Painting History: China's Revolution in a Global Context 1604979399, 9781604979398

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Preface
Chapter 1: The Fate of a Painting
Chapter 2: Red Star over China
Chapter 3: Tolerance
Chapter 4: Wounds
Chapter 5: 1972 Imperial Palanquin
Chapter 6: Laocoön
Chapter 7: The Opening of the Fifth Seal
Chapter 8: Eileen Chang’s Family
Chapter 9: Revolution
Chapter 10: Spain 1937
Chapter 11: Peking Treaty
Chapter 12: 1966 Beijing Jeep
Chapter 13: Third World
Chapter 14: Absolute Truth
Chapter 15: Russia 1917
Chapter 16: Wise Men from the East
Chapter 17: The Last Communist
Epilogue
The Paintings
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Painting History

Painting History China’s Revolution in a Global Context

Shen Jiawei edited by Mabel Lee

Copyright 2018 Cambria Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to [email protected], or mailed to: Cambria Press 100 Corporate Parkway, Suite 128 Amherst, New York 14226, USA Images on front cover are by Shen Jiawei. Copyright restrictions apply. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shen, Jiawei, 1948- author. | Lee, Mabel, editor. Title: Painting history : China's revolution in a global context / Shen Jiawei ; edited by Mabel Lee. Description: Amherst, New York : Cambria Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017044937 | ISBN 9781604979398 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Shen, Jiawei, 1948---Themes, motives. | Art and society--China--History--20th century. Classification: LCC ND1049.S4363 A35 2018 | DDC 759.951--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044937

Table of Contents

List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix Chapter 1: The Fate of a Painting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 2: Red Star over China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Chapter 3: Tolerance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Chapter 4: Wounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Chapter 5: 1972 Imperial Palanquin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Chapter 6: Laocoön . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Chapter 7: The Opening of the Fifth Seal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Chapter 8: Eileen Chang’s Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Chapter 9: Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Chapter 10: Spain 1937 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Chapter 11: Peking Treaty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Chapter 12: 1966 Beijing Jeep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 Chapter 13: Third World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Chapter 14: Absolute Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Chapter 15: Russia 1917 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Chapter 16: Wise Men from the East . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

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Chapter 17: The Last Communist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 The Paintings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275

List of Figures

Figure 1: Roderick Disciplines the Pups while Gillian Sits for Her Portrait  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Figure 2: Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208 Figure 3: Tasting Snow on the Wanda Mountains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Figure 4: Red Star over China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 Figure 4a: Red Star over China (panel 1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Figure 4b: Red Star over China (panel 2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 Figure 4c: Red Star over China (panel 3) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Figure 4d: Red Star over China (panel 4) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214 Figure 4e: Red Star over China (panel 5) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 Figure 4f: Red Star over China (panel 6) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216 Figure 5: Tolerance  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Figure 6: Wounds: The Story of Dr. Norman Bethune . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218 Figure 7: 1972 Imperial Palanquin: After Yan Liben . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 Figure 7a: 1972 Imperial Palanquin: After Yan Liben (part 1) . . . . . . . . . 220

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Figure 7b: 1972 Imperial Palanquin: After Yan Liben (part 2) . . . . . . . . . 221 Figure 8: Laocoön: After El Greco #1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222 Figure 9: The Opening of the Fifth Seal: After El Greco #2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 Figure 10: Eileen Chang’s Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224 Figure 10a: Eileen Chang’s Family (part 1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Figure 10b: Eileen Chang’s Family (part 2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 Figure 10c: Eileen Chang’s Family (part 3) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 Figure 11: Revolution  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228 Figure 11a: Revolution (part 1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Figure 11b: Revolution (part 2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 Figure 11c: Revolution (part 3) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Figure 11d: Revolution (part 4) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 Figure 11e: Revolution (part 5) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Figure 11f: Revolution (part 6) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 Figure 12: Spain 1937  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Figure 12a: Spain 1937 (part 1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 Figure 12b: Spain 1937 (part 2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

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Figure 13: Peking Treaty #2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 Figure 13a: Peking Treaty #2 (part 1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 Figure 13b: Peking Treaty #2 (part 2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240 Figure 13c: Peking Treaty #2 (part 3) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Figure 14: 1966 Beijing Jeep #2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242 Figure 15: Third World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 Figure 15a: Third World (part 1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 Figure 15b: Third World (part 2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 Figure 16: Absolute Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246 Figure 17: Russia 1917 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Figure 18: Wise Men from the East . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248 Figure 19: Merdeka  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 Figure 19a: Merdeka (part 1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250 Figure 19b: Merdeka (part 2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 Figure 19c: Merdeka (part 3) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252 Figure 19d: Merdeka (part 4) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 Figure 19e: Merdeka (part 5) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254

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Figure 19f: Merdeka (part 6) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 Figure 19g: Merdeka (part 7) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256 Figure 19h: Merdeka (part 8) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Figure 20: Chin Peng: The Last Communist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258

Acknowledgments We acknowledge the generous support of our sponsors: Sir Roderick and Lady Gillian Deane, Wellington, New Zealand Yap Lim Sen, Ipoh, Malaysia Helina Chan, founder of iPreciation, Singapore and Hong Kong 

Foreword Mabel Lee Raised in China under the red flag, Shen Jiawei 沈嘉蔚 (a.k.a. Jiawei Shen; b. 16 September 1948, Shanghai) was a firm believer of communism and an erudite reader of Russian literature and art which he greatly admired. When China severed relations with the U.S.S.R. in 1961 due to ideological differences, and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) began soon after, he was persecuted for his pro-Soviet leanings. The Cultural Revolution closed all schools, colleges, and universities; and as Shen had just graduated from high school it seemed that his ambition to pursue a career in art had irretrievably evaporated. Nonetheless, a series of coincidences suggest that even in those tumultuous times somehow it had been preordained that he would succeed in pursuing his ambition. In writing the chapters of this book, Shen himself intuited how certain individuals in life or in books had served to develop both the courage as well as the intellectual, ethical, aesthetic, and analytical skills that have been indispensable to his life and art creation. It was coincidence that, as a member of the “rebel faction” of the Red Guard Third Command, Shen was part of the Zhejiang Joint Provincial Headquarters based on the campus of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine

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Arts in the provincial capital of Hangzhou. By 1968 the academy had become the epicenter of art and literary propaganda. Shen’s painting Chairman Mao Attends the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party at South Lake (1968) that was exhibited in his hometown city of Jiaxing, Zhejiang, did not go unnoticed. Zhang Yongsheng, chairman of the Provincial Revolutionary Committee, as well as an artist and graduate of the academy, arranged for Shen to practice painting at the academy for more than three months in 1969 and gave him access and borrowing rights to the library, even though the library was officially closed. Zhang also arranged for an eminent oil painter to provide Shen with guidance and supervision. By 1968 middle-school graduates were being sent to work on farms for reeducation by poor and lower-middle peasants; alternatively, they could choose to work on farms in remote frontier regions and receive a state salary. In June of 1970 Shen volunteered for duty in Heilongjiang Province where the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the Shenyang Military Region had established the Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps in June of 1968. He was duly assigned to the 42nd regiment of the 4th division of the Corps that was located ten kilometers from the Soviet border. The Heilongjiang regiments consisting of tens of thousands of resettled soldiers and laborers were all stationed in Beidahuang (a.k.a. the Great Northern Wilderness), a vast region of black earth along the basins of the Ussuri, Songhua, and Amur Rivers. When Shen arrived, 400,000 middle-school graduates had also settled there. Each regiment had armed soldiers ready to fight the Soviet, but most of the soldiers had no weapons and were clearly farm workers. Beidahuang was in fact the nation’s granary. Propaganda work was a priority in all PLA projects. Within a year, Shen was appointed art worker to illustrate model-worker slides for screening and to take charge of producing propaganda posters. Before long, he was selected to join the annual three-month Art Class at Corps Headquarters

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where Hao Boyi from the Great Northern Wilderness Printmaking Studio was in charge. Shen was one of the chosen few allowed to do oil painting. To mark the thirtieth anniversary of Mao Zedong’s May 1942 Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, Madam Mao (a.k.a. Jiang Qing) organized the First National Art Exhibition in 1972. Shen’s entry, Tasting Snow on the Wanda Mountains, was entered in provincial and military-region exhibitions. At the time, it was announced that in October 1974 the Second National Art Exhibition would take place to emphasize that workers, peasants, and soldiers had mounted the stage in the nation’s superstructure. Following all the guidelines stipulated for paintings, Shen completed his painting Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland in July 1974, and in September he was notified it had been selected. Taking leave and paying his own expenses to Beijing, he saw that his work had been hung in the most prominent position at the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) but was deeply shocked to see that the two soldiers in the painting had been reworked. Both now had fuller faces, ruddy complexions, and fierce expressions. The work was collected by NAMOC without remuneration for the painter; it was published nationwide in newspapers and magazines, and 200,000 propaganda posters of it were distributed to work units. Shen’s achievement was disparagingly acknowledged at his workplace with a third-class merit, and he was not recommended for further study when universities reopened in 1975. Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 was followed by Jiang Qing’s arrest, presumably to deflect blame from Chairman Mao for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. That Jiang Qing had approved of Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland meant repercussions for Shen Jiawei. In 1977, his father was incarcerated in his workplace prison for one year without explanation, probably because he had proudly hung a poster of his son’s painting next to his desk at work. Worse was yet to come … In 1981, Shen was told that NAMOC had returned his painting to the Heilongjiang Provincial Artists Association in Harbin. When he went the following year to collect his painting, it was in a pile of rubbish in the storage

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space, and he could see it was badly damaged. Too afraid to unwrap the “politically contaminated” work, he took it to Shenyang, where it remained under his bed for twenty years. In 1997, Guggenheim Museum in New York asked to borrow the work for its “China: 5000 Years” exhibition in New York City and Bilboa in 1998, so Shen was goaded into action. Having relocated to Sydney in early 1989, he quickly had the painting brought to Sydney where he worked alongside conservators at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) to restore the painting to its original form. In 2009, Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland sold in Beijing for US$1 million at China Guardian Auctions. The private collector subsequently established the Long Museum in Shanghai in 2012, and the painting has since been on permanent display. This work that is inextricably linked to the history of the Cultural Revolution was almost lost to China, but it has now taken its rightful place alongside other of Shen’s large-scale visual narrations of China’s modern history. NAMOC has collected Shen’s Red Star over China (1987), and the National Museum of China (NMC) has collected his Wounds: The Story of Dr. Norman Bethune (1984) and his Tolerance (1988). In Australia, the White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney that specializes in Chinese art created since 2000 has collected Shen’s Absolute Truth (2000) and his 1972 Imperial Palanquin: After Yan Liben (2002). Shen’s large-scale works Third World (2002) and Merdeka (2008) are meditations on human history that are held in private collections in Malaysia. His visual narrations of Chinese history often involve hundreds of portraits of historical personalities, as in the case of his six-panel work Revolution (2009–2012), that is the first part of a larger three-part work titled Brothers and Sisters. The summary just discussed attempts to give some idea of the extent of Shen’s musing on China’s modern history, as well as his own place in one of the most turbulent eras of human history. This book is a memoir that discusses in detail a selection of his most important historical paintings, why he wanted to paint these works, and the extraordinary circumstances

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in which they were painted. I have mentioned earlier that Shen Jiawei professes to be a communist, but he argues consistently that there are communists who are humanist in orientation, and he declares himself to be one of these. In the early twentieth century, many intellectuals worldwide joined the communist movement in a fight against fascism: this led to Europeans going to fight against the Japanese war of aggression in China during the 1930s and 1940s and to a team of Chinese soldiers going to fight against Franco’s forces in Spain. The Cold War has led to the erasure of the cosmopolitan tendencies that once existed worldwide, or even knowledge of these. Shen’s memoir seeks to understand the dynamics of communism in the hands of political tyrants—because it was under such a regime that he had grown to maturity. History painting is his passion, but it is a highly time-consuming form of art. Since arriving in Australia in early 1989, Shen’s main source of income has been through painting portraits. He is now acknowledged as one of the finest portraitists in the country, with large numbers of his portraits collected in the National Portrait Gallery, as well as in other public institutions. From 1992, he began to surprise the Sydney art world by being shortlisted year after year, fourteen times, for the AGNSW’s Archibald Prize. That prize has eluded him, but in 2006 he won the AGNSW’s Sulman Prize for his Peking Treaty 1901 #2. Painting History is unique because Shen remains committed to history painting, a genre that once flourished in the Western world but is now considered passé. He has always excelled at portraiture, and his large oil paintings reproduce hundreds of portraits of real and recognizable historical personalities. However, as an artist who specializes in history painting, he has no compunction in extending the limitations of the genre. Regarding history paintings as also being “visual narrations” of history in the hands of the artist, he sometimes playfully paints a small image of himself into his complex paintings. His commitment to the genre is equaled by his deep interest in history itself, not just the history of China but also the history of the world, especially that of the international

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communist movement and its fight against fascism in the early twentieth century. In his analysis, there are different kinds of communists. His nonChinese communist heroes like Norman Bethune of Canada and Fred Hollows of Australia are humanists, and he clearly identifies with them.

Preface Shen Jiawei During my exhibition Zai-jian Revolution in Sydney at 4A Gallery in October of 2002, the curator Aaron Seeto told me that my painting 1966 Beijing Jeep #2 had sold to a woman from New Zealand. I had painted three versions and the second version was the best. However, it was not until 2010 when the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre was celebrating the five decades of my career with a retrospective exhibition that I asked Aaron for contact details of the person who had bought my 1966 Beijing Jeep #2. He eventually tracked down an e-mail address for Gillian Deane, but in the interim, 1966 Beijing Jeep #1 had been borrowed for the exhibition. Nonetheless, I was happy I could e-mail a launch invitation to Gillian Deane who replied that she and her husband Roderick would come. We met for the first time at the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery. Tall and graceful, Gillian is three years my senior. Roderick has a head of white hair; and underneath his thick eyebrows, his bright eyes behind his glasses looked even bigger. A highly successful economist, he is a past president of the New Zealand National Te Papa Museum. The couple lived mostly in New Zealand but were often in Sydney for business,

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and they said that 1966 Beijing Jeep #2 was hanging on a wall of their Sydney apartment. They studied my paintings and asked many questions. On display was a quarter-size replica of my painting Red Star over China (1987) that is held in the collection of NAMOC in Beijing. The children of a Red Army soldier saw their father in my painting on television and commissioned me to paint this smaller version. The painting greatly interested Roderick, and he listened intently to my commentary. Over lunch he asked if I would paint Gillian’s portrait, and I immediately agreed. He then asked what he could read about the background of my individual works. I said there was nothing, but that I had it all stored in my head. On hearing this, he proposed that I find someone to interview me and write it all up, adding that he and Gillian would sponsor the project. Before long I was in New Zealand to start on sketches for Gillian’s portrait. She made a striking picture in her black-and-white striped Impressionist blouse when she came to meet me at Wellington Airport. We picked up Roderick on the way, then traveled seventy kilometers north to their property on the West Coast. Surrounded by a vast expanse of greenery, their house on a hillside was simple and elegant and featured an indoor swimming pool, as well as a huge glass window looking out to Kapiti Island across the strait. I asked Gillian to sit by the window and was preparing to sketch her when two black Labrador pups jumped out of nowhere and began licking me. A chuckling Roderick appeared and gave the command to the pups that the welcome ceremony should end. I immediately decided to put Roderick and the pups into the painting. Returning to Sydney I set to work on my portrait of Gillian and Roderick that would win me much acclaim, especially as in the interim they had become Sir Roderick and Lady Deane. Of the many portraits I have painted, this one is my favorite. I also thought about Roderick’s suggestion to find someone to write up the stories behind my history paintings, but could think of no one. In any case, my poor English would prevent me from communicating

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everything I wanted to say. I knew I was the best person to write about my paintings, and that I would only need to find a translator. Over the next three years I wrote more than twenty essays for a collection I called Behind the Canvas, and two long-standing friends, Ted and Denise Ee, worked together to produce an English translation of these. My original essays were published in a local Chinese newspaper and had not been edited for publication as a book manuscript. A third long-standing friend, University of Sydney academic Mabel Lee, said that Behind the Canvas was unique and important as art history archival material. With my total agreement, she has taken my manuscript to a further stage of development and I have retitled this new work Painting History. Because large numbers of early Chinese Communist Party (CPC) leaders stand at center stage in the chapters of my book, the eminent historian David S.G. Goodman, another longstanding friend, was invited to scrutinize the final manuscript for any infelicities. Professor Goodman is author of numerous books on CPC history and is currently Vice President Academic Affairs at Xi’an Jiaotong–Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. 26 September 2017

Painting History

Chapter 1

The Fate of a Painting My Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland was painted in 1974 and had an extraordinary fate that made it a cultural artifact encapsulating the narrative of the Cultural Revolution.1 When Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in May of 1966, he ended my dream of studying in an art academy but turned me into a famous painter at a very young age. I had just graduated from secondary school, so I stayed on at my old school to take part in the Cultural Revolution. I belonged to the “generation raised under the red flag,” and passionately believed in communism. Prior to Mao Zedong’s severing ties with the Soviet Union, I had read extensively in Russian literature and was deeply influenced by Russian and Soviet art, and for this I was persecuted at the start of the Cultural Revolution. I subsequently became a member of what was called the “rebel faction” of the Red Guard Third Command. Our organization was part of the Zhejiang Joint Provincial Headquarters based on the campus of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in the provincial capital of Hangzhou. At the time, Zhejiang was the only province in which the core members of the revolutionary movement were art academy students and young teachers. So, when the Cultural Revolution was transformed from an armed conflict into a propaganda movement in 1968,

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the Zhejiang Academy became its epicenter for literature and art. The most influential oil painting at the time, The World Can Be Changed and the Seas Transformed into Mulberry Fields: Chairman Mao Inspects Areas South and North of the Yangtze, was a collaborative work by Zheng Shengtian2 and other artists of the Zhejiang Academy. It was first published in the nationally distributed magazine Workers, Peasants and Soldiers Pictorial that was edited by the faculty members and students of the Academy. During the revolutionary red tides in the early years of the Cultural Revolution the whole nation was painting portraits of Chairman Mao, and my painting Chairman Mao Attends the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party at South Lake (1968) was exhibited in my hometown of Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province. Zhang Yongsheng,3 the chairman of the Provincial Revolutionary Committee, was impressed by my work and appointed me to the Academy to train peasants on how to paint using that theme. Zhang, a graduate of the Academy, had been recruited for political work, and it was through him that I came to spend over three months at the Academy practicing painting in 1969, during which time I had special access to the library even though officially it had been shut down. I worked my way through all kinds of foreign art catalogues, and I could freely borrow publications, which meant I could practice sketching by copying the images. I was particularly fond of history paintings and journal illustrations of Soviet Russia, so Zhang sent an old professor, Wang Chengyi,4 to provide me with some guidance. Wang was an eminent artist, a 1957 graduate from the oil painting course taught by the Soviet artist Konstantin Maksimov5 at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing. When I returned home to Jiaxing, it turned out that the Zhejiang Academy graduate Hu Yuelong6 had been assigned to work there, so I was also able to benefit from his advice. The Cultural Revolution needed people with the painting skills to create large-scale works that would inspire the population. I was commissioned by the No. 5 Air Corps base in Jiaxing to paint works to commemorate the achievements of air-force heroes, and I learned much from my six

