Friedrich Nietzsche: (1844.10.15 – 1900.8.25) was a famous German philosopher, philologist, cultural critic, poet, composer and thinker. His main works include The Will to Power, The Birth of Tragedy, An Examination of Anachronism, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Philosophy in the Age of Greek Tragedy, and On the Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche offered a wide range of critiques and opinions on religion, morality, modern culture, philosophy, and science. His writing style is unique, often using the techniques of aphorisms and paradoxes. Nietzsche’s ideas have had a major influence on later philosophers as well as artists.
Ding Rong: painter, graduated from Communication University of China, now a member of Shenzhen Artists Association and Shanghai Artists Association.
With Love and Nectar / I oil on canvasDING Rong 2022
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power
With Love and Nectar / II oil on canvasDING Rong 2022
If we train our conscience, it kisses us while it hurts.– Friedrich Nietzsche
2022 / VII oil on canvas DING Rong
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
With Love and Nectar / III oil on canvasDING Rong 2022
For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.– Friedrich Nietzsche.
With Love and Nectar / IV oil on canvasDING Rong 2022
All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.– Friedrich Nietzsche.
With Love and Nectar / V oil on canvasDING Rong 2022
That which is done out of love is always beyond good and evil.– Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
With Love and Nectar / VI oil on canvasDING Rong 2022
Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.– Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
2022 / VIII oil on canvas DING Rong
then is truth?A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.– Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.
With Love and Nectar / VII oil on canvasDING Rong 2022
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it – all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary – but love it.– Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo.
With Love and Nectar / VIII oil on canvasDING Rong 2022
True, we love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
With Love and Nectar / IX oil on canvasDING Rong 2022
One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.– Friedrich Nietzsche.
With Love and Nectar / X oil on canvasDING Rong 2022
Everything straight lies. All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Everything straight lies. All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either.
— Friedrich Nietzche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
With Love and Nectar / XII oil on canvasDING Rong 2022
Beauty is for the artist something outside all orders of rank, because in beauty opposites are tamed; the highest sign of power, namely power over opposites; moreover, without tension that violence is no longer needed: that everything follows, obeys, so easily and so pleasantly – that is what delights the artist’s WILL TO POWER.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
ABOUT THEPHILOSOPHER
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. Nietzsche’s writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favor of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and a related theory of master–slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the “death of God” and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterization of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome cultural and moral mores in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, music, religion, tragedy, culture, and science.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
DING Rong, born in 1970 in Shanghai and graduated from the Communication University of China, is a Chinese painter and photographer. He is a member of Shenzhen Artists Association and Shanghai Artists Association. He has held solo painting exhibitions in major art museums and organizations in China including Guan Shanyue Art Museum (“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once – DING Rong’s Paintings on Chinese Rice Paper”, Oct. 2021, Guan Shanyue Art Museum, Shenzhen, China), Jiangxi Provincial Art Museum (“Azaleas in Full Bloom – DING Rong’s Paintings on Chinese Rice Paper”, Aug.-Sep. 2021, Jiangxi Art Museum, Nanchang, China), Qingpu Museum (“Growing Colours – DING Rong’s Paintings on Chinese Rice Paper”, Jan.-Feb., 2021, Shanghai, Qingpu Museum, China), Shanghai International Commodity Auction Art Center (“Treasured and Delicate – DING Rong’s Paintings on Chinese Rice Paper”, Oct. 2019, Shanghai International Commodity Auction Art Center, Shanghai, China), and Shanghai Research Institute of Culture and History (“Herbaceous Moments – DING Rong’s Paintings on Paper”, Sep. 2019, Shanghai Research Institute of Culture and History, Shanghai, China), to name but a few. His works were collected by museums, organizations and private collectors in China, Japan, Australia and USA.