PART ONE
“BLOOD LINES” AND EARLY HISTORY, 1958-1981
Waking up, with my work finished, I ask myself: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
- Paul Gauguin, Letter from Tahiti to André Fontainas, 1899
Once, we would return to the seashore again and again, losing ourselves in thought as we watched the waves dancing: “Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?”
- Zhang Xiaogang, Looking for That Existence, 1986
Earliest Years
On 22 February 1958, four days after Chinese New Year, Beijing’s maximum temperature on that day was 5-7 degrees and its lowest was 6-8 degrees below. Also on that day, the People’s Daily editorial was undramtically headed “Positive Proposal by the USSR”. Two days previously, the Soviet Union had issued its Declaration of the Soviet Government on the Question of North Korea, to which the Chinese Government had quickly responded by stating that it was withdrawing troops as quickly as possible now that a truce in the Korean War had been concluded for four years, thereby expressing its position on the war of the socialist bloc countries. A story on the front page of People’s Daily reported that Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai had returned to China from Pyongyang, having “taken the friendship of the Chinese people with him, and returned with the friendship of the Korean people”. On page 4 the paper published an article signed by Marshal He Long titled “The Soviet Union is the Model for the Combination of Patriotism and Internationalism”. Other pages presented articles on the Soviet army and reports on DPRK issues. On this day, other major newspapers also devoted a great deal of space to reports treating other aspects of North Korea. Guangming Daily, for example, carried “Premier Zhou’s Telegram of Thanks to Kim Il-Sung” on its front page and on Page Four an article headed “Learn from the Great Soviet Army and Strive to Build an Excellent Modern Revolutionary Army!” China Youth Daily ran articles titled “The Army of Peace” and “Your Heroic Image Inspires Us: Dedicated to the Comrades of the Soviet Air Force Stationed in China” on Page Four, while Wenhui Bao carried reports including “The Chinese and DPRK Governments Hold Ceremony for Signing of the Joint Declaration in Pyongyang” and “Officers and Men of the Chinese People’s Volunteers Support the Sino-DPRK Joint Declaration”.[1]
However, there was another category of articles and reports in the newspapers that day.
The anti-rightist campaign, that had been continuing for nearly a year since it was kicked off by the publication in May 1957 of Mao Zedong’s article “Things Have Changed”, had led to the identification, ridicule, criticism and loss of freedom of “rightists” in culture and art circles.[2] In the art world, Jiang Feng, a veteran artist once filled with revolutionary zeal that took him from the KMT-controlled part of China to join the Communist Party in Yan’an where he eventually became a cultural official of the Party,[3] was now identified as a rightist who had “distorted and damaged the Party’s policies on literature and the arts” and who as a result had been removed from his posts as President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and Deputy Chairman and Party Secretary of the China Artists Association. The tense and vicious political atmosphere generated by the “anti-rightist movement” could also be felt in this news report from the 15 August 1957 issue of Wenhui Bao:
Xinhua News Agency reports: The ongoing disclosures in the art field have begun to expose the true face of Jiang Feng’s anti-Party clique. For the past fortnight the Ministry of Culture, the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and other units have held hundreds of seminars and workshops, attended by Beijing artists, teachers, and students and representatives of artist circles from East, Northeast, Southwestern and Central China who have rallied to the call of the Party to close ranks to attack the Jiang Feng Clique and force its members to begin to confess. According to the facts that have been uncovered, Jiang Feng used his gang to oppose the Communist Party over a long period and his network has expanded to foment trouble in art institutions throughout the country, in alliance with the Ding Chen anti-Party group.[4]
By 1958, the “anti-rightist campaign” had been successful, and an article on page two of Wenhui Bao on 22 February, titled “Vigorously Promote Literary and Artistic Creation”, reported that conferences staged by the Literature and Art Federation and the various Artists Associations “discussed how to advance literature and art to cater to the conditions of the Great Leap Forward in China”. It contained the following statement:
These meetings provide a review of the battlefront in literature and art in 1957. Everyone recognizes that following the anti-rightist struggle in literary and art circles in 1957, there is universal socialist enthusiasm and many writers and artists have penetrated the masses (sic.) to further creative preparation or artistic practice.
……
Vice-Chairman of the China Artists Federation, Zhou Yang, commented: 1957 has been a major victory for literary and art circles in the struggle to counter-attack the rightists. Work in literature and art is now more firmly on the road to socialism and there have also been important new successes in creative work. He said that, in order to ensure that literary and artistic creation makes a great leap forward, we must combine with the masses of workers and peasants on a larger scale and in greater depth, and works must exceed earlier levels, not only quantitatively but also qualitatively.
The report finally concluded that the enlarged meeting on the thirteenth chaired by the China Literature and Art Federation resolved to “revoke the positions of the following seven national committee members of the Federation: Ding Ling, Jiang Feng, Ai Qing, Chen Yi, Bai Lang, Lu Kanru, and Lian Kuoru”.
Guangming Daily was regarded as a newspaper that drew its readership from intellectual and cultural circles. On 22 February 1958, the editorial on its front page was titled “Remove All Ideological Obstacles and Join the Side of the Rectification and Reform”. This editorial made it clear that intellectuals had no choice but to accept the political demand of the Communist Party to transform their thinking:
Our socialist fatherland is riding the waves and striving upstream, generating excitement, as everyone is caught up and encouraged to advance ever onwards. In this glorious era, how should bourgeois intellectuals and members of the democratic parties behave? There is no doubt that the vast majority of people demand to keep up with the times. The new era calls for intellectuals to be both red and expert, and then even more red and expert. Only in this way can they keep up with the times. Therefore, bourgeois intellectuals must spur themselves on to achieve a fundamental transformation.[5]
1958 was the ninth year of the CCP’s rule over China, and the eight years of socialist construction had familiarized people with the political atmosphere created by the CCP and related basic political concepts, such as the concepts of “New China” and the leadership of the CCP, as well as the intimate connection between socialism and communism. Even though this vocabulary had been used in the period of KMT rule, the Chinese people under the leadership of the Communist Party were now to make rapid strides towards a Communist society. On August 17 of that year, the CCP Central Committee declared: “The realization of communism in China is no longer a matter for the distant future”. On the basis of an ideal and happy human society, everything the Communist Party advocated was what the people wanted, everything that the Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong articulated was what the Chinese people felt in their hearts, and Mao Zedong was described as “the savior of the people”.[6] As the Government continued to extend its control over State power and ideology, any questioning of the leadership of the Communist Party, any expression of dissatisfaction with the socialist system, and any comment on the Party and State leadership was regarded as the action of an enemy of the people. Throughout the 1950s, people became all too familiar with a series of ideological and political campaigns: “the elimination of the feudal system of land ownership”; “the suppression of counter-revolutionaries”; “the three-anti and five-anti campaigns [against the three evils and the five evils]”; “the three great transformations”; “smashing the Hu Feng anti-Party clique”; the “anti-rightist campaign”; “the all-out effort to build socialism more rapidly and economically”; the “Great Leap Forward”; and the “People’s Communes”.[7] These different concepts and campaigns were regarded as necessary political steps in order to consolidate the political power of the people and build socialism in line with the interests of the Party, the State and the people. Many people were filled with political enthusiasm and participated to varying degrees in these different campaigns, and most people believed in the truth and credibility of the news, views, and even events that were reported in the daily papers. A strong State apparatus ensured the dominance of the Communist Party, with the previous Kuomintang regime’s corruption and political defeats still fresh in people’s memories. When the Communist Party came to power and told people that the people were now the masters of the country, most believed this to be true: not only could the social and economic damage from the Kuomintang’s period in government be fixed, but now the ideals of communism would soon be realized.
In the 1950s, despite the hostility, tension, and threat that filled political life, daily life continued to have its tender moments, and until 1966, people could still feel that literature, music, and painting were imbued with abundant humanity. During that time, for Zhang Xiaogang and others of his generation Let’s Pull on the Oars was a familiar song, which remains to this day a tender and youthful memory for the generation born in the 1950s. The lyrics, as far as possible, avoided ideology:
Let’s pull on the oars and forward row, over waves our boat will slowly go.
The glorious pagoda’s mirrored in the water, verdant trees and red walls are around yonder.
Our boat’s drifting on the rippling space, a cool breeze rustling on my face.
The red scarf catches sunlight, sunlight scattered on the water’s face.
From below the fish are watching, listening to our happy song.
Our boat’s drifting on the rippling space, a cool breeze rustling on my face…[8]
Of course, the “red scarf” in that era of political symbols could be regarded as a corner of the revolutionary red flag dyed with the blood of Communist martyrs, a symbol of historical opposition to the KMT, and after 1949, opposition to anti-Party or anti-socialist class enemies. The symbol had taken on a different role in a different era, and it could now even express opposition to members of the Communist Party, as after the outbreak of the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in 1966 when it came to be the standard of opposition to national leaders such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Several years later, Zhang’s paintings would evoke personalities and mental states from that Cultural Revolution period, and the red scarf that had been part of the apparent innocence of childhood was symbolic of the history and reality depicted in his paintings. For decades China was steeped in an intense political atmosphere, and for those who were born and grew up in the 1950s every action and every object was given political meaning, so that people remained ever-vigilant and always careful about the meaning of everything. In Zhang Xiaogang’s elementary-school group graduation photograph of 1970, the political background and atmosphere that pervaded his class at school is clearly visible: many students are wearing badges showing Mao Zedong, and on both sides of the school gates are displayed political couplets familiar to most people: “Never Forget Class Struggle; the Working Class Must Lead in Everything”, and “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman; In Making Revolution We Must Rely on Mao Zedong Thought”. In the photograph Zhang Xiaogang, who was twelve at that time, is wearing a military cap that he would have worn with pride.
Zhang Xiaogang was born on 22 February 1958 in Kunming, a city with a climate quite different from Beijing. Kunming is a southern Chinese city, but it is often described as having spring all year round; the annual average maximum temperature is 13-15°C, the lowest temperature, 0-2°C. Yet, on the day Zhang was born, in utter conformity to the “political climate” in Beijing, the local newspaper, Yunnan Daily, on the fourth page of its International Edition published the Soviet-backed Joint Declaration with the DPRK, as well as several articles touching on the withdrawal of the Chinese People’s “Volunteer” army from Korea, as well as the page-one editorial, proclaiming that, after the “anti-rightist movement”, the “Great Leap Forward” was reaching its climax: “Ruthlessly Oppose Waste and Conservatism in Promoting the Great Leap Forward” declared the headline. In society and politics, every city in the country stood together with Beijing and “together with the Central Committee”, and it had ever been so; from the time of his birth this was the inexorable atmosphere in which Zhang Xiaogang would live.
Family
Zhang Xiaogang was ranked third in his family. There were four brothers. In 1963, Zhang’s parents were transferred to Chengdu, after the Southwestern Bureau of the Central Committee was relocated there. The entire family took up residence in the Bureau’s housing in Drum Tower Street. Zhang Xiaogang was five at the time. In his childhood, young Xiaogang’s opportunities to receive an adequate education were stymied, because in 1966, the outbreak of the “Cultural Revolution” [9] resulted in schools across the country being shut down or classes being suspended. Xiaogang was in the first grade of high school at the time. Not until 1969, when large-scale armed fighting [10] had subsided, were the schools reopened. In line with the school’s assessment, he then went into the fifth grade of primary school, from which he graduated in 1970. From 1966 to 1973, the Southwestern Bureau was engulfed in a chaotic period of defensive fighting, turmoil, and constant denunciation meetings, and Xiaogang’s parents were often suddenly required to leave their family to take part in collective “study” groups or were subjected to “political investigation” in isolation. Zhang’s father was sent in 1968 to a “May Seventh” Cadre School.[11] This was hardly a school, but a special political surveillance camp. Such institutions were alleged to have inmates participate in collective political activities or labor training, but the “schools” were in fact organized as prisons to house those suspected of harboring political doubts and to force them to take part in reform through labor as they were subjected to political scrutiny. The form of political scrutiny varied from person to person. The Organization Department of the Communist Party used the records and changes in individuals’ personal files to apply political labels to all levels of cadres, ranging from “those in power who were capitalist roaders” to those who were held to have been Kuomintang secret agents or “counter-revolutionaries”. In the “Cultural Revolution” period, most cadres who had been employed by the Southwestern Bureau underwent political “investigation and struggle”, and the children in each housing compound often went to the Conference Hall in the first courtyard to watch their own or their friends’ parents being denounced, beaten, and humiliated. Of course, these cadres would also return home whenever changes in the political strategy of Mao Zedong or the Communist Party cramped or overstrained the already limited prison arrangements. Those children whose parents were not at home just spent their time playing in the hostel compounds where they lived—playing marbles, hoop-la, or folding up cigarette packets. The children had no idea or understanding of adult society, but the older children would sometimes senselessly and destructively throw stones and fire slingshots in revenge when their own parents were being denounced or quietly engage in senselessly destructive activities—throwing rocks where the denunciations were being orchestrated or, at night, smashing the windows of the homes of the “rebels” waging the campaigns.[12] Like most his friends in the compound, young Zhang Xiaogang saw the world as a very confined place, and he has described this period of his life:
I went to elementary school in 1965. I remember clearly one morning when I was in second-grade. We went to school as usual, but virtually all the classrooms were empty, and our teacher was gone. Later I ran into a language teacher who told me that the Cultural Revolution had begun and there was no need to come to classes from today onwards. With that, we stopped having classes for four years until 1969, when classes resumed and I was then put in grade five at the elementary school. For several years we kept going to the school, where in addition to keeping up with the daily updated big-character posters outside, we could watch our teachers being denounced, like the language teacher Mr. Liu who had first told me that the Cultural Revolution had begun and had later been assigned to pushing the coal cart every day. One of our female math teachers was stripped and publicly paraded by Red Guards. We could distinctly feel how our teachers had divided up into rival factions that fought each other viciously, with all the force that their hatred accumulated over a lifetime had once kept in the shadows. For our part, freed by the Cultural Revolution, every day was full of adventure and curiosity. Opposite our home was the Sichuan Provincial Commercial Office building, and in the armed struggle it had been occupied by Red Guards as a strategic stronghold. There was a Maxim heavy-machine gun emplacement installed on the roof, and they would often fire into the air or at our buildings, so we decided to beef up security and brick up all the doors and windows in our building, leaving only a small door for access, so from the outside our four-storey apartment block resembled a large fortress in a war film. In the basement, where there was no electricity, and we relied on oil lamps for lighting. Many years later, whenever I dreamed of childhood, I pictured a dark room and my soul would wander through this space with no windows and I’d see my brothers gathered around a large square table in the middle of the room, with an oil lamp gently swaying above it, and here we would be painting and reading as though we were free.
In these memories of garbled dreams, Zhang Xiaogang presents a premonitory vision of works he would later create when he became an artist: like those ineradicable early experiences that shape an artist, he must have trawled through the memories floating within his subconscious, and recovered the details of experience and plot that decades later he would modify as properties in his art works: “doors”, “windows”, “oil lamps”, “fountain pens”, “ink bottles”, and “books” that floated up like ghosts.
For Zhang Xiaogang, the most difficult times for him as a child were in 1971 and 1972, when his parents were incarcerated, his eldest brother had gone to Yunnan, and his younger brother had been fostered out to an uncle. He lived with only his second eldest brother. The simplicity of daily life found Zhang Xiaogang at a time that he could not comprehend spending his days painting comic books and for a long time, there was no power in his home at night. His brother would spend twenty cents to buy a bottle of oil and some hemp wicks, so that his younger brother could paint at night. Early each morning, the brothers would go to the Chengdu Public Security Bureau canteen nearby for breakfast, and then go to school. Often, his elder brother would put some of the small amount of money in his shoe that their parents had given him, in case some stronger children tried to swipe it and to ensure they could maintain the basics of everyday life. In winter, his brother would buy rice and boil it up with some cabbage, so they could spin out their food and keep themselves warm. Even though ration coupons for meat were still issued in the “Cultural Revolution”, only when their parents happened to be allowed a home visit did the two brothers use coupons to buy pork and eat a proper meal.
Before 1972, the father was only able to visit on irregular occasions. At about the same time, Zhang’s mother was also detained and investigated, but she could go home once a week. In 1973, the parents were “rehabilitated”, and the father had his Party membership restored. Zhang Xiaogang went to Kunming to live with his parents, and transferred to Kunming’s Number 26 Junior High School to finish his middle school education.
The city of Kunming in south-western China has an average elevation of 1900 meters and southern latitude (latitude 25° N) that creates its unique natural environment. As Yunnan’s provincial capital, the Qinghai-Tibet plateau is located to the northwest and the Wumeng Mountains to the northeast. These mountains block the cold Siberian air coming south and retain the warm airflow from Southeast Asia, resulting in natural conditions with warm moist air, no climatic extremes, a temperate climate, sunny days, and only moderate seasonal variations. People describe Kunming as a city with spring all year round. The Ming dynasty poet Yang Shen, in his poem titled “Meeting and Parting on the Eighth Day of the Second Month”, was describing Kunming when he wrote how “the flowers and the moonlight temper the night in the city of spring”, and in several of his other works Kunming is called “the city of spring”, later poets also describing Kunming as the “city of eternal spring”. Because of its unique geography and climate, people were proud of the beautiful white clouds that filled the sky in the Kunming area. For different ethnic groups and in different eras, the natural features of the region were transformed into the elements of myth and legend, and these myths and legends were woven into historical events that featured the rich and luxuriant climate and environment of Kunming epitomized by its auspicious “multicolored clouds”. In the Republican period the writer Luo Yangru in his collection of writings titled Commemorating What I Know described the auspicious dazzling clouds of Kunming at the time of the 1911 Revolution:
It was as though an enormous cotton quilt had been flung open to afford a view through to the heavens beyond, with multicolored clouds extending all the way to heaven. Every color – red, green, yellow, black, and white – was well defined in this vast quilt that extended all the way to the edges of the sky at the horizon. The sun seen through these clouds was transformed into auspicious light, and these clouds also transformed the Milky Way. Over the course of two hours the colors in the clouds modified and changed. That night the revolutionary army rose, and the next day being Double Ninth Festival, and the clouds augured that the uprising would be successful.
On the evening of that day, the ninth day of the ninth month in the third year (1911) of the Xuantong reign-period at the end of the Qing dynasty, an uprising was staged by revolutionaries in Kunming who wiped out the Qing army and established a military government in Yunnan. Large auspicious multicolored clouds had appeared in the sky before the uprising, and the success of the insurgency was attributed to the clouds that opened up the heavens. In fact, whether sunny or cloudy, the skies over Kunming are unique and the effect of this light on oil paint fascinated and challenged painters, so the “external light”, the plein-air of Kunming, is one reason why even indifferent forms are rendered more fascinating there.
Natives of Kunming are proud of the city’s history that goes back to Zhang Qian’s expedition to far western China in the Han dynasty. Zhang Qian returned to report to the Emperor, before the Han empire entered into relations with kingdoms in what is now Afghanistan, that there was a south-western road that went from the Chengdu region of Sichuan, then known as the kingdom of Shu, through to India.[13] Silk from Sichuan was, indeed, already being sold in foreign markets. This south-western road was a trade route that began in Chengdu, ran southwards to Dali where it turned west to Baoshan and Tengchong, and continued finally to what are now Burma, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. Later, Emperor Wu set up an administration in Yunnan Province to expand Han control of territory and transport to foreign places, and this particular trade route began to transform Kunming into a trading hub where the cultures of the Central Plains, of Yunnan and of foreign lands intermingled and fused. By March 1910, the French had invested in and constructed a railway that linked Yunnan with Vietnam, and residents of Kunming were becoming familiar with the sight of modern means of transport such as trains and cars that made the world smaller and led to the rapid decline of the ancient courier roads and caravan routes. At the end of the Qing dynasty, the French had embarked on the colonization of Vietnam and to meet the needs of colonial development the French, as early as 1898, envisaged building a railway line from Hanoi to Kunming. The French imagined that, after the Yunnan-Vietnam railway was constructed, not only would business in Yunnan Province be controlled by the French, but the Yunnan government would also be under Paris’ control.[14] By the time this railway line was completed, nearly 100,000 Chinese workers and more than 80 Frenchmen had died or disappeared building this “romantic” railroad, that was also known as the “railroad of death”. Its construction resulted in countless tales of the perils and dangers that took the lives of the men who built the line, and when the first locomotive slowly pulled into Kunming, the six hundred instructors and students from the local military college stood and wept. However, the “railroad of death” brought with it foreign currency, cigarettes, consumer goods, lifestyles and ways of thinking; it also led to the construction of buildings, industries, hospitals, and churches. In the early 20th century, as Europeans and Americans came by train to Kunming they brought their ways of life and their tastes to this Chinese frontier city, transforming the city’s ancient atmosphere, and for the locals, at least, the foreigners brought some things people liked, as well as things people didn’t. Even today, some of the old buildings, restaurants, and tree-lined streets of Kunming retain traces of a French style or atmosphere despite the transformations over generations who have diluted the original purity and make the French legacy difficult to identify. Around 1999, the artist Ye Yongqing, a friend and fellow-student of Zhang Xiaogang, set up in what was an old French style villa of the 1930s at No.7 Houxin Street the Upriver Gallery for exhibitions and art activities. Vestiges of the original history and style of the building were everywhere visible, and local and out-of-town artists would often gather there to drink and dine, delighted to be able to take part in activities and exhibitions in this “Western” courtyard, where visiting friends would also often stay. Beginning in 2004, the old building next door that had been an advertising company Nie Rongqing later turned into a restaurant called the “1910 South Railway Station” to extend the space of the Upriver Gallery, and the restaurant area exuding nostalgia was expanded, enhancing the historical feel of the venue. In his early years Nie Rongqing had been fond of painting and he was a friend of many artists in Kunming. In his book he recalls the life of artists in Kunming in the 1980s:
When I was a kid, I lived by Kunming South Station, the terminus of the Yunnan-Vietnam railway. At that time watching the people getting on and off the train or waiting to catch the next train was like seeing a dream-like sequence from some film shot in South America, and I can still remember the scene as though it was yesterday. There were all types of Chinese and foreign nationalities, with different clothing and speaking different languages, in jostling crowds, some arriving and others leaving, and bringing with them different ways of thinking and bringing about all kinds of changes.[15]
The Opium War and the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, in particular, made Chinese people acutely conscious of the need to understand the outside world and the importance of mastering new knowledge. As early as the end of 1917, a young Peking University graduate called Gong Zizhi returned to Kunming imbued with ideas he had imbibed from New Youth. With the support of informed officials, as well as the encouragement provided by Zhang Taiyan, he founded a journal called Shangzhi to promote knowledge of literature, history, philosophy, and the other humanities. The journal also did all it could to publicize the Soviet revolution and progressive developments in Europe, and to promote the new culture and the use of the vernacular, echoing the situation in Beijing and other cities. At that time, even this frontier city publication revealed the radical atmosphere of the times, as is evident from this declaration in the first issue of the second volume of the journal: “In order to eliminate intellectual servility and laziness in China, we are committed to the striving of our nation’s people for the freedom and development of thought. Whatever the doctrine and whatever the style of writing, we will publish whatever has value for research”. In the third issue of the second volume, Shangzhi reproduced the full text of Li Dazhao’s [16] article, The Victory of Bolshevism.[17]
However, what profoundly influenced the entire city was the patriotism during the anti-Japanese war period of the 1930s. In June 1938, when Southwest United University was relocated to Kunming, Chu Tunan [18] in the magazine of the day titled New Trends wrote about the “new phase in the culture of Yunnan of respect for others and intellectual tolerance”:
Since the outbreak of the War of Resistance, people fleeing from other parts of the country have influenced Yunnan in ways markedly different from the effects brought about by those ancient refugees fleeing the barbarian incursions during the Jin dynasty. The new arrivals are ushering in an era in which the southern culture of Yunnan will come to occupy a central place in Chinese intellectual history; it is similar to the situation when Constantinople fell to the Turks and Roman culture fled westwards to Italy, initiating the European Renaissance, which in modern times came to dominate world civilization. At least if the relatively few but influential Jin had moved south and the likewise relatively few but influential Romans moved east, there would have been cultural changes in Yunnan with new elements propelling the move to a new progressive stage.[19]
In November 1937, National Peking University, National Tsinghua University, and the private Nankai University all moved south and amalgamated to form “Changsha Provisional University”, which was renamed “Southwest United University” when relocated to Kunming. What was stirring about the move was that, because of the Japanese blockade of roads and coastal trading ports on the mainland, students from the three universities had to make the journey via Guangzhou to Hong Kong and then from there by boat to Haiphong in Vietnam, and travel to Kunming on the Yunnan-Vietnam “railway of death”.[20] For eight years Southwest United University remained in Kunming, during what was one of the city’s most important historical periods. It was a special time for the teachers and students gathered in Kunming, participating in classes, holding meetings, and staging demonstrations, as well as publishing and writing. They changed the history of the city, and made Kunming China’s cultural capital during the war. In the fight against the political corruption and dictatorship of the Kuomintang, as well as in the pursuit of knowledge and truth, the students, lecturers and scholars of Southwest United University fulfilled an extremely important role in that particular historical period. A display titled “Commemorating May Fourth in 1945 at Southwest United University” in the Southwest United University memorial library looks back at the stirring and profound commemorative activities on that day:
From the KMT government’s strict regulatory orders to the walls covered with posters written by students; from the government’s attempts to prevent gatherings to the demonstrations staged by the students of Southwest United University, as well as the lyrics of the stirring songs sung by the students at that event (Fresh Flowers of May, Democracy Victory March, and Dawn Is Coming) ....