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months’ stay, especially because I had never received formal training in the fundamentals of art. I became a painter without having practiced life drawing, plaster modeling, or still life; and like many in my generation, I became a propaganda painter because of the Cultural Revolution. Before 1966 most households would not have been able to buy oil paints for children wanting to study art: a person’s monthly salary was equivalent to the cost of a few dozen tubes of paint. However, during the Cultural Revolution all work units needed people to paint portraits of Chairman Mao, and after completing paintings the artists could keep the leftover tubes of paint. This was why oil painting—that is, Western painting —became widespread in China and could count as one of the positive byproducts of the Cultural Revolution. I later learned that Zhang Yongsheng had been slated to become Mao’s son-in-law, but his connection with the Gang of Four had led to his imprisonment instead. All members of the division party committee at the No. 5 Air Corps base were implicated in the Lin Biao Incident and were arrested. The division was charged with having remodeled the Russian Ilyushin Il–10 ground attack aircraft for an attack on Mao’s private train carriage, and I learned from former colleagues that one of the heroes I had been commissioned to paint had been killed while trying to fly one of the remodeled aircraft in 1970.7 Most of the Zhejiang Academy teachers and students eventually pursued successful art or art-related careers after the Cultural Revolution ended. One excellent example is Wu Shanming,8 who had served as liaison officer of the Third Command of the Jiaxing Red Guards in 1967, and later became a famous exponent of traditional art and a professor at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now known as Zhongguo Academy of Fine Arts). The Marxist maxim to doubt everything was a mantra for the Red Guards, so they were an obstacle to Mao’s bid to consolidate his authoritarian rule. To resolve this situation, from 1968 all middle-school graduates were sent to work on farms for reeducation by poor- and lower-

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middle peasants. Another option was for students to travel far from home to work on farms in remote frontier regions, and for this they were paid a state salary. I had volunteered to serve in Heilongjiang Province, and was assigned to the 42nd regiment of the 4th division of the Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps with its base located 4,000 kilometers from home, and just ten kilometers from the Soviet border. All Heilongjiang regiments were stationed in Beidahuang (a.k.a. the Great Northern Wilderness), a vast terrain of black earth along the linked basins of the Ussuri, Songhua, and Amur Rivers. Decades earlier when the Japanese Army occupied the region and established the puppet state of Manchukuo, many Chinese were forcibly relocated there to cultivate the land. Then in 1957 and 1958, respectively, large numbers of former workers from the Railway Engineering Corps, and equally large numbers of volunteers demobilized from the PLA after service in the Korean War were resettled there to create farmland out of the virgin soil in a huge conglomerate called the Agricultural Reclamation Corps. During that period, some farms were also converted into huge labor camps for criminals and so-called “rightists.” Dispossessed farmers from Shandong Province were also sent there. After 1963, when the Soviet Union became China’s new enemy, the labor camps were relocated elsewhere. In June 1968, Mao issued a directive to the PLA of the Shenyang Military Region to take charge of the Agricultural Reclamation Corps and to reorganize it as the Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps. When I arrived in June 1970, about 400,000 middle-school graduates had already joined the ranks of the tens of thousands of resettled soldiers and laborers already there. The Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps consisted of more than sixty regiments. Each regiment of 20,000– 30,000 persons was based on a former farm, and each company within a regiment had regular soldiers on active duty. While regiments had soldiers ready to fight Soviet Russia, most of them had no weapons, and were farm workers. Beidahuang was the nation’s granary; and as crops including soybeans and rice were being used for foreign exchange, agricultural production continued to be the real priority.

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Propaganda work was an established practice in the PLA, and all division-level political departments had a propaganda team with at least one art worker. After working in the Corps for a year, I was appointed to the position of art worker. My responsibilities included making slide illustrations for the model-worker slideshows screened by the film brigade, producing propaganda posters, and administering the blackboard poster work. I was also placed on standby to join the Art Class at the Corps Headquarters located in Jiamusi. The political department at Corps Headquarters had established an art class and put Hao Boyi9 in charge. He had been in the marines, then recruited as a cadre in 1958, and eventually joined the Great Northern Wilderness Printmaking Studio in 1960 as its youngest member. The principal members of the studio were subsequently assigned to the provincial capital of Harbin to establish the Heilongjiang Provincial Artists Association and to work as professional painters. Hao’s background and experience facilitated his setting up of a printmaking workshop housed in the Corps Recreation Club. Annual reviews were held from 1970 onwards to assess submissions of draft sketches, and it was through this process that young artists with talent were identified and sent to participate at the Corps Headquarters Art Class. This meant that for about three to four months each year, twenty to thirty art students would eat, live, and work together. It was not until 1972 that artists were permitted to sign their artworks, so all artworks produced were unsigned; artists also received no remuneration. Everyone, however, continued to receive their usual monthly salary of thirtytwo yuan. We discussed and corrected one another’s work, and worked collaboratively on paintings. It was like going to art school without paying tuition fees. There were restrictions on subject matter, but our source materials were derived from our everyday life experiences. Back then, all of us basically identified with the official ideology, but in the evenings whenever possible we would lock the door and surreptitiously copy all kinds of prints that had been outlawed as feudal, capitalist, or

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revisionist. That I was selected to join the Art Class was a stroke of good luck, sheer enjoyment, and I formed many lasting friendships there. Hao Boyi was not a CPC member. His father had been executed, so he had to be careful to avoid running afoul of politics. He ran the Art Class successfully for some years and nurtured many artists. His students became university professors or officials in the China Artists Association, and an even greater number became professional painters. During my time at the Corps Headquarters I was sketching the moment I got up in the morning, so by 1973 I had filled over twenty sketchbooks with drawings and studies for oil paintings, most of them figurative. When I painted Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland, I had developed considerable skill in sketching from life as well as painting. Most of Hao’s students were only allowed to work at printmaking, but I was amongst the privileged few whom he allowed to do oil painting. May 1972 was the thirtieth anniversary of Mao’s legendary 1942 Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, and to celebrate the occasion Jiang Qing organized the First National Art Exhibition, during which it was announced that in October 1974 the Second National Art Exhibition would be held to celebrate Mao’s founding of the People’s Republic of China. Because Cultural Revolution ideology emphasized the role of workers, peasants, and soldiers in the national superstructure, all provincial work units had been mobilizing workers, peasants, and soldiers in the work of art production. Our Art Class was in part such a response. We students had been sent to farm villages and military divisions; as such, we had joined the ranks of workers, peasants, and soldiers. It was in this context that we were to draw subject matter from our personal experiences. However, regulations stipulated that we were not to paint ourselves because as individuals we still ranked as “petit bourgeois in need of rectification.” Our works could only portray themes glorifying heroic workers, peasants, and soldiers. In Tasting Snow on the Wanda Mountains (1972) I drew on my experience of eating snow to quench my thirst while working as a logger, although the person depicted had to be changed,

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because I could not portray myself in the work. A painter friend had his girlfriend model for a poster commission: the person in the painting bore no resemblance to his girlfriend, but because someone had reported him, the 100,000 printed copies of his poster were trashed and the artist was barred from painting for two years. My friend Liu Yulian10 and I discussed collaborating to paint Ussuri River Fishing Song, and we submitted our proposal at the annual review in the winter of 1973. It was approved, and we went to do life sketches in Hulin County situated on the bank of the Ussuri River. The Sino-Soviet border runs along the Ussuri, and Russia and China each had their own twenty-meter watchtower to monitor the other side. We were granted permission by our garrison to ascend the watchtower. At the time, there was a popular song praising the proud bearing of our frontier guards and, while climbing up, a line from that song came into my mind: “Standing guard for our great motherland.” I was convinced that this was also an excellent subject for a painting, and in February 1974 the Art Class approved the idea, and work on the second painting also began with Hao Boyi’s full support. Liu and I were allocated a small room in the Corps Recreation Club. He worked on Ussuri River Fishing Song, while I worked on Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland. Liu and I were again sent to make sketches from life. This time we went to Raohe County, adjoining Hulin County. Zhenbao Island, in Raohe County, had been the flashpoint of the Sino-Soviet border conflict that was reported internationally in April 1969. Once again, we climbed the watchtower. The garrison consisted of a company of PLA troops, and the commander, who was just two years older than I, was from a worker background. He was slim and fit, and he treated the soldiers like brothers. I painted his portrait, and he became the prototype for the commander of my painting. A soldier nicknamed Xiao Wang also posed for me, and he became the prototype for the soldier in my painting. While making my preliminary life sketches, I recorded in minute detail everything I saw, from the model of the rifles to the structure of the

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Painting History

metal tower. In the bitter cold of -30 degrees Celsius, I stood on the ladder of the watchtower for an hour, sketching and taking notes. When Liu turned a telescope onto the Soviet side, he said a Soviet soldier was watching my every move. The man was clearly puzzled by what I was doing. Liu and I also sketched the landscape around Raohe City, which later became important in both our paintings. One evening on our way back to our lodgings, suspected of being Soviet spies, we were detained for questioning by the Raohe County authorities. I spent a month working on various compositions. It was impossible to sketch or photograph the watchtower at a high altitude from a distance, so I had to use perspective to approximate it. I once spent a week in 1969 trying to understand the principle by reading a book given to me by my maternal uncle, The Study of Perspective, which was published by the Commercial Press in Shanghai back in 1917. This was during the Cultural Revolution, and I was trying to find some point of equilibrium between official ideological requirements—which, in terms of the arts, included the “three prominences” principle of the Eight Model Plays and the combining of “revolutionary realism” and “revolutionary romanticism”—and my secret passion for Russian art. China’s Cultural Revolution aesthetics lay in using “revolutionary romanticism” to overthrow Soviet Russia’s “socialist realism.” In technique, Russian “socialist realism” had grown from the legacy of realism evolving from the French artist Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) to the Russian artist Ilya Repin (1844–1930). However, the defining characteristics of revolutionary romanticism in China were the qualities of “red, bright, and shining.” The teachers at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts seemed to accept this and insisted on my using vermilion and chrome yellow to paint faces, but I was not convinced. During the First National Art Exhibition in 1972, I saw the works of artists such as Chen Yifei11 and Wei Jingshan12 that retained the tonal scale of traditional realist painting, and I greatly admired their works. The main influence on my painting was this group of Shanghai painters, and I also followed the principles of

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the Soviet school of painting: the direct observation of nature, coupled with plein-air painting to capture the qualities of natural light. I would get up at the crack of dawn to climb onto rooftops to sketch, seeking to capture the light on people’s faces and the shifting colors on the surface of the snow. In the composition of Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland, the position of the metal structure of the watchtower allowed the main figure to stand out against the background of the sky, and hence naturally conformed to the principle of the “three prominences.” Setting the scene at dawn allowed the sunlight to create a ruddy warmth on the men’s faces, and I was certain there would not be any conflict with the official guidelines. However, according to the subregulations of the time, the Soviet side had to appear to be under dark clouds and located on the right side of the canvas. Failure to conform to these requirements made one’s work politically incorrect. I completed Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland in July 1974. In keeping with the practice of the times I did not sign the painting, but I wrote my name and work unit on the back of the canvas. In September, I was notified that the work had been selected for the Second National Art Exhibition, and in October I was on a steam train to Beijing on my way to see the exhibition. During the train trip, I had time to document the various stages in the creation of the painting. My notes were half true and half fabricated, because at the time any writing, even personal diaries, could be subjected to summary public scrutiny. Any politically incorrect words could bring disaster: it was imperative that even such notes conformed to the official guidelines. I arrived in Beijing and walked into NAMOC and saw my painting hanging in the most prominent position of the circular exhibition hall, to the left of the center, but when I looked closer at my painting, I made a shocking discovery: the faces of the two soldiers had been reworked. Clearly, painting a picture as close to reality as possible was unacceptable: both soldiers now had fuller faces, ruddy complexions, and fierce expressions. Later, I heard that Jiang Qing had appointed

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her close confidant Wang Mantian13 National Art Director, and she led a “rectification team” to rework any exhibits that failed to meet the required criteria. I made a detour to Shanghai to call in on Chen Yifei and other painters at the Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Studio, and while there discovered that my painting had been reviewed by the art critic Han Shangyi14 in the Wenhuibao newspaper. Back at my regiment in November, I was told that Jiang Qing had visited the Second National Art Exhibition and stood in front of a dozen or so works to critique them, while an art cadre noted her comments. On coming to my work, she heard how our Corps had mobilized rusticated youths to create artworks and had responded: “They have determination, and are not afraid of poor living conditions and hardships. That they can create a painting such as this is no small achievement.” I was also told that He Kongde,15 a painter of an older generation and from the Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution, had publicly praised my painting. Knowing this put me in high spirits. My painting Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland was published in newspapers and periodicals nationwide. It was also printed as a propaganda poster on sheets ranging from approximately A1 to A2 in size, and more than 200,000 copies were made. In 1976, when passing through Jiayin County in Heilongjiang, I saw a large copy of my painting attached to a ten-meter wall that faced the Soviet Union. My original painting had been collected by NAMOC in 1974. I received no royalties for the posters or any remuneration for the acquisition of the painting, but at the time everything we did was revolutionary work, and not for the individual. My work unit awarded me a third-class merit as encouragement, but there was no other form of recognition. The following year, when universities began enrolling students, I was not recommended for advanced studies. In 1976 when my work unit in the Shenyang Military Region was disbanded, I joined the PLA and

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worked as a set designer for their Qianjin Opera Troupe in the Shenyang Military Region. From 1974 on people in China came to detest Jiang Qing, and all sorts of negative rumors and reports circulated about her. Of course, I did not like her because of what she had done to my painting. When the Gang of Four was arrested two years later, I was so excited that I painted a series of caricatures: one of them, a cartoon of Jiang Qing, even won an award. However, in 1977, my father was arrested and incarcerated in the prison at his work unit. One of his crimes was that he had hung his son’s painting next to his office desk and told colleagues that Jiang Qing had praised it. He was released a year later, without an apology or any compensation. In 1981, a friend from the Heilongjiang Provincial Artists Association in Harbin told me that Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland had been returned by NAMOC and was at the Association office waiting to be collected. The following year I went to collect it. Both frame and stretcher had gone, and the canvas had been wrongly rolled with the painted surface facing inwards. It was lying in a pile of rubbish in the basement. I unrolled it just a bit and saw flakes of paint coming off, and took it back to Shenyang with me. Not daring to unroll it any further, I just stuck it under my bed, where it stayed for many years. I relocated to Australia in early 1989, and it was only in 1997 when the Guggenheim Museum in New York requested the loan of the painting for their “China: 5000 Years” exhibition scheduled for 1998 that I arranged for someone to bring my painting to Sydney. I took the parcel to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and in the Conservation Department I unrolled it for the first time. Everyone in the room was aghast with what they saw. The painting was covered in soot, there was water damage, and two-thirds of the paint had flaked off. Working under the guidance of the professional conservators, I painstakingly restored the painting. I was happy that the faces of the soldiers that had been repainted by order of Wang Mantian had disappeared completely. By referring to my

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photographs of the original work, as well as to my extensive notes, I restored my painting to how it had originally been painted. Because Jiang Qing had praised my painting, it was tainted by her ignoble stigma. In 1981, it was discarded by NAMOC and returned to my old work unit in Heilongjiang. Today Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland is my most valuable possession. 9 March 2007

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Notes 1. This essay was written for the painting’s second New York exhibition, that was held at the Asia Society in 2008. It was first translated by Valerie C. Doran and published in Melissa Chiu and Zheng Shengtian, Art and China’s Revolution (New York: Asia Society, 2008); for the present publication some small editorial amendments have been made. 2. Zheng Shengtian 郑胜天 (b. 1938, Henan) was an artist, curator, critic, and professor based at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (ZAFA) in Hangzhou until 1989, and after that in Vancouver. He established the digitalized archive Shengtian Collection and is currently managing editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, the first English-language magazine on contemporary Chinese art. 3. Zhang Yongsheng 张永生 (b. 1940, Hunan) was an art teacher of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, who from 1966 was leader of the Red Guards at the Academy, and later chief of Zhejiang Province Red Guards, 1968–1975. After the Cultural Revolution, Zhang was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1979 and is today a freelance artist. 4. Wang Chengyi 汪诚仪 (b. 1930, Anhui) was an artist, professor of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts. Wang studied oil painting in Maksimov’s classes in the 1950s. 5. Konstantin Maksimov 康斯但丁 马克西莫夫 (1913–1993) was a Soviet Russian artist, professor and advisor at CAFA in Beijing, 1955–1957, and had a huge influence on Chinese oil painting development in the 1950s. 6. Hu Yuelong 胡曰龙 (b. 1935, Shanghai) was an artist and professor. A graduate of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Hu worked in Jiaxing as art designer, 1971–1985, taught in Shanghai Art College in the 1990s, and is now a freelance artist in Shanghai. 7. By 1971 authorized CPC information about the Lin Biao affair was being widely circulated. 8. Wu Shanming 吴山明 (b. 1941, Zhejiang). 9. Hao Boyi 郝伯义 (b. 1938, Shandong) was an artist, art teacher and director of the Art Class of the Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps, who from the 1970s into the 2000s was director of the Bureau of Reclamation Farms in Jiamusi.

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10. Liu Yulian 刘宇廉 (1948–1997) was an artist, who carried out postgraduate studies at CAFA (1980–1982), then studied and worked in Japan (1986–1997). 11. Chen Yifei 陈逸飞 (1946–2005) was an artist and member of the Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Studio from 1965 to 1980. Chen moved to New York in 1981, but since the 1990s has mostly worked in China. 12. Wei Jingshan 魏景山 (b. 1943, Shanghai.) was an artist and member of the Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Studio from 1965. An MA graduate from New York University (1988), Wei now works in both New York and Shanghai. 13. Wang Mantian 王曼恬 (1913–1976) is the niece of Mao Zedong. She was the cultural official of the Tianjin CPC, and chief curator of the China National Art Exhibitions of 1972, 1974 and 1975. She committed suicide after her arrest in 1976. 14. Han Shangyi 韩尚义 (1917–1998) was an artist, art critic, and during entire life was chief art designer of the Shanghai Film Studio. 15. He Kongde 何孔德 (1925–2003) was highly regarded by art colleagues, but since the Anti-Rightist Campaign he had been persecuted, and had only around that time been allowed to have his works appear in publications, although still without his name.

