Oriental Health Aesthetics: The Time of Professor Qiu Zhenglun’s Explanation of the Book of Changes(68）

The greatest form of equality is the equality of life itself. We are born free, and life represents freedom. Therefore, you young people must learn to love boldly and selflessly. Actually, that last phrase is redundant—love is inherently selfless. The moment you attach conditions to it, it ceases to be true love.

Love cannot be bought with money, but sex can—that’s simply the reality. Art cannot be purchased with money, yet artworks can be bought. Aesthetic appreciation cannot be acquired with money, but consumer goods can be obtained through purchase. That’s why people often ask, “So you say this art is good? How much per square foot?” These are fundamentally different things.

Objectively speaking, in China today—and this carries a certain critical awareness—the art market is both immature and abnormal. Marx stated that a relationship exists between a commodity’s value and its price, where price fluctuates around value. Yet, China’s current art market severely violates Marx’s principle. It’s not price fluctuating around value; rather, the value of art undergoes seismic shifts dictated by the art market’s prices. Isn’t that abnormal?

Moreover, it’s absurd: just yesterday, a member of the Chinese Artists Association or Calligraphers Association might sell their work for a few thousand yuan per square foot. Then, overnight, they become a Vice Chairman of the Artists Association, or a council member of the Artists or Calligraphers Association—suddenly they’ve hit the jackpot! That piece you hesitated to buy at 5,000 yuan per square foot? Now it’s 50,000 yuan. God forbid it’s even per square foot anymore—soon it’ll be per square inch, or even measured in nanometers! It’s terrifying and utterly irrational.

But the aesthetics I speak of—calligraphic aesthetics, the aesthetics of the I Ching—demand that we return to ourselves through them. We must reconnect with our inner selves, with our lived, authentic experience of art as an expression of life itself. Only then does it gain meaning. Only then does it hold true value.