At this youth festival, all those young people who had not identified with the KMT party-state were enthusiastic participants. Southwest United University’s exhibition showed what we could do in all fields and revealed our strength. Like the re-enactment of a miracle, an evening meal commemorating May Fourth for the entire school was staged on the plaza in front of the library. The most imperturbable professors were visibly excited to participate in this initiative by Southwest United University. That night, the laughter and singing of the crowd filled the campus and a thousand people holding torches began a planned walk around the lake, but the organizers feared the burning firebrands would make the faces of the students recognizable so they were asked us to remain within the walls of the university. When the burning torches were handed in at the end of the walk, the students ecstatically began jumping over the flames, and when two students bumped into each other and accidentally fell into the flames, there was great mirth.[21]
At “National Southwest United University, all students were firmly patriotic”, and the display goes on to maintain that their writing reflected the passion and anger of their firm commitment to their nation and compatriots:
History leaps forward and democracy surges; our fatherland is in crisis and our compatriots are under fire. ……
At this critical juncture for the fatherland, we, the 2,500 students of Southwest United University can never again remain silent, and must proclaim and shout out our concerns for the nation:
1. Immediately end one-party dictatorship, ... ...
2. Immediately end all spying, ... ...
This is our cry to the government. We want the government to join the progressive people throughout the nation loudly calling for the victory of democracy, so that a free and democratic New China can emerge from the tumult.[22]
These early voices echoed many years later through the city of Kunming, and would find lasting resonance with Zhang Xiaogang’s generation in their experiences of reading and life after 1978.
The “eternal values” nurtured by the teachers of Southwest United University and other colleges during their time in Kunming were achievements of the humanities and sciences and even though the libraries might have had few books and the laboratories lacked advanced equipment, the legacy of the studies of the scholars and teachers lived on. There are many reports of the research and writings conducted by scholars at Southwest United University being destroyed by enemy aircraft or looted, [23] but the hundreds of stories praising and mourning the professors of the school became an indispensable part of the epic of China’s humanities in the 1940s, and there is a trove of scholarship and intellectual writing from “the Kunming period”. The legacy includes Feng Youlan’s six philosophical works including New Rational Philosophy and The Six Classics of the Zhenyuan Period, Wu Mi’s English-language monograph Outline History of World Literature, Wu Dayuan’s translation of Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro, Jin Yuelin’s philosophical treatise Lun Dao, Tang Yongtong’s History of Buddhism of the Han, Wei, Jin, and Southern and Northern Dynasties, Qian Mu’s Outline History of China, Fu Sinian’s Dialectic of the Ancient Annotation of Nature and Destiny, Feng Zhi’s translations of, and research on, Goethe, Bing Xin’s Molu Shibi (Silent Cottage Essays), Tian Han’s Reconstructing the Fortress of Culture and his modern Peking Opera Hubei Fisherman’s Song, Wang Li’s Modern Chinese Grammar and Principles of Chinese Grammar, Gu Jiegang’s Langkoucun Essays, Liang Sicheng’s History of Chinese Architecture, Cai Shuheng’s Critique of Chinese Law, Shen Congwen’s novel The River, Pan Guangdan’s Eugenics and the War of Resistance and his translations of Havelock Ellis’ The Psychology of Sex, Hua Luogeng’s mathematical study titled Additive Theory of Prime Numbers, and Wen Yiduo’s The Book of Songs and Songs of Chu. Such works as well as creative works of art, drama and poetry, all made wartime Kunming “the capital of Chinese culture”.
In April 1927, the Kuomintang liquidated members of the Communist Party from its ranks. The Communists in turn went underground and the revolutionary organization never stopped fighting the Kuomintang, using every means possible. At that time the student movement at Southwest United University was undoubtedly influenced by Communist sleeper cells and, in fact, much of the planning and leadership of the student movement were in the hands of the Chinese Communists’ underground organization. Zhang Xiaogang’s father, Zhang Jing, was also a student at Southwest United. Zhang Jing (1921-2015), born with the surname Ye, was a native of Dongguan in Guangdong Province. He was one of five brothers and sisters. His father died when he was four, and left the family with many debts and almost reduced to begging. Zhang Jing’s mother sent him at the age of nine to a local private school, but he had to work at night so that he could go to school during the day. Later this private school was closed down and turned into a government elementary school, so he was then exposed to new knowledge that “denied everything old”. He read novels by Lu Xun and Mao Dun, as well as Soviet fictional classics including Alexander Fadeyev’s The Rout and Alexander Serafimovich’s The Iron Flood. Reading in these latter novels that Soviet socialism was not about exploitation and that everyone had work and food excited him. In 1935, Zhang passed the entrance examination for the county secondary school, where he joined the student movement and helped with propaganda against Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese. In high school, he was selected to be a member of the school’s student council. However, the Japanese were soon making inroads into Dongguan, and Zhang subsequently joined a local anti-Japanese guerrilla unit. A difficult and dangerous life forced him to heed his mother’s arrangements for him to go to Hong Kong. In the summer of 1939, Zhang Xiaogang’s father travelled for a month, taking a boat trip from Hong Kong to Haiphong in Vietnam, the same route later taken by the teachers and students of Southwest United University, and then taking the Yunnan-Vietnam railway from Hekou into Yunnan and then to its capital Kunming, where he found work with Southwest United. Initially, he was a trainee in a mechanical engineering factory under the Machinery Department of Southwest United University’s Institute of Technology. At first, Zhang Xiaogang’s father worked together with Lin Ling, who later became Xiaogang’s painting teacher, and the two men lived together in the university dormitory. Zhang Jing attended Church Bible classes to learn English, but the foreign priest threw him out of the Church because of his feisty attitude.
In the autumn of 1941, Zhang passed the entrance exams to be admitted into the Department of Economics at Southwest United University, but because his high school procedures had been so irregular he had to attend remedial classes at an Overseas Chinese middle school at Baoshan. After the Japanese bombed Baoshan and the school was destroyed, Zhang Jing returned to Kunming. In 1942, he was again admitted to the Department of Economics, and this time he was accepted by the University. At University he attended Zhang Xiruo’s introductory lectures on political concepts, Wen Yiduo’s lectures on Tang dynasty poetry, and Zhu Ziqing’s classes on essay writing. Russian classes led him to read History of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party and Problems of Leninism, as well as works by Tolstoy, Turgenev, Pushkin, and Lermontov. In his autobiography, My Life, Zhang Jing wrote:
Southwest United University was a focus of Communist Party work in Yunnan, and after the Southern Anhui Incident, the democratic movement was very active in the school. Wall posters and big-character posters plastered the walls. Lectures and seminars on current affairs were often held. Many progressive associations were established. All this attracted me.
Zhang Jing was involved in various “progressive” activities at the school and even translated articles sent by the International Bookstore in Moscow, publishing them in wall newspapers at the school. In 1945, he took part in the Communist Party’s external organization called Democratic Youth and was sent by the Party organization to participate in the ethnic work team at Guishan. In August, Japan surrendered and he was sent by the Party organization to teach at Mojiang County Secondary School, “providing preparatory assistance in the ideological drive to provide literacy in this Communist base area”. It was in Mojiang that he formally joined the Communist Party. In 1947, he was transferred to Kunming’s Qianling Secondary School to serve as its educational administrator. At that time, the Party frequently entrusted him with clandestine work. In order to fight against the KMT, several teachers and students set up a Party branch at Qianling Secondary School and he was placed in charge of it. He responded to the Party’s city-wide “student movement” against the KMT, organizing strikes and performing street theatre, as well as collecting donations. In November, he was arrested, but towards the end of the year, in response to pressure fomented by student strikes organized by the Communist Party and to the general social atmosphere, he was released on bail though required to be able to report to the police at all times.
In early 1948, the Party assigned Zhang Jing to teach at Yunxi Secondary School in Gejiu, where he was required to set up a secret organization and serve as Party Secretary of the county. Here he became acquainted with Qiu Ailan, the woman who would one day become Zhang Xiaogang’s mother, and trained her as a Communist Party recruit. In October, to prevent him from being captured by the KMT, the Party organization transferred him to a guerrilla zone in southern Yunnan and made him Political Commissar of a detachment of guards fighting Chiang Kai-shek. It was at this time that he changed his name from Ye Jing to Zhang Jing. In July 1949, Zhang was again sent to Mojiang County, this time to establish the Communist administration there and serve as the county’s Party Secretary. After 1950, he was transferred from Jindong to Kunming, to serve as bureau chief in the Yunnan Provincial Industrial Department. In 1963, Zhang Jing moved to Chengdu with his family, and became chief secretary of the economic planning committee of the Southwestern Bureau. When Deng Xiaoping was Secretary of the Southwestern Bureau, Zhang Jing was stationed as a delegate in Chongqing, where he promoted local industrial development. In 1964, Zhang Xiaogang lived with his parents in Chongqing for one month, this being the first time young Xiaogang had been to the city. However, because they could not tolerate the extremely hot weather, Zhang Xiaogang and his mother soon returned to Chengdu.
During the “Cultural Revolution”, Zhang Jing was branded a traitor and spy because of his earlier underground work for the Communist Party, and his wife Qiu Ailan was branded an “enemy agent” because members of her family lived in Hong Kong. As a result she was expelled from the Communist Party. In the early period of the “Cultural Revolution”, the children of all the cadres who lived in the housing compounds of the Southwestern Bureau became, to varying degrees of participation, Little Red Guards or Little Red Soldiers, but after their parents were successively accused of being “counter-revolutionaries”, “capitalist roaders”, “traitors”, and “spies”, the children who had originally joined these different organizations were required to remove their insignia and arm bands. Zhang Xiaogang’s two elder brothers suffered this fate. As the political struggle continued, houses were ransacked, and people were publicly tried and beaten, as well as taken away and incarcerated. The compounds in which the families of employees of the Southwestern Bureau lived were now the scene of frequent hangings, poisonings, and suicides. What had yesterday been communal compounds in which families lived together on friendly terms were now carved up into politically hostile zones, and the children who had all once played together as friends were now suddenly separated and prevented from mixing with each other. In 1971, Zhang Xiaogang’s eldest brother was sent to the Yunnan Construction Corps, and in 1973 when the Southwestern Bureau was dissolved, Zhang Jing, faced with several choices, decided to return to Yunnan, a major motivation being that he wanted to seek out former comrades and subordinates in Kunming to help his eldest son return to Kunming from the Construction Corps. Zhang Jing returned to the Provincial Party Committee’s Labor Exchange Political Department, but at this time, the “Cultural Revolution” was not yet over and in Yunnan the complex interpersonal relationships resulting from factional struggles meant that Zhang Jing failed in his efforts to bring his eldest son back to Kunming from the Construction Corps. Zhang Jing returned to Kunming, only to be waiting to be assigned to some specific job, task or duty in that city, but later found he was assigned instead to Lijiang. He rejected the arrangement. It was not until 1976 that Zhang Jing finished his time at the Labor Exchange Political Department where he had nothing to do and was given a position in the Provincial Office for Educated Youth. At that time Zhang Xiaogang and his second eldest brother Zhang Xiaoxi had been sent, as sons of a cadre in the Labor Exchange Political Department, to the countryside in Jinning. Zhang Xiaogang and Zhang Xiaoxi attended the one school in the village that doubled as an elementary and middle school;[24] compared with many other brothers at that time, they were able to be together often.
Zhang Jing’s personal experience, political beliefs, and unique circumstances determined that he was a man with a serious and orthodox character in conformity with what was expected in that social environment. As a revolutionary, he engaged in political activities from his early years in a spirit of sacrifice, and this was accentuated by his military experience and commitment to defend the basic position of the Communist regime. In that period most Communist Party members had a sense of awareness and conviction of their revolutionary political stance, but successive political campaigns, culminating in the outbreak of the “Cultural Revolution”, seriously impaired their intellectual judgment: most of them might agree that their revolutionary thought, will, and political levels fell far short of the standards required by the Party, or might even also admit that they had made mistakes in different revolutionary periods or in performing revolutionary work, but when the Communist Party organization cast a blanket suspicion over their entire personal history and utterly denied their revolutionary achievements, even going so far as to classify them as enemies of the Party and the people, many of them found this reality difficult to comprehend and accept.
Different people resolved their situations differently; some chose suicide to prove their purity and innocence but those with will and determination who still trusted in the Party Organization chose to wait for the time and opportunity to vindicate themselves. Everyone’s fate is specific, and it can be imagined that being placed in a politically passive position, let alone being subjected to denunciation and incarceration, is not something to be taken lightly; the serious and dire situation Zhang Xiaogang’s parents experienced did, at least, give them the willpower to confront and endure their predicament. This was why, during the “Cultural Revolution”, Zhang Jing would from time to time take out his emotions on his own children, and why it became impossible to read the expressions on his mother’s face. Interrogations, confessions, insults, beatings, incarceration, and enforced study were for a long time the sum total of Xiaogang’s parents’ political lives, and they could only handle everyday life by subjugating everything to rational control and repression. Nevertheless, Xiaogang’s father always maintained his loyalty to the Communist Party, even though he had been through many political campaigns and been subjected to suspicion and interrogation from the Organization; his political faith remained unshaken and steadfast, an attitude that would also directly affect his judgment about his growing children.[25] In 1984 he wrote an autobiography as a way of examining everything in his past:
Due to personal issues, as well as my history of social relations, in the various political campaigns after Liberation, I was subjected to interrogation many times, but I remained steadfast and made no complaints. Ever since I joined the revolution, I unflinchingly regarded the Party and the State as my mother, and however much she scolded me or hit me, I never wanted to leave her.
Ironically, the mother of his children endured a political life of physical and mental torture, and her sense of self-recrimination led to insanity, and for the family the long-term repression made it difficult for there ever to be an atmosphere of joy in the home.
Perhaps his long-term revolutionary experience made Zhang Jing, as a father, able to withstand anything blows that came his way, but this did not mean that he was able to feign joy in front of his children. Whenever the father returned home and remained constantly sullen, smoking cigarette after cigarette, this naturally did not encourage the children to heed their father, especially a child as disobedient as Zhang Xiaogang, who felt that the atmosphere at home was repressed, if not even terrifying.
During the “Cultural Revolution”, Zhang’s mother was imprisoned allegedly in order to make her take part in “political study”. At that time she was the secretary of the director of municipal public prosecutions and, under the slogan calling for “smashing the office of public prosecutions”, the Organization required Zhang’s mother to expose the director, who had fairly solid credentials as a revolutionary. At the same time, because of her family background, she was required to provide once again an explanation of her personal background to the Party organization. At the outset, she could return home once a week and see her children, but later she was only allowed to return once a month. Soon after, Zhang Xiaogang’s father was required to go every day to the Number One courtyard of the Southwestern Bureau to attend special political study sessions, and to make “confessions” to the Organization. In 1969, the father was no longer able to return home and most cadres of the Southwestern Bureau were sent to the “May Seventh Cadre School” at Qipangou in Wenchuan, where they were further investigated by the Organization Department. The day before he left Chengdu, Zhang Jing decided to leave his children in Chengdu because he was very concerned that the future of the children would be uncertain if anything unforeseen happened to him at the camp. At this time, the fourth eldest child had already been sent away for foster care. At this particular moment, Zhang Jing probably felt that the future looked bleak, so he decided to tell his children about their mother’s mental illness, even though the four boys were not very old (Zhang Xiaogang was only eleven at the time). The boys were far from able to withstand any mental shock or pressure. Zhang Xiaogang describes this in his Autobiography (Zishu):
Until around 1957, my father later told me, because something implicated her at her work unit, my mother suddenly developed schizophrenia. My mother’s illness grew progressively worse as we children got older. Sometimes during a bout she would not eat or sleep for three days and nights, and this became a nightmare and dilemma of my childhood. It was not until I was eleven (1969) that my father, on the eve of being sent to Wenchuan, told us brothers formally about our mother’s condition. We suddenly felt mature, finally having an explanation for the many years of fear and confusion. For decades afterwards, whenever we brothers were together or I was alone with my father, her illness was inevitably something we would discuss, until she died in 2010.
Before the family moved to the Southwestern Bureau in Chengdu, Zhang’s mother had worked as the chief inspector at the Kunming Railway Bureau. After they arrived in Chengdu, she became a secretary in the Chengdu People’s Committee. She had been born into an economically well-off large family, something that was a “stain” used against her in future political campaigns. From childhood, she was educated in writing and painting, so she had a fine hand and could paint well. Her father won distinction in the imperial examinations, and after the imperial examination system ended he was sent to Guangzhou and Hong Kong, where he studied medicine at the “Li Ji Tang”. Painting was one of the major pursuits of Zhang Xiaogang’s grandfather. As a consequence Zhang Xiaogang’s mother later received an excellent traditional education and she strictly inculcated correct habits in her children: rising early, and sticking to a routine that included hanging up one’s towel neatly after washing, always placing the toothbrush and cup back in its place after properly brushing one’s teeth, and always putting notebooks and items neatly in one’s drawers. She even issued rewards and punishments to regulate these habits, wanting her children to inherit the family tradition. At the same time, Zhang’s mother made sure that she bought the latest books from the Xinhua Bookstore for her sons, such as the 100,000 Reasons Why series so that her sons could acquire new knowledge. Later, Zhang Xiaogang wrote in his Autobiography (2014):
My mother’s ancestors were from Jiangxi Province, and they later moved to Yunnan. My maternal grandfather was a scholar in the late-Qing years and like his forebears he became a doctor of traditional medicine. His wife could also read; she had bound feet and wrote fine calligraphy in the xiaokai or “small regular style”. From childhood my mother loved painting, calligraphy, and literature, so my grandparents spoiled her. But she ran away from home after high school, joined the revolution, and took up an office job in the armed forces. My ‘artistic gene’ probably comes from my mother’s blood line.
Zhang Xiaogang’s second eldest brother remembers Xiaogang as the “cleverest” of the boys: he was able to sit quietly alone to one side with pencils or water-color paints, unlike his two older brothers who couldn’t sit still and preferred to run into the courtyard and play with other children. His mother gave Zhang Xiaogang special treatment: he didn’t force him to transcribe a page of large characters and xiaokai characters every day, unlike his two brothers, and she indulged his need to paint. Until 1966, when the “Cultural Revolution” broke out, his mother often painted watercolors for Zhang Xiaogang, to encourage and nurture his fondness and enthusiasm for art; his mother’s care and her unique mental condition nurtured and influenced Zhang Xiaogang, and became some of the most important psychological factors in his future artistic creativity.
A unique mental illness, in addition to its potential biological factors, often determines unique human experiences and social environments. The 1950s were years of endless political campaigns and concepts born out of extreme political obsessions and fears; people suspected by the Party’s Organization Department because of their political position, family background, and social status all repeatedly suffered varying degrees of suspicion, denunciation, and eventually even death in the succession of political campaigns. Of course, the internal political struggles within the Chinese Communist Party prior to 1949 were the same. The concept of revolution and related terms were always used to legitimize politics and were used to consolidate power or to attack the enemy. After 1949, the broad masses of working people were described as the true masters in the “New China”, and those who did not belong to the category of the “working people” could be identified as enemies of the people. Early in 1942, the Communist Party led by Mao Zedong collectively launched a Party “rectification” to liquidate those groups or factions with different views within the Party, and the concepts they applied inevitably reinforced the Party’s legitimacy and orthodoxy; the concepts of “dogmatism”, “subjectivism”, and “empiricism” concealed a hidden political agenda and were used to liquidate those authoritative persons who originally had Comintern endorsement or who were versed in the Marxist classics, such as Wang Ming, or to criticize those Party members who were strategists with extensive experience in KMT-ruled areas, such as Zhou Enlai. In short, given the different internal factions, there would always be struggles for power and revolutionary strategy. At the same time, the leaders who held power did their utmost to instill their ideas and concepts into those who were not wholly obedient, especially those intellectuals who had come from the KMT-ruled areas and regarded by Mao Zedong as belonging to the bourgeoisie or petty-bourgeoisie. In his Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art in 1942, Mao Zedong reminded these intellectuals, that if they did not transform their thinking to conform to the Communist Party’s requirements, then they would become “enemies of the people”. At the Yan’an Forum, Mao Zedong invoked the workers and peasants (later, “the masses of the people”) to fight against those intellectuals who had different personalities or ideas, whose qualities he mercilessly caricatured:
The workers and peasants are the cleanest people, and even though their hands are soiled and their feet smeared with cow-dung, they are cleaner than the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intellectuals. This is what is meant by a change in feelings, a change from one class to another. If our writers and artists who come from the intelligentsia want their works to be well received by the masses, they must change and remold their thinking and their feelings. Without such a change, without such remolding, they can do nothing well and will be misfits.
After 1949 these earlier remarks by Mao Zedong became classic political dogma. In fact, at a very early date Mao had arrived at his political conclusion regarding intellectuals, especially influential intellectuals: those intellectuals who had not undergone transformation belonged neither to the revolutionary proletariat nor to the masses, and so at all times such people remained very dangerous, and so only those individuals who were highly attuned to the core content in each political campaign launched by the Communist Party, who understood the particular meaning of every quotation of Mao Zedong in every specific context, and who could accurately and effectively apply that particular meaning, could withstand the many political campaigns and act in accordance with the wishes of the Party or Organization. Before 1966, for Communist senior cadres and people with worker or peasant origins their identities were relatively protected, but for those whose origins were “bad” - landlords, capitalists, officials in the KMT period, and various categories of bourgeois intellectuals – with every political campaign or when suspicion from any quarter fell on them, disaster could always eventuate.
Zhang Xiaogang’s mother obviously was not one of the masses of workers and peasants, despite her early involvement in the revolution and membership of the Communist Party of China. When the Communist Party needed to mobilize more community support during the Communist revolution, anyone who sympathized with or felt close to the Communist Party was welcomed. Prior to 1949 China was subject to the KMT’s corrupt and dictatorial rule. From the 1911 Revolution to 1927, the year when the KMT’s dictatorship began, and then into the 1930s’ decade of construction of the national government generation, intellectuals influenced by the “May Fourth” and New Culture movements could clearly see the many social and political problems that existed under KMT rule and many intellectuals gradually lost confidence in the KMT, which is why, as soon as the war with Japan ended, intellectuals and students immediately accepted the Communist influenced campaign to “fight against hunger and oppose the civil war” and demonstrated in support of the establishment of a “coalition government”. The nation’s disasters had taught them that China needed a peaceful environment and a social system built on democracy and science.
However, after the Communist Party assumed State power and did not convert the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference that they had established in September 1949 into any balancing authority, there was not further mention of the “coalition government” the Communists had once proposed to the KMT government, and the entire country was administered by Communist Party-controlled government agencies. At every level of government and in all social and mass organizations Communist Party committees or branches were established in order to allow the Chinese Communists to fully exercise control, so that China’s Communist leaders became the will of the State and even the will of “the people”. In such a political structure, a person’s destiny depended on the personal sensitivity and grasp of his or her own situation. According to her explanation of “the situation in which she joined the Communist Party front organization, the Democratic Youth League”, Zhang Xiaogang’s mother Qiu Ailan joined in the spring of 1948, introduced by Zhang’s father, Zhang Jing:
After participating in the Democratic Youth League, I studied mimeographed documents including Comrade Mao Zedong’s On New Democracy, and The Current Situation and Our Present Tasks, and presented my own understanding of the discussion program arranged by the organization”.
In late April 1949, Qiu Ailan joined the Communist Party, and in July, she participated in the anti-Chiang Kai-shek “southwest borderland military alliance”. Her statement of record, written in November 1983, aimed to explain to the Party that she “had never left the Organization, and that her various activities were conducted under the leadership of the Party”. Regardless, until the conclusion of the “Cultural Revolution” a Party cadre was still obliged to write their personal history for the Party to determine whether he or she was politically blameless, in order to be recognized as a loyal Party member, which suggests that until this time the Party remained skeptical regarding Qiu Ailan’s political position. Her frequent bouts of mental illness often resulted in her destroying, to varying degrees, objects and files around the house, but after her death, some of her diaries from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s remained, together with notes of meetings and other written material. These writings reveal the extent to which an intelligent, cultivated and educated woman, after joining the ranks of the Communist revolution, was subject to self-reflection and self-recrimination in the political movements and struggles that engulfed her. Throughout her endless self-reflection and self-recrimination she never doubted the Party, but reserved her complaints, analysis, and critique for her own words and actions, finding herself personally to blame. This readily explains how from the 1950s onwards, Zhang Xiaogang’s mother became unable to control her schizophrenia and suffered terribly in simply wanting to have a warm family life.
Among Zhang Xiaogang’s mother’s remaining writings is a description of herself she penned for the Communist Party School (October 16, 1953):
Because of the influence from childhood of petty-bourgeois selfishness, arrogance, and over-weaning pride, I wanted to be a famous writer but after participating in the Organization I was unable to thoroughly transform my nature and demanded that the Party respect and nurture me, even though I had no sense of the Organization, ... My idea of love reflected the ideological consciousness of the exploiting classes and after I had adopted that position, for reasons of personal face, pride, and hostility to the Party, I attempted to change the nature of the Party to suit my petty-bourgeois taste. I was often uncaring and negative and in my work I made little effort, so my progress was negligible. In Party matters I was barely politically responsible and in my work I craved being scot-free, fearing any effort or trouble. At teacher study meetings I wantonly condoned the willful behavior of counter-revolutionary elements and in my confidential work I failed to distinguish ideologically between the enemy and ourselves, allowing counter-revolutionary elements into the room that was meant to remain off limits to them...[26]
Such profound remorse for doing almost nothing practically became a way for Qiu Ailan to resolve her habitual psychological “contradictions”, and in every political campaign self-recrimination and “heartfelt confessions to the Party” became the inevitable way she resolved the psychological pressures imposed on her. In November 1959, a document “requesting medical treatment” was included in the file covering her participation in the “Great Leap Forward” movement, and in it we can see that there is no difference between her confession on this occasion and the earlier self-recrimination she described:
Because of the arrogance and complacency I have nurtured over the last few years and my bourgeois individualism which discourages me from working hard, I again stuck to my liberal attitude towards the Party’s critical education and my own self-transformation, and so I remained ideologically opinionated, convinced that I was right, fearful of any hardship in my work, looking for the easy way out in life, and lacking the spirit and courage to engage in continuous revolution. So when the revolution became urgent and conflicted with my personal interests, I began to waver ideologically, and during the Great Leap Forward I was afraid to stay up late and pleaded poor health, ... When I encountered difficulties at work I did not actively try to overcome them, but blamed the leadership for not strengthening the leadership personnel provided for the departmental work, thereby totally reflecting my own thinking, speech, and action that was diametrically opposed to the general line of going all out to build socialism faster and more economically...[27]
Even though such soul-searching, usually referred to as “self-criticism”, was quite ubiquitous in that era, people always hoped that through such “deep” confessions they would win back the Party’s trust back and be used again. Yet the position in which Party members or cadres found themselves in different political campaigns, in fact, ultimately defined their political possibilities which depended on the needs and judgment of the specific powers-that-be and policymakers representing the Party at a particular time: anyone’s confession could be regarded either as a “heartfelt expression for the Party” or as an “exposé of the soul”, and how a confession was accepted by people at the time was determined by those in charge of the political campaign and the needs of the organization. This uncertainty resulted in most people, especially whose family backgrounds did not meet the standards of purity demanded by the Party, attempting to gain understanding, sympathy, or recognition, by searching through the “deepest layers” of political factors to find some cause for remorse and self-critique. In a confession concerning her motivation for joining the revolution, Zhang Xiaogang’s mother wrote something that all those who had participated in previous political movements could imagine and understand and, if necessary, what she wrote could serve as textbook material for people at that time who had been alerted that their confessions were inadequate:
My motives in joining the revolution were impure. I was able to accept revolutionary thought before Liberation and subjectively hope to participate actively in the revolution primarily because I had the declining economic status of a petty-bourgeois family at that time and ideologically my thinking was bound by the shackles of remnant feudalism. My dissatisfaction with the reactionary rule by the KMT in collusion with imperialism that opposed the people meant that I was simply eager to find a way out and pursue democratic freedoms and personal liberation. At that time the nature of the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal revolution suited my selfish requirements, so I actively took refuge in the revolution and joined the Party, bringing with me my democratic revolutionary motives and vague concepts of socialism. My ultimate motivation was self-development, even during the period of the democratic revolution, my enthusiasm for work would wax and wane ... I basically lacked any notion of serving the people...
