu Wang was a major collector of Bada Shanren paintings from the 1960s until his death in 1997.
他的画作以笔触尖利为特征，这是因为他握画笔时总是斜着身子。在20世纪30年代，中国画家张大千制作了几部八大山人的赝品，但明眼人一看便知，因为这些现代的仿品的笔触较之真迹更柔，更圆润。旅美华人文化学者,先后任美国耶鲁大学中文教授的王方宇自20世纪60年代到他1997年去世期间，是八大山人画作的主要收藏者。
记者 | 赵静然 曹俊懿 叶锦仪
责编 | 李依璇 吴修远 史佳颖
美编 | 刘童 钟程祥
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