Chapter 2

Red Star over China My painting Red Star over China has its origins in a book of that title by the American journalist Edgar Snow.1 The Chinese edition, titled Travel Notes from a Trip to the West, was published by Commercial Press, Shanghai, 1938, after the Japanese Imperial Army had besieged the city, but I have adopted the English title for my painting. Snow’s book is historically as important as Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed2 that reports on the Russian Revolution: both books are eyewitness accounts by American journalists of the two mighty revolutions of the twentieth century. Unlike Reed, who died soon after his book was published, Snow was never a communist and remained a democrat all his life, and moreover, thirty years later witnessed another so-called “revolutionary” period of Chinese history, known as the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). For many decades both publications were banned in the Soviet Union and China because Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong were intent on covering up the brutality of their revolutions. Today as the tide of communism recedes, Snow faces another dilemma. The excesses of Mao’s totalitarian dictatorship have led to certain critics naming Snow as the first person to glorify Mao’s rule and charge that his book Red Star over China had been coopted for political propaganda by the CPC.

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Over the past thirty years, I have read widely on the international communist movement that inspired so many intellectual luminaries of the world in the early decades of the twentieth century. While I have come to the view that many problems of the movement stem from Leninism, I have never revised my positive view of Snow’s book: it is a historical document, an archival record of those times, and, as such, his book cannot be compared with later “historical” accounts even if they are authored by famous writers such as Jung Chang.3 For example, in Mao: The Unknown Story it is claimed that the Red Army’s capture of Luding Bridge in 1935 was a fabrication.4 The authors Chang and Halliday make this assertion because of the 1997 testimony of an elderly woman who claimed she was present and had witnessed that the Red Army did not fight the Kuomintang (KMT) forces on the bridge. In October 2005, the Melbourne newspaper The Age reported that the witness could not be located, but the Sydney Morning Herald reported that another elderly woman had come forward to testify that fighting did take place on the bridge. The accounts of these two elderly eyewitnesses, of course, negate one another, and it is clearly pointless to go to the trouble of digging up such unreliable “eyewitnesses.” In contrast is the Comintern military advisor Otto Braun5 who was a genuine eyewitness to the event, and he had a strong motive for hating Mao Zedong. In his memoirs published as Chinese Notes he records how the Red Army found the only available boat on the Dadu River. Under cover of machine guns, a platoon of soldiers crossed the river, and with hand grenades destroyed the enemy guards to establish a beachhead. The next day KMT planes began to bomb the crossing. As a result, the 2nd division of the Red Army received the order to attack Luding Bridge, and the 1st division that had already crossed the river attacked from the rear: this was why the battle of Luding Bridge ended so quickly. The KMT forces consisted of the Sichuan troops of Liu Wenhui,6 drawn from the militias of various Sichuan warlords who distrusted one another and were at odds over many matters with Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT government. Even together, they were a weak fighting force. It should be noted that

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Chiang Kai-shek did not give the order to let the Red Army escape, as fictionalized by Jung Chang. Zhang Guotao,7 another of Mao’s sworn enemies, also wrote his memoirs during the 1970s. He describes how when his Fourth Front Red Army entered northern Sichuan in 1933, the mutual distrust between the warlords allowed his forces to establish themselves there and to rebuild troop numbers to what they had been before their defeat. Years later, in 1949 Liu Wenhui in fact led his troops to join forces with the Red Army, so clearly that part of history is not the simplistic picture presented by Jung Chang. Snow’s account was written in 1936, when these events were just beginning to unfold. When he met the Red Army, the three forces of the Red Army had not joined up yet. As an outsider and a non-communist, Snow would have known little of the real situation. Indeed, many facts did not become clear until recent times, more than half a century after the events took place. For example, what came to be known as the Futian Incident (1930),8 which constituted the earliest purge of “counterrevolutionaries,” did not become widely known in China until as late as 2000. Hu Yaobang,9 a survivor, traced the origin of Mao’s trumpedup cases to the Futian Incident and found that Mao had decided on his strategy in December 1930. This first case of brutal party “cannibalism” in the name of revolution therefore took place six years before Stalin’s purges. In a single stroke, Mao had cadres from the Jiangxi Provincial Committee and officers of the 20th Army of the Red Army killed by their own comrades. According to present official estimates in China, at the time 100,000 CPC members fell victim. When Hu Yaobang suddenly fell from power, this report that he had approved was shelved for more than a decade and was only published in 2000,10 thirteen years after I had completed my painting Red Star over China. Snow was a humane American with the keen observation skills of an outstanding journalist. He conducted many interviews, including with Mao Zedong and other high-level leaders of the CPC, ordinary soldiers, youngsters called “little red devils,”11 and ordinary civilians. He was

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lucky because back then Mao had not yet been able to assert his authority as dictator, and many of the revolutionaries had not yet surrendered their sense of individual autonomy. In addition, the CPC had not yet implemented a closely monitored surveillance system. In 1960 when Snow revisited China, he could not meet many of his old friends and he certainly was not allowed to interview even ordinary soldiers. But in his 1936 interviews, he captured an essential quality that helped him to reach to the heart of the truth: the relationship between people in a new society. This included the relationship between officials and soldiers in the Red Army, the relationship between party leaders and ordinary members and between the leaders themselves, as well as the relationship between the CPC and the people. He captured the confidence, optimism, self-respect, and love that could be seen in the faces of the people around him. He did not encounter these kinds of relationships in other parts of China. If he had gone to Yan’an in 1942, he would have detected the widespread fear and unease that was prevalent. But in 1936, what he captured in his portrayal was positive, something that he felt was a kind of Boy Scout idealism, which he reported on truthfully and accurately. The year 1936 counts as the best year in CPC history. What Snow captured in his reports that greatly moved readers was a creation of the CPC leadership, which included Mao Zedong. It was a vivid portrayal of the Red Army, an army that was substantially different from any other in China at the time. Working under orders from the CPC, the Red Army killed countless innocent compatriots in the bloody process of overthrowing the KMT government, and in its own internal purges also killed many thousands of its own members. Yet it was an army rarely seen in Chinese history. The Red Army was characterized by very strict discipline, as well as a fraternalism resulting from the equality between officers and soldiers. Every soldier understood the aim of the revolutionary struggle. This was a major reason for the survival of the revolution that attracted and continued to attract many young people who longed for a democratic society. Snow’s observations were accurate, and they were substantiated by the changes that took place in China up

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to 1949. Of course, while brutality was one of its strengths, it was in fact the new relationship between people that was largely responsible for the CPC’s growth and rise to power. Snow’s book provides an answer for how and why the CPC succeeded in winning over a large majority of the population, including vast numbers of intellectuals, and eventually was able in 1949 to establish a new regime with genuine popular support at its foundation. However, from 1950 onwards, endless political movements led to a decline in popular support. By 1957 any dissenting voices from intellectuals had been silenced, and by the time of the Cultural Revolution a decade later the rest of the thinking population had also been silenced. It was not until 1976 during the Qingming Festival when the death of Zhou Enlai12 was commemorated that people began for the first time to express their anger against the injustices perpetrated on themselves personally and on the population collectively for so many decades. Corruption within the CPC was worse than it had been during the KMT regime that it had replaced. This situation has its origins in the 1942 “rectification” movement that Mao orchestrated in Yan’an to begin his dictatorship. However, when Snow visited the soviet region in Bao’an in 1936, it was during a brief but glorious period in the history of the CPC, before Mao had been able to assert his authority over other CPC leaders. The members of the CPC were mostly men and women under thirty years of age who had joined to fight for the ideal of a democratic, free, and just society. They belonged to a new generation of radicalized youth who were highly critical of Old China’s traditional practices and ways of thinking, and they saw revolution as the only solution. Japan had already invaded China when the Chinese edition of Snow’s book was published. After reading the book, many young students endured great hardship to travel to the CPC base in Yan’an where the Red Army had relocated in January 1937. Sixty years later, those who survived are denoted “moderates” within the CPC. Outstanding examples are Gu

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Zhun (1915–1974), Li Rui (b. 1917) and Li Shenzhi (1923–2003). It was Snow’s book that had awakened their generation.13 However, Snow could not have imagined that his book that Mao had banned for thirty years would also awaken my generation. By 1966 Mao Zedong, who is featured predominantly in his book, had become both political and religious head. Ruling supreme as both “emperor” and “pope,” he plunged China into the dark ages. When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, there were bloody conflicts everywhere and all books (apart from Mao’s works and a small number of other works) were banned. There were public book burnings, but books do not burn easily, so books that were not burned or would not burn were transported to paper factories for pulping. One day in 1967 a worker at the Dongfeng Paper Factory in Jiaxing stuffed a book without a cover into his pocket, and because we took painting lessons together, he asked if I wanted to read it. I realized it was a copy of Snow’s banned book that had been published more than thirty years ago. I read it overnight and was overcome by a sinking sense of confusion and incomprehension. The streets outside were hung with big posters of people’s names written in black characters, that were overwritten with a big red “X” to delete them. Most of the people named on the big posters were mentioned in Snow’s book, and he had depicted them as idealistic young revolutionaries. His style of writing that rang with truth in the Chinese translation convinced me he was describing real people. Yet the political movement at the time, in stark contrast, was a nightmare. Political surveillance was strict, and everyone was encouraged to report any sign of suspected counterrevolutionary activity. I was careful to keep my feelings to myself and returned the book with barely a comment. Although I continued to wear a Red Guard armband on my left arm to demonstrate my revolutionary fervor, my Red Guard fanaticism had totally dissipated. Six years later, while working at the Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps, I again came across Snow’s book. I borrowed it for a few months, and I loved it so much that I copied most of it by hand. I

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was not collecting material for a future painting, but I simply wanted to have my own copy. By that time many banned books were circulating in underground reading networks amongst friends. When the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution came to an end in 1978—not in 1976 as usually stated—I had already read many books and completed the initial stage of my awakening. Snow’s book was published in a new Chinese edition after a thirty-year ban. As they appeared in print, I also read Chinese editions of Inside Red China by Snow’s wife Helen Foster Snow;14 The Great Road by Snow’s communist compatriot Agnes Smedley;15 Twin Stars of China by Snow’s friend and a World War II hero Evans F. Carlson;16 and The Long March: The Untold Story (1986) by Snow’s good friend Harrison E. Salisbury,17 who had traced the route of the CPC’s Long March. By the mid-1980s when I completed my studies at CAFA in Beijing, I had already been working in the history-painting genre for several years, and without too much effort I managed to acquire the knowledge and technical expertise to explore artistic truth through large-scale paintings. In January of 1987, I began a painting about He Long18 and other generals of the Second Front Red Army. While working on the draft, I was inspired to extend the painting in both directions and to lengthen the painting six-fold. By following the principles of composition adopted in the long scroll painting Refugees (1943) by Sichuan artist Jiang Zhaohe,19 I placed together on the same scene persons belonging to different temporal and spatial settings. The result was a group portrait of more than 100 people, including almost all the people I had read about in Snow’s book: the completed work contains 104 portraits of actual historical persons. There are also some nameless persons: twenty female workers, and some “little red devils” and dancers, but they are all real people I had found in historical photographs. There was one person I particularly wanted to include, but knew it would not be allowed: Hu Yaobang. In January of 1987 he was forced from power, signaling the first major setback after the end of the Cultural Revolution. I became depressed and locked myself at home to paint.

22

Painting History

The Cultural Revolution had ended some years back, but no groundbreaking works were emerging in history painting. There was a backlash against the repression of creative freedom, and large numbers of talented painters had turned to other styles. However, I was intent on specializing in history painting, and I began reading intensively and extensively to prepare myself to achieve that goal. At the time, my wife Wang Lan (b. 1953; artist) and I were living in Shenyang where I was a professional painter of the Liaoning Art Studio. I did not have my own studio, but as Lan was undertaking postgraduate studies at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts she had been allocated a studio with skylights. I took over her studio and started on my six-panel large-scale painting. When the leadership of my work unit heard that my painting would include all the important members of the 1930s CPC Central Committee, it was thought that the current CPC Politburo would have to be consulted. Fortunately, there was no interference or attempt to stop me, so I went ahead and decided on my own list of characters. In 1980, the CPC Central Committee issued an official document detailing some mistakes made by Mao Zedong, hence providing a less tense environment for me to work on my painting. There were designated forbidden areas, and persons deemed by CPC historians to be negative characters, like Lin Biao and Zhang Guotao, could not be painted in a positive way.20 I decided to ignore the prohibitions but, to minimize the risk of having my painting stopped, I painted Lin Biao in profile while still locating him in the ranks of the generals, in fact, quite close to the central position. I also located Zhang Guotao at the right extremity of the painting, while still retaining the order of the Fourth Front Red Army. At that time, the Cultural Revolution style of history painting still prevailed: Mao Zedong was portrayed as a demigod and was always taller than everyone else. I decided to change this, and placed him behind Zhou Enlai. Even though Mao remains at the center of the composition, he is treated as the equal of the other figures. I had read Zhang Guotao’s My Memoirs21 a few months earlier, while it was still banned, and it alluded to how Mao often smirked or had a wicked laugh.

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Following the end of the extreme repression of the Cultural Revolution, from 1979 onwards, a widespread liberalization in thinking gained impetus and even CPC members began to express views contrary to the official pronouncements. In 1985 Xin Guancha Weekly Magazine published an article discussing the relationship between CPC members and the “Party.” It was proposed that the CPC was a political body formed by a group of people with a common political ideal. I agreed wholeheartedly, and my painting Red Star over China was a visual expression of that viewpoint. It was a total rejection of the emperor-subject feudal relationship established within the CPC after the rectification movement and purges of 1942 in Yan’an. This painting provides today’s audiences with what Snow had witnessed in 1936, when everyone was equal within the CPC and the Red Army, and people treated one another like brothers and sisters, whether they were party leaders or ordinary party members, commanders or orderlies. In Snow’s Red Star over China he noted that there was no personality cult, no one called Mao “our beloved and respected leader.” It was not until five years later that people started shouting: “Long live Mao Zedong!” In 1959 Marshal Peng Dehuai,22 the only person still calling Mao Zedong “Old Mao,” was sacked and criticized. From then on Mao became a virtual emperor. My painting Red Star over China had not been commissioned by the CPC. I had meticulously worked out the composition and was determined to paint the work even if I could not exhibit it. However, 1987 was an opportune time: the liberalization of the post-Mao era continued unabated, and the political situation became even more relaxed with Zhao Ziyang assuming power from Hu Yaobang. In July of 1987, I learned with great excitement that Zhao Ziyang had crushed the leftwing faction of the CPC and that my painting would participate in the National Exhibition Celebrating the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Founding of the PLA. The exhibition was held in NAMOC but curated by art experts in the cultural section of the political department of the PLA. All the PLA officials liked my work and decided to show the complete painting, even

24

Painting History

though it was six times larger than any of the other works. They did not make many demands but asked me to add Liu Shaoqi,23 whom I had omitted, and to make minor changes to Deng Yingchao24 and Deng Xiaoping.25 My painting Red Star over China was given center stage at the exhibition, hung right in the middle of the circular exhibition hall. The exhibition organizers wanted to award me with a gold medal, but no medal was attached to the “Excellent Work Prizes,” so my entry was placed first on the awards list. At the end of the exhibition, NAMOC acted swiftly to purchase the work for their collection because both the Military Museum and the National History Museum also wanted it. I was paid 7000 RMB: just enough to buy a plane ticket to Australia two years later. At the time, it was a huge sum of money, the equivalent of several years of salary for me. My Red Star over China is painted on a six-panel canvas. The featured individuals are mostly people who had met with Snow during his visit to the Shanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region in the summer and autumn of 1936. It also includes some important people active in the region up to the summer of 1937, as well as others outside this period, such as Liu Zhidan,26 who was killed in battle in Shanxi in 1936. At the time, the Red Army consisted of three armies: The First, Second, and Fourth Front Armies. The Central Committee of the CPC was located within the First Front Army, so it was also known as the Central Red Army that established the Chinese Soviet Republic in the provinces of Jiangxi and Fujian. For six years the Central Red Army fought off successive KMT government “encircle and exterminate” campaigns and, in October 1934, finally broke through the KMT encirclement blockade in Jiangxi and began the historic Long March. At the Zunyi Conference in January 1935, Mao Zedong took command of military strategy; and in the spring of 1935, after the Central Red Army joined forces with the Fourth Front Army led by Zhang Guotao in Western Sichuan, the two armies were reorganized into left and right columns to march north in a parallel formation. However, the left column—with Zhu De as commander-in-

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chief, Zhang Guotao as chief commissar, and Liu Bocheng27 as chief-ofstaff—was unable to proceed because of floods. Zhang Guotao decided to head south. The Central Committee commanding the right force as well as the first corps and third corps of the First Front Army continued north, and there they found the Red Army led by Liu Zhidan in northern Shaanxi. With their remaining 9000 soldiers, they went to join Liu, and created a new base at Bao’an. Zhang Hao28 was sent by the Comintern in early 1936 to resolve differences between Zhang Guotao and the Central Committee. At the same time the Second Front Army, under the command of Ren Bishi,29 marched from Hunan Province to Chuankang (i.e., the area of West Sichuan and East Tibet) to join forces with the Fourth Front Army (including the fifth and ninth corps of the First Front Army) and then continued north. In October 1936, they reached Ningxia to meet with the First Front Army, thus ending the Long March. The Central Military Commission then ordered the original left force to reorganize into the Western Route Army and, led by Chen Changhao, to cross the Yellow River into Gansu to open a corridor into Soviet Russia. However, by the spring of 1937 the Western Route Army had been decimated, with only several hundred soldiers breaking the blockade to reach Xinjiang. Mao and some other members of the Central Committee resented Zhang Guotao and, attributing the disaster to the bankruptcy of the “Zhang Guotao line,” Mao took control of what remained of the Fourth Front Army. At the time, Zhang Xueliang,30 deputy commander-in-chief of the KMT forces, together with Yang Hucheng,31 instigated the Xi’an Incident by kidnapping Chiang Kai-shek.32 The Comintern prevailed upon the CPC and Zhang Xueliang to form an alliance with Chiang Kai-shek to fight the Japanese. Zhang Xueliang agreed to be held prisoner for the rest of his life to end the civil war between the CPC and the KMT. The War of Resistance against the Japanese was declared in the summer of 1937, the CPC became a legitimate political party, and China was united in the war against Japan.