As I was born into a family of petty-bourgeois independent professionals, my petty-bourgeois ego, vanity, and selfishness dominated my narrowly vacillating maliciousness that prevented me from consciously ideologically accepting the Party’s call for educational reform ...[28]
In fact, after 1949 the political and national will within the Communist Party, to varying degrees, became a part of everyone’s lives, as with Qiu Ailan who often referred, for example, to “the general line of going all out to build socialism faster and more economically” and other different political movements. In the twelve pages in her confession devoted to studying the final outline program of the plenary session of the Eighth Central Committee, Qiu Ailan’s remorse and confession are an indicator of the inner life of the individual in that period: in summarizing her own work over the previous year, Qiu Ailan confessed to how she was “lethargic” during the “Great Leap Forward” campaign. This was the year in which she gave birth to Zhang Xiaogang, a year when the New Year’s day editorial of People’s Daily proclaimed that in the “mighty upsurge” of the Great Leap Forward China would “overtake Britain and catch up with America”, and in January, Mao Zedong, at a work conference in Nanning, Guangxi Province, accused those opposed to the Great Leap Forward of excessively unrealistic economic behavior that “discouraged” China’s 600 million people. Zhang Xiaogang was born in February, when the Central Government called for eliminating the “four pests” (flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows) throughout the country. This resulted in everyone throughout China beating gongs and drums in attempt to keep the sparrows in the sky until they dropped to the ground, dead from exhaustion.[29] At a meeting in March in Chengdu, Mao Zedong simplistically announced that “forging ahead” (i.e., rushing ahead without specific preparations having been made) was indeed Marxist, being opposed to “forging ahead” in this way was anti-Marxist; it was just after this instrumental meeting that the “Great Leap Forward” and the movement to establish the People’s Communes were initiated, and in May, at the second session of the Eight Central Committee of the CCP that Mao Zedong announced the general policy of “going all out to improve oneself and more rapidly and economically implementing the general line of building socialism”. Soon, the news media released grossly inflated agricultural output statistics with seemingly impossible per hectare yields from “satellite” production areas around the country. On August 27, the People’s Daily observed that such high yields depended on how “bold” the people were. However, by the end of the year, at the Communist Party’s Zhengzhou Conference it was realized that these grandiose and spurious claims were a “left-deviationist” problem, and at the Lushan Conference in the following July, Mao Zedong, disregarding the problems of the “Great Leap Forward” outlined by Peng Dehuai in a circulated letter with which most people agreed, suddenly declared to the participants that Peng Dehuai “is a spokesman for the bourgeoisie within the Party, and this attack he launched on the Party shows planning, preparation, organization, and deliberate purpose”. The document called the “Eighth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee” was sent out to all local Party organizations throughout the country which were then required to convene “spontaneous” and “thorough” study sessions for people from outside and outside the Communist Party. Under the umbrella of the powerful State apparatus and national ideology, and in the light of the judgments made by CCP members prior to 1949 regarding basic forms, no person could harbor any doubts regarding the correctness and legitimacy of this Party document, and in line with the guidelines and requirements set out in that document, people had to examine themselves for any problems or serious errors they might harbor, in other sides allowing their daily words and deeds to be led by even basic human principles.
However, in an age when the interests of the Party were above all politics, an individual’s personality and family could be considered unhealthy or even belonging to the landlord-bourgeois class which was erroneous and needed to be corrected immediately. In examining the Party’s program, even though Qiu Ailan agreed that the spirit of the document showed the Eighth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee’s opposition to rightist ideological tendencies and defended the general line of the Party, she also admitted that she had made serious errors in implementing the line: she admitted to being “lethargic and lacking energy, and so, in the Great Leap Forward movement of the ebullient masses under the leadership of the Party, she had been ideologically fearful and vacillating”. Qiu Ailan was in fact simply referring to a regular mother’s instinct only two months after she gave birth to Zhang Xiaogang, her need to give her child special care and attention. Yet it would seem that some instinctive actions she made as a recent mother were regarded by the Communist Party as inappropriate. Given her experience it was only natural that she would feel conflicted and uncertain in the political atmosphere of that time, but in that era when the interests of the Party and the revolution were above all else, Qiu Ailan, given her many years of training in Party discipline, instinctively discovered that motherly love lacked political legitimacy, and this is why she confessed to her “errors”:
At that time, I had been on maternity leave, and had just gone back to work when the campaign to eliminate the four pests was implemented. As a Communist Party member, I should have been aware that battling the four pests was a glorious measure to build socialist society, and should have also realized that the elimination of pests and disease was a glorious innovation in which the masses courageously participated. However, in pandering to my own personal comfort, I behaved selfishly. I insisted that my child was very young and had to be breastfed twice each night, and the nanny did not live in our own courtyard. I was frightened that I would damage my health, which reveals how swayed by fear I was.[30]
Zhang Xiaogang’s mother’s self-criticism thus reveals that she was a compassionate and thoughtful person, but why did those human psychological factors have to be obscured or suppressed and not recognized as natural human behavior? She subjected herself to scrutiny applying the Party’s standards, but she unconsciously also revealed traces of her own human warmth:
One night, the office of the general branch summoned me for ‘a difficult battle’ that was scheduled to continue until 2 AM, but at only 11 PM I went home to take care of my young child. At that time the department leaders were not consistently rigorous and often showed me consideration, but I was frightened of hard work, and my action in shirking the ‘difficult battle’ was not consistent with the enthusiasm expected of a Communist Party member imbued with the spirit of active participation in the revolutionary movement. At that time I was unaware of my thoughts and actions. When the nanny said: ‘That little child can’t be left with other people and if you go out at night what will the child do?’ I felt that the nanny was thinking of me, and at the same time I found a magnanimous excuse for indulging my fear of working until late at night.[31]
Could anyone not appreciate the inner workings of a mother’s mind in writing these confessions? How could she not have felt deep remorse for her words and deeds in fully endorsing the demands that Party placed upon her? Wasn’t she simply protecting her own beloved flesh and blood by not speaking out? Or was her timid political stance in the ferocious political campaign simply designed for self-protection, not to mention protecting her children and family? Such a complex psychology was ubiquitous after 1949 throughout the Party’s political organs, schools, and units in the fields of culture and the arts. Compounded with the near uniformity of clothing, common stereotypes were replacing the more readily identifiable, but complex, personalities and expressions of earlier times. Several years later, when Zhang Xiaogang examined early photographs of his parents, the images of his mother and father flooded him feelings that he could not readily articulate, but could only capture in detail with his brush.
The political campaigns grew more intensely harsh until the outbreak of the “Cultural Revolution”, and his mother was never able to resolve the problems that troubled her. When she dutifully copied out “Chairman Mao’s Letter to Comrade Jiang Qing” of July 8, 1966, or recording the core content of Zhou Enlai’s political report to the Party’s Tenth National Congress, she would understand the meaning of “the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution”, she would understand the meaning of “the protracted nature of the two-line struggle” described in Communist Party documents, she would understand the profound meaning of the “universal chaos” in the international situation that Mao Zedong described, she would understand the nature of Zhou Enlai’s government work report to the National People’s Congress, and she would understand the profound significance of the “Movement to Criticize Confucius and Lin Biao”. Yet in all her private diary entries, we can detect no trace of the concern and guilt she felt for her family. This was a revolutionary age in which the individual and “the self” were eliminated, and any issues involving individuals, family, and friends were not suitable topics to discuss, let alone record, because personal and family matters were not connected with the revolution and lacked any connection to politics, unless the image of a military family from the ranks of the revolutionary heroes was being presented. From 1966 until 1976, when the political clique called the “Gang of Four” fell from power, Mao Zedong’s call to “struggle against selfishness and revisionism” served as a national political slogan, and warmth, love and the private aspects of personal life were deemed to be unhealthy and incompatible with the requirements of the Party and the revolution, and therefore necessarily subject to denunciation.
Beginning with the “three-anti” and “five-anti” political movements of the 1950s, Zhang Xiaogang’s mother, whose own family had been called into question and politically liquidated by the Communist Party’s Organization Bureau, in her diary entries and confessions from different periods was clearly constantly “remorseful” regarding her family background and ideological level, but as soon as there was the slightest hint of political relaxation, she would always show care and concern in raising her children in keeping with her own background and nurturing, and this image of her permanently remained floating in Zhang Xiaogang’s subconscious whenever he attempted to understand his mother’s psychological problems.
In late 1973, when his parents regained their freedom and were sent back to Kunming, Zhang Xiaogang returned with his family to the city of his birth. He could appreciate the glorious sunshine of Kunming once again, and again had the time and the environment in which to pursue his study of painting.
Zhang Xiaogang’s Teacher, Lin Ling
In 1973, Zhang Jing was sent back to Kunming to wait for the provincial Party Committee’s Organization Department to assign him work, and the entire family took up residence in the Overseas Chinese Remedial School, which was in fact a hostel belonging to the Yunnan Provincial Communist Party Committee. Now they could enjoy electricity and hot water, meat one a week, and some improvement in living conditions. Zhang Xiaogang resumed his schooling in Grade Two at the Kunming Number 26 Middle School, later transferring to the Number 23 Middle School. According to Zhang Xiaogang’s recollection, it was after returning to Kunming that he learned to draw from Harding’s guide to pencil drawing and began to learn about painting, including the basic idea of sketching, the use of tools such as pencils, and the basic principles of light and shade in sketching. In those days his basic learning materials included the textbooks edited by the Krupskaya Studio and these included an introduction to the Chistyakov art-pedagogical system used in the Soviet Union, but none of these materials he read or copies after returning to Kunming were new books, because the only art books or textbooks remaining from the 1950s that had not been completely destroyed in the “Cultural Revolution” usually circulated only among lovers of painting. But the Russian and Soviet system of art education was a strong influence on Zhang, and this is significant because Zhang Xiaogang no longer needed to simply copy Chinese comic books. In preparing to paint still life works or in looking for scenes for landscape compositions, these small manuals played a significant role. In the murky and inaccurate color illustrations in these books, young Zhang could feel the magic of such Russian painters as Repin and Surikov. In Harding’s sketch book he also saw drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and others.
In 1974, Zhang Jing was assigned housing in the Provincial Committee compound built next to the Maitreya Temple, and the entire family moved from the Overseas Chinese Remedial School to this new home, which was also in the neighborhood of the Kunming Military Region headquarters. Zhang Jing soon got in touch with his old friend Lin Ling who was teaching in the political department of the Kunming Military Region and visited his old colleague from the Southwest United University many years previously. Excited and thrilled to see his old friend, Lin Ling presented Zhang Jing with two watercolor works he had painted.
In spring 1975, Zhang Jing paid another visit to Lin Ling. As a committed and caring father, Zhang Jing took Zhang Xiaogang along with him this time to meet his friend, and in their conversations Zhang Jing expressed the wish that Lin Ling could give his son some pointers about painting. Zhang Jing recalled how Lin Ling used to study painting under an oil lamp when they were students together back at Southwest United University, even though his old classmate had never received any professional training in painting. After joining the People’s Liberation Army, Lin Ling became an army artist, who in 1958 participated in the design work for the Chinese People’s Military Museum in Beijing. Lin Ling’s home was clean and tidy, and his bookshelves and desk, and the rarely seen folios of prints he owned as well as the pictures on his walls left a deep impression on Zhang Xiaogang. In the summer of 1975, Zhang Xiaogang became a student of Lin Ling, whose strict teaching was a major factor opening up Zhang Xiaogang’s eye for painting. Among the artists in Kunming who studied Western art, people were familiar with Dong Yidao, a painter from Yuxi who had initiated Western-style art teaching there; Li Heming who opened the “Heming Painting Shop” and later the “Shengsheng Advertising Company”; Li Tingying, who had once studied in Japan; Huang Jiling, Liu Fuhui, Tang Guanfang, and Xia Ming who in the early 1940s were among of the Yunnan graduates from the National Art College; Liao Xinxue, Liu Wenqing, Xiong Bingming, and Liu Ziming who in the 1930s and 1940s had gone to France to study; Yuan Xiaocen, who became renowned after 1949; his student Lu Yufei, who in the 1950s became a renowned art teacher; and Yao Zhonghua, who had graduated from Central Academy of Fine Arts. Of all these artists, it was only Lin Ling who made an immediate and decisive impact on the young Zhang Xiaogang. Zhang later recalls how he formally became Lin Ling’s apprentice:
After I met Mister Lin for the first time, I was fired up. Finally, at noon one day, I plucked up the courage to go on my own to knock on his door. I said to him: ‘My name is Zhang Xiaogang and I want to learn to paint from you’. He had apparently forgotten who I was and when I told him, he said: ‘Bring along what you’ve painted to show me’. After he looked through my pictures, he said: ‘You basically can’t paint, and that’s good. I’d like to teach you’. In that era of pure idealism, he not only did not charge me anything, but instead gave me all my drawing materials, and showed me his large collection of folios of prints of European drawings and oil paintings. These volumes included A History of Western Painting published back in the Republican period. Several afternoons each week I went to his home to study sketching and watercolor painting, and after I returned home I would continue to paint as though I was intoxicated, oblivious to the outside world.
Lin Ling (1918-2007) was born in Guixian County (today’s Guigang City) in Guangxi Province, the son of a general school teacher. His father and second eldest brother both painted and, after his father’s death, he continued his education supported by his second eldest brother who was ten years older than him. In 1930, he saw his second eldest brother killed by the KMT for participating in a secret Communist underground organization. During the period from 1936 to 1938, he worked as a primary school teacher, printer, and railroad worker, and during that period, he got to know the print maker Li Hua. Li Hua, who had been a student of Lu Xun, was already a famous young artist and in 1934 participated in the establishment and activities of Guangzhou’s Modern Print Society. The print he completed in 1935 titled Roar, China was one of the important works of the new print movement of the 1930s. The exhibitions and publications of the Modern Print Society (June 1934 – July 1937) were highly influential among young artists, and Lin Ling’s contact with Li Hua greatly contributed to his artistic thinking and painting practice.[32] In fact, the new prints of the 1930s were an important part of this period of Chinese art history, and Lin Ling’s own prints, in terms of subject matter and style, achieved a high degree of consistency with the New Print, and his prints of 1937 titled Watching the Seedlings and Enforced Rent, as well as Blood Debt, completed in 1937, were part of the New Print movement in theme and style. In 1938, Lin Ling became as a member of the Chinese National Association of Woodcut Artists Resisting the Enemy. In 1940, Lin Ling went to Yunnan, and in the following year he published many propaganda works extolling the War of Resistance. In that same year, Lin joined Southwest United University’s Sunlight Painting Society, resigning at the same time from his job as a railway surveyor and draughtsman, and remained at Southwest United. Lin Ling’s knowledge of Western painting was mostly acquired from studying technical drawing at a US army base from 1944 onwards; his skill in drawing and interpretation can be seen in two of his works of 1944, Yunnan-Vietnam Railroad Station and Train of the Yunnan-Vietnam Railroad. In 1945, Lin Ling took up the post of art teacher at Kunming’s Huguo Middle School, and his training in sketching, watercolors and oil paintings became more professional. In 1949, Lin Ling held his first solo exhibition, and a critic who used the nom-de-plume “Li Hong” wrote of his works:
Lin Ling’s works include watercolors, pen drawings, charcoal sketches, pencil sketches, and pastel crayon works. All the works are characterized by concise composition, strong lines, and simple and harmonious colors that give viewers the impression of freshness, youth, and enjoyment! We derive no sense of pious overworking or flat and lifeless academicism from his painstakingly meticulous works. This painter is committed to the newly flourishing realism, steeped in individual emotion and the freedom of expression that bring an original approach to Western-style painting.[33]
In 1950, Lin Ling came to the attention of the army because he helped organize an exhibition of paintings welcoming the arrival of the PLA, and later became a soldier serving as an “art worker” under the auspices of the Kunming Military Command. Later, he worked on revolutionary history paintings, and this echoed the history painting for which the Communist Party was recruiting artists during the early 1950s. However, Lin Ling was still nurtured by pure emotions and atmosphere of that time; an oil painting titled The Banks of the Lancang River which he completed in 1954 reveals his familiarity and understanding of the print and shows none of the influence of Soviet oil painting. This work was entered in the Second Annual National Art Exhibition held in March 1955, and the work was later included in the folio of that exhibition titled Selection of Works Showing the Lives of China’s Various Nationalities from the Second Annual National Art Exhibition, together with works by such famous painters as Dong Xiwen and Ai Zhongxin. Lin Ling went through the various political movements of different periods; the “Great Leap Forward” and the “People’s Communes” both provided him with subject matter for his paintings, but this did not affect his love of painting scenes from nature and still life works. When the “Cultural Revolution” broke out, Lin Ling was only allowed to paint or design badges that were portraits of “the beloved leader”. Lin Ling describes this time:
After the ‘Cultural Revolution’ broke out, drawing landscape works was classified as ‘feudal, capitalist, and revisionist’, so at that time no one dared to paint landscapes. If you wanted to paint, you had to paint workers, peasants, and soldiers, and images of the great leader, and everything had to be painted bright red. I originally liked painting landscapes, but at that time did not even dare paint, although sometimes I wanted to just hide in my home and paint.[34]
Even though Lin Ling completed all the painting tasks the Party organization assigned to him, but whenever possible he attempted to insert his own individual taste and understanding of life into his works. Many years later, Zhang Xiaogang, in honor of his teacher, used his own style and technique to copy a watercolor of his teacher, completed in 1970, titled Be Ever Mindful of Class Enemies and the Nation’s Grievances. The subject of this painting was taken from a scene in the model Beijing Opera, The Red Lantern, although the female protagonist Li Tiemei of the play was only assigned a minor part in the composition, but anyone familiar with this drama would instantly recognize her classic pose and role. The conventions of symbolic shapes and colors used in model operas became stock memories of the generations living through those years, but for those who experienced this period the sight of these shapes and symbols conveyed deep feelings. However, Lin Ling’s use of this subject to express his early moods and emotions seems almost inadvertent, but the austere backdrops with simple furniture and props readily evoked memories of the era that produced such works. After painting his Big Family series, Zhang Xiaogang embarked on painting a series of “interior scenes” and these were very obviously influenced by memories of that era, in terms of the experiences evoked by that history and scenarios, and in this Zhang Xiaogang subconsciously resonated with his teacher. In fact, after Lin Ling formally became Zhang Xiaogang’s teacher in 1975, Zhang Xiaogang’s training in painting completely emerged from his childhood practice of copying comics as he began to be set the task of doing still-life paintings. In the works he produced as exercises between 1975 and 1977, we can clearly see the changes and improvement in the young man’s ability to compose and in his understanding of color. What is interesting is that his still life and scenery compositions were very close to those of his teacher; the composition of Zhang’s Beijing Cloth Shoes (1975), Father’s Bookshelf (1976), and Teacher’s Room, #1 (1977) readily evoke Lin’s paintings. Zhang described Lin Ling as an extremely exacting teacher:
My teacher was always very hard on himself, and he would often do the same sketch many times changing it each time. When I was one of his students, he would often tear up his own works in despair, including two watercolor paintings that he presented to me but was about to tear up because of some minor imperfection he perceived before I ‘rescued’ them; later he would mutter about how he was dissatisfied with those two ‘failures’ which he wanted to replace. I heard later that when he grew older and was at home, he would constantly revise his earlier works while at the same time destroying many other works. When I heard about how rigorous and exacting he was regarding his old work, I could not help feeling very sad. My teacher lived a life of solitary self-discipline, and he had a detached and simple attitude to the complexities of life; his sincerity and frankness never made him treat me as a student in a perfunctory way, but he was very strict, and rarely expressed ‘approval’, let alone ‘praise’.[35]
Zhang Xiaogang’s friend Nie Rongqing has written tellingly of how Lin Ling was a teacher who made stringent demands of Zhang Xiaogang:
After Lin Ling formally became his teacher, whenever the weather in Kunming was sunny, Lin Ling would take Zhang Xiaogang out to the plant nursery to paint outdoors. Lin Ling was very strict about Zhang Xiaogang’s basic training in painting, and even a little pedantic. At that time, Zhang Xiaogang was gradually becoming acquainted with some of the local young artists in Kunming. He had got to know Chen Yiyun, who was one of the active young artists at that time, and through Chen Yiyun, Zhang also met Xia Wei and Yang Yijiang who were regarded as young talents in art circles. Mixing with these friends who shared his passion, he also got to know Su Xinhong who was one of the talented artists who also painted plein-air landscapes in the plant nursery.
The young Zhang Xiaogang was immediately won over to the bold way in which they applied attractive dripping strokes with a palette knife to their canvases, and his compositions also began to acquire a somewhat similar expression. Lin Ling adamantly stopped him from following this tendency, and made him continue to adhere strictly and mechanically to the traditional European model of art education and training. Zhang’s art was therefore not the same as other artists in Kunming painting circles and his paintings were quite different from those of all his friends. Everyone disregarded his method of painting which they regarded as conservative, and Zhang Xiaogang himself often suspected that he was going down the wrong path. Many years later at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts when he ran into the teacher Huang Weiyi who had gone to Yunnan to recruit students, Huang told Zhang that it was only because his sketching and use of watercolors in his paintings were so well done that he had recruited him. Everything he had learned from Lin Ling would finally pay off.
Ye Yongqing later put his interpretation on Zhang Xiaogang’s early training:
The foundation of Lin Ling’s sketching and watercolor painting was mostly derived from his early years as a woodcut artist and from the American and Soviet artistic influences he received in the Republican period. Later he served in the PLA forces. Lin Ling, as a painting teacher, was an exacting and orthodox practitioner, who did not fit into any category and had not been subject to the formulae of any art college, which enabled Zhang Xiaogang in future to give play to his own talent, leaving him ample room, and Zhang Xiaogang had good reason to feel grateful for the concern his teacher had for his student’s life and personality and for his influence.[36]
In any case, Lin Ling’s instruction was exceptionally serious, and he even made a case for Zhang Xiaogang’s paints. In providing for all his student’s needs, Lin Ling expected that his student could really be a successful painter. However, as far as Zhang Xiaogang’s father Zhang Jing saw it, entrusting his child to learn painting from his old army friend was, to a large extent, a way of preventing his child from getting into trouble with other children, and painting was a safe choice. However, whether his son had any future as a painter was not something Zhang Jing considered, and he only saw painting as a safe way to protect and raise his child. In fact, Zhang Jing never saw painting as his son’s future, and he never expended time and effort on thinking about such issues. His army friend Lin Ling would often take the young Zhang Xiaogang on painting excursions and the more often he went, the more Zhang Xiaogang’s routine changed, which seemed to make Zhang Jing uneasy. At that time, people ate three meals a day at strict times, so whenever Xiaogang didn’t get back from a painting trip in time to have dinner with his family and leftovers had to be reheated, the family routine was disturbed. During this period, Zhang Jing felt uneasy because while his Party credentials had been restored and he had returned to the Yunnan Provincial Party Committee, for a long period of time he had, in fact, nothing to do and no regular job, a situation described in Chinese as “sitting on a cold bench”. However, this was no ordinary “cold bench”, because if a Chinese Communist Party cadre who participated in the revolution at an early date returned to his old familiar town but still had no specific work, this indicated that, politically, he continued to be held under suspicion by the Organization, so it is no surprise that this dire situation made it easier for Zhang Jing to transfer his repressed emotions to his children.
In 1974, Xiaogang’s second eldest brother Zhang Xiaoxi went to the countryside and before Zhang Xiaogang joined him in the village in 1976, Zhang Xiaogang spent two tense years living with his father. However, these two years were of crucial importance for Zhang Xiaogang’s understanding of art, and from Lin Ling he acquired a much deeper understanding through the practice of painting. The important thing was that Zhang Xiaogang became infatuated with painting. When the second eldest brother happened to return to Kunming from the countryside he discovered that Zhang Xiaogang now unrestrained in using oil paints, and could understand why the relationship between Zhang and his father was so tense. Buying paints required money, which for Xiaogang’s father at that time was not easy to come by. However, Zhang Xiaogang was no longer a child indulging in painting as though it were a hobby; he felt an inner compulsion to paint, and only painting made him happy. Gradually, Zhang Jing stopped letting Xiaogang go to Lin Ling’s home, as he discovered that his son’s painting was no longer a hobby but an obsession which he felt would adversely any future career of his son. Zhang Xiaogang ignored his father’s warnings and continued to go to Lin Ling’s home. Zhang Jing no longer gave his son money to buy painting materials in an effort to prevent him from studying painting. But whenever the second eldest brother came to Kunming, he always gave part of his allowance to Zhang Xiaogang to satisfy his need to paint. Zhang Xiaoxi said: “At that time, I always tried to smooth out things between my father and Xiaogang, and reduce the tension in the family”. The mother doted on the son who painted, but she could only support her son’s studies when her mental condition allowed her. In 1972, Xiaogang’s mother regained her freedom and was assigned work in a grain store on the western side of the Grain Bureau, but her descent from being a cadre to working in a grain bureau was part of the unjust political treatment meted out to her and it brought on a serious relapse into mental illness.
