古有唱和，今有对话。面对中国人文传统，高山仰止是每一个深具文人素养和视觉阅历的艺术家的真切心境。严善錞的学者、艺术家双重身份，使他能够通过创作实践探究笔墨与形式，与自己心仪的精神高峰对话，以获得一种细腻的创造性体验。他不仅喜欢动脑，而且越来越喜欢动手，来体会文人画传统中的趣味。创作，使他常常在一种独到、高远的艺术境界中回应内心挑战和诱惑，同时不断汲取的感性认识，刷新自己形而上思考的上下文。

　　精通欧美现代主义符号体系和阐释方式的严善錞，善于收集阅历中一个个具有当代形式感的思想碎片，并以文化传承为依托，十分从容地磨砺自己的个性。严善錞的纸上作品以极简的笔墨比拟出有关故乡杭州西湖的图像记忆，往往有一种从现实图像和概念中抽离而出的形象，平实、恬淡。他近期的布面作品则运用水墨、丙烯和蛋彩画的多种材料和技法，所做的事仍是描绘记忆中刻骨铭心的故乡。为此，他把意识和无意识深处的视觉积累尽可能透析出来，过滤掉诸多大师的形式感，从而获取一种冲和、朴素的趣味。他自如地穿行在文人画整体传统之中，无拘无束地在艺术史系统中缀入自己随心所欲挥洒、打造的文化补丁。严善錞的对话是自设的。在不再沉寂的文本系统中，他的对话方式甚至有些好高骛远。全球化背景下，随着文化对流的加速，严善錞的语境却越来越有现实性和开放性。显然，他将拥有更为漫长的回响。

　　读严善淳文，观严善淳画，使我想到了唐代的大艺术家王维，想到了他那自嘲而又自负的诗句：“宿世谬词客，前身应画师。”

　　Preface

　　Gu Zhenqing

　　Executive Director, Zhu Qizhan Art Museum

　　The ancient talked like a duet, the modern converse in a dialogue. According to the tradition of Chinese intellectuals, reverence for the great is what an erudite artist feels. The double identity as scholar and artist enables Yan Shancun to steer – by practicing and exploring the ink and form – a dialogue with his inner world so as to gain a delicate, original experience. His thinking and practicing also enables him to taste the fun in the tradition of intellectual painting. Standing in a high level of art, Yan uses his creation as a response to the challenge and allusion in his heart. In the meanwhile he draws on the cognition to refresh the context of his metaphysical thinking.

　　With great savvy on semiology and its deduction in the Western modernism, Yan is adroit at gathering scattered but contemporary and figurative thoughts, which facilitates him to forge his personalities culturally influenced by the traditional. Yan’s works on paper produce, with a few touches, flashbacks of the West Lake in his hometown Hangzhou. And some simple, concise images arise from the real and the conceptual. His latest productions that were actualized with ink, acrylic and many materials and techniques involved in tempera depict the unforgettable hometown. To this end he extracted the visual residues – whether conscious or subconscious – and filtered the vintage formative style so as to achieve a sense of both caprice and austerity. Yan can travel easily back and forth along the lineage of intellectual painting while making his unstrained renovative contribution to the system of art history. The dialogue he enacted was also preprogrammed by Yan himself. Within a no more silenced text system, his discourse shows somewhat artist’s high ambition. Against the global background and with the speedy cultural import-export, Yan has had an increasingly more realistic and open context. Evidently, he is about to meet up with a longer resonance.

　　Yan’s words and paintings remind me of Wang Wei (Tang Dynasty)’s self-mocking yet pretentious verse: a poet I am but a painter I was in the preexistence.

　　I mast have been an artist, but now I have being thought of as a poet.