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Painting History

Snow visited the Chinese soviet region on the eve of the meeting of the three Front Armies. At the time, Zhang Xueliang was secretly applying to join the CPC and he provided a military vehicle for Snow. In addition, CPC leader Deng Fa, who was living in Zhang’s headquarters, arranged Snow’s itinerary.33 Helen Snow and Agnes Smedley did not reach the soviet region until after the Xi’an Incident. Smedley was directly involved in the Xi’an Incident, both as an eyewitness and a participant.34 In my painting, the generals and soldiers of the Red Army have joined forces with Chiang Kai-shek, and are preparing to defend the country. The Western Route Army was found guilty of following the Zhang Guotao line, which was forbidden territory in CPC history for many years. When I began painting the work, the ban had been lifted but no pictorial representations existed. The first indication of the lifting of the ban was in Harrison Salisbury’s The Long March: The Untold Story, which I read about in the Chinese edition published in 1986. The commander of the Thirtieth Army, Li Xiannian,35 one of the few survivors of the Western Route Army, told Salisbury: “The order to cross the Yellow River and march west was signed by the Central Military Committee. I read it twenty times.” This meant that Mao Zedong as chairman of the Central Military Committee had given the order—it was not Zhang Guotao’s decision. In the war against Japan, what remained of the Fourth Front Army was reorganized as the 129th division of the Eighth Route Army; and by February of 1938 Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping were serving, respectively, as commander and commissar. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong relied on Lin Biao for military support. Mao used many of Lin Biao’s generals, and most of them had been in the original First Front Red Army. When Lin Biao died in the autumn of 1971, many of his old generals were forced from power. After Mao’s death and Deng Xiaoping’s return to power, many of Deng’s generals, such as Li Xiannian, from the Fourth Front Red Army succeeded in returning to positions of power. This led to the reevaluation of the Western Route Army. But Zhang

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Guotao, who had been forced to seek KMT protection in 1938, has never been forgiven and to this day is regarded as a Judas in CPC history. In Red Star over China the figures in the six panels of canvas have been arranged as follows: Panel 1: Most of the figures here are female and amongst them is Agnes Smedley in her Red Army uniform and Helen Snow. The figure on the extreme left is He Zizhen (1909–1984; at that time Mao’s wife) and to her left is Zhu De’s wife Kang Keqing (1911–1992): both women had been guerrilla fighters for many years. In between the two American women is Zhou Enlai’s wife, Deng Yingchao (1904–1992). Behind Kang Keqing’s head is Ding Ling (1904–1986), the outspoken writer who had just escaped from a KMT prison and joined the Red Army. Panel 2: Here Edgar Snow is surrounded by several people. The Red Army dancer is pretending to be a locomotive charging forward. In front of Snow and to the left is Hu Jinkuai (1906–1982), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs worker who accompanied Snow throughout his journey, and the little red devil called “Shanxi Kid.” Behind Snow are two doctors. The one on the left is Fu Lianzhang (1894–1968) who had been trained in a British missionary hospital in Changting, Fujian Province. He took his entire family as well as his hospital with him to join the Red Army. Having cured Mao of an illness, he was later put in charge of medical care for the top officials in the Central Committee. However, he did not escape the Cultural Revolution and was persecuted until he died. To Fu Liangzhang’s left is George Hatem (1910–1988), an American doctor of Lebanese heritage. He came with Snow to the Soviet region and later joined the Red Army; he was always trusted despite the Soviet Russian delegate suspecting him of being a spy. Between him and Snow is Huang Hua (1913–2010), Snow’s Yenching University student who was travelling as his interpreter. Behind Fu Lianzhang and Hatem is the writer Cheng Fangwu (1897–1984). The tall man behind Snow is the famous Comintern military advisor Otto Braun (1900–1974). The hatless person behind him is Xi Zhongxun (1913–2002), a local revolutionary from northern Shaanxi

28

Painting History

whose son Xi Jinping is currently general secretary of the CPC, president of the PRC, and chairman of the Central Military Commission. In front of Xi Zhongxun is Lu Dingyi (1906–1996), an intellectual who later became Minister of Propaganda. Both Xi Zhongxun and Lu Dingyi lost favor with Mao and were imprisoned for lengthy periods. To the right of Lu Dingyi and wearing white is Ye Jianying (1897–1986), who eventually became a marshal. To his right, also wearing white, is Peng Xuefeng (1907–1944), who later died in battle. Behind and to the right of Peng Xuefeng is party veteran Dong Biwu (1886–1975), a representative at the First Congress of the CPC. Dong Biwu, together with the three hat-wearing figures to the front right of Panel 3—Lin Boqu (1886–1960) at the back, Xu Teli (1877–1968) at the right, and Xie Juezai (1884–1971) at the left—were known as “The Four Veterans,” because all four had taken part in the 1911 Revolution. Panel 3: This panel features the Central Committee of the CPC. Zhou Enlai has a beard and is in the middle with his arms akimbo. Behind him, holding a cigarette, is Mao Zedong. To the left and behind Zhou Enlai is Zhang Wentian (1900–1976), then general secretary of the CPC. On the left, behind Xu Teli and Xie Juezai, is Wang Jiaxiang (1906–1974). Behind Wang, wearing white is Bo Gu (1907–1946) embracing Li Kenong (1899–1962), superintendent of the secret service. Behind Li Kenong is Zhang Hao (1897–1942) who disagreed with Mao’s criticism of Zhang Guotao and had tried to resolve the conflict. Of the three people at the back and to the right of the panel, the tallest is Liu Shaoqi (1898–1969). To his left and wearing a greatcoat is Deng Fa (1906–1946), who killed many comrades during purges, and later died in an air crash. Between Liu Shaoqi and Deng Fa is Yang Shangkun (1907–1998). Yang was imprisoned by Mao for many years during the Cultural Revolution and was released when Deng Xiaoping began his reforms. In this panel, Liu Shaoqi, Zhang Wentian, and Wang Jiaxiang are shown to be the victims of Mao that they were during the Cultural Revolution.

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Panel 4: These are members of the First Front Army. At the front and to the left, talking to a young Red soldier is Peng Dehuai (1898–1974). Mao sacked Peng when I was eleven years old, but I often heard older people say that Peng was a good man; he was strict towards his officers but very good to his soldiers. He came from a poor family and dared to speak out on behalf of the starving millions in front of Chairman Mao. So, he was a heroic figure among the ordinary people. Unlike Stalin, who would execute anyone he did not trust, Mao was sadistic and toyed with his victims like a cat with a mouse, often for very lengthy periods. Such was the fate of Peng Dehuai and many others. Behind Peng and to the left is Nie Rongzhen (1899–1992), who took charge of making the A-bomb. The tall man behind Nie Rongzhen is Luo Ruiqing (1906–1978) who rose to the rank of four-star general, but in fact directed internal security. He established the infamous Qincheng Prison in Beijing and victimized many innocent comrades and ordinary people. Later, he lost favor with Mao and was himself imprisoned in Qincheng Prison as the sacrificial lamb in the power brokering between Mao and Lin Biao. Behind Peng Dehuai and to the right is the famous general Zuo Quan (1905–1942), who for a long time was suspected of being a Trotskyite. For the first six years of the War of Resistance he was chief-of-staff of the Eighth Route Army, but in 1942 he was killed in a Japanese bombing raid. Behind and to the left of Zuo Quan is Yuan Guoping (1906–1941), who later worked in the New Fourth Army. To the left and behind Yuan Guoping, in profile, is Lin Biao. At the front and to the right of this panel is the jolly general Chen Geng (1903–1961), who loved to joke and did so even when he was taken prisoner by the KMT. Years back, while at the Whampoa Military Academy, he had saved Chiang Kai-shek’s life in battle, so instead of having him executed, Chiang set him free. Later, Chen Geng would command more than 100,000 troops in the civil war, fighting over most of China. But he too had his times of sorrow, and three years after being released, his wife, also a soldier, was captured by the Japanese and killed.

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Painting History

In between Chen Geng and Zuo Quan is Deng Xiaoping. Behind Chen Geng and to the left is Cheng Zihua (1905–1991), and on the right in full view is Xu Haidong (1900–1970), and between Cheng and Xu is Liu Zhidan (1903–1936). The Red 25th Corps of Cheng Zihua and Xu Haidong reached northern Shaanxi several months before the Central Red Army, and their purge workers imprisoned Liu Zhidan, as well as leaders of the Red 26th Corps. If the Central Red Army had arrived a little later and had not ordered a stay of execution, Liu Zhidan would have been dead. Even so, more than 200 people were killed. Snow told an interesting story about Xu Haidong. While riding on horseback he knocked down one of his soldiers, and turned to see if the man had been hurt. However, he himself then crashed into a tree, causing him to lose his front teeth when he fell and they became embedded in the tree. Panel 5: This depicts the Second Front Red Army. At the front of the panel and holding a picture book is the famous bandit general He Long (1896–1969). His trademark was his goatee beard and pipe. This straightforward character was recruited into the party by Zhou Enlai and served the party with complete loyalty. Two years prior to this, the CPC Central Committee sent Xia Xi (1901–1936) as a special agent to He Long’s army, where as a part of a purification procedure he had large numbers of people, including officers, put to death. He Long wept but could do nothing: Xia Xi represented the CPC and He Long was a devout believer. Xia Xi’s retribution came when he drowned crossing a river. Even though He Long had escaped the sword of Xia Xi, he was not able to escape Mao’s treachery thirty years later. Mao’s persecution led to his death, and Zhou Enlai could do nothing to save him. Behind He Long and to his right is Ren Bishi (1904–1950) who was popular with everyone. When, for the first time, Mao killed many comrades in the Futian Incident, Ren Bishi as a representative of the Central Committee supported Mao, so Mao trusted him more than others. But Ren Bishi quickly discovered the problem with Mao’s leadership. In a view expressed by Yang Shangkun in 1986, Mao would most certainly

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have brought about Ren Bishi’s death during the Cultural Revolution had he not already died of illness in 1950.36 On the left of He Long and wearing a greatcoat is Zhu Rui (1905–1948), who later became an artillery commander and was killed in action. Also to the left of He Long is his second in command Xiao Ke (1907–2008), who lived to over a hundred. On 27 November 2008, a month after Xiao Ke died, The Guardian carried a report with the title: “Long March General Who Criticized Mao Dies.” During the Long March, Xiao Ke held a Swiss missionary hostage and made him translate maps. The missionary was eventually released and published a book detailing his adventure.37 Between Xiao Ke and Zhu Rui is the hapless Lu Dongsheng (1908– 1945). During Chiang Kai-shek’s purge of Communists in 1927, Lu was Captain Chen Geng’s bodyguard. Chen was wounded in the leg, so Lu carried Chen to a doctor and then helped him escape to Hong Kong where he hid him in a public toilet. Chen Geng joked that it would be nice to have a Western meal. Lu Dongsheng duly ordered a meal. The waiter saw that the address was a public toilet, took it to be a bad joke, and roundly cursed Lu. Afterwards, Lu helped Chen Geng escape back to Shanghai. Lu Dongsheng eventually joined the Red Army, and after the Long March he was sent to the Soviet Union for military studies. In August 1945, he was a major serving in the Far East Division of the U.S.S.R. Red Army in Manchuria. The Soviet forces were an ill-disciplined group; one night, Lu encountered Soviet soldiers robbing people and intervened. When the soldiers saw this Chinese in a Soviet army uniform speaking fluent Russian, they were afraid he might report them and so they shot him. Behind Zhu Rui and to the left, in profile, is Wang Zhen (1908–1993), who started life as a rickshaw puller and rose to the rank of general. He respected intellectuals and protected writers such as Ding Ling (1904–1986) and Ai Qing (1910–1996) when they were accused of being “rightists.” In 1989, he supported Deng Xiaoping’s move to open fire on the students, so critics have denounced him as a “warlord.” The person talking to Wang Zhen is the commissar Guan Xiangying (1902–1946). To

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Painting History

his left is Li Zhen (1908–1990), who was the only female general when military decorations were distributed in 1955. Panel 6: This panel depicts the Western Route Army and the Fourth Front Army. On the left front is the patriarch of the Red Army, Zhu De. He represents the most idealistic of the CPC revolutionaries. He was the soul of the Red Army and was Mao’s earliest adversary. He saw through Mao’s naked ambition, and wanted to find an exit strategy. However, Mao needed Zhu’s high standing in the Red Army as well as his military knowledge, so from 1929 the two managed to coexist. Zhu De had participated in the battles between warlords of the early Republican era, and by 1922 he was a brigadier general. But, worried about the future of China, he left the armed forces, sent his wife and concubines away, and went to Shanghai to meet Chen Duxiu, seeking to join the CPC but was rebuffed. He then went to Germany, where he met Zhou Enlai, and was admitted. In 1928, following the failure of the Nanchang Uprising, he led the remnants of his forces to meet with Mao’s. From then on, their combined force was known as the “Zhu-Mao Red Army.” He dressed like an ordinary soldier and experienced hardship and good times with his men. He looked so much like an ordinary soldier that, when captured on one occasion, he was thought to be the cook and released. His wife at the time, Wu Ruolan (1903–1929), was not so lucky—she was captured by KMT forces and beheaded. Prior to Zhu De and Wu Ruolan’s marriage, He Zhihua had for a time been Zhu De’s girlfriend; when arrested by the KMT, He Zhihua became a traitor. After the death of Wu Ruolan, Zhu De married an eighteen-year-old fighter, Kang Keqing, and he lived with her for the rest of his life. Behind Zhu De, holding a baby, is Red Army fighter Zhang Qinqiu (1904–1968), another legendary figure who had trained in Moscow. After returning to China, she was sent to start what would later become the Fourth Front Army, and she also founded a genuine Women’s Red Army that was an independent detachment of the Fourth Front Army. Her husband was her Moscow classmate Shen Zemin (1900–1933); after his

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death from illness, she lived with another classmate, Chen Changhao (1906–1967). Zhang and Chen were high-level leaders of the Fourth Front Army, and while fighting with the Western Route Army in 1937 they were caught in a dangerous situation. Chen escaped and later returned to Russia, where he married a Russian woman. But Zhang was captured and taken to Nanjing after giving birth in the desert to a baby who died shortly after. Some months later, the KMT and CPC alliance facilitated her release and she returned to Yan’an. When the PRC was established, she was appointed Minister for Textiles. However, having served under Zhang Guotao, she and Chen Changhao could not avoid Mao’s willful tormenting during the Cultural Revolution, which resulted in them committing suicide. The Fourth Front Army also had its bloody purification campaigns during which Shen Zemin and Zhang Guotao caused the death of many comrades. All three Red Armies killed over 100,000 of their own people. Mao had launched the practice of purification campaigns during the Futian Incident in China, six years before Stalin began similar purges in the U.S.S.R. Behind and to the right of Zhang Qinqiu is Liao Chengzhi (1908–1983), the talented son of the famous KMT martyr Liao Zhongkai (1877–1925). During the Long March, Liao Chengzhi was nearly executed by Zhang Guotao because of his family background. To the right of Liao Chengzhi is Li Xiannian, and to the right and in front of Li is Chen Changhao who had been one of Zhang Guotao’s important assistants. Following the failure of the Western Route Army, Chen went to the Soviet Union and pursued the life of a scholar. As a child, I saw a thick Russian-Chinese dictionary in my uncle’s home. It had been published in Moscow and the chief editor was Chen Changhao. In Moscow, he married a Russian woman—his third wife—and they had a son they named Victor. In the 1950s the family returned to China, but during the Cultural Revolution Chen Changhao committed suicide; his Russian wife, accused of being a Soviet spy, was locked up for many years in Qincheng Prison. Years

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Painting History

later, she moved with her son to Sydney. I once paid her a visit and saw that her lower lip was completely black. Victor explained that this was the result of his mother biting her lip, a habit she had developed during those years in prison. In front of Chen and wearing black is the commander of the Fourth Front Army, Xu Xiangqian (1901–1990). During the purification campaign, both Shen Zemin and Zhang Guotao had absolute trust in him, and yet they had his wife killed. To the right and in front of Xu Xiangqian is the general Wang Shusheng (1905–1974), and in front to his right, in full view and holding binoculars, is the one-eyed marshal Liu Bocheng. A professional soldier with a high standing in the army, Liu later worked with his fellow Sichuan provincial Deng Xiaoping. To the extreme right is Zhang Guotao. Even though Zhang was demonized for a long time within the party, his party credentials were in fact higher than Mao Zedong’s. It appears that the deathbed revelations of Dong Biwu have cast doubt on Mao’s status at the First National Congress: Mao had not been an official delegate. In fact, Chen Duxiu had designated Zhang Guotao his representative, and Zhang was therefore an important figure at the First National Congress. Zhang Guotao’s Fourth Front Army was the best equipped of all the Red Armies, and his officers and soldiers supported him wholeheartedly. Mao saw him as an opponent within the party, one that had to be eliminated. With Mao having the upper hand, Zhang had no choice but to flee. It was like the power struggle between Stalin and Leon Trotsky. Georgi Plekhanov’s prophecy, “Revolution eats its own children, and even its parents,” time and again became reality in the history of the communist international movement founded by Vladimir Lenin; it was the disastrous and inextricable fate for communists all over the world. Unlike the French and Russian revolutions, the Chinese revolution has lasted a very long time, spanning two generations: from 1911, when the Manchu dynasty was overthrown, until 1978, two years after Mao Zedong’s death. Even now it has not ended. Mao Zedong was like Li

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Zicheng (1606–1645), who overthrew the Ming dynasty in the seventeenth century, or Hong Xiuquan (1814–1864), who occupied half of China in the nineteenth century. In each case, they led peasant armies to overthrow an existing emperor to found a new despotic dynasty. Meanwhile, however, Western influence increasingly began to infiltrate the Chinese empire. In 2000 years of peasant revolts, Hong Xiuquan was the first leader to use Western ideology to color his banner. Christianity was used to further his own importance, and the name of a Western god was used to attract followers, even though all the Christian denominations regarded Hong Xiuquan as a heretic. Mao’s peasant army fought under the twentieth-century banner of communism, but Mao too was viewed as a heretic by the new “pope,” Stalin. The Comintern intervened and controlled the course of the Chinese revolution, and Mao Zedong used the Comintern to create his own dynasty. Mao had the ability to be an outstanding emperor: his leadership and charisma conquered colleagues and followers alike. As true believers in communism, many paid the ultimate price of their lives for seeking to replace the existing society with an ideal society of fraternity, equality, and freedom; and to reach this goal, they were prepared to dispatch to hell their fellow countrymen who had different ideals. But after the members of this peasant army had founded the new regime, they themselves, along with the entire population, became the toys of the new despotic emperor, Mao Zedong. Snow had been living for some time in Beiping (now known as Beijing) and teaching at Yenching University. When Snow visited the Chinese soviet region, he was already friends with student leaders who had planned the anti-Japanese student demonstration of 9 December 1935. That generation of students joined the Red Army in the War of Resistance and became the most active new blood of the CPC. During the 1930s Snow observed and wrote about this generation of young Chinese rebels who were like their European counterparts described by Albert Camus in his work L’Homme révolté. These young Chinese were no different from their forebears: the fervent overseas Chinese students at the end of the Qing dynasty, the May Fourth students of 1919, their successors like the

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Red Guards of 1966 who afterwards became “intellectual youths,” or the young student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989. They were all l’homme révolté, and in the century-long history of China’s revolutions they all voluntarily stepped forward to become sacrifices in the meat mincer known as revolution. In this painting of mine, most of the figures are smiling and the dancing children add an atmosphere of festivity. While I was painting, the school song of the Red Army University reverberated in my ears: “On the banks of the Yellow River, gather fine descendants of the Chinese people. The liberation of mankind, the burden of saving the country, must be shouldered by all of us …” The curtain is raised and these 120 characters mount the stage of history. This is only Act I of their life history, and I have only recorded this scene of Act I. But this is a real-life tragedy: what is painted here is Act I of a tragedy. The fine quality, beauty, youthfulness, and ideals will be destroyed by later acts that are yet to be painted. Because of this, people will forever appreciate this Act I. What I want to relate in this work is that no matter how heartbreaking the end of this tragedy may be, all the characters have had their finest moment in history. Mikhail Markovich Borodin (1884–1951), the advisor sent by Stalin to Sun Yat-sen, said despondently when he left bloodstained China in 1927: “When they were young they were all good people …” Borodin later died in Stalin’s gulag. 7 July 2011

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Notes 1. Edgar Parks Snow (1905–1972) was an American journalist. 2. John Silas “Jack” Reed (1887–1920) was an American journalist, poet, and social activist. 3. Jung Chang 张戎 (b. 1952) is a China-born British writer now living in London. 4. Since relocating from China to the United Kingdom, Jung Chang has authored the best-selling autobiographical work Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991), and co-authored with her historian husband Jon Halliday another bestseller, Mao: The Unknown Story (2005). Both books have been favorably reviewed by literary critics, but the latter work has drawn much harsh criticism from academics for its lack of honesty with sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao:_The_Unknown_Story (accessed 28 February 2017). 5. Otto Braun (a.k.a. Li De 李德, 1900–1974) was a German communist. He was sent by the Comintern to China, and took part in the Long March. His memoir was published in English as Otto Braun, A Comintern Agent in China 1932–1939, trans. Jeanne Moore (London: C. Hurst, 1982). The original German edition was published in the DDR in 1973, and Chinese editions were published in the 1980s and in 2004 by Renmin and Dongfang respectively: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Braun_ (communist) (accessed 28 February 2017). 6. Liu Wenhui 刘文辉 (1895–1976) was a prominent Sichuan warlord during the 1920s and 1930s. He aligned with the KMT, and during 1927– 1929 commanded the Sichuan-Xikang Defense Force. Western Sichuan adjoining Tibet was known as Xikang Province, and Liu as provincial governor decided to join the Communists on 9 December 1949. 7. Zhang Guotao 张国焘 (1897–1979), a founding member and important leader of the CPC, was a bitter rival to Mao Zedong. 8. The Futian Incident 富田事变 is the general name for the purge of a battalion of the Jiangxi-Fujian Soviet Red Army that took place in December 1930. The earliest account of the Futian Incident is contained in The Vladimirov Diaries: Yenan, China, 1942–1945, that was published in Russian in 1973. The book was subsequently translated and published in numerous editions: Vietnam (1973), India (1974), USA (1975), Czechoslovakia (1975), Taiwan (1976), East Germany (1976), and PRC (2004).