Life as an “Educated Youth”
In the summer of 1976, Zhang Xiaogang was exiled to the countryside of Jinning County, Yunnan, to a work team in the Second Street Commune, and this was the same village as his second eldest brother. His painting was further strengthened by the relatively liberal environment in which he now found himself. Zhang often used peasants as models for his portrait paintings. His ability to paint brought him to the attention of the County Cultural Center, who took him off farm laboring duties and asked him to help draw propaganda posters or complete paintings on nominated themes. All educated youths with painting talents wanted to have such an opportunity to escape the hardships of farm labor and have more opportunities to paint; at the same time he could also receive work points, and this was an extraordinary opportunity for any educated youth in those days. Yet for the production team, however, it was an uneconomical arrangement, because if an educated youth did not participate in the labor force he or she still had to receive remuneration from the production team, although the production team would normally not agree to this. A friend of the second brother Xiaoxi who also happened to be an educated youth was the person who recommended Zhang Xiaogang to the County Cultural Center that provided Xiaogang with the opportunity to help design propaganda posters. Although the County Cultural Center issued an official letter of appointment, because the conditions which allowed the production team to earn points per month were not favorable, in order to compensate for Zhang Xiaogang leaving the team while receiving monthly subsistence rations and leaving the production team with a “shortfall”, Zhang’s second eldest brother took the initiative and asked to do Zhang Xiaogang’s laboring duties in his stead so Xiaogang could still get his work points and have the opportunity to paint at the County Cultural Center. His brother later recalled: “At that time, it was difficult for Xiaogang to paint, due to the lack of reliable protection and support, and the most basic conditions for painting were lacking. Even though mother was fond of him, she was often sick and couldn’t look after him”.
Those who spent time as “educated youth” sent down to the countryside are well aware that the experience was boring and uninteresting and, like the farmers, they had no entertainment or cultural activities, apart from daily labor in the fields and returning to the dorm to rest. The production brigade would often organize political study or meetings to discuss reports, but the simple political slogans and campaigns made the life of an “educated youth” unbearably monotonous, and for those “educated youths” scattered in more remote, outlying production teams life was even more boring. In those days when reading and study were regarded as “pointless”, [37] what could make a person happy and satisfied? For Zhang Xiaogang, the answer to such a question was simple:
Why did our generation actually need to learn to paint? What motivated me? I felt that my love of painting was, in the first instance, a passion and complete obsession, but secondly this was a time when learning was useless, as there was no university, no prospects, and there was the prevailing sense that culture was useless. In such an era, when we were “educated youths” serving as farmers, what was our greatest ideal? It was to be re-assigned to the city to work in a factory. That was really my greatest ambition. However, there was no support for such an ambition, so why wouldn’t I want to continue learning to paint? This was an attempt to transcend reality, the reality of the environment in which I found myself; as soon as I was painting I could forget my environment and feel that my life was meaningful; otherwise I would feel that life was intensely boring.
Zhang Xiaogang studied painting under Lin Ling from 1975 to 1977, and while for a lot of that time he was in the countryside, whenever he to Kunming, he would paint still life pictures, practice sketching, practice mixing colors, and even go outdoors to paint under the tutelage of Lin Ling. From Lin Ling, Zhang Xiaogang acquired access to folios and books, providing his earliest insights into painting.
In the summer of 1977, Xiaogang’s second year in the countryside, when attending a folk painting training course organized by the County Cultural Centre, Zhang met Mao Xuhui with whom he saw eye-to-eye on art and who in the future become a good friend. At that time, Mao Xuhui was a cadre in charge of a work team implementing the movement that called for agriculture to “emulate Dazhai”. Mao selected Zhang Xiaogang as an assistant engaged in painting window displays for the town’s general store. Although Mao Xuhui thought Zhang Xiaogang introverted and extremely lacking in confidence and also picked some other friends (Xia Wei, Chen Yiyun, and Peng Shuming), Zhang Xiaogang was still able to remember the context in which he met Mao Xuhui who had already demonstrated a gift and talent that attracted Xiaogang. Zhang Xiaogang has described his memories of Mao:
Old Mao was originally nicknamed Little Mao. It was said that when he was a teenager in Kunming he worked as a warehouse storeman in some unit and, because of his passion for painting, often mixed with a bunch of slightly older ‘amateur’ painters who instructed him and also gave him his nickname. For a long time, as a result of his extraordinary diligence and hard work, his landscape paintings were gradually beginning to enjoy a measure of popularity in Kunming.
……
I remember that the first time I saw him was in the early summer of 1977 in Jinning County, Yunnan, at a training courses on peasant [fine] art. I was there at the time as an ‘educated youth’. Because he loved painting he was recruited by the county to ‘paint’. Little Mao became a ‘leading cadre’ of a team in Baofeng Commune (putting him in a different category to me). For the training course, the County Cultural Centre allowed its director to rely on his personal relationships to recruit instructors and so they asked several experts from Kunming to come to the county to guide them. It is said that one of the experts told them: ‘Tucked away in your county is a landscape painting master called Mao Xuhui, who is known by the nickname Little Mao’. The director then asked Little Mao to be their ‘distinguished guest’ for a few days. I was completely unknown in Kunming and also knew very few people, but through this training course I probably got to know the whole network in Kunming. It was around noon one day that a friend excitedly told me: ‘Little Mao is here!’ ……
Later, I naturally had the opportunity to look at his work. I remember that he had painted a lot of street scenes of old Kunming as well as scenes of Dianchi Lake in Kunming. One particularly impressive work was of the setting sun above a tall building shining down on Jinbi Road and Tongren Street. The blend of orange and bluish-grey tones and the thickly applied pigments created a warm and powerful scene; another work showed the Western Hills and Dianchi Lake in refracted light, and the contrast between the dark brown and pale lemon colors and the waters of the lake lapping against the rocks gave the lake a slightly metallic feel. My teacher always painted with watercolors, and it was usually hard for me to see works with such expression done with such rich colors, and I admired and marveled at this work.[38]
Zhang Xiaogang has kept a photograph from that time showing Mao Xuhui participating in the Jinning County Conference on Literary and Artistic Creation. Seeing this photograph no one could guess that future geniuses were tucked away among the dozens of villagers in the photograph. Zhang Xiaogang, standing in the last row, was just one of the tens of millions of lovers of peasant art in the countryside at that time, and at that time his talents went completely unremarked. According to Zhang Xiaogang’s later memoirs, he had only limited self-confidence as an artist until he later became a college student. In his résumé, Zhang wrote:
In June 1976, on graduating from high school I went down to the countryside to work in the fifth team of Suoxi Brigade of the Second Street Commune in Jinning County, Yunnan Province, where in addition to regular labor, I was often transferred to the County Cultural Center to participate in peasant art training courses, where I studied print making and crayon.
However, at a time when he was passionate and obsessed with painting, but still lacked any formal artistic training or environment, he remained little different from anyone with a passion for art whose only recourse was doodling. A passion for images is somehow instinctive, but at that time, the range of imagery in most circumstances rarely extended beyond street scenes or albums of revolutionary images. At that time, the visual imagination was severely restricted by social realities, so how could a person with a talent for painting develop his or her own dreams and abilities? How could those vague and cerebral imaginings and images be transformed into meaningful pictures? Zhang Xiaogang participated in art courses at the County Cultural Center on a number of occasions, and he certainly gained insights and experience in painting techniques, but the opportunity that would transfer the unconscious desires of a timid boy into cultural or historical imagery had not yet come.
On his high school graduation photograph of June 1976 we read the inscription: “1976, Kunming No. 23 (Senior) Middle School, Class 2, Red Medical Class, Graduation Photograph”. The words “Red Medical Class” indicate that Zhang Xiaogang’s class in the previous year had been trained to serve as rural doctors. At a time when they might not have the opportunity to return to the city, everyone needed expertise in some field, and the school had assigned these students to be “doctors”. Later, Zhang Xiaogang could have become a rural “barefoot doctor”. In the “Cultural Revolution” rural medical standards were not high, and there was a specific category of “semi-agricultural semi-medical” doctors set up in the Fifth Team of the Suoxi Brigade of the Second Street Commune in Jinning County, who tended farmers who were ill, administered acupuncture and moxibustion, and issued medicines. In another two photographs of 1976, we see Zhang Xiaogang and his companions sketching in the fields of Jinning and we get no sense that they have just put down “rural roots” as new farmers as they look more like middle school students on a weekend sketching trip to the city outskirts. They look to be in a lively mood, with a sprightly attitude, and have all the awkwardness of youth, with no apparent evidence of the loneliness and despair that the cruel experiences of those years could bring. Several decades later, those “educated youth”, who found themselves still stranded in rural villages, remote mountain areas, or in construction corps and for whom no miracle had occurred, got married, had children, and blended into those landscapes; to differing degrees they lost their ability to make judgments about the outside world. Finally, they became strangers to the city, to knowledge, and to the psychological world of ordinary people, until they grew sick and old and eventually died. At the outset Zhang Xiaogang’s lot in life was no different from them, but in October 1977, the State Council proposed that students and researchers would be selected for admission to colleges and universities in 1977. Zhang Xiaogang and his friends who loved art were saved, because this meant that they had a genuine opportunity to receive real professional learning – the sense that they could acquire knowledge and training.
Zhang Xiaogang has described his mood and emotions when he was admitted to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts:
In 1977, the college entrance examinations resumed. I thought I would take a chance and try to matriculate to the Academy of Fine Arts. After the Cultural Revolution, there was a backlog in the number of people eager to take part in the examinations. Among Kunming’s artists I knew many who wanted to get in so I was not feeling very confident. I never thought I would find my name on the list of successful candidates, but when I did I also wasn’t sure what school I’d matriculated to. My ideal was to get into the print making section of the Fine Arts Department of Yunnan Normal University (now the Yunnan Arts Institute), but the school hadn’t listed my name as one of those they had accepted. The schools had only just started up again, and those who were not admitted in the first batch could apply to enroll, so I went to the college to apply. A teacher asked: ‘Who are you?’ I said: ‘Zhang Xiaogang, an educated youth from Jinning County’. The teacher told me: ‘Your details are not with us, so they have probably been sent to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, so you need to go to the Provincial Admissions Office’. I thought he was pulling my leg, because as we all knew, the Sichuan Academy that year would only take two students from Yunnan Province, one in oil painting and one in print making. Who did I think I was? So the next day I went to the Provincial Admissions Office, where the office chief said to me: ‘Jinning County, ah, so you are the educated youth! Come right back tomorrow’. The next day he took an envelope out from the safe and said: ‘Your notice came in early, but we forgot about it’. I quickly opened the envelope and found I was accepted for oil painting by the Sichuan Academy! I felt giddy and my first thought was to run and find my teacher. I sped on my bicycle all the way to my teacher’s house. When Mr. Lin read the letter of acceptance, he excitedly patted me on the shoulder for the first time and said: ‘That’s great! Go and find your dad!’ That day, he was at my house with my father drinking until midnight.
Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts and the “Scar Art” of his Fellow-Students
Things in the year of 1977 looked outwardly relaxed, but it was in fact a tense year of conflict with nothing romantic about it. On 7 February, People’s Daily, Red Flag, and Liberation Army Daily simultaneously published an editorial titled “Study the Document and Grasp the Agenda”.[39] The core of the editorial was this: “Whatever decisions Chairman Mao made, we must all support, and whatever instructions Chairman Mao issued, we must consistently follow”. This meant that the fall of the political clique called the “Gang of Four”, which included Mao Zedong’s wife, did not mean that everything Mao decreed could be changed. However, on April 10, Deng Xiaoping wrote to the CCP Central Committee stating that these “Two Whatevers” could not be questioned and the understanding of Mao Zedong thought had to be “accurate” and “complete”. In other words, what Mao Zedong had said in the past could be reinterpreted. Soon (May 24), Deng also told two other leaders in the Party, Wang Zhen and Deng Liqun: “It is impossible that every word a person utters is true or that a person is always absolutely correct”. In July, the third plenary session of the Eleventh Central Committee adopted a resolution to restore Comrade Deng Xiaoping to his former position, and by August, Chairman Hua Guofeng formally announced that the fall of the “Gang of Four” brought to an end the decade-long “Cultural Revolution”, but he suggested that political revolutions of this nature would in the future have to be implemented many times. However, on October 22, with the restoration of the national college entrance examination system, the enrollment targets, criteria, and methods were a departure from Mao’s original intention which was that those with the status of workers, peasants, and soldiers could enter schools without exams regardless of whether they had common sense or basic knowledge. Now almost any youth could sign up for the college entrance examination; in order to allow more people to have the opportunity to study, the maximum age of candidates was relaxed and extended to 30 years of age, regardless of whether they already had a family. At the same time, this examination necessarily required that a high school education system be in place, all of which was a dramatic contrast to the disdain for knowledge in the “Cultural Revolution” period.
In late November, Zhang took part in the 1977 national college entrance examination. As he later recalled, he did not hold out much hope of getting into the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. However, in the end, in mid-March 1978, he was lucky enough to receive a notification from the school. When he arrived at the school, classes had already been going for two weeks, and the students were participating in manual labor organized by the school. On the third day after he arrived at the school, Zhang Xiaogang and his classmates had their first lesson in sketching.
The ‘78 year at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts consisted of only fifty students, divided into three departments and four classes; Zhang was a student in the oil painting department:
There were twenty students in our class; [40] the maximum age was said to be 32 years old, and the youngest only 17 years old. I was twenty, like several others in the class. He Duoling, Luo Zhongli and some others who were more than ten years older than me had a variety of knowledge and experience that far exceeded the fine art teachers at the Academy. They were already regarded as master painters in Chengdu, Chongqing, and other places. When the nation was paralyzed by the Cultural Revolution, they could not become students. Otherwise they would now have been teachers. He Duoling only needed to do a sketch of something, and he could immediately reproduce it as a painting. With Cheng Conglin, for example, no one could compare with him for hard work, dedication and seriousness, and his sketches would always top the class. Their knowledge of literature and music was also superior, and they were the idols of the other students; wherever they went, there would always be a group of people who immediately gathered around to listen. I had learned a little of the fundamentals of sketching in Kunming, but in my first two years at college I was one of the lowest students in the class. I worked hard every day and wanted to be like them, but the gap was too great and it was unbearable. I remember in first grade that I first had the idea of dropping out of college, but after much thought, I thought about how much I loved painting as a child and how hard it had been to get to this position where I had good teachers who could help me, so I dismissed this idea, unable to face my conscience and my mentor. Even though I had only a mediocre talent and would never paint a masterpiece, I realized what joy it was to be able to keep doing what I loved. So I regained my resolve and by second grade I was slowly improving.[41]
Zhang Xiaogang recognized that in terms of basic sketching skills not to mention painting abilities he was not as good as his classmates, and even though he thought of dropping out, frustrated that he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, he then devoted all his energies to sketching, plaster sculpture, and oil painting classes in an attempt to catch up with his classmates. Shortly after he entered the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Zhang Xiaogang wrote in a letter to Ye Yongqing:
I’m finished! These students in our class all paint so well. He Duoling, Cheng Conglin, and Gao Xiaohua. They are just so good. I think they even paint portraits better than all the models in textbooks we have to copy.
His fellow student Gao Xiaohua described Zhang Xiaogang at that time:
At school there was no indication that he would one day become so successful. Throughout his four years at the school, he seemed ordinary: his exercises and examination works were all average. However, during ‘the third wave’ of art [42] emanating from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts when his painting titled Tibetan Women [43] brought the style of Van Gogh into his work, he quickly changed style. That was in the invigorating early days of the reform and opening, and all of a sudden there were lots of new things coming in, unstoppably, and there were all types of art – the whole history of Western art was suddenly coming in and filling the minds of young Chinese artists who felt dizzy with all this input. Xiaogang’s personality was very gentle and tranquil and he always spoke slowly and softly with a smile, not wanting to ‘intrude’ on anyone.[44]
Gao Xiaohua also described the students of 1977 who entered the school:
That year was a bitterly cold winter and the Huangjueping district of Chongqing was bleak and filthy. At that time the country had the look of ‘poverty’ which characterized the ‘Chinese landscape’. The first batch of students accepted by the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts after the ‘Cultural Revolution’ were described as ‘new’, but nothing looked new about their appearance; although I wore an old army uniform, the other students were almost exclusively dressed in blue-grey clothing, which was standard ‘national dress’ at the time. Beneath long messy hair, the faces of the students always looked undernourished and unwashed, not clean, but they were excited and exciting, as well as exhausted ……
After we entered the school, we were assigned to a dormitory that was a dilapidated and ‘condemned’ three-storied building, earmarked for demolition, and the up-down bunk beds inside were equipped with mattresses made of a blend of bamboo and straw. However, this environment, that now evokes charity ‘primary school’ accommodation in the countryside, would produce tomorrow’s ‘stars’ of the art world. That’s how our new life began.[45]
The Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts was first officially used as the name of the school in 1959. Prior to then it had been called the Southwest College of Fine Arts, and it was an amalgamation of the Southwest People’s College of Art and the Fine Arts Department of the Chengdu School of Art.[46] At the time of the school’s founding in 1953, the Communist Party’s Southwest Specialized School of Fine Arts Branch Committee was also set up, and this meant that from the outset the Communist Party was in control of the school’s teaching and other work. As with all school organizations, the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts had undergone successive political movements, and to varying degrees school teachers and students were participants and victims of those political campaigns, and of course, sometimes there were also beneficiaries of these political struggles. In 1990, an unofficial publication titled A Concise History of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts: 1938-1989, recorded successive political campaigns and their impact on the school. In the anti-rightist movement the school even allowed “all students to boycott classes and forego examinations, in order to concentrate fully on the struggle”.[47] Later successive political campaigns resulted in teachers and staff being sent down to rural areas, not for what was called training but for “thought reform”, if a teacher required to be sent down happened to be a rightist. In the book one section, which describes how teachers and students from the school attempted to produce steel during the “Great Leap Forward”, allows us to appreciate the unimaginable situation in China at that time:
In September 1958, the school responded to the call that the entire people constituted an army and established the fine arts militia corps. Wang Songxian was its political commissar, Wei Jiyu was the corps commander and deputy political commissar, and Qi Yunchu was chief of staff. The militia corps comprised five companies and after its establishment its top priority was producing steel. With the atmosphere of directives and exaggeration raging at the time, the leadership blindly demanded that the school produce 500 kg of steel daily. The staff and students were blitzed with fatigue as they took turns in the struggle. Holes were dug all over the fine grounds of the campus, and some comrades went without sleep over consecutive days and nights. By mid-October, more than twenty furnaces of different types, under the direction of the Party Secretary and the Principal, were burning up large quantities of wood, coke, and scrap, turning out steel that was simply all scrap metal.[48]
By 1961, after the CCP Central Committee approved the draft version of provisional regulations on the work of colleges and universities directly under the Ministry of Education and other regulations, the schools were directed to “focus on teaching”, and so school teaching was restored and strengthened. However, in September 1962, Mao Zedong, at the second plenary session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Party, once again emphasized the seriousness of class struggle. He warned the entire Party that the bourgeoisie was attempting a restoration from within the Party by appealing to revisionist arguments, and this political judgment led to the nation-wide Socialist Education Movement [49] that was played out from 1963 to 1965. The students and teachers of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts naturally could not be spared. The large clay sculptural work titled Rent Collection Courtyard was completed in 1965 by teachers of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts working under the direction of the Party organization and this nationally sensational sculptural work was considered the artistic model for depicting class struggle, useful for educating people across the country to “never forget class struggle”. This was the first time that the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts gained national prominence.[50]
Like every other area, city, school, and government organization, the “Cultural Revolution” which began in May 1966 and was terminated in October 1976 was a disastrously destructive event for the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts: the school lost any ability to function normally; many teachers, professors, and experts at the school were labeled as “historical counter-revolutionaries”, “reactionary academic authorities”, or “monsters and demons”, and as a result locked up, and physically tortured; almost all teaching equipment was destroyed; and political factions set up allegedly to defend Mao Zedong took turns occupying the school and killed each other. This continued until 1968, when soldiers organized into “army propaganda teams” entered the school and some teachers and cadres formed an interim authority, and the ongoing battles tended to die down. Later, “Mao Zedong thought propaganda teams” formed by workers from several factories entered the school, and they were regarded as representatives of the proletariat administering the school who must “lead in everything”. In 1969, the entire school staff had to perform the “loyalty dance” [51] for one month to celebrate the convening of the Ninth Party Congress. It was not until 1976 that the last “propaganda team” left the school.
From the beginning of the “Cultural Revolution” onwards the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts had stopped admissions, and teaching was only resumed in 1974. However, at that time only “worker-peasant-soldier” students with practical experience were eligible to attend college. These students lacked skills in painting or sculpture but in view of the fact that they were both the subject and object art was intended to serve, the workers, peasants and soldiers who were the only social classes considered to have the qualities of leadership participated in the running of the school and teaching reforms. As can be imagined, as at all other universities and colleges in the country, all teachers and students of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts had to participate in the political campaigns to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius and to reverse “the right-wing political verdict” regarding Deng Xiaoping before the “great Cultural Revolution” was ended in 1976. The Chinese people were verging on nervous collapse, and people had lost any stable basis for reaching a conclusion about any political position.
So when 109 students emerged successfully from 5,795 candidates wanting to enter the Academy in the spring of 1978, the devastated school was fully restored to proper working order, and by December of that year, the school restored live model sketching. People described the period from October 1976 to December 1978 as a new “springtime”.
To be able to leave the countryside and go to college in the city was, of course, an important opportunity to change one’s lot in life, but until this time the fate of every individual in China was still directly, and decisively, influenced by the policies and political life of the Communist Party and the State. After graduation, a person from a rural area could also be re-assigned back to the countryside; the Communists did not change their political strategies, nor did the nation effect any ideological change.
Two months after the ebullient and excited young students entered the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Guangming Daily on May 11 on page 4 carried an article titled “Practice Is the Sole Criterion of Truth”. Signed by Deng Xiaoping, the article reminded people that all issues from the past could be questioned, thereby negating the policy regarding the “Two whatevers” of the previous year. Now that Deng Xiaoping’s interpretation of Mao Zedong Thought had come into force, Deng delivered speeches to the Army (June) and local government (September) which constituted a decisive political view: In rethinking the future of the party and the State, the endless recitation of quotations from Chairman Mao would no longer control the debate. On November 14, the Chinese Communist Party’s Beijing Municipal Committee announced that the 1976 Tiananmen Incident that occurred during the Qingming Festival was no longer regarded as a counter-revolutionary incident, but as a revolutionary act.[52] The political nature of the changed interpretation was largely in conformity with the judgment spelled out by the Central Committee in April in the document titled Regarding the Implementation of the Decision to Remove from People All Rightist Labels. The reason given for re-assessing the 1976 Tiananmen Incident was that the demonstration had not been directed against the Party, but against the “Gang of Four” clique. This new decision of the Central Committee was intended to win the support of more people for the new collective political position of the Central Committee. In 1978, the most decisive historical event was the plenary session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party (December 18), which presented a decisive judgment on history and reality, the decision to substitute modernization for “class warfare”. This would completely transform the political direction of the nation and determine the future direction of China’s market economy. It can be imagined that even though ideological principles continued to exist and occupy the dominant position, values involving the commodity economy and the corresponding background of civilization and thought would begin to support markets in China, and introduce to China Western thought and culture through translations and publications, performances, and exhibitions. Following the release of the Sino-US communiqué establishing diplomatic relations (December 16), the cold war ideological conflicts would obviously be weakened, and the big socialist family would begin to dissolve with the end of the cold war.
The political atmosphere in the arts could only reflect the line of the official organ of the China Artists Association titled Fine Arts.[53] In the first issue of 1977, the journal reported the arrest two months previously of the arrest of the “Gang of Four” led by Mao Zedong’s widow Jiang Qing and the assumption by Hua Guofeng of the positions of chairmen of the Party and the State. Given the habit in art circles and the demands placed on literature and art by the Communist Party, the first issue heralded the opening of the national fine art exhibition at Spring Festival which warmly celebrated Hua Guofeng’s new positions and the great victory in smashing of the Gang of Four’s conspiracy to seize Party and state power. Each issue spelled out the demands and response the Party expected of the arts in its political struggles, as in Shao Dazhen’s “Why Was Jiang Qing Opposed to the Chinese-style Painting This Land So Rich in Beauty” (Issue 1), Liu Jigang’s “Strive to Create Proletarian Heroic Images: A Critique of the ‘Gang of Four’s’ Theory of ‘Three Highlights’” (Issue 4), or articles introducing painters’ creative experiences, such as Hou Yimin’s “The Process of Creating Chairman Mao Together with the Workers of Anyuan and Some Insights”. Until 1978, art workers throughout the country began to be able to read a number of articles relating to historical and artistic topics, and by the sixth issue, “Characteristic of Style in Chinese Traditional Painting”, a posthumous article by the painter Pan Tianshou who lost his life in the “Cultural Revolution”, was published. The same issue also reported a long delayed memorial service held for those older artists who had died in political movements, including Pan Tianshou, Ni Yide, and Xiao Chuanjiu. People were familiar with the sketch by Xu Beihong and the painting by Pan Tianshou also published in that issue, but they also see how a work like Pan Tianshou’s Chinese-style painting titled Eager to Pay the Agricultural Tax had suffered obvious signs of “age” since 1949.
