Feng Yuanzheng exposes the single standard for art exams: Taiwan is full of "tall, rich and handsome", but "Fat Huang" from "Teahouse" can't be found

Recently, Feng Yuanzheng, dean of Beijing People's Art Institute, bluntly stated in an interview that art school admissions are now blindly pursuing "tall, rich and handsome", sparking heated discussion. He said that when the theater was rehearsing "Tea House", it couldn't even find a suitable candidate for the role of "Yellow Fatty" with a specific body shape. There was a serious gap between the actress who was over 1.6 meters tall and the male actor who was over 1.7 meters tall, because the actresses in art schools were all over 1.7 meters tall, and the male actors were all over 1.8 meters tall.

What Feng Yuanzheng is troubled about is that art schools currently fall into a single standard for selecting performing talents. Art exams often regard appearance and figure as the first screening threshold, pursue "photogenic good looks", and aim to cultivate potential stars, so that "the most beautiful candidate" becomes a hot topic every year.

The root of the problem is that in recent years, the aesthetic standards of film and television capital and the traffic economy have been like a baton, guiding the enrollment process of art schools in reverse. Some investors and producers adhere to the "star-centered system". When filming, they first look at the number of fans and traffic, even if the acting skills are not good. Under this logic, the casting of many film and television works does not take adaptation to the role as the highest principle, but only selects idol actors with exquisite facial features and good figures. The selection criteria for art exams and performance majors also have to be penetrated by this set of market logic.

The acting industry can be divided into "shengdan and pure ugliness", and diverse characters constitute thousands of roles in drama stages and film and television works. When various colleges and universities only produce "handsome men and beautiful women" like an assembly line, those rich and diverse "ordinary people" disappear from the works, and with them the ability of the works to present the complex world disappears.

The single standard of "appearance is justice" and "face is everything" also easily causes many young actors to fall into misunderstandings, thinking that as long as they have a good skin, they can create hit works even if they have no acting skills and just show off in front of the camera. As everyone knows, for performance, one's own image and temperament are only the basic conditions, and the basic skills of stage appearance are the foundation of success. If you fail to give a performance that touches people's hearts, the end result will be that the performance is just beautiful and soulless, leaving the audience feeling uninterested. Actors currently fear that they will be replaced by AI, but if they are all "copy and paste" in a stereotyped manner from their appearance to their acting skills, perhaps the first ones to be replaced by AI will be these actors with no personal identity.

When art schools recruit performance talents, their focus should shift from preset appearance templates to role plasticity: in addition to the assessment of basic performance skills, they should consciously reserve places for candidates with different body shapes and temperaments. When selecting actors, art schools, performance agencies, and film and television crews can also appropriately expand and enrich recruitment channels, face the whole society, and strive to discover more diverse performing talents.