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9. Hu Yaobang 胡耀邦 (1915–1989) was a high-ranking PRC official. He was leader of the CPC, 1981–1987, first as Chairman (1981–1982), and then as general secretary (1982–1987). 10. I read the Taiwan edition in 1990, and saw the Futian Incident first reported in a PRC publication in 2000: Jing Yuchuan 景玉川, “富田事变 及其平反,” 《百年潮》, 1 (2000, Beijing). 11. Orphaned children sometimes attached themselves to the Red Army soldiers who had saved them from starvation or injury. The soldiers affectionately called them “little red devils.” 12. Zhou Enlai 周恩来 (1898–1976) was the first premier of the PRC, holding office from October 1949 until his death in January 1976. Serving under Chairman Mao Zedong, he was instrumental in the CPC’s rise to power, and subsequently its consolidation of power, the forming of foreign policy, and the development of the national economy. 13. Gu Zhun 顾准 (1915–1974) was an intellectual, economist, and pioneer of post-Marxist Chinese liberalism. A victim of “anti-rightist” purges. Li Rui 李锐 (b. 1917), retired CPC politician, and later a vocal advocate of democratic reform. Li Shenzhi 李慎之 (1923–2003) was a prominent social scientist and public intellectual. A trusted spokesperson of the CPC, who rose to become the vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. 14. Helen Foster Snow (a.k.a. Nym Wales, 1907–1997) was born in Utah, USA. She arrived as a journalist in China in 1931, a few days before the Yangtze floods displaced 120,000 people. She married Edgar Snow, who taught journalism at Yenching University, in Beiping (now known as Beijing). The couple sympathized with the strong anti-Japanese sentiments of the Yenching students, many of whom were communists. Her book My China Years: A Memoir by Helen Foster Snow (New York: William Morrow, 1984) was published in Chinese by Shijie zhishi Press, Beijing 1985. Her earlier book Inside Red China was not published in Chinese until 2002, so I read it much later. 15. Agnes Smedley (1892–1950) was an American journalist and writer, well known for her semi-autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth (1929) as well as for her chronicling of the Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War. Best known for her book The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Deh (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1956); Chinese edition, Beijing: Sanlian, 1979. 16. Evans Fordyce Carlson (1896–1947) was a decorated and retired officer of the U.S. Marine Corps, and legendary leader of “Carlson’s Raiders”

Red Star over China

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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during World War II. He is known for his book Twin Stars of China (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1940); Chinese edition, Beijing: Xinhua, 1987. Harrison E. Salisbury (1908–1993) was an American journalist and the first regular New York Times correspondent in Moscow after World War II. Acclaimed author of The Long March: The Untold Story (New York: McGraw Hill, 1985); Chinese edition, Beijing: PLA Publishing, 1986. He Long 贺龙 (1896–1969) was a military leader and marshal of the PLA. Jiang Zhaohe 蒋兆和 (1904–1986) introduced powerful social realist themes into traditional Chinese ink painting by depicting the impact of the Japanese invasion on his compatriots. From 1950 onwards, he was a professor at CAFA in Beijing, and held many important positions in art and literary organizations. A few years later, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang became two new forbidden areas. Zhang Guotao, My Memoirs (Hong Kong: Ming Pao Monthly Press, 1971). Peng Dehuai 彭德怀 (1898–1974) was a prominent military leader and marshal of the PLA. Liu Shaoqi 刘少奇 (1898–1969) was a revolutionary and statesman, vice chairman of the CPC 1956–1966, and president of the PRC. Deng Yingchao 邓颖超 (1904–1992) was chair of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, 1983–1988. A member of the CPC, she was the wife of the first premier of China, Zhou Enlai. Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 (1904–1997) was a revolutionary and statesman. He was paramount leader of the PRC from 1978 until his retirement in 1989. Liu Zhidan 刘志丹 (1903–1936) was a military commander and Communist leader, who founded the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia base area in northwest China, which became the Yan’an soviet. Liu Bocheng 刘伯承 (1892–1986) was a communist military commander and marshal of the PLA. Zhang Hao 张浩, a.k.a. Lin Yuying 林育英 (1897–1942) was one of the early leaders of the CPC. Ren Bishi 任弼时 (1904–1950) was a military and political leader in the early CPC. Zhang Xueliang 张学良 (1901–2001), nicknamed the “Young Marshal,” was the effective ruler of Manchuria, Northeast China and most of Northern China, after his father Zhang Zuolin’s assassination by the Japanese on 4 June 1928. He was instigator of the Xi’an Incident, and

40

31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

Painting History captured Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the ruling KMT, to force him to enter a truce with the CPC, and form a united front to fight the Japanese who had already occupied Manchuria. He spent over 50 years under KMT house arrest and is regarded by the CPC as a patriotic hero. Yang Hucheng 杨虎城 (1893–1949) was a general during the warlord era of Republican China, and KMT general during the civil war. Chiang Kai-shek 蒋介石 (1887–1975), a.k.a. Jiang Jieshi, was leader of the KMT, the ruling party of the Republic of China, 1928–1975. Before the advance of CPC troops, he withdrew to Taiwan to reestablish government. Zhang Xueliang’s application to join the CPC can be verified in the Comintern Archives of Moscow, and is documented in major authoritative works, especially Yang Kuisong, New Explorations into the Sian Incident: Research on Zhang Xueliang and his Relationship with the Chinese Communist Party (Taipei: Taiwan Dongda tushu, 1995), 109–112, 166. See Agnes Smedley’s Battle Hymn of China (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943 and 1944; and London: Victor Gollancz, 1943 and 1944); reprinted as China Correspondent in 1984; Chinese edition Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1986. Li Xiannian 李先念 (1909–1992) was president of the PRC, 1983–1986, and then chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference until his death. Zhang Peisen ed., “Yang Shangkun’s 1986 Talks on Zhang Wentian and Mao Zedong,” in Yanhuang chunqiu 3 (2009). Rudolf Alfred Bosshardt (1897–1993) was a British Protestant missionary serving with the China Inland Mission. See his R.A. Bosshardt, The Restraining Hand: Captivity for Christ in China (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1936); Chinese edition Huanghe chubanshe, 2006.

Chapter 3

Tolerance Tolerance was completed in December 1988 and was the last work I painted in China before relocating to Australia in early 1989. In 1987, while painting my 11-metre long Red Star over China, I began thinking about painting a gallery of figures who would depict the modern history of China. Red Star over China focuses on the Red Army and belongs to the genre of revolutionary history painting of that time. The work had broken through the Cultural Revolution mold, but I was still dissatisfied with the monotone “song in praise” aspect of the model. I wanted to break from that tradition by painting a work that would contain everyone I wanted from a specific era, including those with conflicting political ideals and who had received varying degrees of praise or condemnation in official histories. Juxtaposed in this new composition would be members of the elite and the grassroots: an emperor who had abdicated as well as revolutionaries, scholars, bureaucrats, merchants, and hawkers. The composition would be in the form of a long mural, several times longer than Red Star over China. However, the opportunity to travel to Australia arose and put a stop to my ambitious plan. Tolerance was the only part I had painted, and it became an independent work.

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My painting Tolerance is limited to portraits of Peking University luminaries who had clustered in the humanities departments while Cai Yuanpei was president during the May Fourth era. When I began preparations in 1987, I was aware that the seventieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement was just two years away, so I decided to start from that angle. The authorities were actively promoting liberalization in thinking in 1979, and the population gradually began to emerge from the strict thought-control of the Mao dictatorship. There were still sudden government clampdowns in the form of political campaigns such as the anti-spiritual-pollution and the anti-bourgeois-liberalism campaigns, but an irrepressible dynamic for deep reflection on China’s recent history continued to grow amongst intellectuals. The May Fourth Movement of 1919 was officially denoted as a popular movement calling for the end of imperialism and feudalism during which the introduction of MarxismLeninism led to the founding of the CPC and the start of a revolutionary era of new democracy. Deliberately ignored and repressed was reference to the intellectual awakening of the time that defined and encapsulated the spirit of May Fourth. It was an intellectual awakening that called for the adoption of Western science and democracy to bring China into the modern world. However, by the early 1920s, the main players had basically divided into two camps: liberalism or communism. With Mao Zedong’s ascent to power, liberals such as Hu Shi were denounced in large-scale and vitriolic criticism campaigns. The communist camp consisted of leftist intellectuals, including the most eminent writer of the time, Lu Xun (1881–1936). During the 1980s Chinese intellectuals returned to addressing the intellectual awakening of the May Fourth era, and the contribution of Cai Yuanpei as the president of Peking University in fostering and encouraging that intellectual awakening came to be fully recognized. He had been a leading participant in the revolutionary movement that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911 and then a leading official of the KMT government as the Minister of Education. Cai had spent time studying in Europe, and was well known as the first to advocate replacing

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religion with aesthetics. However, his most outstanding contribution was his understanding of the essence of Western liberalism; under his leadership Peking University became a bastion for scholarly research. He did not restrict himself to any school of thought when appointing professors. There were Western-trained PhD scholars such as Hu Shi, and at the same time eminent scholars of ancient Chinese philology like Huang Kan; and there was also Liang Shuming, who did not have a degree but was appointed on the grounds of his research in Western and Oriental cultures and their philosophies. The political ideals of the scholars on campus were even more varied. There was the monarchist Gu Hongming, who continued to wear a queue; Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, who together were founders of the CPC in 1921; and the eminent scholar of ancient philosophy, Liu Shipei, who was a traitor to the antiManchu revolutionary cause. Cai Yuanpei described his running of Peking University as “accommodating and inclusive,” and this has the implications of the English word “tolerance.” However, while “accommodating and inclusive” describes the way he appointed people from all schools and walks of life, “tolerance” describes his style as the president of the university and the spirit he displayed towards interpersonal relationships in a free society. By disposition I am not fond of “struggle,” but my youth was spent in the struggles of the Cultural Revolution, so I was full of contradictions and doubts. In 1979 when the authorities began promoting liberalization in thinking, I fully endorsed the idea. I was always one for pondering about human existence, and as my wide-ranging reading accelerated through the 1980s and 1990s, I became aware of my growing intellectual maturity. On reading Hendrik Willem van Loon’s Tolerance, the word “tolerance” had a profound impact on me: it expressed precisely my attitude towards life, as well as values that suited my nature. The stories of Cai Yuanpei and other extraordinary Peking University luminaries provided me with a way of articulating the many new ideas circulating in my mind. At the time, I read in Chinese translation about

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Gu Hongming in Somerset Maugham’s On a Chinese Screen: Sketches of Life in China (1922), and in Lin Yutang’s novel Moment in Peking that contains a brilliant description of this scholar. I also discovered that the famous writer Lu Xun, a fellow provincial of Cai Yuanpei, taught literature at Peking University, and that he had designed the Peking University insignia. My interest in these people grew as I read more about them. The memoirs written by their contemporaries also provided sharp images of these individuals. Some, for instance, talk of the grease stains on Gu Hongming’s long scholar robe, and the metaphors he used to express his views on the institution of concubines. Cai Yuanpei emphasized morality and founded an organization called the Morality Advancement Society —and yet his dean of Humanities, Chen Duxiu, was a frequent visitor to the red-light district in Bada Alley. Having decided on the theme, I began to collect pictorial material for the images of the persons I wanted to paint. This was a challenge, because in the 1980s Google-type search engines were not available. But it happened that ten years earlier, my work in the army culture corps, involved sorting through a pile of old magazines, and I came across a news photograph of Gu Hongming that had been taken during his 1927 Korean lecture tour. For some reason, I made a photocopy of it. I now used that as the basis for the person at the forefront of my work. In the composition of a painting, there is usually one or several images that are decisive. The image of this figure is the key motif of this painting. I went to search for material at Peking University, but after the ravages of the Cultural Revolution, there were no longer any photographs or archives for the Cai Yuanpei period. I found out that the original of a 1919 graduation photograph of the Faculty of Humanities belonged to the eminent philosopher Feng Youlan (1895–1990), so I went to his home to ask for permission to make a photocopy. A photograph of Hu Shi was obtained from a volume of Who’s Who in Nanjing at the Second National Archive Museum, and fortunately it had been taken around 1918.

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I found a Cai Yuanpei photograph from a publication, so I did not try to contact his descendants. Many years later, I was back in Shanghai to visit my family, and going along Huashan Road I discovered Cai Yuanpei’s old home. It had been converted into a museum, so I went in to have a look. When it became known that I was the artist who had painted Tolerance, Cai Yuanpei’s daughter Cai Sui’ang was informed. She lived above the museum, and I was invited upstairs. Graciously hospitable, she showed me a film documentary and then presented me with a commemorative volume. A woman over seventy, her back was badly stooped to a 90degree angle. Her father’s presence seemed to be everywhere in the room, and her mother’s oil paintings hung on the walls. In Red Star over China I had paid scant attention to the painting of hands, but I wanted to give this new work the atmosphere of Europe’s famous Renaissance artworks, such as Raphael’s The School of Athens. I asked friends to model for me, and I photographed different hand gestures for reference. The painter Wei Ershen was my model for Chen Duxiu’s gestures, and for Lu Xun I used the painter Wang Wei because he is thin and resembles Lu Xun when holding a cigarette in his left hand. Cai Yuanpei was mentioned in an article as being extremely polite. He was courteous to the educated but equally courteous towards people of lower social standing. He was known for doffing his hat even to the campus laborers, and I was keen to capture him in this action. My treatment of other figures was related either to their thinking or to specific incidents. Gu Hongming taught English poetry at Peking University, so he is holding a copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and this provides a strong contrast to his antiquated appearance. In contrast, Liang Shuming (front right) is holding a copy of his book Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies. Liu Shipei (far left, back view) is holding a copy of National Heritage, the magazine which he edited. Chen Duxiu (in a white suit) is holding a copy of New Youth, the influential May Fourth magazine he had founded. Behind Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi stands pointing with his right hand

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at his essay “A Draft Proposal for Literary Reform” published in the copy of New Youth that he is holding open in his left hand. Li Dazhao (behind and to the right of Cai Yuanpei) is holding a copy of the newspaper Weekly Critique, of which he was editor. Lu Xun, who is dressed in white, is holding aloft the Peking University insignia that he had designed. At the front right of the work, behind Liang Shuming, are Qian Xuantong to the left and Liu Bannong to the right: the pair are arguing. Both were strong supporters of Hu Shi’s vernacular language movement, but put on an act of being enemies and attacked each other in New Youth magazine to draw attention to the movement. At the very back, Huang Kan, the strongest critic of Hu Shi’s literary revolution, is the one on the extreme left. In his lectures, he would spend forty of the fifty minutes attacking Hu Shi. In the painting, with his left hand he is pointing at the back of Hu Shi’s head. Behind Lu Xun and to his right is his brother Zhou Zuoren, with whom he had fallen out. It took me a long time to complete the painting. In October 1988, I received my visa to study English in Australia, but I did not arrive in Sydney until three months later, and barely days before the expiry date of the visa. Up till then I had been working on this painting. At that time, Chinese painters who left for overseas usually took some small paintings to sell and to show to gallery owners. I arrived in Australia empty handed, and this was one of the reasons why I was reduced to earning a living drawing sketches on the street. I had planned to exhibit the painting at the Seventh National Art Exhibition scheduled for June 1989. However, because I was not in the country, my work was not forwarded by my respective provincial artists association, and left in the warehouse. Luckily, I had passed through Beijing before travelling to Australia, and while there I visited Li Rencai, the director of the art department of the Museum of the History of the Chinese Revolution (now the National Museum of China), and gave him some photographs of the painting. In 1991, just three years later it happened to be the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the CPC.