In 1979, Fine Arts, as in the past, attempted in as timely a manner as possible to keep up with the pace of the Party Central Committee and in its first issue of the year published Xiao Feng’s article “Creating New Pictures for the New Tasks of the New Era”, in other words images in “the spirit of the Third Plenary Session”. At the same time as publishing reproductions of history paintings showing the Party’s alternate leaders – those persons designated as “capitalist roaders”, “traitors”, and “spies” during the “Cultural Revolution”, the magazine also praised art works depicting martyrs who struggled against the “Gang of Four” political clique such as Zhang Zhixin and the martyrs of the Tiananmen Square Incident of 1976.[54] These themes were based on the Party’s political decisions and had been legitimized as topics, forming an obvious contrast to the paintings of the “Cultural Revolution” decade. In September 1979, the editor He Rong, [55] discussing the topics and themes of the “Exhibition of Fine Art, Photography and Calligraphy on Learning from the Martyr Zhang Zhixin” as well as some other recent paintings, wrote that he felt a “great turning point in art” had come, and in fact, the real meaning of this “turning point” was that the art world of that period had begun to “examine real emotions and tell the truth”. People now discovered that Zhang Zhixin, previously labeled as an “active counter-revolutionary”, had died a martyr’s death when she was shot on April 4, 1975 after having her neck broken. Now, she became the object of praise and her earlier struggles were interpreted as her fight with the “Gang of Four”, in accordance with the political logic of the day. People shied away from regarding the system as the root cause why this and similar tragedies occurred, and documents and media followed the Party line conforming to immediate political needs and these expedient explanations continued to form the basis for artistic creation. In that year the art world was shaken up to a greater extent by the more complex issues surrounding the publication of the comic book (lianhuanhua) titled Maple in the eighth issue of the periodical Lianhuanhua Bao.[56] Because the comic included images of Jiang Qing and Lin Biao, the periodical’s publication was halted. The editor He Rong again defended this art work, saying that history should be respectful of facts, and that everything that happened in history could not be erased or tampered with. The images of Lin Biao and Jiang Qing that appeared in the first fourteen frames of the comic were true images and not caricatures, were integral to the entire arrangement of the theme and story, and in terms of political stance were not problematic. He Rong cited many examples of how, in the political past, historical facts had been doctored or eliminated, and argued that Maple signaled the beginning of a respect for history and an elucidation of historical facts, and that its rationality was a fundamental denial of the political arguments for armed struggle made in the early phase of the “Cultural Revolution” as well as the “Cultural Revolution” itself. He Rong expressed sympathy with Maple’s story of the lovers Lu Danfeng and Li Honggang, and his compassion was grounded in the way the “Cultural Revolution” had trampled on the spirit of the young and called on them to kill each other and make sacrifices under the banner of sanctimonious revolutionary slogans. The authors of Maple used a masterly realistic writing style and tone to narrate a personal story concealed within the human tragedy of those times. The story profoundly moved those who lived through that era; there was a subtle sense of something concealed behind the illustrations and this prompted further speculation that enabled people to see clearly the history and reality that people really needed to know. Thus, in the field of artistic creation issues and concepts regarding “truth” and “reality” were once again mentioned. In a note just before the conclusion of his article, He Rong cautioned: “Regarding the need to adhere to historical truth, please refer to the commentary article in the seventh issue for 1979 of the magazine Historical Research titled ‘Only by Being Faithful to Facts Can We Be Loyal to the Truth’”.[57] Although this view had the characteristics of simplicity and purity, hardly plummeting any philosophical depths, subsequent thinking and artistic practices would entail minute examination and changes of issues related to “history”, “facts”, “genuineness”, and “truth”. The same issue of Fine Arts also published a discussion article by the young Li Xianting titled “The Harsh Lessons of Modern Superstition: The Delineation of the Environment of Typicality in the Comic Book Maple”. This young man who had just joined the art magazine as an editor presented an incisive analysis of Maple, writing:
At its most profound, the comic strip Maple sings an elegy for superstition in the modern age. The value of history lies in its presentation of the true face of the past so that future generations can learn from it. We ‘look back’ in order to better ‘look forward’, to ascertain the pitfalls and deviations in the road ahead we need to avoid, and to reveal to us what shocking deceits, conspiracies, delusions, and tragedy could lie before us, so that people are awakened and can think profoundly. The real significance of Maple is that it can remind us that we must adhere to dialectical materialism and not to idealism and metaphysics; we must continue to liberate our thinking and not be trapped by the imprisoned doctrines of feudal fascism; we want science, we want democracy, and we don’t want various forms of religious superstition and dictatorship.[58]
Li Xianting was at that time a young editor with no qualifications or grounding in Western thought. The terms he used such as “modern superstition”, “dialectical materialism”, “idealism”, and “metaphysics” were a substitute for the Western philosophy being newly re-introduced to China, but he soon became an ardent defender and promoter of “scar art”, and would become one of the most important critics of the modernist art movement of the 1980s.
In his article discussing Maple, He Rong used the term “scar”, and this was because not long previously the phenomenon in literature of what was called “scar literature” had emerged. However, in the field of art, what truly constituted a historic turning point was the creation of works designated as “scar art” by several students from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. In 1979, the China Art Museum (today’s NAMOC) staged the National Fine Arts Exhibition Commemorating the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China. However, the focus of attention was not the big-name artists of the older generation, or those works by artists who continued to present works on themes requested by the Communist Party, but the paintings by students of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts - Gao Xiaohua, Cheng Conglin, and Luo Zhongli. They were all classmates of Zhang Xiaogang, who felt these students all greatly influenced and molded him:
In 1979, China initiated enormous changes. School libraries gradually began to open, every day on the radio one could listen to broadcasts of music by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Mozart, as well as recordings of “scar” literature, and walking down the street one could see people queuing up outside bookstores to purchase books by world famous authors. In classrooms and dormitories, teachers and students engaged in impassioned debates. Incisive art works by my classmates condemning the Cultural Revolution, such as Snow on an Unrecorded Day in 1968 and Why, started to receive publicity, while some masterpieces even rose to national prominence such as Luo Zhongli’s Father and He Duoling’s Spring Has Come. Suddenly my classmates had become stars, and every day people from all over the country came to interview them; this was the most glorious time I had ever witnessed at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. Every day it seemed that a new star was born, or a new impressive masterpiece was produced. The Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts was no longer just a teaching unit, but a passionately creative institution; teachers and students could tentatively explore certain types of ‘new art’. Although this was not an exploration of the core language driving ‘new art’ nor of the rendering and study of concepts, it was an irrepressible enthusiasm for humanity, a critical consciousness of years of repression, an attempt at liberation, and an impassionate awakening of the self.[59]
The word “scar” had specific historical meaning and it derived from a post-October 1976 literary practice. In November 1977, the journal People’s Literature published Liu Xinwu’s novella The Head Teacher. Because the novella prised human nature from the grip of class struggle, it was sympathetically received by the general public. In compliance with Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, the concept of “human nature” and its inner meaning never previously existed in the People’s Republic of China and at Yan’an Mao Zedong issued this serious warning to the intellectuals attending the Forum: “There can only be ever be some specific human nature; there is no such thing as human nature in the abstract. In class society there can only be the human nature of a specific class, and there is no human nature that transcends classes”. Yet every human being feels emotions that are difficult to articulate - sadness, depression, desire, and love. If these feelings cannot be expressed, how are people to act? Mao Zedong told writers and artists that they had to choose and discriminate between the human nature of the proletariat and the human nature of the landlord-bourgeois class. Those who violated this injunction in their works were creating erroneous literature and art. However, it was only after the conclusion of the “Cultural Revolution” that the long-overdue restoration of human nature could replace the human nature assigned by Mao to social classes and the expression of a “common humanity” could be voiced.
On August 11, 1979, Wen Hui Bao published the short story Scar, and for convenience people used the term “scar literature” to refer to literature that exposed and criticized the past (mainly the “Cultural Revolution”). Lu Xinhua’s short story Scar described a girl named Wang Xiaohua who was not allowed to graduate from middle school allegedly because her mother was accused of once being a “traitor” in the Communist revolutionary ranks. This determination broke up the family which was exiled to the countryside. The young girl was determined to fundamentally change the political label assigned to her, but in the countryside she suffered greatly because of her mother’s “political problem”, but it also compromised her boyfriend. After the “Cultural Revolution” ended, her mother wrote to the Communist Party Organization Department requesting that she be rehabilitated and reinstated in her original leadership position, but she now suffered poor health, aggravated by her inability to see her exiled daughter for the previous eight years. However, when Wang Xiaohua finally returned to Shanghai and arrived at the hospital where her ill mother was accommodated, she discovered that her mother had already died. She read these final words in her mother’s diary:
….So looking forward to today, but Xiaohua is not back yet. I saw Xiaolin and thought of her even more. Although the children have not been physically tortured like me by the “Gang of Four”, I know that the scars my children carry in their hearts are probably worse than mine. I can only hope my children can come back. I know that I only have a few days more, but I still want to try and hold out for these few days, because I know my children will definitely return...
The generations born in the 1940s and 1950s could fully appreciate the historical background of this short story, and the theme of this fictional work had universal resonance. At this time, few could imagine a true story that played out in 1970. On February 19 of that year, an “educated youth” from Nanjing called Ren Yi was arrested in Jiangpu County, Jiangsu, on the charge of writing a popular song in 1969 called Song of the Educated Youth (also called My Hometown). Unlike bombastic revolutionary songs, this particularly song was tinged with melancholy and filled with human emotion. At that time, the massive number of “educated youth” sent down to the countryside had already down their time, and ever since arriving in the countryside these innocents from the city had felt inferior, alone, distressed, and restive. Their lives were so different from what they had previously felt and experienced, but they did not know how to confront and explain their suffering. By exposing these emotions, Song of the Educated Youth became a source of solace and the song’s popularity grew. After Moscow Radio began broadcasting the song, a campaign to denounce the song was whipped up in China and posters in the streets of Nanjing accused the song of “articulating the words and singing the praises of imperialism, revisionism, and counter-revolution”.[60] Finally, Ren Yi was sentenced to ten years imprisonment with hard labor. For those engaged in literary and artistic creation, and especially for those engaged in the theory of literature and art, it was very clear what political problems were attached to such emotions. As early as 1942, Mao Zedong made it explicitly clear to intellectuals fond of “exposing” social problems in their work that “revolutionary writers and artists can only expose the aggressors, exploiters, and oppressors, and their adverse influence on the people; not the masses”. The problem now was that some authors of songs and short stories were exposing the cruelty of the “Cultural Revolution” initiated by Mao and the various problems that had arisen in the revolutionary ranks, and examining the resulting tragedy. In 1979, people had just escaped from the brutal and tragic “Cultural Revolution”, and were now beginning to awaken and ask questions. At the very least, people needed to recount or write their personal stories that led them to the extremes of misery, so that the community could collectively seek solace. There were in fact people who accused such literature of exposing the seamy side of socialism and they held this kind of literature to be “regressive” and lacking in “forward-looking” enthusiasm, but the exposure of iniquities and the tragedies of ordinary people to be found in this type of literature succeeded in arousing people’s understanding of the past and, gradually, their understanding of history. “Scar literature” also initiated a debate about whether the purpose of literature was to “praise” or “detract”; in other words, was the task of the writer to sing the praises of the Communist Party, the State, socialism, and the masses, or to expose the “dark side” of the socialist system. Therefore, for its exposure, “scar literature” should be criticized. The author of an article titled “Praise or Detraction” thus followed Mao Zedong’s logic: “in class society, there are only writers belonging to a particular class, there are no writers who transcend class”; “we insist on the four basic principles, and in creating literature and art we must express the position of workers, peasants and soldiers, and erect a monument for the proletariat”; “if the people’s writers do not praise the virtue of the people, then what use are they?”; and “if a writer is not delivering praise then he must be detracting from his subject”. The discussion was fiercely lively, but in that unique political period, the school of “praise” did not prevail and people, with their newly acquired freedom and power, passionately argued, and questions regarded the nature of literature and art were intrinsic within these sympathetic exposés, complaints, and tragedies.[61]
Unlike at the Central Academy of Fine Arts or other art colleges, the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts did not interfere excessively with the work being produced by its inaugural class of 1977 and in 1979, under the slogan of “teaching and creative research as the core”, [62] the Academy provided its students with opportunities to do creative work, even though Gao Xiaohua might have had memories of the school still placing taboos on students’ work when he first entered the Academy. Among Zhang Xiaogang’s classmates, Gao Xiaohua was perhaps the first student to do original creative work. After being at the Institute for six months or so, Gao had completed the sketches for one of the most important paintings of the “scar art” genre - Why. His theme of “exposé” alarmed many people, because it did not match the criteria that people were long accustomed to expect of art. Why depicted Red Guards resting, during a lull in street fighting. The painting featured grey tones and in it we see the “young revolutionary generals” defending Mao Zedong and his ideological line in a despondent mood, seemingly little confident that they will be victorious in tomorrow’s battle. During the early period of the “Cultural Revolution”, Chongqing was one of the cities with some of the cruelest and most brutal fighting and this history was seared into the memories of Gao Xiaohua and Cheng Conglin. Ever since the 1940s the city of Chongqing had a high concentration of armaments factories and arsenals, and these provided the conditions for some of the heaviest fighting during the “Cultural Revolution” period. However, more than a decade later, young students were becoming aware of the city’s historical problems. Gao Xiaohua’s parents had been in the army and during his childhood in Chongqing he was subject to nightmares: “My childhood in Sichuan’s Chongqing left me with memories of the scars of war and brutal poverty. I left Chongqing in the year following the call during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ for armed struggle (1969). For many years thereafter, I had recurring nightmares of terribly cruel scenes and grotesque corpses ... ... Because my mother was a doctor in the army, many of those who suffered in the battles were treated or died in the emergency unit of the army hospital where she worked”.[63] In the journal Fine Arts (1978: 8), Gao Xiaohua explained “why he painted Why”:
Once works of literature and drama began to give prominence to the ‘Cultural Revolution’ period, people’s thinking was gradually emancipated, and my own way of thinking also gradually matured. I often thought about how I had also been a witness of this tragedy, as well as being a participant and a victim; my mental and physical ‘scars’ were the witnesses of history. Our generation had the right and the duty to speak out and document these historical events.[64]
Gao Xiaohua acknowledged that his work was a “thematic” creation, and his handling of the painting style and technique was influenced by Russian and Soviet painters, especially the Soviet painter Gely M. Korzhev, and he wanted to create an image filled with characters caught up in this tragic atmosphere.
Among “scar paintings”, Cheng Conglin’s Snow on an Unrecorded Day in 1968 suggested to those familiar with the Russian Itinerant School the inspirationally and tragically dramatic techniques of Vasili Ivanovich Surikov. This painting depicted the outcome of a violent battle, with the rival Red Guard factions separately registering the joy of victory and the grief of defeat. However, the treatment of the different roles is not simplistic; their images and appearances convey their faith and altruism, and both the victorious and the defeated appear to believe that they were fighting for the truth. To one side we see a female teacher assigned to sweeping duties observing all of this with a tragic expression on her face and her eyes filled with tears; her identity is obvious: she is an intellectual undergoing re-education, a teacher who has been deprived of her right to teach. Cheng Conglin has effectively applied Surikov’s approach to thematic painting to recreate the history he has personally experienced or witnessed, and this painting was profoundly moving for many of his peers who had similar experiences of the “Cultural Revolution”.
At first, no one would have imagined that the painting Spring by Wang Hai could have won second prize at the National Fine Arts Exhibition Commemorating the 30th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China, because the work seemed to have no discernible theme nor plot, being seemingly emotionally unable to arouse “revolutionary enthusiasm”. However, anyone who had experienced the chill of the “Cultural Revolution” could understand what life really felt like during that period, and that now a moment of warmth and comfort had finally arrived. The grey tones of the work heightened the environment depicted in the work; we see an emotionally inscrutable female “educated youth” distractedly or almost unconsciously combing her long hair, and her bare feet make it very clear that this a normal day in the life of a young person sent down to the countryside. The subject of the painting is partly hidden by a cactus in the foreground and the theme is indicated by the opening flower. This was an era regarded by most people as an era of renewed life, and even if people were not yet completely free they could sense the coming of spring. The writer Zheng Yi, another author of “scar literature”, has described this symbolic image:
The cactus that grows in the desert is not afraid of the fierce sun. This spiky plant that doesn’t fear arid conditions is praised for its obstinate vitality and amazing vigor. The cactus with its strong character and flourishing vitality is a metaphor for the youth of the protagonist. A tiny scarlet cactus flower is struggling to open up, letting us know that, ultimately, spring is unstoppable.[65]
This description is an affirmation of hope by people who have experienced a tragedy in the recent past. What is really touching about this painting is the psychological mixture of sorrow and joy that it evokes, as a tragic metaphor of the fate of “educated youth” who had been sent down to the countryside:
The cactus in the porcelain pot in the corner of the room has put out five green tender spines, symbolizing the five years that she has been ‘settled’ in the countryside, as well as her determination to ‘survive’ and ‘grow’; it is as though her sad and bitter feelings can be dimly discerned in the future of this young and tender plant.[66]
When audiences first saw Father by Luo Zhongli, they were shocked by the image of suffering evoked by the network of deep lines that furrowed the exquisitely delineated, yet powerful and commanding, face of the subject. Until this time, Chinese audiences have never seen an ordinary farmer’s face placed so prominently and assertively at the centre of a painting, like that of a Communist Party leader. However, at that time, people were not discussing why a student would decide to emulate the style of Chuck Close to depict a Chinese subject, but rather what this painting politically signified. Most critics endorsed Luo Zhongli’s decision to make his subject a real Chinese farmer, and one clearly living after 1949. The genuine happiness people felt at seeing an image of a farmer depicted in such a large-scale painting and with such fine brushwork, totally different from the previous “light, bright, red” [67] images of peasants from the “Cultural Revolution” period, appearing at just that time when people had the opportunity to vent their dissatisfaction with the politics and art of the past, naturally made people simply think that Luo Zhongli was deploying hyper-realist techniques to depict real feelings. At this more relaxed time, some people regarded this image as representative of farmers. This went beyond art theories, and when it came to evaluating the social status and living conditions of farmers before and after 1949, for those familiar with the theory presented by Mao Zedong at the Yan’an Forum as well as the theory of literature and art presented by Jiang Qing during the “Cultural Revolution” period, this became a major issue regarding political principles. A critic named Shao Yangde was opposed to Luo Zhongli’s Father:
The work portrays a Chinese peasant of the 1980s as someone ‘numb’ and ‘paralyzed’, ‘staring’ at us with the ‘docile look of a cow or sheep’ (which we cannot consider to be healthy, normal, or reasonable), and such images hardly convey a feeling of beauty. This is obvious to all. Such artistic images necessarily depict the character and features of a peasant in the old society. To paint the same type of image, thirty years later, is incomprehensible. That being the case, the artist can only depict a typical ‘middling character’; given his artistic attributes of ‘numbness’, ‘paralysis’, negativity, retrograde loyalty, and pessimistic despair (he is an old-style peasant who has not been liberated); the painter injects no revolutionary ideals into his subject, so how could he be the ‘father of 800 million peasants’?[68]
Many were drawn into the controversy surrounding Luo Zhongli’s Father. Shao Yangde even wrote another article about the painting, and Shao Dazhen criticized the work using different arguments, devoting a long essay to making just one point: Luo Zhongli’s “father” was not a socialist father, but a peasant from the period of KMT rule before 1949. Yet such a question hardly required debate; the fundamental context determined the legitimacy of Luo Zhongli’s humane and naturalistic style. The original intention of the painter who had done time as an educated youth in the Daba Mountains had been simply to portray realistically an ordinary farmer who had stirred his emotions, but such an intention could only be revealed in 1978, because the farmers one saw going about their daily lives were utterly different from the peasants that the Communist Party’s policies on literature and the arts required artists to depict. Now, Luo Zhongli no longer needed to consider what had previously shackled the thinking of writers and artists, and he frankly revealed what his eyes had perceived. He has described the genesis and inspiration for his painting, a farmer who was on duty collecting manure from a public privy on New Year’s Eve:
It was the eve of Chinese New Year in 1975 and people were being buffeted by the sleet and snow. It was extremely cold. At the public toilet near my apartment a middle-aged farmer was on duty and in the morning I noticed him moving stiffly in the snow, wielding a long pole like a farmer and placing the load on the wall surrounding the septic tank. He rested on the top and had his hands in his sleeves. He looked mesmerized and numb, as steam came from his silent mouth. He had been there since the night before, although he had changed positions. The New Year’s Eve celebrations had been underway: warm lights shone in the surrounding apartments and houses, the sounds of laughter, music, and firecrackers mingled with the shouts of people playing drinking games ... ... the different sounds blended together. But the farmer looking after the privy seemed to have been forgotten, and his mesmerized and numbed appearance was a dramatic and poignant contrast with his surroundings. He too would have had a home and children waiting for him to return and be with them.[69]
Luo Zhongli eventually painted the farmer as he saw him, without the usual red facial highlights and aura, in stark contrast to the images of peasants that had been presented in the art of the “Cultural Revolution”, thereby readily evoking the question of how politics had transcended art itself. Father was included in the 1981 Second National Youth Art Exhibition, in which it won first prize, signaling that almost all of judges at this time tacitly approved of the painting’s treatment of historical reality. With everyone variously explaining the importance of this painting and its artistic rationality, the use of Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art to endorse the logic of “exposure” and “praise” had obviously been overturned, and no one would, or could, again present such arguments.
One artist who pulled away from external reality and directly presented his subject’s inner drama was He Duoling, who had not studied as an undergraduate at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts but had been directly admitted as a graduate student. In 1982, when the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts staged its exhibition of oil paintings at the China Art Gallery (today’s National Art Museum of China) in Beijing, He Duoling’s painting Spring Has Come made people aware that inner solace could overcome problems of reality. Nine years older than his fellow student Zhang Xiaogang, He Duoling was already a very well-known painter in Chengdu before entering the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. His classmate Gao Xiaohua has described He Duoling’s imagery and temperament:
He had many of the features of the ‘artists’ described in so many early literary works (especially Russian novels): long flowing hair, a thin body, and delicate hands, a slightly weary face with melancholy and passionate eyes ... ... Because of his odd ‘European’ appearance and his gentle, easy-going temperament, people liked him and he appealed to the girls and the boys! Of course, that was only his appearance, but in fact he was widely regarded as an artistic ‘genius’. In the class, he was one of most ‘petit bourgeois” in temperament, and he had a naturally good voice and played the guitar beautifully. I remember one midsummer night suddenly hearing him and his younger brother playing a Russian song on the guitar and deep male voices singing the choruses. Wow! Such fantastic singing and music coming from the window and filling the night at the Academy ... ... I remember how one year he taught everyone in the class to sing the Soviet Cavalry March, and it irresistibly became the ‘class song’ for the 1977 oil painting class!” [70]
Spring Has Come (1981) did not recount any particular story. It depicted a girl who was grazing cattle seated on the grass, as though lost in reverie. In flavor and technique, the painting revealed obvious influences of the American artist Andrew Wyeth. Before that, he and several friends had collectively painted a work titled The Song We Used to Sing, which depicted the lives of educated youth. The work was melancholic and nostalgic in its tone and emotions. This mood continued in Spring Has Come. In fact, He Duoling had already detached this work from its basis in reality and allowed it to present inner emotions and attitudes, quite different from the thematic approach favored by his classmates. His emotions and attitudes were derived from his reading of literature and his perception of European and Russian music. He Duoling instinctively and prodigiously sought to transcend reality and to position his art within his own aesthetic and imagination, without making compromises. Through his paintings he sought to express ideas and was not interested in eulogizing; he was concerned with inner feelings, and the emotions of love expressed through art; he was concerned with the nature of life and with man’s fundamental nature; he was also not keen on “beauty” or “ferocity” per se, and sought to express things concealed within his work in a subtle way through brush strokes and tones. He Duoling was not at all fond of formalism or pure art, but wanted his work to “bring tears to people’s eyes”; ultimately, this extremely talented artist sought genuine sincerity, and was faithful to his ideal of getting as close to his art as possible. In Youth which He Duoling completed in 1984 we see this temperament at its pinnacle. Even though we can discern a deep sense of humanity in other “scar art” works painted by some of his fellow students, such as Zhu Yiyong’s Mountain Village Shop (1981) and Yang Qian’s Feeding (1981), He Duoling’s paintings, despite their “realism”, are at a remove from realism, and can even be described as typified by an abstract mood and form.
In any case, the mainstream of “scar art” was built on the tradition of realism and, in an age urgently hoping to “overturn chaos and restore normality”, methods were less important; what mattered was political attitude and stance, as well as a revaluation and fresh understanding of history, which is why a critical realist approach and attitude were able to play a rationalizing role. At this time in China, the practices in art education after 1949 and the need to explain recent history led most theorists and teachers to focus on realism, clarify the theory of realism of theory, and discuss methodology flexibly. For example, in discussing the exhibition of paintings by the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, the art historian Shao Dazhen from the Central Academy of Fine Arts made a point of praising the paintings for their attention to theme. On the basis of the view of art, he praised the “narrative” quality of the works. Shao Dazhen had once studied in the Soviet Union and was familiar with Russian and Soviet art history, and he even referred to a work by the Soviet painter Fedor Pavlovich Reshetnikov, Low Marks Again, to illustrate how “plot” was well handled, and how the “plot” and “painterly” quality of a work were not contradictory ideas. In the article he also advocated “creating characters with depth”.[71]
After 1949, oil paintings in China were greatly influenced by the “literary” quality, “plot”, and “themes” of Russian paintings, and especially by Soviet socialist realist painting. After the Soviet painter Yuri Pavlovich Maksimov [72] came to Beijing in 1956 to teach courses in oil painting, Russian and Soviet art exerted a subversive and pervasive influence on Chinese painting. After 1949, China closed its doors to European capitalist countries, but in the constant criticism of bourgeois art, European painting techniques and taste were obviously suppressed, so people could generally only understand and appreciate oil painting through Soviet painting. As a result, Soviet socialist realist literary paintings served politics and society and constituted the themes of this country; such paintings were ideally suited to genre paintings and history paintings, because they readily explained relationships and conveyed ideas and themes to audiences.
Indeed, the critical function of realism played its part. After the “Cultural Revolution”, in other words after the third plenary session of the Eleventh Central Committee, there was no change in China’s political system and the system of art institutes still perpetuated the system established in the 1950s, with the China Artists Association led by the Communist Party directing, organizing, and conducting all art activities. The only thing was that in order to effect a recovery as soon as possible from the nightmare of the “Cultural Revolution”, the legitimacy of the Party’s new collective leadership and participation in the recovery of the economy were fully acknowledged, thereby extending the room for creative work and comment in the art field and, at least in this period, people were once again encouraged to be aware of history and reality once the thinking of the “Gang of Four” had been cleared away. At this time, regardless of the extent to which people had experiences a painful tragedy, people retained their humane impulses, earlier ideals, and responsibilities, and continued to guide, support, and appreciate works that were sensitive at that time. If they had real power, they could have initiated a movement. Indeed, in addition to “scar” being a term borrowed from the literature, “scar art” was a trend driven by an earlier generation of revolutionaries in the art system. In 1982 when the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts staged its exhibition of oil paintings in Beijing, almost all of the older generation of Chinese oil painters visited has this exhibition. The list included such historically important artists as Wu Zuoren, Wu Guanzhong, Xu Xingzhi, Dai Ze, He Kongde, Zhan Jianjun, Wu Biduan, Wen Lipeng, Pan Shixun, Zhong Han, Lü Enyi, Sun Cixi, and Wei Qimei. With the coming of this new era, many painters of an earlier generation who had enjoyed halcyon years in their youth might have felt to varying degrees, seeing the works of these young students, that they would enjoy a future without the controls to which they themselves became subject. In fact, Gao Xiaohua and his fellow students from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts felt that the reason why several important “scar art” works won awards at the 30th anniversary show had something to do with Hua Junwu being Vice-Chairman of the China Artists Association or with Jiang Feng, in particular, who held the position of Chairman of that organization. In his early years Jiang Feng had studied printmaking under the auspices of Lu Xun whose powerful critical spirit he emulated, and he later went to Yan’an where he ascribed to Mao Zedong’s teachings on revolutionary literature and art. In 1949, he became President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and in art he was inclined to realism, stressing art’s interventional function in reality; his personal views on guohua painting and those of traditional painters were quite different, and his conflicts in the 1950s with traditional painters such as Pan Tianshou were one of the reasons he also became a victim of the anti-rightist political campaign in 1957.[73] After 1978 Jiang Feng was restored to his former position and, in fact, as an artist who during the period of KMT rule had followed Lu Xun, he had retained some of his instinctive dedication and sensitivity. On February 9, 1979, as a member of the China Artists Association’s preparatory group [74] for the Conference of Beijing Art Workers to Study Comrade Zhou Enlai’s Talk at the Literature and Art Work Forum and Talk at the Symposium of Feature Film “Creation” Delivered in 1961, Jiang Feng’s tone evoked his early youthful qualities: “Democracy must rely on the people themselves and cannot be something bestowed from above, otherwise it cannot be relied upon. Since Liberation, many things have demonstrated that if democracy is not implemented, a single authority can rapidly become dictatorial. …… Today, the main issue is allowing people to dare to speak up and to rely on the masses to implement the four modernizations”.[75] It was the support of Jiang Feng that led to students from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts winning a number of awards at the 1980 National Youth Art Exhibition and to the subsequent staging of the 1981 National Young Oil Painting Artists Forum and the 1982 and 1984 “Exhibitions of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing”. In “scar painting”, Jiang Feng seemed to see the passionate and rebellious spirit that had earlier motivated young print makers like himself during the period of KMT rule. In spring 1982, Jiang Feng in Chongqing convened the National Symposium on the Teaching of Sketching and Creating in Art Institutions of Higher Learning, six months after the release of Resolution on Certain Questions of Party History since the Founding of the PRC (June 27, 1981), a “resolution” declaring that the “Cultural Revolution” was “internal chaos that brought severe suffering to the Party, the State, and people of all ethnic groups in the country”. Now, Jiang Feng could feel completely at ease in supporting complaints about the “Cultural Revolution’s” “realist” art. There is a group photograph of Jiang Feng together with students of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts and significantly this is the last photograph of his life. It evokes the memory of his own early years, at the same time as it records the names of the young students around him - Gao Xiaohua, Cheng Conglin, Luo Zhongli, Zhou Chunya, and Yang Qian – who would later enter the pages of art history.
“The Flock of Goats Wandering into the Distance”
Zhang Xiaogang, of course, knew and admired the oil painting techniques of the Russian Itinerant School of painting, but he had no interest in the political function and literary quality of Soviet painting. At the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts he had undergone rigorous college training, but his nature and his recounting of real-life stories were probably far removed from his love of true and solid images. In the latter part of 1979, the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts’ library opened up its Western art folios to students, and Zhang Xiaogang and classmates including Zhou Chunya and Ye Yongqing enthusiastically and lovingly devoured the modernist art works illustrated in these volumes:
In that ebullient era, my status was that of a regular ‘student’ filled with curiosity and wide open to influences. At a time when most of my classmates identified as artists and were actively painting, I was always in the library excitedly devouring the new art books that came in. When each new art album arrived, there was often only one copy, so the school would place them in a glass case and turn a page every day. Like my classmates, such as Ye Yongqing, who shared this enthusiasm, we would daily copy each page into our sketch books, and I still have a copy of a color print of a Post-Impressionist painting I made at that time. Over that year I gradually developed a love of Western modernist art, from ‘Post-Impressionism’ to the ‘Blue Riders’, so that I was no longer interested in the Soviet drawing and painting we did in class. My confidence was also growing by the day, and by the fourth year of studies I had become the class ‘modernist’, but I was filled with veneration for the critical realist works by students in our class that were enjoying such success across the country.
This was a time when young students were seeing Western art folios for the first time: during the thirty previous years, teachers and students in art colleges were hardly ever able to see a European art book. Gao Xiaohua has described how rare such an opportunity was:
Mentioning materials and art folios reminds me of the ‘sensation’ they were when the class of 1977 began at Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. Because of the destruction wrought by the ‘Cultural Revolution’, when the Academy of Fine Arts reopened few decent Chinese or foreign art albums were left and so access to these became a ‘privilege’, one which students did not enjoy. As a result, the class of 77 who felt special was intolerant of this ‘discrimination’. I hatched a plan to deliver a ‘petition’: we first put up big-character posters and then staged a boycott of classes and the canteen. Our goal was very simple - we wanted to study and improve, so we needed to have access to pictures and information! ... ... In this way, the school library was opened. I remember the immense joy and sense of victory we felt as we lined up, and when we perused the art albums in turn we were so happy! The school had a new rule: when we looked through the art books we had to wear gloves, and we could never forget that no books could be defaced or lost![76]
In a sketch book that he began to keep on September 5, 1978, Zhang Xiaogang wrote a small essay he completed by 1980. In less than two years, the content of his sketch book underwent obvious changes. During this time The Gadfly was the earliest foreign films to have the ban on it lifted. Based on the novel of the same name by Ethel Lilian Voynich, the Soviet Union produced a movie in 1955 that was enthusiastically received by young Chinese audiences allowed to see a foreign film for the first time. When Zhang Xiaogang read the novel, he was irresistibly influenced by the revolutionary fervor of the book’s protagonist Arthur Burton whose enthusiasms corresponded to Zhang’s own idealistic sentiments. Revolution, love, misunderstanding, and sacrifice were elements which effectively expressed the feelings and impulses of young students from the Academy of Fine Arts emerging from the arid artistic environment of the ‘Cultural Revolution’. On October 10, 1978, Zhang Xiaogang painted a scene from memory of the movie The Gadfly, but the focus of interest was love with utopian revolution as its background. From this work we can see that Zhang Xiaogang’s painting abilities and techniques were still shrouded by Soviet socialist realist painting, and through imagination and memory he was able to scenes and plot details from many movies using the techniques he had studied, including the image of the cool and slick passionate revolutionary, Pavel Korchagin, from the novel and film How the Steel Was Tempered, loved by his generation. Sometimes, Zhang Xiaogang also recorded some of his creations as ideas in his sketch book; the oldest sketch of his we have is for Youth (1978), for which he scored 85 marks. The creative thinking in that sketch is very similar to works of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ period, and it was the result of him taking a group of students from the school to experience life in a mining camp. Other sketches for paintings also clearly reveal the influence of familiar subjects drawn from popular consciousness, the news and mainstream propaganda. However, in a rough sketch for a painting featuring the “strong direct and unrelenting setting sun” from the first half of 1979 Zhang Xiaogang reveals a trace of melancholy and, regardless of whether he himself realized it, the confused feelings he revealed would in the future be strengthened and sustained as he continued to express them. More than thirty years later in discussing his feelings about a work titled Obvious Difficulties in Xiao Quan’s photographic exhibition titled Our Generation: The Context of History and Portraits, Zhang Xiaogang commented that it “can be regarded as a portrait of a female typical of that era. She is not a celebrity, but the sorrow in her face makes her difficulties readily apparent, but the faces of people today do not have that quality. This was not some minor sorrow, but the almost universal feeling of melancholy but people felt at a time when people were feeling to lose all faith. Later, with the beginning of capitalist society, that look would disappear. When we have too much, there is no unadulterated joy or sorrow”.[77] On his own small sketch, Zhang wrote: “Where will the future take us? With this loss, who flung us aside on this desolate mountain?” Although the theme of his painting was youth, the sketch expressed his subtle psychological sensitivity to the life of “educated youth”.
For his generation, the psychological state of “loss” that set in after “the death of God” demonstrated a fragile mental state. Until the mid-1980s, when young people read many Western books, this state of mind was deeply entrenched, widespread, and incurable. However, prior to the autumn of 1979, Zhang Xiaogang’s visual experience was within the sphere of influence of the Russian Itinerant School. He also had a profound interest in the paintings of the Barbizon artists and Millet in particular, [78] from seeing the illustrations of their work in locally published art folios and magazines, despite the fact that they were poorly reproduced. In the summer of that year, Zhang Xiaogang returned to Kunming from Chongqing and, with Mao Xuhui and Ye Yongqing, went for the first time to Guishan, less than 200 kilometers from Kunming. From some older artists, they heard that Da Nuohei village was ideal for painting. This was a small village inhabited mainly by the Sani ethnic group who lived simple and quiet lives. They were soon captivated by this rustic location and even regarded this simple mountain village as their “Barbizon”.[79] Nie Rongqing, who went with artist friends on many occasions to Guishan in the late 1970s, has almost mythically described this village and the impact it had on artists at that time:
The Sani mountain village was dispersed among karst topography; there were medieval stone farmhouses, tall barns for curing tobacco leaves, and even churches like those in the European countryside. Over generations, the households and families of the village had trod the worn and polished stone paths, and the village was surrounded by mountains and valleys that were dark limestone Karst formations. Between the hills and farmhouses the earth was deep red clay and the plants and trees that grew in the red earth filled the picture with graceful lines that seemed to have been deliberately created. Every morning, the households’ flocks of goats would be led with their tinkling bells along the stone paths to the pastures on the mountainside. As night fell, the slightly tipsy men would entice the women they fancied into the night. The women were half willing and half coerced; of an evening one could always hear their shoes on the flagstone paths. Apart the village loudspeaker that would occasionally relay messages from the village’s Party Committee, the village remained oblivious of the outside world. The Sani people were a branch of the Yi ethnic group; the Sani men were virile and loved bullfighting, while the Sani women were dark and attractive and fond of embroidery, both distinctly different from the Han nationality.[80]
Nie Rongqing has also described a visit to Guishan during the summer holidays of 1979:
When they came to Nuohei village, it was in summer. Summer evenings in Guishan are the most beautiful. The colors of the sky are unusually rich, the red clay is vibrant like blood, the walnut trees cast shade over the village, and only the beautifully silhouetted black branches sway in the breeze. The Sani girls wearing costumes from the epic ballad Ashima return with the flocks of goars from the distant pastures accompanied by the floating tinkling of their bells. They were stunned by the beautiful mountain village before them.
Mao Xuhui led the way. They were carrying with them a letter of introduction addressed to head of the village work team, asking them to provide accommodation for the student artists who wanted to have the experience of painting here. The village was very poor at that time and could not bear the burden of so many people, so they were assigned to families in three different work teams who would provide them with meals. They slept in the village granary, but had no beds. Ye Yongqing and Zhang Xiaogang slept in a large crate. “Nuohei” in the Sani language meant ‘eating after dark’; the villagers worked until after sunset and only finished eating at eight or nine o’clock at night. The village was very poor and had almost no lamps. The meal time was very reminiscent of Van Gogh’s painting The Potato Eaters; everyone mostly ate potatoes and a little rice with corn, and there was basically no meat, but there was corn wine. ……
Later, everyone was drunk. The group would pick up stones and follow the flashlight back to the warehouse because the many dogs in the village would bite outsiders, so when these students from outside the village went walking, they needed to carry rocks in their bags to keep the dogs at bay.[81]
An interest in primitive and pristine places was a common feature of the art scene in this period. In fact, artists living in Chengdu, such as Zhou Chunya and He Duoling as well as many other young painters, were similarly motivated to go to the grasslands of the Aba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture and to Yi nationality villages in the Liangshan Yi Nationality Autonomous Prefecture to sketch and paint, and their taste for original and simple subjects to draw and paint was akin to that of the Barbizon painters. After experiencing the painful, tedious, and desiccated “Cultural Revolution” period, artists almost instinctively craved warmth and simplicity; this change in sentiment was an attempt to discard political shackles and inhumanity, and engage again with their real inner needs. So when they went to Guishan for the first time, Zhang Xiaogang and his visually sensitive but “academic” [82] fellow students were trying to find in this simple village scenes that matched the Barbizon artistic style they sought: from composition to color and style, Zhang Xiaogang was trying to find in this mountain village traces of the paintings of Millet he had seen in illustrations in magazines. This clearly demonstrates that, even before 1980, Zhang Xiaogang was influenced by realist painting from Europe, by painters from Barbizon, and by Millet. In fact, in Zhang Xiaogang’s graduation paintings we can still feel the effects of Millet: heavy modeling, brown tones, and spiritual piety. This is very naturalistic and interesting, and it is similar to the artistic change that Chinese artists, such as Lin Fengmian and Liu Haisu, underwent in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s: sometimes, such a shift can be seen in a single picture, or in a series of works, and Zhang Xiaogang himself has his own observations regarding this shift:
China’s art scene was at that time still wholly under Soviet domination and when we said we are going to ‘sketch outdoors’ we were, in fact, attempting to paint works with the composition, colors, style, and emotional feel of the paintings of the French Barbizon School and the Russian Itinerant School. This kind of ‘painting from nature’ was very difficult, because it was somewhat forced to place Soviet ‘grey moods’ and ‘elegant prosody’ in the context of Yunnan’s red soil, blue sky and wilderness. On my subsequent trips to Guishan, it was similar; at the same time as I was moved by its red earth, its stone houses, its spreading trees, and its goat trails, I was also in search of traces of scenes familiar to me in the paintings of the masters I admired. Perhaps Nuohei was such a mysterious and neutral place, that it made me imagine and conjecture that it was a refuge, a place of shelter. On the one hand, I was not greatly interested in the local folk customs and the rustic primitive lifestyle, but on the other, I always wanted to be moved by a place with such a unique sense of sacred tranquility and by the trees and paths by which people and goats musically moved.[83]
Nature influences the feelings and the color palette of an artist, and the sunlight of Yunnan influences the colors and expression used by the painters working there. Many years later (2003), Mao Xuhui described the style of those early Kunming landscape painters of the generation born in the 1950s as “the outdoor light school”. The works of those far from academic painters became a topic discussed by Mao Xuhui, because in the early days, the painters of “the outdoor light school” influenced the early painting careers of the modernist artists born in the 1950s. Necessary inclusions among the list of painters of “the outdoor light school” were: Su Xinhong, Pei Wenkun, Pei Wenlu, Xiao Jiahe, Sha Lin, Jiang Gaoyi, Chen Chongping, and Gan Jiawei. Nie Rongqing has the following description in his Colors of the City Moat:
Kunming in the 1970s was still a frontier town. It was little different in size to what it had been in the late 1940s. Apart from the ‘ten big buildings’ in a Soviet socialist style of architecture built during the Sino-Soviet honeymoon period, the city buildings and the natural environment had suffered virtually no damage. As in the past the sunshine continued to filter down through the swaying leaves onto the mottled yellow walls. Artists living in this city could always find the scenes and moods that they imagined. People born in the late 1940s and 1950s who liked and studied Western art were mostly inspired by art albums and Soviet films. So they came to regard the Western houses with red tiles, yellow walls, and green windows scattered through the city as sufficiently exotic evocations of foreign lands for their paintings. In the scattering of sunlight on the beds of seedlings at the Xiba nursery and the brilliant sunshine that drenched the shores of Dianchi Lake, they felt they were experiencing the beautiful colors of the Russian Itinerant School of painting.
The seedlings in Kunming’s Xihua Gardens and the undulating shores on the edge of Lake Dianchi were where at that time almost all Kunming artists painted landscapes from nature and socialized …… In spring Kunming’s painters habitually painted the cherry blossoms and begonias on Yuantong Mountain, in summer they painted the exquisite seedlings in the nurseries, in autumn they painted the ginkgo trees losing their leaves on the campus of Yunnan University, and in winter they painted the snow scenes at Cuihu Lake. With its high altitude, the colors of these scenes in Kunming were quite different from those at lower altitudes; the colors were quite unreal and not easily blended, and as a result very difficult to paint; those who painted in the outdoor light had their own techniques for handling the colors; to begin with, Mao Xuhui was not able to paint colors well, but under the direction [guidance] of artists of ‘the outdoor light school’ he was suddenly able to accurately express the feel of the changes created by the sunlight.
After each of them went to college, a correspondence between Zhang Xiaogang and Mao Xuhui consolidated their friendship and furthered their passionate discussions about the arts; through their letters they discussed what was taught at their colleges and the paintings of their colleagues and fellow students. However, the influences of this period persisted, and their exchanges were largely limited to approaches in brushwork and other techniques of realism. When reproductions of paintings and articles by Wu Guanzhong, the veteran artist of the older generation who had studied in France, were published in the journal Fine Arts and other painters in Kunming began to move in the direction of formalist decorative painting, Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang felt that the tragic temperament in “scar painting” was more pertinent. Although Mao Xuhui had been greatly influenced by his teacher Ding Shaoguang, in Mao’s view the Pablo Picasso discussed by Ding was merely a master at altering form but lacking in inner appeal. In any case, at the beginning of their college lives, Zhang Xiaogang and his friend Mao Xuhui’s knowledge of art was generally limited to realist painting, and when on vacation they went to Lijiang or other places to sketch, they took with them their limited enthusiasms for the painting schools of Russia, the Soviet Union, and for the Barbizon painters; even know they had some understanding of modernism, they had almost no experience of the original. This was a dilemma: how, in their practice, could they connect the brilliant sunlight with the subtle and somber colors in the works of those masters they so admired? How was realist painting to express these relationships and the sense of atmosphere to acquire the sense of transparency created by the fierce sun? This was a contradiction, and unless the realist method of painting was discarded, they would encounter this problem on all of their painting trips.
However, it is probably in the works completed after the summer of 1979 that we can see obvious changes in Zhang Xiaogang’s style. That was when Zhang Xiaogang and his classmates, Zhou Chunya and Ye Yongqing, began going to the library to examine the art albums and reproducing the Impressionist paintings they saw in these volumes, preparing copies of works by Degas, Van Gogh, Matisse, Gauguin, and other Impressionist painters. Compared with his earlier small color paintings, for Zhang Xiaogang the French Impressionist painters seemed to evoke genuine joy, and this is evident in his copy of Degas’ Dancers which seemed to resonate with this tender young painter from Kunming. By virtue of constantly examining and copying illustrations of Impressionist works, Zhang Xiaogang gradually began to discard the solid sketching and heavy colors of the Soviet artists, and the literary and narrative approach of the Barbizon School of painters. His fellow student Ye Yongqing has left a record of their trips to the library to examine art tomes: “At the time we couldn’t access the art folios in the school library and it was only after our class teacher and one of the people in charge of the library had made a request to see the sole copy of The Anthology of World Art that the whole class was organized to wash their hands and view the volume. Later the school displayed volumes in locked glass cabinets, turning one page a day, and Zhang Xiaogang and I would excitedly go to the library with crayons and faithfully reproduce the colors and composition of the works on every page”.[84] This is corroborated in Gao Xiaohua’s memoirs and Ye Yongqing’s Journey of the Heart completed in 1993.
In his classroom practical sketching and color assignments of the 1980s, Zhang Xiaogang revealed an unusually familiar grasp of color and excellent modeling capabilities and skills, but these assignments were mainly intended to conform to Russian and Soviet artistic criteria and were possibly the last venture of Zhang Xiaogang along those lines. Zhang Xiaogang had previously also studied the set techniques of the Romanian painter Eugen Popa, [85] whose methods were more general and formalist in feel than those of Maksimov and who was also a model emulated by many teachers and students at the Zhejiang Institute of Fine Arts. However, Zhang Xiaogang’s copying from art albums and his art expeditions to Guishan soon meant that any realist styles, whether those of the Russian Itinerants, the Chistyakov system, of Maksimov, of Eugen Popa, or of Barbizon, gradually succumbed to the impact of van Gogh’s yellow lamps, Gauguin’s forthright sketching, and Degas’ elegant brushstrokes, and the Impressionists provided the signals and lessons for Zhang Xiaogang and his friends. Zhang Xiaogang, at least, made obvious changes to his color palette.
This was an age in which people acquired and desired a greater amount of personal liberation, and any action or suggestion could arouse people’s desires. It was only two or three years since people had been watching films treating struggles within the Communist Party, such as Rupture (1975) and Jubilant Xiaoliang River (1976), but after 1979, schools even broadcasted songs and screened humane films criticizing the “Cultural Revolution”. However, for Zhang Xiaogang and his more adventurous fellow students, Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Hugo’s Les Miserables, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and their film adaptations were far more appealing. Even though these classics could be considered works of realism, their themes of human nature and love, as well as their resistance to injustice and evil, were values that transcended their narrative context and provided Chinese students with spiritual nourishment. For these adventurous young students, it was of little consequence that Julien was ultimately defeated; what was more important was the thrilling adventure he embarked upon and his love story which expressed the inner complexity of intelligent Chinese youths who like their hero from the lower ranks of society wanted to unnerve the powers-that-be. When the era of harsh asceticism prevailed, love was thwarted by class and political factions, and when the period when humanity was lost came to an end and was rejected, a scene containing a restrained kiss or a line expressing the struggle for individual liberation would long be recalled by students and replicated in life. Among the more sensitive younger students, what they perceived from their reading and viewing were not simply historical stories about the Enlightenment or the Chartist movements, but the humanity and values enshrined in these tales. Thus, words taken from context but enshrined in their memories invariably tended to be intentionally or unintentionally borrowed to convey their responsive psychological states and ideas. In a letter written on December 16, 1981, letter, Zhang Xiaogang unconsciously reflected something he read in Jane Eyre:
I am grateful to the grasslands! I am grateful to those dry winds! I wrapped myself in that deep and expansive warm current that gave rise to untamed love, and like Jane Eyre said that she was gifted by God! I believe that as long as lava flows beneath the strata, it will always find an appropriate crater, and does the power of art not truly ‘flow’ and gain eternal life?[86]
For this generation such sentences readily recalled the quality of how Jane Eyre described in her love of Rochester God had equably tempered judgment with mercy:
My soul is with you, and my heart is with you in everything! ... ... I’m talking to you, not through customs, practices, or even through the medium of the body – it is my spirit that speaks to you just as though we both had passed beyond the grave and stood at God’s feet as equals - because we are all equal!
This passage was of course not about art, being simply a declaration of the human spirit, dignity, and liberation, but for Zhang Xiaogang’s generation, its adoption and interpretation informed their understanding of Western civilization, and in particular their understanding of modern Western thought. This feeling, understanding, and perception, as well as its simulation, structured China’s cultural atmosphere in the 1980s. With the publication of large numbers of Western titles yet to happen, students in the classes of 1977 and 1978 began to plough through Xinhua Bookstore’s warehouses of secondhand books and through any out-of-print or discarded titles missing their covers that had survived the “Cultural Revolution” in friends’ homes, and began to attend premieres of old movies and the occasional fleeting exhibition, all in an effort to make sense of the world. Everything was felt to be new, even the old movies that had been shot in the 1930s, 1940s, or 1950s and could now only be seen in prints that were blurry. For young people emerging from the shackles of the “Cultural Revolution”, even the spirit and values of 18th and 19th century literature and art seemed utterly new. Zhang Xiaogang’s classmate Ye Yongqing vividly describes how young people had their hands full as they voraciously devoured Western art:
Today, I am immersed in medieval altar paintings and Giotto, the peace and tranquility of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, and tomorrow I will praise Delacroix’s passion, the beauty of the Trevi Fountain, or Ingres’ elegant refinement, Giorgio Morandi’s sedate detachment, or perhaps I will be fascinated by Magritte’s enigmas and Klee’s wisdom, Odilon Redon’s poetic quality, or Munch’s despair.[87]
This was a typical range of experiences savored by most of the students at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts.