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The museum had reviewed the exhibits and found that a painting on the May Fourth Movement was needed. Li Rencai proposed that this painting of mine be used, and the relevant authorities approved. The painting was collected and became a permanent exhibit. However, once the painting had official status, the original title of Tolerance was deemed unsuitable. And after the June Fourth Incident of 1989, “tolerance” became a sensitive word. The Minister of Propaganda Zhu Houze was a Hu Yaobang appointee who proposed tolerance, and Deng Xiaoping had sacked him. At first, they reverted to my earlier title of Accommodating and Inclusive, but afterwards, the museum renamed the painting The Sound of Bells at Peking University—this was poetic and contained subtle references; I liked it. This year, in the exhibition celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the CPC held at NAMOC, my painting was showcased with the title changed back to Accommodating and Inclusive. As for me, whenever I refer to the painting, I always use the title Tolerance. Nonetheless, the fact that the current authorities can accept this painting as part of the official exhibition at NAMOC demonstrates that the present CPC is much more tolerant than it was in the Mao era.1 I had painted Chen Duxiu distributing copies of the anti-government leaflet “Manifesto of the Citizens of Peking,” printed in both Chinese and English according to the official CPC party archive. There is irony in the fact that six months after the painting had been completed, a similar large-scale demonstration took place in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and that leaflets like Chen’s “Manifesto of the Citizens of Peking” were distributed. The nature of these leaflets was the same. Yet the former was regarded as a glorious historical document, while the latter was used as evidence against “violent protesters.” Chen Duxiu had printed his pamphlets in English and Chinese so that foreigners in Beijing could read them and spread the word overseas. To use the official language of today, this would be considered “collaborating with foreign countries” or “colluding with the West.” Chen was imprisoned for three months, but

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seventy years later his successors were not so lucky. Even now, ninety years later, one of his successors was imprisoned for eleven years for the crime of “sedition.” Clearly, the ideals of the May Fourth activists are yet to be realized. Sun Yat-sen said, “The revolution has not yet succeeded. Comrades, we must still work hard,” but people today think this should be changed to “Constitutional rule has yet to be realized. Citizens, we still must strive hard to hasten it.” 20 July 2011

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Notes 1. In 1957 Luo Ji’nan asked Mao Zedong this question in Shanghai: “If Lu Xun were alive today, how would he be getting on?” Mao replied: “I guess he’d either be in jail still wanting to write, or else, understanding the situation, he might not be making a sound.” This conversation recorded in the memoir of Lu Xun’s son, Zhou Haiying, has been verified by at least two eyewitnesses. From the 1950s, Hu Feng and Feng Xuefeng were both criticized and imprisoned for lengthy periods. Hu became demented, and Feng died with his name tarnished. Large numbers of intellectuals were implicated in the case of the so-called Hu-Feng Clique, and were all victims of persecution for a long time.

Chapter 4

Wounds The Story of Dr. Norman Bethune In the early summer of 1968, after two years of turmoil following the start of the Cultural Revolution, the political situation in my hometown of Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province, had stabilized to some extent. New signs bearing the words “Revolutionary Committee” now replaced the former signs on government offices. As Red Guards, there was little for us to do, so I applied for travel funds through my classmate, who was the person in charge in the Red Guard Representative Committee. I made a trip to Shanghai to buy canvases and paints, and then I commandeered a school office to begin work on my painting titled: Chairman Mao at the South Lake First National Congress. South Lake is in the southern part of Jiaxing. There is an islet in the middle of the lake with an old building called Yanyulou, and it is one of the famous scenic spots of southeast China. In July 1921, the CPC First National Congress was held on a boat in South Lake, when it was forced to move the meeting in secret from Shanghai. After the CPC established government, South Lake became a sacred revolutionary site. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards from Shanghai

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proposed changing the name of Jiaxing County to First July County, but this did not eventuate. On the west, South Lake joins the Grand Canal that flows from Suzhou and skirts Jiaxing from east to north, heading southwest in a semicircle, then turning around west of the town. Facing the bend in the canal stand three pagodas dating back to the Tang dynasty, and boat haulers for several centuries have skirted around these pagodas that rank with Yanyulou as Jiaxing’s scenic spots. To the west along Zhongshan Road, across the canal bridge beside the city ring road, is the farmland of North Jiaxing Commune, and a little further along are the three pagodas. In 1958 when people’s communes were established, the villages here were designated the Three Pagodas Brigade of the North Jiaxing Commune. From the beginning of the Cultural Revolution everything had to give way to political activities. However, a strange happening astonished this simple-minded Red Guard (me). Suddenly crowds were flocking to the farmland around the three pagodas. A rumor had spread among the peasants and townsfolk that the Great Immortal Bai Qiu’en had descended on the three pagodas, and that anyone with an illness needed only to go there and burn a piece of red paper inscribed with a quotation from Chairman Mao’s essay “In Memory of Dr. Norman Bethune.” Wherever the ashes fell, one was to dig up the roots of the plants there, boil them, drink the soup, and the illness would go away. This rumor spread far and wide, and when peasants from neighboring counties heard about it, they arrived in huge numbers by boat, and some groups were even led by their local party secretaries. I am not sure how the newly formed Revolutionary Committee dealt with this rare comedy of traditional superstition mixed with Cultural Revolution superstition. But by the time the affair blew over after a few months, the fields of the Three Pagodas Brigade had been laid waste. It was worse than if a plague of locusts had swept through. The following year the Three Pagodas Brigade produced a peasant painter called Xu Feng. He too had painted a Chairman Mao at the South

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Lake First National Congress and made a great fuss of reporting this to the Provincial Revolutionary Committee. The leader of the Provincial Revolutionary Committee was Zhang Yongsheng, a young teacher at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts. He summoned Xu Feng and me to work with a military doctor as leader of a three-person team at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou on another painting: Chairman Mao at South Lake. We enjoyed three months at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, where the library that was closed to everyone else was open for us. One day I asked Xu Feng about the “Immortal Bai Qiu’en” business the year before at the Three Pagodas Brigade. Xu Feng said angrily: “It was all because of the Three Pagodas. I’m going to tear them down!” I was shocked to hear him say this. Two years later the Three Pagodas were indeed torn down, but whether this had anything to do with Xu Feng was not clear. Thirty years later, I saw three concrete pagodas standing on the old site: they were said to be the exact size of the originals. At the base of the pagodas was an inscription: Built by Xu Feng & Son Construction Company. Times had changed, and the Three Pagodas Brigade was now a residential precinct with high-rise buildings everywhere, so that in this environment, the replica pagodas looked even more fake. In 1968, the entire 600 million population of China could recite Chairman Mao’s “three old essays” as ordered by Marshal Lin Biao, and Chairman Mao himself had proclaimed that “The whole nation should learn from the Liberation Army.” As a result, everyone could recite these essays, and they were even made into songs that were sung. The “three old essays” were three short speeches Mao Zedong had made during the Yan’an period, and one of these was “In Memory of Dr. Norman Bethune.” So, everyone in China at the time knew of Norman Bethune by his Chinese name Bai Qiu’en, just as today everyone in the world knows of Michael Jackson. However, it was somehow a pity that Dr. Norman Bethune had been transformed into the legendary Immortal Bai Qiu’en. While the Three Pagodas Brigade was busy with the Immortal Bai Qiu’en, I was engrossed in reading a book. Throughout the country

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all libraries had been closed by order of Chairman Mao. A group of bookworms, including me, felt we had no choice but to steal books from the school library and pass them around. A book in Chinese translation came to me with the title The Scalpel, the Sword. The authors were two Canadians, Ted Allan and Sydney Gordon, and it turned out to be a biography of Dr. Norman Bethune.1 In the preface to the 1979 reprinted edition of the book that I later acquired, the translator Wu Ningkun states that this title had been used in the first edition published by Shanghai Pingming Publishing House in 1954. The full English title is The Scalpel, the Sword: The Story of Doctor Norman Bethune. Dr. Norman Bethune had been transformed into a Chinese figure, and was idolized throughout China. The book by his Canadian friends and colleagues, in contrast, was free from Cultural Revolution contamination, and Bethune emerged as a real person. Maybe this was why reprinted editions were banned for more than a decade even though Bethune was a great hero in the eyes of the Chinese people in the 1960s. Bethune was known only through a 1000-word essay Mao had written: it is factually correct, and his assessment of the man accords with Bethune’s character. On rereading that essay, I still agree with almost every word, but I indict the author as a manipulative and dishonest teacher. In the essay, Mao exhorts the masses to emulate Bethune’s selfless spirit, yet this was something he himself would never do. In the early years of the War of Resistance, Chinese laborers in North America used their hard-earned cash to buy an ambulance for the Eighth Route Army that was engaged in fighting the Japanese. Bethune arrived in North China around the same time as the ambulance, and he went straight to the frontline where he died saving the lives of numerous soldiers. This is in sharp contrast to the ambulance that was kept in Yan’an and commandeered as Mao’s personal vehicle. In Yan’an at that time there was only this one ambulance driving about, and everyone knew that inside were Chairman Mao and Jiang Qing.

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Recently, I took out the 1979 reprinted edition of the Norman Bethune biography. The Chinese title had been changed to The Scalpel Is the Weapon, which I do not think is as good as the original. Reading it again, I was as moved as I had been when I first read it in my youth. It also brought back many memories. In fact, after I read the biography for the first time at the age of twenty, Bethune became my role model. I appreciated that I had encountered the book early in life, and this allowed me to reject the “Immortal Bai Qiu’en” of the Three Pagodas Brigade. Later, while working in the Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps, quite a few times I heard old soldiers talking about how Bethune was quick-tempered with the nurses and cadres, but he always “fussed like an old woman” with the wounded. While writing this essay I suddenly realized that communists could belong to different schools and that the schools were all quite different. As a twenty-year-old, it was inconceivable that I would have suspected Chairman Mao of having political or moral problems, or of having any “thought problems” whatsoever, but I was aware of liking and believing in the Bethune described in the book. Now at the age of over sixty, on rereading the book and thinking about these questions, everything became clear. Bethune had joined the Communist Party in 1935 and belonged to a school of communism based on pure humanism. Up to the age of forty-five, Bethune had worked in medical research and was a world-renowned chest specialist. He maintained his independent character and humanist traditions throughout. Joining the Communist Party meant only two things to him: to struggle against wars created by inhumane fascism and arms dealers, and to serve the poor who needed medical care but did not have the money.2 From Norman Bethune, my thoughts turned to the late Fred Hollows of Australia. A New Zealander by birth, Hollows was an eye specialist who restored eyesight to countless Third World people: he too was a communist. Dr. Hollows was the Dr. Bethune of the second half of the twentieth century, and they belonged to the same school of communism. By the time I was twenty, I subscribed to their school of communism, and

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no longer to the communism of Mao Zedong. Bethune died in 1939, at a time when Mao was beginning to lay the foundations for achieving his political goals. It was during my formative years that Mao unambiguously declared the lineage of his communism to be the despotism of China’s First Emperor, and this was diametrically opposed to humanism. I was also drawn to Bethune because of his artist identity that further shortened the spiritual distance between us. His artistic achievement came from a strange experience. At the age of thirty-seven, he was on the brink of death from tuberculosis, and while awaiting death in hospital, he painted a surreal mural onto the wall of the ward. It was five feet high and sixty feet long, and it depicted his life from the time he was in his mother’s womb to the time of his death in the embrace of angels. When the mural was completed, he had miraculously cured himself by artificial pneumothorax, a new technique at that time. China in 1979 was the spring thaw following the long winter night that had been Mao’s dictatorship. It was also the fortieth anniversary of Dr. Bethune’s death, even though his comrades-in-arms Marshal Nie Rongzhen and even Song Qingling were still alive. Apart from reprinting his biography, People’s Publishing House also produced a beautifully designed memorial volume containing all the photographs and literature associated with Dr. Bethune. For me, the most precious were his artworks that included a black-and-white reproduction of his autobiographical mural, as well as his correspondence and literary works. His famous poem “The Pallid Moon” and a 3,000-word essay “Wounds” are included in the biography, and each of these individually possesses a unique beauty. “Wounds” is one of the most beautiful pieces of short prose I have ever read. In terms of form it is particularly suited to a near-square rectangular painting: this is purely my intuition as an artist. There are 3000 words, but not a single word is superfluous: the essay was written with the precision of a highly skilled surgeon. At the same time, it had to be the work of an antifascist fighter and a communist, who possessed the soul of an artist. The work is permeated with the black aesthetics of

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modernism, and it is like the paintings of Otto Dix and George Grosz that depict the horror of amputee soldiers. This, of course, is to be expected because Bethune had experienced the Great War both as a stretcherbearer and as an army doctor. I recall that when I first read the essay “Wounds,” this paragraph particularly impressed me: Any more? Four Japanese prisoners. Bring them in. In this community of pain, there are no enemies. Cut away that blood-stained uniform. Stop that hemorrhage. Lay them beside the others. Why, they’re alike as brothers! Are these soldiers professional mankillers? No, these are amateurs-in-arms. Workman’s hands. These are workers-in-uniform. This was unforgettable basic training in internationalism for me. Thinking back to the summer of 1968 when I had been completely won over by Bethune’s biography, I began to make plans to do a painting of Bethune. I wanted to paint his Spanish Republican salute and got a classmate to model the salute for me. At that time, I was a beginner, and conceding that I was not up to the task, I shelved the project. By 1975 I had painted Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland, and my painting technique had rapidly improved. I developed a keen interest to specialize in the history painting genre, but my status as amateur painter in the Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps meant that this was not an option. Nonetheless, I began to make compositions with gouache on paper, and I completed two composition studies. One was of Snow meeting four Red Army buglers. The other was of Bethune with an Eighth Route Army soldier who had recovered from his injuries. The soldier had mounted his horse, and as he saluted Bethune in farewell, Bethune responded with the Spanish salute, his right fist held to his eyebrow. The background was high mountains and the Great Wall. Apparently, someone liked my two studies, and stole them. Many years later I did indeed paint Snow and Bethune, but the compositions were quite different.

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The first half of 1984 was the final semester of my second year at CAFA, and the time was to be spent in creating a graduation work. I decided to paint Bethune. By this time my artistic vision had broadened considerably, and I had good control of my creative impulses. To accommodate the rich and complex experience that Bethune had given me, I had to free myself from the three unities of realism: time, space, and action. And at the same time, I had to avoid the pitfall of simply listing events. During my investigations, quite by luck I found an action that better expressed his spirit than his Spanish salute. It was his action of presenting his left arm to donate blood. Bethune was the first to donate blood on the Chinese battlefield during the anti-Japanese War of Resistance, and he did this to dissipate the fears of the Chinese peasant soldiers. His blood was type O negative, so he was a natural blood donor for most cases. Moreover, he had earlier pioneered blood transfusion on the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War. My painting is a visual realization of Bethune’s essay “Wounds.” He is surrounded by injured Chinese: badly wounded soldiers clutching their rifles, an old man close to death, and a baby searching for milk on the breast of an unconscious mother. Wounded Japanese soldiers are also present. The painting is on a tall rectangular canvas, and on the upper left is the kerosene lamp that keeps spluttering, as described in the opening sentence of his essay. At the upper right corner, away from the Chinese soldiers, is a trench with Republican soldiers of the Spanish Civil War. Robert Capa is there with his camera taking shots of the back of a falling Republican soldier who has just been shot, as described in Bethune’s poem “The Pallid Moon.” Above the shattered mountain tops, Last night, rose low and wild and red, Reflecting back from her illumined shield, The blood bespattered faces of the dead.

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In my work, between the moon and the kerosene lamp is the image of a knight slaying a dragon. The flying dragon is also a bat, flying in from the darkness, and the scene is from the first panel of Bethune’s autobiographical mural that refers to the slaying of the dragon by the knight. The allusion in my painting is the struggle against fascist demons. The final key feature is Bethune’s head, and here I made use of images from his self-portrait and a photograph. At CAFA, my direction was constantly shifting, and at the time I was drawn to El Greco. His works possess a disturbing and uneasy rhythm full of tension, and it was this quality that I wanted to replicate in my painting. I spent much time making draft sketches the same size as the oil painting, but when the painting was completed, I did not like the sketches and trashed them. I also asked classmates to model for me. Li Quanwu from Wuhan is 1.9 meters tall and has long fingers and beautiful feet that are rare for Chinese, and this was useful. I also asked Chen Shuxia, a female student in the middle school attached to CAFA, to act as my model for the daughter of the dying old woman. A Romanian artist happened to visit CAFA when my painting was on the verge of completion, and he was instantly drawn to it. He became excited and kept pointing at the painting and commenting nonstop. I could not understand what he was saying, but I knew he was alluding the presence of Qi energy that important quality sought by Chinese artists. Sun Jingbo, my teacher and friend, defined the flow of Qi energy as abstract movement in a composition resulting from the interaction between movement in the lines and the figures of a painting. Not understanding art, modern art commentators have turned abstract painting into an absolute, failing to understand that it is precisely those abstract elements of figurative painting that painters over the ages have sought to achieve. From the CAFA costume store I found genuine Japanese military caps, helmets, and a greatcoat. The greatcoat was perfect, and it became the center of the four figures that form a cross. The four figures turned out well, especially the wounded Japanese soldier. His prone body is

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based on the dying son of Laocoön in El Greco’s Laocoön, but I found a classmate who could lie down in an even more natural pose, so I used my authentic model instead. Our class model, Zhao, was a perfect image for the wounded woman. Finding an image for the baby was a problem, but I eventually received help from some families in the CAFA dormitory. Quite a few of the CAFA graduation works were excellent, mine included; living and working alongside the country’s top painters induced me to strive to my full potential. I recall how I was driven to paint the foreground (i.e., the lowest part of the painting) in a single day, with all the creases in the uniform of the wounded soldier clutching his sword. My teacher Sun Jingbo was full of praise for this part of the work, and it greatly encouraged me. In the painting, I used a large amount of Prussian blue, a technique learned from the works of a Sichuan classmate, Cheng Conglin. The coloring in the painting was kept cold, and even the red was simply burnt sienna with a little earth red. My work was completed just in time for the Sixth National Art Exhibition. Although we completed our works at CAFA in Beijing, they had to be sent for appraisal by our respective work units. My painting was sent to Shenyang to be assessed by the Liaoning Provincial Artists Association. I was still in Beijing when I learned that my painting had been rejected, allegedly because it promoted the horrors of war. It was hard to believe that this style of criticism still existed in 1984. Thinking back now, it was hardly surprising, because “New Wave Art” had not yet arrived. My art exploration was limited to expressive techniques, but in the eyes of conservative provincial art bureaucrats it was too daring. But times have changed. When news of the rejection reached Wang Lan, who was teaching at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, she went to the Liaoning Provincial Artists Association to argue the case for my painting. The matter also angered many teachers at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, and quite a few leading artists protested to the Liaoning Provincial Artists Association. As a result, the earlier decision was overturned. My painting was first shown in Shenyang, and then

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forwarded as an outstanding work to the National Arts Association for the Sixth National Arts Exhibition in Beijing. Two years later, the Chinese People’s Revolution Military Museum (now National Museum of China), collected the work together with my work Pioneers (1981). Having completed my graduation artwork, I wrote a dissertation titled “Practice and Reflection on the Genre of History Painting: Notes on the Creation of Wounds.” It was published in the CAFA journal Art Research and records in detail the artistic processes involved in the work. In my painting Wounds I had set out to transcend the spatial and temporal limitations of realist composition. I was determined to demonstrate that the genre of history painting had not stagnated and atrophied, and that there was still much space for developing the genre. I have continued to explore new possibilities right up to the present. Thinking about this painting twenty-seven years later, I realize there had been a political implication to my creation of the work. It was as if I had taken a scalpel and excised the cancerous growth of Maoist superstition that had distorted Bethune’s image during the Cultural Revolution. There are countless paintings of Bethune in China, and maybe this is the difference between my painting and that of others. My painting Wounds was created in 1984, the year that is the title of George Orwell’s novel. Thankfully, China’s Big Brother died eight years earlier, and the real year of 1984 was no longer as repressive. In the autumn of that year, after I graduated from CAFA and returned to my work unit a “party rectification” occurred, but no one took any notice of Big Brother’s successor. Like Bethune, George Orwell was a Republican volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. Around the same time, they were fighting on different battlefields in Spain: both men belonged to different communist parties with the same ancestry. Today, “at the end of history” when “communist” and “left wing” have become oldfashioned and even terms of abuse, the likes of Bethune and Orwell stand tall in the deep recesses of history, reminding us that there can be an alternative interpretation.