In the second semester of 1981, the students of the class of 1977 were preparing works for their practical examination and this creative period would extend until January of the following year. For these exercises their supervisory teacher Wei Chuanyi’s requirements persisted in “the fine traditions of the Great Lu Xun Art Academy of the Yan’an period”, and he stressed the engagement of the students with society, although at this time such a concept was still confined within the limited range of Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. Wei Chuanyi, in his “Discussion of Teaching the Graduation Work of the 1977 Oil Painting Class”, stated: “Only by being familiar with the lives of workers and peasants and emulating their thought and feelings, as well as unearthing the trove of art and understanding the aesthetic needs and interests of the masses of workers and peasants, is it possible to create works that reflect the spirit of the times and are well received by the people. This is tradition pioneered by the Lu Xun Art Academy in Yan’an”.[88] Obviously, he stressed the need to “adhere to the road of revolutionary realism”. However, the school placed no restrictions on the students’ practice and experience of social life, “allowing them, in accordance with their own basis in life and approach to creation, to choose the aspects of life they would paint and to propose their preliminary work plans, and after these were agreed to by the classroom teacher, the students were split up and headed into society to pursue their observations and experiences, to collect the material required for their work, and to create (turning their sketches into preliminary works). Then within a fixed time, they returned to the school where their work was reviewed and finalized”.[89]
In the summer of 1981, Zhang Xiaogang and Zhou Chunya went to the Aba grasslands. Zhou Chunya is a student of print making, and the two students’ shared artistic interests made them very close friends. Before entering the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Zhou Chunya had been subjected to rigorous training at the Chengdu May Seventh Art School and his painting techniques had already earned him a reputation among his classmates as a “master”. It was Zhou Chunya who supported and encouraged Zhang Xiaogang to follow his own feelings in art. Zhou Chunya also painted works with “scar art” themes, for example a work he jointly painted with Gao Xiaohua inspired by a comic book titled Blood-Stained Morning, which depicted the tragedy that resulted from fratricidal fighting in the “Cultural Revolution”. Perhaps because Zhou lacked interest or the atmosphere in the school had changed, the work of this partnership was not completed. Like Zhang Xiaogang, Zhou Chunya also showed little interest in the realist path, and after perusing the foreign art folios in the school library, he rapidly became infatuated with Impressionist and later Modernist paintings. In 1978, Zhou Chunya had been keenly interested in the use of light in realist painting and in a portrait he did of his English teacher he showed an interest in the subtle play of sunlight in the setting of the work, but in a landscape painting titled The Little Bridge completed in 1980, his brushwork and composition are very spare and there is a rich sense of form. The curriculum taught in the printmaking department generally gave students an outstanding and keen ability to summarize, and it seemed natural for them to understand and study modernist art. Previously, Zhou Chunya had already visited he grasslands and he had taken many photographs of Tibetan children, and as a result he completed a series of works called A New Generation of Tibetans (1980) which he entered in the National Youth Art Exhibition, and won an award. In accordance with established practice, these paintings had a politically correct theme: Tibetan children in this socialist nation could enjoy an education, but Zhou Chunya was interested in the innate purity of the Tibetans in their natural environment. As a result, he did not focus on the visual effect of his subjects but like “scar painting” classmates, he wanted to express the feelings aroused by his work, and so used only coarse brushwork and colors not fully mixed to express everything he felt. Zhou Chunya later explained how he felt about creating those paintings:
After I had left my experience on the grasslands behind, many details quickly faded, leaving only the intense and luxuriant colors of the grass, the simple and rugged images of the Tibetans, and the lines that connected these colors and images. …… I wished that I could be in simple contact with nature, in the way that newborn children see the world.[90]
Just as they went together to the library to look at the Impressionist albums, Zhang Xiaogang and Zhou Chunya went together to the grasslands, and Zhou would most certainly have told Zhang in advance how comfortable and suitable for painting the Tibetan areas were, and how the grasslands allowed one to paint what one wanted to express.
They spent two months in the grasslands, and the natural environment stimulated Zhang Xiaogang to complete more than three hundred sketches and more than twenty paintings. In fact, he was excited, passionate, and happy about every aspect of their stay, and the student who had been working through the Impressionist art volumes in the school library despite the inconvenience and difficulties now felt completely opened up by the environment of pure pastures bathed in brilliant sunlight. The landscapes of the grasslands were not as intimate as those of Guishan but the expansive horizon and the undulating topography came with a climate that opened up one’s heart. At this time he was subject to the inner promptings of Van Gogh and beginning to express inner feelings and truths.
On returning to school, he embarked on his examination paintings. Although he was already feeling the influence of Impressionist and Modernist methods, these were not well received by his teacher. Nevertheless, he decided to keep to the attempt to satisfy his inner desires and prepare a series of works with which he was happy. The series of paintings titled “Grassland Paintings” comprised a total of nine works: Tibetan Women at Rest, Tibetan Girl Walking, Mother and Son, On the Roof, The Storm Is Approaching, Two Mothers Talking, Clouds in the Sky, Mother and Son II, and The Flock of Goats Wandering into the Distance. In this series, the rugged styling and coloring with brown tones made it easier to feel the characteristics of the Tibetan characters, but the inspiration behind the broad and rolling brushstrokes most certainly came from Van Gogh whom Zhang Xiaogang venerated. The details of the description varied according to the content of the nine paintings, but what they had in common was clear: the images of these women were fiercely robust in body and spirit. In using coarse brushwork to simply sketch their full breasts, Zhang Xiaogang was expressing a desire for life, even erotic desires. In an early private essay, Zhang explained his Clouds in the Sky as follows:
When a person is in a dream realm of true purity and sincerity steeped in magical colors, with everything in a turbulent state of imminently knowing the unknown and with the consciousness of adolescence awakening to erotic longing and imaginings for the future, he or she might seem laughable in the eyes of others, but it is the happiest time. Perhaps this is the idea I was hoping to express through Clouds in the Sky.[91]
Zhang Xiaogang seemed to believe that these inner subconscious desires could be best expressed in an Impressionist and Modernist style of painting. In any case, from the history of the changes in the artistic style of Zhang Xiaogang, Mao Xuhui, Ye Yongqing, and Zhou Chunya, we can see how these art students moving towards Modernist painting had completely rejected the Soviet style and rapidly accepted the European tradition and modern art. Unlike older artists, these young people born in the 1950s were moving towards the future in their comprehension and judgment, and they did not feel nostalgic regarding the past, because they had already discovered a new world. Unlike many individuals enthusiastically painting Tibetan subject matter (such as Ai Xuan), Zhang Xiaogang might have been seen as being among the early “life stream” artists, but his interest in this ethnic minority was not a superficial curiosity. He focused on the inherent simplicity in their lives but basically did not want to be limited by this simplicity in describing their customary style and physical characteristics. Despite the fact that he discovered a sacred naturalism in Millet and other French painters, a naturalness springing from within and related to the soul, Zhang Xiaogang’s visual experience had already undergone a fundamental change, and he rapidly realized that the nature delineated by the blue skies, the intensely red earth, and by Barbizon was distinctly different, and the Impressionists he had seen in prints had already suggested to him that he must view the world before him once again. Indeed, from the oneness felt by the “mentally ill” Van Gogh, Zhang Xiaogang felt that the trembling of the soul was the most important thing. What the painter in 1981 clearly reveals is that the artist must maintain his vigilance, and while he loved everything belonging to nature and to the depths of his emotions, he had to be cautious that he did not succumb to the nature that reduced insensitive people to vulgarity:
I was finally seeing the sea of grasslands! Every green wave, with its beautiful melodies and profound meanings, swallows you up! This pure and luxuriant world holds your soul, extending and unfurling it, exalting it ... ... an intrepid wildness is a characteristic of the Tibetans, but I am even more intoxicated by what their faces convey. I don’t want to penetrate their ‘lives’ like some other people nor do their ‘customs’ excite interest. I can never forget that here I am just a painter, and my eyes and soul are more important. I keep my distance, so that what I receive is the artistic feeling appropriate to the form that expresses my own temperament.[92]
Zhang Xiaogang’s strenuous “attempt to express the rough lines and rich colors of the grasslands he experienced, and to express their wonderful heavy forms” was not appreciated by his school, and in a letter addressed to Zhou Chunya, Zhang expressed his stress and disquiet:
Today is November 15. Time really flies. My seventh painting is almost complete, and tomorrow I can start working on the eighth. There have been big changes and over these two days I have a premonition that this graduation painting won’t see me accepted by the school. A few days ago the director came to the classroom specifically to look at my paintings, but I wasn’t there. After he looked at them he said something weird like, how could anyone like paintings like this? Who would want to exhibit paintings like this? After cursing them, he left. The previous night, I put the finishing touches on my works, but I felt that the sketches in my bedroom had been completely invalidated. The expression on my teacher Mister W’s face had suddenly signified a complete volte-face…[93]
“Mister W” was Wei Chuanyi, who in his early years had been trained in oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and had studied oil painting techniques and style under Maksimov. He was disappointed by the graduation paintings of Zhang Xiaogang, which featured rough brushstrokes, lacked literary quality, or even characterization; it even seemed that he would probably not approve the paintings of Zhang Xiaogang which he maintained lacked academic form and structure. Even though his fellow students had painted shocking works that also would not seem to appeal to Mister W, Zhang Xiaogang instinctively felt that his artistic path was different from theirs, but in his anxiety and stress he stuck to his own artistic expression. In the third issue of Arts Research of 1982 Wei Chuanyi published an article titled “A Discussion of the Graduation Paintings of the Class of 1977”, in which he presented his students’ works. He introduced works by Luo Zhongli, Zhu Yiyong, Cheng Conglin, Gao Xiaohua, Mo Ye, and Yang Qian, and even introduced the ideas and techniques of some of his less distinguished students, but he only mentioned Zhang Xiaogang and the name of his painting. Not being endorsed by his teacher naturally distressed Zhang and made him feel anxious, and given that his future occupation would be allocated by the state, at a time when independent artists could not expect to be supported by society, the graduation paintings were of vital importance for his final marks and his future job assignment.
Regardless, Zhang Xiaogang’s graduation painting Clouds in the Sky was included in the first exhibition in Beijing (1982) staged by the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts. This was a new period of openness, and although the majority of official artists were still mentally shackled and modern art theories were not widely disseminated, the third plenary session of the Party’s Eleventh Central Committee politically provided some space for basic literary and artistic freedom. In 1979, Wu Guanzhong, an artist who had once studied in France published in the May issue of Fine Arts his famous essay titled “The Beauty of Form in Painting”, which emphasized the importance of form in art and caused a stir by effectively supporting the artists who were willing to accept and begin to practice modern art. This artist of the older generation finally had an opportunity to remind painters that they must pay attention to beauty and attention to form and rhythm, and to have their own style. A year earlier Wu Guanzhong had made the following bold declaration at an exhibition of 19th-century French pastoral realist works organized by the National Art Museum of China:
Beauty, formal beauty, is a science that can be analyzed and dissected. The analysis of the styling techniques of any artist or work that has unique achievements was long ago regular classroom content in Western art colleges, but in China’s art colleges this has been a forbidden area, with the result that our young students are amazingly ignorant about this subject! The dissatisfaction aroused by exhibiting these French 19th century rural landscapes warrants our attention, because why in today’s world of satellites are we only able to display foreign steam engines! Art workers in general hope to open up to European modern painting, and initiate a wide-ranging discussion on the scientific nature of formal beauty. This will provide the microscope and scalpel that can examine how art is shaped, that can be used to summarize and enrich the development of our traditions.[94]
Zhang Xiaogang was probably not that pleased with Wu’s views, because, as he saw it, the European painters who moved him spiritually, particularly artists like Vincent van Gogh, impressed him because of spiritual qualities which were not simply “formal” issues. However, at this time, modern art was only considered to be a formalist art, while earlier thematic paintings were regarded as being truly imbued with the qualities of thought and art. Therefore, an age emphasized form or formal beauty not simply in order to fight for the freedom of artistic creation, but to overthrow taboos and fully embrace the attainments of human civilization. Wu Guanzhong was at this time ahead of theorists in advocating the issue of formal beauty, as this was a criticism of the artistic thought of the “Cultural Revolution” and a further expression of the fight for creative freedom, and this naturally encouraged those younger people trying to follow their own thoughts and feelings in their practice of painting.
In fact, Zhang Xiaogang’s art received direct encouragement from the editors of the only authoritative art magazine of the time, Fine Arts. In October 1981, the editors of Fine Arts magazine Xia Hang and Li Xianting travelled to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts to look at the graduate paintings of the students, and at a seminar at the college held by the two editors strong support was given to the graduation paintings of Zhang Xiaogang, and in view of the lack of support given by the teachers to Zhang’s work, the positive assessments of these two editors may have played a decisive role in Zhang Xiaogang eventually actually graduating. After returning to Beijing, Li Xianting wrote a letter to Zhang Xiaogang, telling this young student who had still not yet completed his graduation paintings that Fine Arts would be publishing his work. This thrilled Zhang. Even before the magazine published his work, Zhang wrote to several friends telling them his works were going to be published. At this time, if a young artist’s work was published in an art magazine, future success seemed assured. In a letter to Mao Xuhui, he wrote: “I have been blown away since hearing about this stroke of good fortune”. (December 16, 1981) Soon after, the January 1982 issue of Fine Arts published The Storm Is Approaching from his series Grassland Paintings series and it was accompanied by an article by the editor Xia Hang, assessing Zhang’s graduation series:
The people he paints do not appear to conform to fashionable taste, because the figures’ movements are exaggerated and their frames appear too bulky. But, from the fact that they seem to serve the ‘feeling’ of the paintings, the distortion and exaggeration are justified. In the painting titled The Storm Is Approaching, the rhythmic lines, together with the tense composition of the dark clouds and pasture, and the agitated atmosphere evoked by the distant running yaks and the baby flung down on the grass also add vitality and expressiveness to the work.[95]
However, when the issue of the journal Fine Arts finally reached Zhang Xiaogang, he had already graduated from the school and had been assigned back to Kunming, waiting for his notice from the Personnel Bureau.
Visual information relayed to the brain, with experiential support, is readily transformed through corresponding habit into language, and those images depicting ethnic minorities and rural villages gradually began to proliferate after the National Youth Art Exhibition. When the Sichuan Academy of the Fine Arts staged an exhibition of oil paintings for the first time in Beijing, General Zhang Aiping who had been born in Sichuan Province wrote a poem commemorating the images:
The resplendent colors of western Sichuan
have struck a chord in this group of paintings.
Entrusted to this elevated mix,
the vernacular sense is thereby enriched.
In using the word “vernacular” (xiangtu) in his poem, this elderly military man was appealing to nostalgia for his home province triggered in the first instance by Luo Zhongli’s work set in the Great Bashan Mountains of Sichuan. At the close of the exhibition in 1982, Luo Zhongli painted a series titled My Home County that emphasized the sense of local color and customs. At about the same time, Long Quan completed Foundation Stone and Zhu Yiyong completed his Mountain Village Shop, works regarded as appealing to nostalgia for local homelands. Gao Xiaohua in an essay recalling his “scar paintings” went so far as to see the Youth Exhibition as a phase of “vernacular realist paintings”, because so many works in the exhibition used the depiction of rustic and ethnic minority materials to convey warm humanitarian emotions. For several years later, Cheng Conglin, He Duoling and many other Sichuan painters’ later works made use of images of the lives of ethnic minority groups to build up a body of art with a “local” flavor. However, this artistic trend that had originally reflected the past experiences and pure feelings of a particular group of painters rapidly attracted many followers who transformed the trend into a “cute” and “novelty seeking” fashion often to be seen in the 1980s in galleries in Hong Kong and Taiwan. In fact, “xiangtu painting” (variously rendered as “vernacular painting”, “indigenous”, “rustic painting”, or “indigenous painting”; another expression of “life stream” painting) was, unlike “scar painting”, not a concept with obvious and clear parameters of meaning. Like “scar painting”, “xiangtu painting” sought the truth, but “scar painting” sought the truth in history and reality whereas “xiangtu painting” sought the truth in locale, nature and humanity. As a result of the choice of subjects by painters in Sichuan in the early 1980s, some northern critics repeatedly used the term “xiangtu” as a vague blanket term for the paintings of south-western China, but the concept rapidly lost all precision and force. In fact, the rural subject matter and the purity of style on display in the exhibition of French pastoral paintings held in the China Art Gallery in Beijing in 1978 probably exerted the earliest influence in the direction of this fashion, and this influence combined with the efforts of those artists who wanted to restore sympathy for humanity, readily recalled the inner demands of those artists who wanted to reassess the questions of art. The critic Li Xianting recalls the deep impression made by the painting titled Haymaking by Jules Bastien-Lepaze included in the exhibition of nineteenth-century French pastoral paintings:
Haymaking aroused a strong audience response, because we had never seen such detailed techniques as could be seen in that work. Prior to the exhibition of French 19th century rural landscape paintings, China had never staged a large-scale exhibition of Western paintings, added to which more or less no one had the experience of going abroad and seeing the genuinely original paintings that we had only seen in prints, so people were profoundly shaken by what they saw.
People were “shaken” simply by the profound impression made by the pure expression in the works and their refusal to pursue dramatic themes. The Tibetans, a series of paintings by the representative “vernacular” (or “indigenous”) artist Chen Danqing was one of the important results of this exhibition. Chen Danqing, discussing Pilgrimage which was a work from this series and which depicted pious Tibetan pilgrims, made the following comment:
Some people want me to discuss the people and lives in this painting and the attention I pay to the social phenomena and the fate of this ethnic group. I could possibly write several pages on these topics, but I don’t to want to say anything more. … If people seeing the painting happen to be moved by the reality and humanity described in the work, and feel that ‘this is life and these are people’, then that is my greatest desire. … Some people applaud the work, commending how I have exposed and denounced a backward and benighted phenomenon. I must disillusion them. I cannot bear the use of paintings as exposé. Others say that the work reveals my deep sympathy and compassion for the pilgrims, but that is beside the point …[96]
In Hubei, the painting titled Mother of the Loess Plateau (1983) by Shang Yang was also considered to be an important work of vernacular painting. In fact, here the “vernacular” refers to a new attitude regarding truth and a point of view calling for a new understanding of nature and man, and those themes drawn from Tibet or the national minority areas of Liangshan also related to this sensibility because, at the outset, painters were trying to find artistic purity and inner sincerity not yet lost in places uncontaminated by civilization. In fact, as soon as the artist was drawn in by a formal or surface interest, the intrinsic basis of the “vernacular” immediately disappeared. Therefore, Zhang Xiaogang had no interest in those cute paintings; in his view, what mattered was not the “vernacular”, but inner feeling, the feeling that transcended the visual surface.
We can safely say that in the six months before graduation Zhang Xiaogang was strongly influenced by the grasslands and nature and he threw himself completely into his graduation paintings; at the same time, he completely and uninhibitedly succumbed to the passions the grasslands aroused in him. He wrote letters to old friends, telling each of them how in completing the “Grasslands” series, he loudly proclaimed the grasslands for the inspiration and stimulus they provided him. He told Zhou Chunya: “The fierce ultraviolet rays and the dry warm air on the grasslands never disappear from my mind, and the impressions the grasslands give me fuses with my emotions, giving rise to new sensations”. He told his friend: “I am so grateful to the grasslands! They have given me pure and profound feelings that make my buried strength silently flow and I gradually regain consciousness”. Perhaps at this time he had just suffered an emotional setback, when he also wrote to Mao Xuhui telling him of the emotional impact the grasslands made on him: “Once again, I experienced an emotional storm and complex forces, and my self-confidence and willpower were often put to the greatest test. Beneficently, the dry winds of the grasslands, the shapes and the simple solid colors always remain in my heart driving out the confusing anguish and torment …”. This was Zhao Xiaogang’s basic attitude from when he was about to graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts until the end of December 1981, and his inner world was totally engulfed by the emotions evoked by the grasslands and the balmy breezes that blew there.
However, during this time the subject he discussed with his friends most often was where he would be assigned after graduation. In his letter to Mao Xuhui dated December 16, it was with a mixture of happiness and expectation that Zhang Xiaogang told his friend that he anticipated that when Fine Arts published his work in January this “stroke of good fortune” might “play a positive role in his post-graduation job allocation”. However, he already knew that many of the school teachers thought his paintings were “weird”, “not beautiful”, “without feeling, and imitating others rather than the subject”, and so on. So, in his letters of this period, Zhang frequently alluded to his anxiety concerning the work to which he would be assigned upon graduation.
In China at this time the planned economy still reigned supreme, despite the fact that the 1978 third plenary session of the CCP saw economic development as the focus of the work of the entire Party and nation, but how this decision would drive and influence the country’s commodity economy, resulting in the generation of human resources and the mobility of capital, would only gradually be revealed over the following decade; only after the market economy was in place, would people have the possibility of choosing their work and life style. Therefore, where college students were assigned after graduation depended on the different plans and arrangements of the government agencies and personnel departments in individual cities or regions. Graduates of the various academies of fine arts were assigned to colleges, universities, academies, or publishers, as well as to culture- and art-related institutions and units, but for graduates not popular with their schools there was little possibility of their receiving highly appreciative recommendation letters or being assigned to ideal workplaces, [97] not to mention being recruited as teachers by those schools. In this murky situation, Zhang Xiaogang, on graduating, first left the school and returned to Kunming in accordance with the basic policy and there he was told to wait patiently until he was notified of personnel arrangements.
In mid-December 1981, Zhang Xiaogang had written in a letter to Mao Xuhui:
Now I’m beginning to paint the ninth painting in the series The Flock of Goats Wandering into the Distance, and everything is proceeding relatively smoothly. Prior to this, I had moved away from my true feelings and almost felt defeated, losing my confidence to paint. For this reason I went to Nanchong to relax for a few days. Seeing the Yangtze River obstinately and continuously flowing, watching the ships ploughing forward into the waves, and hearing the strong, visceral work songs of the boatmen made me realize once more that the most reliable course of action was to rely on my own strength.[98]
The Flock of Goats Wandering into the Distance was the last of the “Grasslands” series treating the life and customs on the grasslands. He depicted the end of the harvest at dusk and the robust and wholesome Tibetan women with their children gleaning the last husks from the ground, a scene that reminded many people of the work of Millet. The flock is wandering away, disappearing over the horizon. In the distance we see a splendid setting sun. The piety revealed in the modeling, brushwork and rendering of color was an artistic view he presented to his friends for aesthetic confirmation. Perhaps, because this painting was completed as he was emotionally preparing to leave school, the “flocks” in the distance might be far from their homes where storms could be raging in the wilderness. Here, the consciousness of an individual’s fate has emerged; innocence and purity will follow the flock home. Zhang Xiaogang unconsciously regarded this scene of returning home at dusk on the grasslands as a symbol of his mood: the future was murky.....
NOTES:
[1] In 1950, North Korea’s Kim Il Sung with support from the Soviet Union launched a war aimed at unifying the Korean peninsula. As the Soviet Union’s socialist partner, China, in the context of being provided with Soviet weapons, took part in the Korean War. The CCP, under the slogan “oppose the United States and assist Korea, defend your families and protect the fatherland”, called on the entire nation to support the war effort. In October a Chinese “Volunteer” Army entered North Korea. Finally, in July 1953, with a loss of 400,000 volunteer casualties, China forced the United Nations (with a total of 15 countries having sent troops) to sign the Armistice Agreement on behalf of the United States, with the Kim Il Sung regime remaining in power in North Korea (DPRK). In October 1958, China’s volunteer troops completed their withdrawal from North Korea. However, in mainland China’s propaganda, it was the United States who initiated the Korean War at that time, and to the present day, China’s history books and textbooks retain this explanation.
[2] The “anti-rightist campaign” was a political campaign waged by Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong in 1957. Previously, Mao had called on the democratic parties and the Communist Party to practice “long-term coexistence and mutual supervision”, and for literary and art circles to implement an approach described as “a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend”. However, intellectuals and democrats expressed different views regarding one-party rule, hoping to change the political system, and called for each party “to occupy the chair in turn”, which went beyond the bottom line of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists. On 15 May 1958, Mao Zedong pointed out in “The Situation Has Changed” that the democratic parties and the “rightists” in institutions of higher learning were trying to “eliminate the Communist Party”. On 8 June 1957, the CPC Central Committee issued Mao Zedong’s personally drafted “Directive Calling on Organizational Forces to Prepare a Counter Attack against the Savage Onslaught of the Rightists”, and on the same day, People’s Daily published an editorial simply titled “Why”, which emphasized the existence of class struggle and its seriousness on the ideological front. It argued that the Rightists were trying to use the policy of letting “a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend” to challenge and bring down the Communist Party. On 10 June, the CPC Central Committee had specifically deployed its forces and strategies for the anti-rightist movement and brought the national anti-rightist campaign into full swing. A large number of professors, lecturers, students, and other intellectuals and artists were labeled “rightist” and sent to different areas for reform through labor, losing all personal freedoms. As a result most of their families and children as well as their lives and work would suffer in the future. Officially released figures state that 55 million people throughout the country were designated as right-wingers.
[3] Jiang Feng (1910-1982) was originally named Zhou Xi. In his early years he engaged in print making and art theory. He participated in Shanghai’s left-wing art movement and the woodcut workshops organized by Lu Xun. In 1938 he arrived in Yan’an, where he served as Director of the fine arts department of Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts. In 1949 years he was elected Deputy President of the China Artists Association, in 1951 served as Vice President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, in 1957 was classified as a “rightist”, and in 1979 served as President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and was elected as Chairman of the China Artists Association.
[4] Quoted from Lü Peng ed., Chinese Art Chronicles: 1900-2010, China Youth Publishing House, 2012 edition, p.645. The “Ding Chen anti-Party group” was identified by the CPC as an anti-Party political group organized by the writers Ding Ling and Chen Qixia. Unlike other “rightist” groups, Ding and Chen were well-known writers of the Communist Party, and people were shocked by this case. It was a political event of 1957 that had a significant impact. After the two writers were identified as “rightists” they were sent down to the countryside to undergo thought reform.
[5] In 1958, forty painters including Chen Banding, Yu Fei’an, Hui Xiaotong, Chen Yuandu, Ye Qianyu, Li Keran, and Jiang Zhaohe attended a gathering in Beijing, at which was presented the “Proposal that Artists of the Capital Strive to Reform” (February); the fine arts group of the China Artists Association held the “Great Leap Forward” conference (March); the Shanghai artists Lai Shaoqi, Lin Fengmian, Guan Liang, Chen Yanqiao, and Wu Dayu went to Shanghai’s Dongjiao Tongxin Production Cooperative to take part in labor (March); forty painters, including Wu Zuoren, Liu Kaiqu, Dong Xiwen, Ai Zhongxin, and Li Hu, went to visit workers and take part in labor at the Ming Tombs Reservoir which was organized by the Ministry of Culture, the China Literature and Arts Federation, Beijing Municipal Cultural Bureau, and other organizations (May).
[6] As early as the 1940s in Yan’an, Mao Zedong was already referred to as the “Star of Salvation” in folk songs anthologized under the guidance of the Communist Party.
[7] “The three-anti and five-anti” campaigns: Beginning in December 1951 and brought to an end in June 1952, these campaigns were a savage onslaught on the bourgeoisie. The “three-antis” referred to opposition to corruption, waste, and bureaucratism; the “five-antis” were opposition to bribery, tax evasion, stealing and swindling state property, shirking work and pilfering, and the theft of economic intelligence. The “three great transformations”, which began at the end of 1953 and were brought to an end in 1956, saw the transformation of the system of ownership in agriculture, handicrafts and businesses. The struggle against the “Hu Feng anti-Party clique”, which began in 1955, was a major political campaign denouncing the literature and art Hu Feng. In 1954 Hu Feng presented to the Politburo his “Report on the Practice of Literature and Art over Recent Years”, which was regarded as a counter-revolutionary offensive against the Party. Hu Feng was later arrested, and the nationwide struggle against the “Hu Feng anti-Party clique” was launched, which directly implicated 2000 people, leading to the arrest of 92 people were arrested, while 62 people were placed in solitary confinement and 73 people were removed from their jobs and forced to make confessions. The policy calling for people to “go all out to improve ourselves, and to build socialism more quickly and more economically”, was the general line adopted by the second session of the Eighth Party Congress in 1958, and its aim was to have the people nationwide follow the Party’s policy. The “Great Leap Forward” was the slogan presented at the second session of the Eighth Party Congress. While the policy was intended to accelerate the development of industry and agriculture, it ultimately led to false and exaggerated economic reports and economic regression throughout the country. The “People’s Commune” campaign was the movement to establish rural people’s communes led by the “Great Leap Forward”. In July 1958 years, the journal Red Flag published Mao Zedong’s injunction: “Our direction is to organize industry, agriculture, commerce, education and the army into a great socialist commune in a gradual and orderly fashion, to constitute our basic unit of socialism”. Soon, the entire nation was engulfed in the campaign to establish people’s communes. This political structure and practice led to economic recession, and was concluded after 1978.
[8] This song, composed by Qiao Yu (b. 1927) in 1955, was one of the songs in the feature film Flowers of the Fatherland. The song’s beautiful and pure melody made it familiar to those born in the 1940s and 1950s for whom it became a fond memory of growing up.
[9] The “cultural revolution”, its full name being the “great proletarian cultural revolution”, was a political movement instigated by Mao Zedong that led to comprehensive nationwide political and economic collapse. The movement began in 1966 with the release of the “Notice of the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China” (referred to as “May 16 notice”) and concluded in October 1976 with the arrest of the political group in the Communist Party called the “Gang of Four” (Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hongwen), a period of ten years. This political movement was considered to be an “unprecedented catastrophe” for the country in the political, economic, cultural and social fields, radically transforming China. The systems of thought and habits generated movement have had a major impact on China, even today.
[10] “Armed fighting” (wudou) refers to the fights with weapons between different Red Guard political organizations during the early phase of the “cultural revolution”, with each side in the conflict having political goals guided by Mao Zedong thought and the purpose of defending Mao Zedong thought. Yet each side held the other to be the enemy.
[11] Mao Zedong on May 7 1966 wrote the following instruction on a report: If the army must study military matters, they must also study industry and agriculture; workers must also study agriculture, military matters, and culture. Two years later, a farm set up in Liuhe, Qing’an County, Heilongjiang Province, where government officials and “capitalist roaders” (high ranking cadres in the Communist Party and government said to have taken the capitalist road) were sent to serve time doing labor reform, was named the “May 7 Cadre School” (“57 cadre school” for short). Mao Zedong later said: “If the broad masses of cadres are sent down to the countryside to do labor, this is a critical opportunity to be re-educated, and everyone should take part, except those who are old, infirm, ill, or incapacitated. Groups of cadres in turn will be sent down to the countryside to engage in labor”. As a result, “May 7 Cadre Schools” were established across the country. In fact, many “May 7 Cadre Schools” were used as prison labor camps for politically suspect cadres, intellectuals and cultural figures.
[12] “Rebels” (zaofan-pai): Generally speaking the “revolutionary masses” in schools, institutions, and enterprises were usually the Red Guards, workers, peasants, and ordinary workers in any institution. They were the political force that Mao Zedong wanted to use, and they were often simply described as “the people”. In the “cultural revolution”, the most important political strategies were “launched [mobilized] by the people”.
[13] “Shu”, an ancient name for the Chengdu region of Sichuan; “Shendu”, an ancient name for India.
[14] Quoted from: Yang Yang, Kunming’s Past, Huacheng Publishing House, 2010, p.78.
[15] Nie Rongqing, Colors of the City Moat.
[16] Li Dazhao (1889-1927), who had studied undergraduate politics at Tokyo’s Waseda University, was one of the early leaders of the CPC.
[17] See Gong Zizhi, “The response of the periodical press in Yunnan to the May Fourth movement and its stylistic influences”, in Memoirs of the May Fourth Movement, China Social Sciences Publishing House, 1979.
[18] Chu Tunan (1899-1994), native of Wenshan, Yunnan province. He later served as a professor at Jinan University, Yunnan University, and Shanghai Law College. After 1949 he became at professor at Beijing Normal University, director of the Foreign Cultural Association, and Chairman of the Democratic League Central Committee.
[19] Quoted from Ran Longzhong ed., The Eyes of Kunming, Yunnan People’s Publishing House, 2011, p.42.
[20] Another group of teachers and students from United University (numbering more than 300 people) took 40 days, hiking through Guizhou, western Hunan, and eastern Yunnan before reaching Kunming, a journey of more than 1,663 km. This arduous “Long March” is well documented
[21] Eight Years of United University, Xinxing Chubanshe, 2010, p.34.
[22] Ibid., p.41.
[23] The manuscripts, for example, of the sociologist Li Shuqing, including his Report of a Survey of the Chinese Land Question were stolen during an air raid in 1942. Jin Yuelin’s manuscripts of his Epistemology articles was left behind during an air raid and subsequently lost; the later published version was rewritten from scratch.
[24] The phenomenon of youth being sent down to the countryside, known fully in Chinese to have been sent “up to the mountains and down to the countryside” (shangshan-xiaxiang), was a concept first mentioned in a document issued by the Politburo on 25 October 1956 titled “1956-1967 National Agricultural Development Program (Revised Draft)”. Even though in the 1950s many urban youths were sent to the countryside, it was not until 1968 however that such a movement became a political strategy of Mao Zedong, aimed at having the Red Guards leave the city as soon as possible, diminishing the chaos brought to the city by fighting, and easing urban unemployment problems. On 5 September 1968, Mao Zedong, in an editorial note on an article in People’s Daily on the education revolution, pointed out that tertiary and secondary school graduates must accept “re-education” from the workers and peasants, and these students or graduates of higher or secondary educational institutions were called “educated youth”, a term later especially applied to those who went to the countryside for “re-education”. On 22 December1968 People’s Daily quoted Mao Zedong’s instruction: “It is imperative that young intellectuals go to the countryside to be re-educated by the poor and lower-middle peasants”. Later, urban households nationwide had to comply with this slogan, and those people who did not want to go to the countryside were regarded as evading labor and re-education, and they struggled to find work in the city. After 1968 about 16,000,000 educated youth were sent down to the countryside, and these were mainly middle and high school graduates, and almost every urban family was involved. Most educated youth in rural and frontier areas had their education delayed and their youth wasted, and many educated youth are physically and mentally abused. At the same time, China in the late 20th century suffered from a missing generation in science and technology and scholarship, and this was another of the dire consequences of sending youth down to the countryside. From the 1978 onwards, more than 99% of the educated youth returned to the city, and they staged demonstrations protesting this movement and its consequences. Zhang Xiaogang was sent to be educated by the peasants in Jinning just after he graduated from high school, and that was simply a result of this political movement.
[25] Zhang Xiaogang’s father, in his Autobiography thus discusses his sons and the regret he felt: “We worked so hard to raise four sons, three of them went to college, but none fulfilled their father’s ideals. They did not care about politics and had no regard for the country’s future, having no aspirations and caring only for their personal happiness. They believed that nature was beneficent and always felt that society little rewarded them, and they were especially dissatisfied with the country’s leaders. Some even blindly worshipped Western things, viewing foreign garbage as precious, and probably even having very little national pride. I neglected their education, so I have a certain responsibility, but personal power was no match for the influence of society so they drew their own lessons from their experience”.
The reference here to the son who, “blindly worshipped Western things, viewing foreign garbage as precious” was a reference to Zhang Xiaogang who in the 1980s read a large number of Western works and spent his time doing modernist art.
[26] Original manuscript (unpublished).
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] “The four pests”: flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows. In 1958 the Central Committee issued “Directive on the Campaign Eliminating the Four Pests and Paying Attention to Patriotic Public Health”, and later the State Council issued a specific directive launching the campaign nationwide. Many people who experienced the campaign to eliminate the “four pests” wrote at that time that the campaign had been a ridiculous move.
[30] Original manuscript (unpublished).
[31] Ibid.
[32] Lin Ling in his memoir of 9 October 2002 wrote: “After the ‘Marco Polo Bridge Incident’... when passing through Nanning, I visited Li Hua one night, and then he taught me some regular woodcut engraving techniques and urged me to go among the laboring masses, understand them, and reflect their poor and miserable lives”. (Quoted from: The Individual Launches History: Lin Ling’s Painting, Yunnan People’s Publishing House, 2008, p.9.)
[33] Ibid., p.11.
[34] Ibid., p.19.
[35] Ibid., p.2.
[36] Ibid., p.258.
[37] As early as 1942, Mao Zedong in Yan’an ridiculed and denounced intellectuals. After 1949, when the Communist regime came to power, in order to unify ideology and political positions, the Communist Party in 1951 simultaneously launched a nationwide “movement for the thought reform of intellectuals” a rectification campaign in literature and art circles. During the “Cultural Revolution” period, intellectuals were called “the old stinking ninth category”, ranking them lower than enemies of the people, rich landlords, reactionaries, bad elements, and rightists. In 1973, a youth from Liaoning named Zhang Tiesheng failed in the national college entrance examination (scoring 38 in language and 6 in physics and chemistry), and submitted a previously prepared letter together with physics and chemistry examination paper. He made the accusation that the exam had been “monopolized by carefree profligate bookworms not doing their job properly”, arguing that this was just “excessively selfish” behavior. This attack on intellectuals and knowledge won support by Liaoning Province Party Secretary, Mao Yuanxin, and the letter was eventually published in Liaoning Daily. Zhang Tiesheng became known nationally as “the hero of the blank examination form”, now described as worthy of emulation. In December, Beijing Daily published a letter from a primary school pupil called Huang Shuai. “Regarding teachers with respect” was now seen as a resurgence of revisionism in education and the restoration to power of the bourgeoisie, and as a result many school teachers were subjected to denunciation and political scrutiny. These political events intensified the fear of knowledge at all levels and constituted a part of the “Cultural Revolution” political movement.
[38] Zhang Xiaogang, The Mao Xuhui I Know, 2005.
[39] These three media outlets, referred to as “the two newspapers and the one journal”, were under the direct control of the CCP, and editorials and articles published in these three media expressed most directly the supreme will of the core leadership of the CCP Central Committee. From 1966 on, Chinese people made it a habit to use the articles in the “the two newspapers and the one journal” to determine the political mood and internal problems of the Central Committee.
[40] At the beginning there were 20 students, but two years later He Duoling and Huang Tongjiang became postgraduate students, and so there were 18 students in the class at the time of graduation.
[41] Autobiography, 2014.
[42] Gao Xiaohua personally categorized “the Sichuan School of painting” as having passed, conceptually, through “three waves”: the first time was the 1978-1979 period culminating in the National Art Exhibition Commemorating the 30th Anniversary of the Founding of the PRC (the period of “scar art”); the second was the 1980 National Youth Art Exhibition (the period of “vernacular realist painting”); and, the third was 1982—1984, highlighted by the Exhibition of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts at NAMOC in Beijing (the heyday of the Sichuan School of painting). He Guiyan ed., Anthology of Criticism of the “Sichuan School of Painting”: 1976-2006, Jilin Fine Arts Publishing House, 2007.
[43] Referring to the series of works completed by Zhang Xiaogang in 1981 which included The Storm Is Approaching and Clouds in the Sky.
[44] Gao Xiaohua, ‘“Scar Painting’ in the History of Modern Chinese Art”, Reminiscence and Narrative, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2007, p.153.
[45] Ibid., p.150.
[46] Full information regarding the history of this school can be found in: Liu Zhaoquan ed., History of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts: 1938-1989, Chongqing, 1990.
[47] Ibid., p.69.
[48] Ibid., p.71.
[49] The “Four Clean-Ups Movement” was a campaign to “purify the politics, economy, ideology, and organization”, which was a later phase of the CCP campaign in the 1960s to implement the political goals of the “socialist education movement” in rural areas. At the beginning it emphasized a major clean-up of the economic mess, but later became more of a political purge. Following on the heels of the “Socialist Education Movement”, the “Cultural Revolution” broke out.
[50] On 15 December 1965, Fine Arts in its 6th issue published six articles about Rent Collection Courtyard. At the same time, the editorial board wrote this assessment: “This clay sculptural work titled Rent Collection Courtyard created as an exhibit for Landlord Manor in Dayi, Sichuan Province, has been welcomed by the masses and attracted the attention of artists. It raises the red flag of Mao Zedong thought, and is a great victory in adhering to the Party’s literary and artistic direction in artistic creation. It is a product of the glorious Socialist Education Movement, and it intimately coordinates with the fundamental tasks of the revolutionary struggle. It reflects class struggle from the perspective of the historical stage of China’s Democratic Revolution, embodying how the masses will never forget class struggle and the revolutionary will that will never tolerate the restoration of the system of exploitation. Its ideological and artistic loftiness makes it a powerful weapon for class education for the masses and it plays a great role in promoting socialist revolution and socialist construction. This creative practice is a concentrated embodiment of the ongoing revolutionizing of art workers, also well as which it provides precious experience for artists constantly revolutionizing. This sculptural group by Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts is to this day an important historical document.
[51]These massed political dances popular in the “Cultural Revolution” featured simple movements, formations, and themes intended to express loyalty to Mao Zedong.
[52] On 8 January 1976, Premier Zhou Enlai died, and on the afternoon of 11 January was to be sent to Babaoshan cemetery for cremation. Millions of mourners lined Chang’an Boulevard. On 14 January, crowds laid wreaths and flowers in Tiananmen Square, culminating on 4 April, Qingming Festival, with a memorial service in the square, with people reading poems in tribute to Zhou Enlai, and expressing defiance and resistance to the “gang of four” in power. On 5 April, the wreaths in the Square were destroyed, and a large number of mourners seriously clashed with the police; in the confusion hundreds of people were arrested and the crowd was driven from the Square. On 7 April Beijing Revolutionary Committee, the city government at the time, issued an emergency notice declaring the “Tiananmen Square incident” to be the largest ever counter-revolutionary incident since 1949.
[53] Fine Arts was set up in 1950 (originally as a bi-monthly titled People’s Fine Arts) as the official organ of the China artists Association, and at that time it was almost the only national art journal in China. It covered all political campaigns, exhibitions, art-related theory and events, which could almost exclusively only be found in this publication. During the “Cultural Revolution” the journal was suspended, but in 1976 it resumed publication. In the 1980s, through its editor Li Xianting and Gao Minglu, the magazine promoted the modernist art movement until 1989, when the publication’s influence gradually declined. The publication continues to this day.
[54]For example, in 1979 the first (January) issue of Fine Arts published portraits and sketches of participants in the April 5 Tiananmen Incident, the second (February) issue included reproductions of Ai Xuan’s oil painting On Guard and Bai Jingzhou’s lithograph Unflinchingly Loyal through Danger; and, in the November, Shen Yaoyi’s oil paintings, Blood and Heart.
[55]He Rong (1921-1989) entered the Central Academy of Fine Arts as a student in its painting department in 1949, and in 1951 became a teacher at the school. As a student of Xu Beihong, Wu Zuoren, Wang Zhaowen, and Dong Xiwen, he was one of those who in autumn 1953 made Fine Arts an authoritative journal in the fine art world, and he was also a guohua painter.
[56] A total of 32 paintings by Chen Yiming, Liu Yulian, and Li Bin.
[57]He Rong, “Destroying the Valuable Things of Life for Others to See: Problems Occasioned by the Comic Book Maple”, Fine Arts, 1979: 8.
[58] Fine Arts, 1979: 8, p.38.
[59] Autobiography, 2014.
[60] “Imperialism, revisionism, counterrevolution”: “Imperialism”, mainly refers to the Western capitalist countries dominated by the United States; and, “revisionism”, refers to the Soviet-dominated Eastern European socialist countries. Even though China and the Soviet Union signed a treaty of friendship in 1950, becoming members of the “family” of socialist nations and participating in the “cold war” with Western capitalism led by the United States, by 1963, the CCP had split with the CPSU, and “revisionism” became China’s primary enemy. “Counterrevolution” and reactionaries: Mainly refers to the KMT and its followers on the Mainland.
[61] On 5 April 1979, Guangzhou Daily published an article titled “Look to the Future, Literature and Art!”. The article referred to the drama In a Silent Place, the novella Class Teacher, and other works that “looked back” at the plight of ordinary people in the “cultural revolution”, maintaining that such literature and art was not conducive to encouraging people to “unite in moving forward and to unite for the four modernizations”; writers and artists should focus instead on “the slogan of promoting literature and art that was forward-looking and promote literature and art that was forward-looking”. In the same month, the fourth issue of Shanghai Literature published a commentary titled “Restore the Reputation of Literature and Art: Oppose the Theory that Art Is a Tool for Class Struggle”, which argued that while such a theory was the theoretical basis for the “conspiracy literature” of the “Gang of Four”, it implied that the criticism of the theory that literature was a tool might also be suspect, as well as Mao Zedong’s view that literature and art must serve politics. Later, the journal Hebei Literature and Art (1979:6) published an article discussing eulogy vis-à-vis exposé and this intensified the national discussion on the arts. At this time, People’s Daily, Guangming Daily, and Red Flag tended to take the view that “exposure” “lacked virtue”.
[62] Discussing the creative circumstances of the students of the classes of 1977 and 1978, Long Quan who was a student at that time recalls: “The major difference between the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts and other art colleges was that there was a better connection between the teaching and the creative practice of the students, and from then on a healthy tradition was established of having creative work promoting teaching at Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, and this continued to now is active on into the generation of contemporary art”. He Guiyan ed., Anthology of Criticism of the “Sichuan School of Painting”: 1976-2006, Jilin Fine Arts Publishing House, 2007, p.496.
[63] Gao Xiaohua, “Scar Painting in the History of Modern Chinese Art”, in Lü Peng and Kong Lingwei ed., Reminiscence and Narration, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2007, pp.144-145.
[64] Gao Xiaohua, “Why I Painted Why”, Fine Arts, 1979:8, p.7.
[65] Zheng Yi, “Spring Moved Me”, Fine Arts, 1980:1, p.39.
[66] Quoted from: Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts School History Compilation Committee, Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts: 1940-2009, Southwest Normal University Press, 2010, p.146.
[67] “Red, light, bright”: A summary of the approved features of art in the “Cultural Revolution” period, designed to eulogize the revolution and its leaders. Jiang Qing stipulated that artists depict positive characters with a healthy image, ruddy faces emanating light, faces with clean and smooth complexions, and dramatic sunlight.
[68] Shao Yangde, “Create • Appreciate • Assess: A Reading of Father and a Discussion with Critics”, Fine Arts, 1981:9, p.57.
[69] Luo Zhongli, “Letter from the Painter of My Father”, Fine Arts, 1981:2, p.4.
[70] Gao Xiaohua, “Scar Painting in the History of Modern Chinese Art”, in Lü Peng and Kong Lingwei ed., Reminiscence and Narration, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2007, p.152.
[71] See: Shao Dazhen, “To a Higher Level: Feelings on Seeing the Exhibition of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts”, Fine Arts, 1984:6, pp.14-16.
[72] Maksimov (1913-1993) was a painter from the Soviet Union, who came to China in 1956 to give oil painting courses in China. He had a lasting impact on academic painting in China in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
[73] In 1978, the Yan’an period artist Wang Qi participated in the work of a small group in the Ministry of Culture overseeing rectifying the injustices of the earlier period, and the case of the “Jiang Feng Clique” came up for review. In the investigation, he took copious notes from those familiar with the overthrow of the “Jiang Feng Clique” during the anti-rightist campaign. Chen Kehan, Vice-Minister of Culture at that time, made the following statement: “Comrade Jiang Feng was marked out as a rightist, and the decision was made the Party group in the Ministry of Culture and approved by the Central Propaganda Department. He was classified as a Rightist for the following reasons: (a) he opposed the leadership of the CCP; and (b) he promoted the running of the school by the “faculty”. The main reason was the first. He was said to have opposed the leadership of the CCP, because in 1956 Comrade Qian Junrui convened a number of seminars promoting guohua painting, and criticized Comrade Jiang Feng for only paying attention to oil painting, for despising guohua painting, and for being contemptuous of national forms. Comrade Jiang Feng was not swayed by such criticism. In 1957 during the “Hundred Flowers” period of “free speech”, a number of art figures submitted a petition to the Ministry of Culture, ferociously criticizing Comrade Qian Junrui for despising Western painting. This petition was thought to have been initiated by Comrade Jiang Feng. When the Rightists were denounced, Comrade Jiang Feng became the target of anti-Rightist denunciation”. (Quoted from: Wang Qi, “Returning People’s Identities”, Storms in the Sea of Art: The Memoirs of Wang Qi, People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 1998, p.337.)
[74] The China Artists Association was established on 21 July 1949; it was at that time called the All-China Art Workers Association and did not acquire its present name until 4 October 1953. In the “Cultural Revolution” period, the China Artists Association was disbanded until reconvened at meetings 8-11 March1979 and a formal resolution to return to work was announced.
[75] Fine Arts, 1979:2, p.7.
[76] Gao Xiaohua, “Scar Painting in the History of Modern Chinese Art”, in Lü Peng and Kong Lingwei ed., Reminiscence and Narration, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2007, p.160.
[77] Zhang Xiaogang, “Crisis of Faith and the Split Life”, Artron document, Artron website (www.artron.net), 4 January 2015.
[78] Jean-François Millet (1814-1875): French painter whose pastoral works were officially approved in China in the 1950s and 1960s.
[79] Lunan County is affiliated with Kunming City and is 100 km from downtown Kunming. Because the entire area is covered by Karst topography, especially the renowned Stone Forest World Heritage Park, in October 1998 the county changed its name to Shilin County. In the 1950s this area inspired the older painter Huang Yongyu to create his woodcut illustrations inspired by the Sani epic poem Ashima. In the 1960s years the outdoor shots for the film Ashima were filmed on location in Nuohei and Echongyi villages. The older painters Yao Zhonghua and Ding Shaoguang also often came here to paint. Ye Yongqing recalls that in 1977 he first saw Sani girls in Sun Jingbo’s work titled Busy Spring Morning and first saw the Stone Forest and Guishan in Jiang Tiefeng’s works. In their second year at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Ye Yongqing, Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang decided to go to Guishan to sketch and paint from real life. Ye Yongqing has written in an unpublished source that Guishan was “the base for the realist painting for the earlier generation of Yunnan artists such as Yao Zhonghua and for artists from outside the province. The villagers have experience in receiving visiting cadres and workers who came to the countryside for field experience. Arrangements could be made with the villagers for private or public accommodations”.
[80] Nie Rongqing, Colors of the City Moat.
[81] Ibid.
[82] The “academy” (“academic”) is a general term in the art world for any art school of teaching institution.
[83] Private files.
[84]Ye Yongqing, “Journey of the Heart”, quoted in Time Traveler, China Youth Publishing House, 2010, p.23.
[85] Eugen Popa (1919-1996) was a Romanian painter and art educator, who was an oil painting instructor in 1960-1962 at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts. He was the second foreign oil painting teacher to conduct classes in China after 1949, following Maksimov. His methods and approach were different from those of Maksimov, and his style had to a certain degree of influence in China.
[86] Zhang Xiaogang, “Letter to Mao Xuhui” (16 December 1981), Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.17.
[87] Ye Yongqing, “Journey of the Heart”, quoted in Time Traveler, China Youth Publishing House, 2010, pp.24-25.
[88] Fine Arts Research, 1982:3.
[89] Ibid.
[90] Fine Arts, 1982:4.
[91] Private files.
[92] Private files.
[93] Zhang Xiaogang, “Letter to Zhou Chunya” (15 November 1981), Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, p.9.
[94]Wu Guanzhong, “Formal Beauty in Painting”, Fine Arts, 1979:5, p.35.
[95] Xia Hang, “Seeing the Detail in Painting”, Fine Arts, 1982:1, p.57.
[96] Fine Arts Research, 1981:1, p.51.
[97] Zhang Xiaogang also participated in the Wild Grass Exhibition of Paintings in January 1980. The works in this exhibition, with their bold themes and expression, surprised audiences in Chongqing, and some works in style and expression were similar to works in the 1979 Stars Exhibition in Beijing.
[98] Zhang Xiaogang, “Letter to Mao Xuhui” (16 December 1981), Amnesia and Memory: Zhang Xiaogang’s Correspondence 1981-1996, Peking University Press, 2010, pp.16-17.