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Orwell was thirteen years younger than Bethune, but lived two years less. He died from tuberculosis. I fancifully imagine that had Bethune not died from a finger wound on the battlefield, he might have been able to save Orwell’s life in 1950. 18 October 2011

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Notes 1. Ted Allan (1916–1995) joined the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. He was manager of the Canadian Blood Transfusion Unit headed by Dr. Norman Bethune, and concurrently a war reporter. On 25 July 1937, while visiting the battlefront with 27-year-old photojournalist Gerda Taro they were struck by a tank. Taro died. Allan survived, through Bethune’s meticulous treatment, and he regarded Bethune as his father for the rest of his life. Taro was the first woman photojournalist in the world to die in the line of duty while on the battlefield. She was the girlfriend and colleague of Robert Capa. The 2007 discovery of a “Mexican suitcase” containing a huge number of photo negatives of the Spanish Civil War shot by these famous photojournalists has enhanced the legendary romance of Gerda Taro and Robert Capa. 2. The Comintern archives decoded in 2005 by a Canadian scholar reveal that Stalin’s agents for eliminating counterrevolutionaries in Spain suspected Bethune of being an enemy agent but, wanting to take advantage of his fame, he was sent back to Canada to raise funds and then prevented from returning to Spain. This new information explains why he went to China instead.

Chapter 5

1972 Imperial Palanquin After Yan Liben Yan Liben (d. 673), a great painter of the Tang dynasty, was also a court official who had once occupied the position of prime minister. His Imperial Palanquin is one of the earliest politico-history paintings of China, and possibly of the world. It records an important event that the artist had witnessed. In 641, Emperor Taizong gave his daughter Princess Wencheng in marriage to Songtsän Gampo, ruler of the Tibetan kingdom of Pugyäl, the region today known as Tibet. Songtsän Gampo sent his envoy, Mgar stong-btsan yul-srung, to the Tang capital Chang’an to fetch the princess. Imperial Palanquin depicts the scene in which Emperor Taizong receives Mgar stong-btsan yul-srung. The right half of the painting shows Emperor Taizong sitting in the imperial palanquin, surrounded by nine court ladies. The figures on the left half of the painting, from right to left, are officials of the Tang court, and then Mgar stong-btsan yul-srung and his interpreter. The size of each figure is determined by their relative importance. Therefore, the gradations in size are such that Emperor Taizong is the largest figure, his officials are smaller, and Mgar stong-btsan yul-srung and his interpreter are even smaller. The court ladies are the smallest. The original painting (ink

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and color on silk, 38.5 cm x 129 cm) is housed in the Palace Museum Collection in Beijing. My painting 1972 Imperial Palanquin: After Yan Liben makes use of double satire to depict the historic 1972 event of Mao Zedong receiving the US dignitaries Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. I copied Yan Liben’s original as far as possible. Using an overhead projector, I enlarged Yan Liben’s painting to 200 cm x 400 cm, and made a sketch on the canvas. Into this framework, I inserted the participants. Kissinger is now the interpreter, Nixon takes the place of Mgar stong-btsan yul-srung, Zhou Enlai replaces the Tang officials, and Mao is in the place of Emperor Taizong. The images of the Tang court ladies remain unchanged. The meaning of my satire is quite clear. Firstly, after thirty years of political machinations and strategic planning, Mao had succeeded in Sinicizing the “personal worship” created by Stalin and was able to defeat all real and imaginary political opponents. He became emperor of China in all but name, and Zhou Enlai was his loyal servant who answered to only one person. Secondly, in the eyes of the Chinese of the time, Nixon was no more than a foreign ruler who had come to seek peace. 1972 Imperial Palanquin is like a fun-park mirror presenting a distorted comic image of reality, and some historians are likely to disapprove of my poking fun at this momentous event. The historic meeting of 1972 between China and the United States can be considered the most positive Cold War breakthrough of the twentieth century. However, at the same time it was little more than one of the tricks that Mao Zedong had learned from the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms: it was used to counter the Soviet Revisionists that, in his mind, were the greater enemy. Undeniably, however, the meeting established the foundation for the opening of China to the world that was later orchestrated by Deng Xiaoping, so the Nixon-Kissinger visit was of considerable significance. From the viewpoint of the West, although Nixon ended his political career with an ignoble impeachment on the domestic front, his greatest political achievement was on the international front: laying the cornerstone of a

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peaceful relationship with China. This was a positive outcome of Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. Nonetheless, artists have the freedom to develop their own interpretation of events. Exactly 100 years older than I, the great nineteenth-century Russian artist Vasily Surikov took such a stance. He depicted Peter the Great as a coldhearted tyrant, while the guards who were to be executed for opposing his reforms are depicted as positive characters. The artist, as well as any other thinking individual, can have different perspectives on history. History can be interpreted as a historical process, or looked at from a humanitarian viewpoint. Therefore, the same historical event can produce a broad spectrum of reflections. Nixon was no more than a clown in the eyes of his political opponents in the United States, while in China he was despised as the head of American imperialism, and that was how I treated him in this painting. At the time, there was a political joke circulating in China. An American said to a Chinese, “We are very free, we can abuse our president.” The Chinese replied, “We are also very free. We can also abuse your president.” In 1972 Imperial Palanquin, targeted in my satire are Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Nonetheless, I did not transgress political cartoon aesthetics by focusing only on personal weaknesses and failings. Having diminished their moral character, I also emphasized their “comic” and “lovable” aspects. Mao was fond of Emperor Taizong and liked to compare himself with both Taizong and the First Emperor of China, Qin Shihuang. Compared to the tyrannical First Emperor, Taizong was generally considered a wise ruler and in historical accounts is viewed in a positive light. While working on this painting, I had an interesting thought. If I had painted this work during the Mao era, would Mao have had me executed, or would he have conferred upon me the title of model worker? The court ladies surrounding “Emperor” Mao are the same as those in the Yan Liben painting, and “loyalty” is inscribed in their demeanor. The word loyalty was frequently used during the Cultural Revolution and was used most often in political declarations. The word loyalty also denotes the

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organizational structure of “The People’s Republic.” In this “republic,” which was in fact a monarchy, the person with the most difficult task was Zhou Enlai. Was he a modern “premier,” or was he forced to enact the role of a “prime minister” of the imperial past? This is a question that only he could have answered. As an upright communist with strong political ideals, he had no option but to serve as “Emperor” Mao’s lackey, carrying out the dictator’s orders. He must have been fully aware of his situation, but throughout he succeeded in keeping his inner struggles to himself. Therefore, my 1972 Imperial Palanquin is a belated political comment as well as artistic satire on the feudal despotism that Mao Zedong had created with his Cultural Revolution. I feel slightly apologetic about having appropriated President Nixon and Dr. Kissinger to act as my accomplices. 2 August 2012

Chapter 6

Laocoön After El Greco In 2001 advanced media technology brought the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon before the eyes of people all over the world. I can still vividly remember the shock I felt, and my realization right then that the twenty-first century had begun: it was a bad omen for the beginning of the third millennium. Perpetrated by Muslim extremists, this criminal act angered people everywhere, and I recall that the leaders of many countries, even those engaged in disputes with the United States, were saying: “We are now all Americans!” I can also remember the responses of Arab world leaders. Yasser Arafat was outraged, and even Muammar Gaddafi condemned the attack. I clearly remember Osama Bin Laden denying knowledge of the attack and certainly not claiming that he had planned it. However, there were people applauding the terrorist attack, including some Chinese. It was reported that there were Chinese officials in New York clapping as they watched the TV broadcast of the events, and some of them regarded the terrorists as martyrs. Following the initial shock, some expert analysts began to suggest that US foreign policies might have caused the intense hatred that provoked the attack.

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In the affairs of the world, who can clearly see the cause of any event? Chile also had a 9/11 that occurred in 1973, and I think it was also a Tuesday. That day the CIA instigated the Chilean fascist military coup that began the eighteen-year Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. Eight years prior to that, a right-wing military coup resulting in the killing of 100,000 people ushered in the long dictatorship of Suharto in Indonesia. The CIA was also implicated in the coup. During the half-century of the Cold War, there were in fact uninterrupted wars. The war most closely related to the Muslim extremist attack was the one in Afghanistan, but in that war the United States had backed the Muslims in their fight against Soviet Russia. Al Qaeda, which later came to be regarded as the mortal enemy of the United States, had in fact been nurtured with US support. In the civil wars that broke out at the end of the Cold War in the former Yugoslavia, the United States again sided with the Muslims. My thoughts on the matter are best expressed by borrowing the words of Confucius. These mad extremists indeed lacked any feelings of “humanity or righteousness.” It was an unforgivable and insane crime. As an artist, I expressed my reaction in a painting. When 9/11 occurred, I was in the process of painting The Third World,1 a work that includes many Third World leaders. The events surrounding 9/11 elevated the status of Bin Laden, so I immediately inserted Bin Laden and the bombing of the Twin Towers in the upper part of the center of the painting. Three years later, using two large paintings of El Greco as models, I began painting Laocoön: After El Greco #1 and its sister work The Opening of the Fifth Seal: After El Greco #2, but other projects delayed their completion until early 2012. El Greco’s Laocoön tells the story of an ancient Greek tragedy. When their attack on Troy was repulsed, the Greeks implemented the Trojan horse strategy by offering the gift of a giant wooden horse. The Trojan high priest Laocoön sensed it was a trick and warned his fellow citizens against accepting the gift. However, the Greek gods Apollo and Diana intervened by sending two serpents to attack Laocoön and his two sons. The giant horse was wheeled into

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Troy, and soldiers hidden inside the horse emerged and quickly overran the city. In the seventeenth century, El Greco in the final years of his life painted his famous work depicting the struggle of Laocoön and his sons, the rapaciousness of the serpents, and the cold eyes of the Greek gods as they looked on. The wooden horse and the city of Troy are in the background of the painting. El Greco’s Laocoön is housed in the National Museum of Washington, DC, and I took the opportunity of studying it carefully during my visits to the United States in 2005 and 2008. Four years after 9/11, I visited the site of the attack for the first time. When I saw that the bronze sculpture The Sphere by the German artist Fritz Koenig had been resurrected from the ruins, nothing could hold back my tears. My Laocoön is three or four times larger than El Greco’s work. Apart from changes to the background, I copied the original faithfully to preserve El Greco’s style. In the background of my painting, the city of Troy has been replaced by Manhattan with the Twin Towers burning after the terrorist attack, while El Greco’s wooden horse has become the Statue of Liberty. These changes represent the basic symbols of a new theme and alert viewers that the work does not portray the ancient tragedy of Troy, but the contemporary tragedy of September 11 in 2001. In this way, my painting preserves a large part of El Greco’s original. But with my changes to the narrative elements, the figures in the painting take on new meaning and become new symbolic representations. My intention was that the serpents would represent the terrorists, and Laocoön and his two sons would represent not only the direct victims of 9/11 but also their relatives and friends. Given that the victims of 9/11 were people of different races and religions from many different countries, including Arabs and Muslims, Laocoön and his two sons may be considered as representing the whole human race. The unfeeling Greek gods who watch the spectacle represent two types of minorities: the Muslim extremists who had perpetrated the 9/11 attack and the spectators who reveled in the tragic event. As this contemporary work

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has many different layers of meaning, I do not wish to force my ideas on viewers. Those who see the work will have their own associations and explanations. 14 February 2012

Laocoön

Notes 1. The painting Third World is discussed in chapter 13 of this book.

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Chapter 7

The Opening of the Fifth Seal After El Greco The story behind The Opening of the Fifth Seal comes from the Book of Revelation of the New Testament as related by Saint John. He had witnessed scenes of the end of the world as prophesized in a scroll bearing seven seals. As the Lamb broke each of the seals, a terrifying scene appeared. The fifth seal was opened in section 6 of the Book of Revelation, and the original text reads: When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice: “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the full number of their fellow servants, their brothers and sisters, were killed just as they had been. As in the case of Laocoön, El Greco completed his The Opening of the Fifth Seal at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in the last years

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of his life. The original is now held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where I carefully studied the painting in 2005 and 2008 while I was there. My painting The Opening of the Fifth Seal: After El Greco #2 is so named because it is the sister work of my Laocoön: After El Greco #1. Both works are comments on the two major historical trends of the early part of the twenty-first century: terrorism and war. Laocoön is about a terrorist attack and The Opening of the Fifth Seal is about war. In the latter work I again copied El Greco’s work faithfully, only adding a B-2 stealth bomber at the top of the background. This transformed the theme of the original work into a comment on current affairs. More than one war has resulted from 9/11. First there was the war in Afghanistan but before there was any sign of it ending, the United States attacked Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein’s regime. Those two wars started in 2001 and 2003, respectively. I started The Opening of the Fifth Seal: After El Greco #2 in 2004, and completed it in 2012. However, as for these two wars, one is far from finished and the other has not completely ended. I see these two wars as being totally different in nature. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan had sheltered Al Qaeda, and it was Al Qaeda that had masterminded the 9/11 terrorist attack, so the attack on Afghanistan by the United States and its allies could be construed as “a just war.” However, I fail to understand why the Bush Administration did not complete the war in Afghanistan before charging in to attack Iraq. Without doubt both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were heinous forces, but did this justify the United States prosecuting wars against them? The emergence and existence of such regimes have strong grassroots support and there are other reasons. That foreign armies had overthrown these regimes will create divisions in the population as well as unleashing many political dynamics to complicate the situation. When this occurs the use of military means to resolve the problems will not have good outcomes. To attack the Taliban was unavoidable, but to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein was unwise. So, in discussing war in The Opening of the

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Fifth Seal: After El Greco #2, I wanted to explore the issue of what justifies the starting of a war. The weeping souls of the dead in El Greco’s original here symbolize the 9/11 victims who have yet to see justice, as well as the civilians of Afghanistan and Iraq who continue to be slaughtered. The figure of Saint John represents the sad sigh of this painter. 14 February 2012

Chapter 8

Eileen Chang’s Family Who is Eileen Chang? Young Chinese growing up in Mao’s New China, like my Red Guard generation, would not have known of her. I later found out that she was highly regarded as a writer by Chinese living abroad, and that she was for a time a legendary figure. Until her death in 1995 she lived in the same world as her readers, but she seemed forever to belong in the 1940s. In her later life she became a recluse, and her death was not discovered until days later. At the time, she was less than ten days from her seventy-fifth birthday. When I started painting a group portrait of Eileen Chang (a.k.a. Zhang Ailing) and her three generations of ancestors, I told Australian visitors to my studio that I was painting a Chinese Miles Franklin (1879–1954). In Australia, the preeminent portrait competition in Australia is the Archibald, and its equivalent in literature is the Miles Franklin Award. Franklin was a famous Australian writer, best known for her debut novel My Brilliant Career. There is a striking photograph of Franklin as a young woman holding a parasol on the Internet, as well as an equally striking photograph of a beautiful and youthful Eileen Chang. Both writers became famous in their early twenties.

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Neither woman was a world-class writer, but each occupies an important position in the literary history of their respective countries. During the mid-1980s the works of Eileen Chang suddenly took China by storm alongside the songs of Teresa Teng, the romantic novels of Qiong Yao, and the martial arts novels of Jin Yong. However, since then Chang’s works have come to be regarded as serious literature, and they no longer enjoy the same attention as popular literature. While still living in China, I had heard of Eileen Chang but had not read any of her books. I had settled in Australia in early 1989, and in 1994 I happened to be in Hong Kong where Crown Publishing House had just released Eileen Chang’s book Contrasts. It was my love of old photographs that led me to buy a copy of this slim volume. Chang’s early writings, and the two works she wrote in English in middle age—Book of Change and The Fall of the Pagoda—as well as Little Reunion, are all to some extent memoirs. However, her book Contrasts purports to be memoirs that are set alongside family photographs, and photographs are the most reliable documentation of memory. Of course, what captivated me most was the story of how Chang’s grandfather became the son-in-law of Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), the most important official of the Qing imperial court at the time. It was through Contrasts that I became interested in the life of the author. The book presented mysteries that I would subsequently resolve through further reading. In the memoir, I found it intriguing that there is no mention of Chang’s first love, Hu Lancheng, even though he was generally known to have been a great presence in her life. That Chang had never forgotten this painful part of her life is revealed in her work Little Reunion, that barely escaped being destroyed and was not published until 2009, many years after Chang’s death. While in San Francisco during 2005, I read Hu Lancheng’s memoir This Life, published by Yuanjing Publishing House in Taipei. But it was only when Little Reunion was published in Chinese that Eileen Chang’s side of the story came to be known. On comparing the two accounts, it seems that

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there was little that Hu Lancheng had falsified. Before encountering Hu Lancheng’s This Life, I had only read the one book by Chang: Contrasts. On reading Hu’s book, I came to understand how a literary celebrity such as Chang could become so enchanted by Hu Lancheng that she was willing to become his mistress. In Shanghai society of the time she would have been considered a “slut,” but for Chang “only love without an ulterior motive is true love” (from Little Reunion). Hu Lancheng was a composite character with at least three personalities. He was a political writer and politician who was naïve at times but incredibly arrogant, a natural lady-killer who took pleasure in the conquest of women, and he was a talented writer. There have been many Chinese writers before Eileen Chang and Hu Lancheng, and there will be others after them, yet among the writers I have read there are few with such distinctive styles of writing. I first became aware of the power of writing style at the end of 1983 and the beginning of 1984, when I read manuscripts by a painter friend, Zhong Acheng. One of his manuscripts was The Chess King. I sensed that this was extraordinary writing, and when I saw a black-and-white photograph of Lao She on his desk I realized that he was trying his hand at writing. The Chess King was later published in Shanghai Literature. When he received his author’s fee, he treated a group of his painter friends to dinner in the staff canteen of CAFA, where we congratulated him on his upgraded status as writer. I was won over by Hu Lancheng’s writing. Maybe it was because he was a native of Zhejiang Province and his mother tongue was close to mine. Until I read his work, it had never occurred to me that language could be written in such a way. I think Hu Lancheng’s literary genius made Eileen Chang feel that he was a kindred spirit: “Sympathy derives from understanding.” Even though in middle age Chang poked fun at Hu’s style, she must have admired it earlier on. Then many years later, she said: “His writing is very much like Lu Xun’s” (from Little Reunion). This by no means denigrated Hu Lancheng’s writing but was high praise.

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Hu Lancheng’s hometown was not far from Lu Xun’s and they would have spoken a similar language. One can detect similarities between Eileen Chang’s style of writing and Hu Langcheng’s. What she wrote while in love is sometimes cited in Hu’s memoirs, for example, the lines: “The room is tranquility buried deep in fine gold dust and sand. Outside it is wind and rain, yet everywhere on the mountains and plains it is today.” The setting is clearly indoors, but the line “everywhere on the mountains and plains it is today” is truly inspired writing. Reading this poem is like reading poems written in the Tang and Song dynasties, and it is unforgettable. Hu Lancheng wrote on the same page the comment: “A good line of poetry takes one straight to life.” However, he then reveals his politician streak when he goes on to write: “I suddenly thought of Mr. Wang, who had died an unfortunate death before the warhorse of the Republic.” Eileen Chang made her literary debut in 1943 during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and most of her works were produced in the two or three years that followed. Shanghai was no longer the hub of literary activities as it had been during its golden years of the 1920s and 1930s. Writers had relocated en masse to the wartime capital of Chongqing, and the authoritative voice of left-wing literature had been silenced. Chang’s novel Love in a Fallen City, which won her fame, tells of Hong Kong after it had fallen to the Japanese in 1942: “Thousands upon thousands died, and thousands upon thousands were suffering, and afterwards came heaven- and earth-shaking changes.” When she wrote this sentence, she could not have imagined that it would be the reason for her rise in the Chinese literary scene of 1943, and even predict what would follow in the 1950s. If I claimed that Eileen Chang was the daughter of the May Fourth New Culture Movement, I would immediately be corrected: “You’re wrong, Ding Ling was.” Indeed, Ding Ling was, but Eileen Chang was even more so. This was because there were two May Fourth movements: the new culture movement, and following immediately afterwards the political,

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patriotic movement. Led by Chen Duxiu, the latter movement embarked on the road of Russian-style communism, and Ding Ling participated in Chen Duxiu’s journey. However, the standard bearer of the former movement was Hu Shi, who staunchly upheld the basic principles of the new culture movement: “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy.” He called upon people to “study more problems, and talk less about isms.” Of course, he too had his own ideology—Anglo-American liberalism— and Eileen Chang participated in Hu Shi’s journey. Mao Zedong transformed Chen Duxiu’s Russian-style communism into a weapon for conquering the nation, and on 1 October 1949 to shouts of “Long live!” Mao ascended his throne. For Hu Shi and Eileen Chang, and other May Fourth standard bearers and their disciples, Mao’s revolution either sent them abroad to safety or, if they chose to remain in China, to the depths of Hell. Of Eileen’s father’s generation, Hu Shi was also living as an exile in New York. In her essay “Remembering Hu Shi” she recalls a meeting with him: The cold wind blew from the Hudson River on the other side of the road. His scarf was wrapped tightly around his neck that was drawn into his old coat. He had broad shoulders and a big face, and he looked like a bronze bust. The second half of Chang’s life was spent as a scholar, and she achieved some success with her research on Dream of Red Mansions (a.k.a. Dream of the Red Chamber), and her translation into Standard Chinese of Han Bangqing’s 1894 novel Shanghai Flowers—stories about the lives of Shanghai prostitutes—that had been written in the Wu dialect. However, she no longer enjoyed the flamboyant life of her early years. It could be said that Hu Lancheng had sabotaged Eileen Chang’s life because following the Japanese surrender Hu Lancheng was classified as a traitor. Eileen Chang later collaborated in writing and directing films with Sang Hu, and she fell in love again. However, her previous liaison with the traitor Hu Lancheng led to Sang Hu’s decision to marry someone

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else. After the liberation of Shanghai, the playwright Xia Yan, who controlled the literary scene at the time, arranged for Eileen Chang to go to the countryside to participate in the land-reform movement. Astutely recognizing that there would be no place for her in Mao’s new society, she quickly left for Hong Kong and later settled in the United States. During the Mao era, Eileen Chang was labeled an “anticommunist” writer. Her works were banned in China and, for virtually the same reason, she was promoted in Taiwan—so, involuntarily, she had been swept into politics. Her novels Rice Sprout Song and Naked Earth were highly critical of the land reforms and the movement to eradicate counterrevolutionaries, but her Little Ai and Eighteen Springs presented positive views of the revolution. In her private life, she had had a liaison with the pro-Japanese traitor Hu Lancheng, but her second lover, Sang Hu, was a left-wing writer. In the United States, she married the American writer Ferdinand Reyher, a left-wing writer who was a collaborator and friend of the communist playwright Berthold Brecht. She thought there was nothing much to communism, and that the trend in modern thinking was that everyone should have enough to eat. In matters like education, it was taking whatever you could absorb, although in practice it was not the case. As to discipline, to surrender your freedom completely results in your never being able to regain it. (from Little Reunion) In 2007 the film Lust, Caution based on Eileen Chang’s novel of the same name created quite a stir. The novel alludes to her love affair with Hu Lancheng that is related in Little Reunion, so her close friends persuaded her to turn it into a fictional double-agent story. The ending is typical of Chang’s distinctive antihero style. I did not find the film interesting. Around 1993 I had seen Red Dust, by the Taiwanese writer San Mao. It too drew from the love story of Eileen Chang and Hu Lancheng. The end of the film was about the civil war in Manchuria, but the appearance of a T62 tank was the only memory I have of the film. The ending of Lust, Caution reminded me of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Dirty Hands. In that play

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Hugo, a young communist from a small European country, is ordered by his immediate superior to assassinate the party leader because of a strategy disagreement. Hugo becomes close to the leader and almost abandons his mission. Up until this point, the plot is virtually the same as in Chang’s Lust, Caution. But from that point the two plots diverge. Hugo’s wife falls in love with the party leader, and in a jealous rage Hugo shoots the leader and is sent to jail. However, two years later Moscow gives orders to follow the original strategy of the old party leader. The new leader, Hugo’s former immediate superior, then kills Hugo to cover his tracks. When comparing the two works, one can see why Sartre is Sartre and Eileen Chang is Eileen Chang. Sartre uses humanity to write about politics, whereas Chang uses politics to write about humanity. In 1996, a couple of years after reading Chang’s Contrasts, I had the idea of painting the group portrait that I would later name Eileen Chang’s Family. The original composition is not far from the final work, but for a long time I procrastinated before committing the work to canvas. A trip to Shanghai for a history painting conference in late 2011 provided the impetus for me to start on the work. I was staying with my painter friend Li Bin, and after the conference dinner our old friend Han Xin invited us to visit his sister’s apartment where he was staying for the time being. Her apartment was across the road from the Jing’an Temple Metro in an old-style building called Changde Mansion. Han Xin said: “This is where Eileen Chang used to live.” The building is located at 195 Changde Road and has been named after the street: it had originally been called Eddington Mansion. After so many years and changes, it has miraculously remained intact, and even the gate and electric elevator retain their distinctive art deco style. On entering the foyer, I couldn’t help exclaiming: “Hu Lancheng entered this gate and pressed the lift button.” Married to a Westerner, Han Xin’s sister works in real estate in Shanghai. She knew about the Eileen Chang connection and was willing to pay a high price to acquire an apartment on the second floor of the building. Her apartment is not

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on the sixth level, where Chang and her aunt lived, but she had decorated the interior meticulously in 1940s style. We drank tea in the lounge room and, of course, the topic of conversation was Eileen Chang. Soon after returning to Sydney, I lined up three 54 x 54 inch canvases and finally proceeded to paint Eileen Chang’s Family. At the time, the title I had in mind was a sentence from Chang’s Contrasts: “They rest quietly in my blood …” Instead, I painted the sentence onto the canvas. Adopting the traditional composition of Chinese embroidered portraits, I painted Eileen Chang and four generations of her family. It is only the figure of Eileen Chang that is painted in color. I used a seated pose taken from a photograph. She is wearing a dress made from her grandmother’s quilt cover, and the grandmother is none other than Ju’ou, the daughter of Li Hongzhang. The next paragraphs describe the individuals in my painting in the order they appear. Beginning from the right of the painting is Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), the most important figure in Chinese politics during the second half of the nineteenth century. He was concurrently governor-general of Zhili Province and commander of the Beiyang Navy. He also played a dominant role in China’s westernization movement. However, the ineptitude of the Qing imperial government led to his being faced with the ignoble task of signing a series of humiliating treaties with foreign powers. He died suddenly after signing the Boxer Protocol with the Eight Power Legation in 1901. He was much abused by his countrymen thereafter, and only in recent years have historians begun to say anything positive about him. I have a great deal of respect for him, and I have also painted him in each of my three variations of Peking Treaty. Zhang Peilun (1848–1903) is listed in the Hebei provincial register, but he was in fact born in my hometown of Jiaxing. Before the age of thirty-six, his official career was promising. However, as a member of the Qingliu group in the imperial court, he had impeached many corrupt officials and was a strong advocate for war against the foreign

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powers. When China was defeated in the 1884 Sino-French war, he took responsibility and was exiled to the border. At this point, the legendary story of Eileen Chang’s family begins to unfold. According to the story told in the late-Qing novel A Flower in a Sea of Sin, coauthored by Jin Tianhe and Zeng Pu (but largely attributed to Zeng Pu), Zhang Peilun was young and impulsive, and he was outspoken in his criticism of Li Hongzhang’s policies. Nonetheless, Li Hongzhang secretly admired him, arranged for his repatriation back to the capital, and appointed him as a member of his personal staff. He also wanted Zhang to marry his daughter Ju’ou. At that time, Zhang was middleaged and his second wife had recently died. The talented scholar and the beauty briefly encounter one another, and afterwards Zhang accidently reads a poem she had written, one that expresses sympathy for his political misfortunes: Looking south from Jilong my tears flow On hearing a solitary horse return from the battlefield Great strategies cannot be treated lightly in wartime Causing border passes for the four directions to be lost. According to Eileen Chang’s Contrasts, Zhang Peilun wept on reading the poem, but Li Hongzhang laughed and made disparaging comments about his daughter’s poem. Nonetheless, despite his wife objecting to “her daughter marrying a convict who was over twenty years her senior,” he solicited help to encourage Zhang to seek his daughter’s hand in marriage. Ju’ou expressed her willingness to marry Zhang, so the marriage went ahead, and afterwards the couple settled in Nanjing where they led a happy life and continued writing poems to one other. The marriage produced a son and a daughter. Zhang died before he was sixty. Ju’ou lived as a widow for many years and, before her death at the age of forty-seven, arranged for the son to marry a woman from a family of equal social standing.

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In my painting, behind Zhang Peilun is his son, that is, Eileen’s father, Zhang Zhiyi (a.k.a. Zhang Tingzhong, 1896–1953). In the painting, he is depicted as a child. Despite his good literary education, he did not accomplish much in life. An opium addict, he also kept concubines, which resulted in the breakup of his marriage. Further to the left is Ju’ou (1869–1916), before her marriage. Here she is eighteen years old, beautiful with a gentle demeanour. Her mother Madam Zhao, a stately and dignified woman, had been decorated by the emperor; she was Li Hongzhang’s second wife, and she also died young. The group to the left of the mother and daughter are Aunt Zhang Maoyuan (1901–1991) and Cousin Niu’er. Both women had nursed Eileen as an infant. Below them is Eileen’s younger brother Zhang Zijing (1921–1996). Cousin Niu’er’s father was Zhang Renjun, concurrently governor-general of the provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu. During the 1911 Revolution he escaped from Nanjing in a basket. I had previously painted him in 1996, in a painting of Manchu Prince Zaixun, Qing naval minister, being photographed with the governor of Hong Kong. On the extreme left of the canvas, next to the group of people with Aunt Zhang Maoyuan, is Eileen herself. To her left, at the extreme left of the entire work, are two women who are mother and daughter: Eileen’s mother, Huang Suqiong (1896–1957), and Huang’s birth mother. Huang’s birth mother was Eileen’s father’s concubine, the daughter of a peasant family from Changsha in Hunan Province. Huang Suqiong’s grandfather, Huang Yisheng, once commanded the Jiangnan Navy under Li Hongzhang. This was what Ju’ou valued in matching family status in marriage. Unfortunately, her own son did not live up to her expectations. It was Huang Suqiong marrying into the family after Ju’ou’s death who achieved some importance. She was one of the first wave of activists in China’s New Culture Movement. Two or three years after giving birth to Eileen and Zhang Zijing, she denounced her husband’s decadent lifestyle and, on the pretext of accompanying her husband’s sister to study

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overseas, she went to Europe, with bound feet, to begin an independent life, like “Nora leaving her family.” This was how Eileen Chang described her mother: “With her bound feet, she strode across two eras. In the Swiss Alps, she was at least better at skiing than her sister-in-law … She did oil painting, and knew Xu Beihong and Jiang Biwei” (from Contrasts). Eileen’s mother, who had changed her name to Huang Yifan, returned to China to divorce her husband before setting off again to travel around Europe. Eileen quarreled with her stepmother and was kept a prisoner at home by her father. After escaping, she never returned home again, and until 1952 when she left for overseas she lived with her Aunt Zhang Maoyuan. Eileen did not have any children, and her brother Zhang Zijing never married. When the siblings both died, this branch of the family came to an end. 13 August 2012

Chapter 9

Revolution I In this chapter on Revolution (Part I of my trilogy Brothers and Sisters), I reflect on the aesthetics I have developed over forty years of exploration in history painting, and attempt to define the intellectual and philosophical thrust of my choice of subject matter or theme. My history paintings may be said to extol, narrate, or reflect in subject treatment; and while my paintings of the late 1970s and early 1980s extolled, they did not follow the prescribed Cultural Revolution “deification” pattern. My award-winning Mary MacKillop of Australia, painted as late as 1994 in Australia, also belongs to this category. However, since my Seven Self-Portraits (1997), most of my works have been “reflective.” Red Star over China (1987) clearly “narrates,” although there are lingering traces of “extolling” in the work. In terms of the relationship between the artist and the historical figures painted, “to extol” involves the artist looking up in admiration to the personalities portrayed; “to narrate” involves the artist looking upon past or present personalities as the artist’s equal; and “to reflect” is to look from great heights at humanity, including at the artist him- or herself.

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My early work Red Star over China (1987) was one of the works from NAMOC that exhibited for four months in 2011 at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. The interest and positive comments of Australian viewers surprised me. I had painted the work for audiences in China, and it had many special meanings for Chinese about their recent history. But Australian viewers were very interested in the 124 individuals portrayed. By 1980 I had totally recovered from my Red Guard madness, and had strongly reaffirmed humanism as the core element of my value system. That was probably why my work ostensibly extolling Chinese peasants, workers, and soldiers of the Red Army succeeded in captivating Western audiences. The highly positive response to my work in the Canberra exhibition inspired me to employ the narrative model again. Back in 2009, I was commissioned by the daughter of a former member of the Red Army whose image appears in the painting to paint a quarter-size version of Red Star over China. In preparing myself for that work, I revisited materials I had gathered over the years and in the process decided next to work on a variation of Red Star over China. I made sketches of the composition on four canvases. This variation would be half the length of Red Star over China, but it would include the historical figures involved in the Xi’an Incident of 1936. Around 1980 I had authored a picture book on the Xi’an Incident, so I was familiar with the details of this event that overlaps the period depicted in Red Star over China. Whereas in Red Star over China, I had limited myself to painting Red Army personalities from the ShaanxiGansu-Ningxia Border Region, it was now suddenly clear how I could combine these contemporaneous events. Back in my Bundeena studio after the Canberra launch of the exhibition, I began to explore even greater possibilities for the idea that was taking shape in my mind. Some years earlier, I had decided that a large-scale mural The Tower of Babel would be the final work of my artistic career, and I had already made a detailed draft sketch. However, I had always also wanted somehow to give artistic expression to my extensive readings

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in twentieth-century Chinese history that had preoccupied me for many decades. In Esben Storm’s film documentary Goodbye Revolution (2008)1 that tells of my journey as an artist from Shanghai to Sydney, I mentioned that I had wanted to paint a large mural titled Shanghai Modern, but later gave up the idea. However, I did not give up my desire to return to the subject of Chinese historical figures. After months of focused research, thinking, planning and making draft sketches, I decided on a group portrait that would be the same height as Red Star over China but nearly double the length. More than 300 figures would be portrayed, and the work would have the Chinese title “Brothers Quarrel within the Walls,” the first part of a line from the ancient Book of Songs. The second part of the line would be subliminal for most Chinese: while siblings may quarrel within the walls of home, they “unite against outside threat.” I settled on the English title Brothers and Sisters for this work of eighteen panels of canvas, each measuring 198 cm x 137 cm, and evenly divided into three six-panel “Parts,” each with a subtitle. I also decided on the stipulation that any individual could appear only once in the work. As in the case of Red Star over China, this new work would be a cross section of twentieth-century Chinese history from the end of June 1936 to June 1937. The persons depicted would be historical figures, and they would look as they did during that timeframe (with one exception that will be explained later). Anyone who died before the end of June 1936 would be excluded. As the work was a cross section in historical time, the lives of those portrayed naturally extended beyond this one-year timeframe. In the painting, the oldest ones had experienced the 1911 Revolution, and many of the younger ones lived into the twenty-first century. Each portrait “narrates” a story, and these stories, which number more than 300, span the whole of twentieth-century Chinese history— the topic “narrated” in the trilogy Brothers and Sisters. Afterwards, I made accommodations to include some persons not living in China at that time. There are several foreigners who had close

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connections with Chinese history and happened not to be in China during that one-year period. For example, the historian John K. Fairbank and his wife had left China over a year earlier, and Brigadier Evans F. Carlson was about to arrive in Shanghai; others like General Joseph W. Stilwell were indeed in China at the time, and there are some such as Leon Trotsky who had never been to China but had a profound influence on the course of Chinese history. My rationale for this specific timeframe was that, despite being fraught with latent crises, it was the least turbulent one-year period in the history of Republican China. It was a turning point in twentieth-century Chinese history, during which the Xi’an Incident was the landmark event. In 1936, the bloody civil war temporarily halted, only to be followed by the bloody eight-year War of Resistance against the Japanese invaders. In the second half of that year, all political forces formed a united front and, at least on the surface, supported Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek as national leader. At the same time, returning from the brink of total annihilation, the CPC began to consolidate its strength under the leadership of Mao Zedong. The journalist Edgar Snow notes that there were no signs of “personal worship” in the Chinese Soviet areas, and this was perhaps the most harmonious time in the history of the CPC. Even Zhang Guotao, who had broken off relations with the CPC leadership, was back in Bao’an and again cooperating with the Central Committee of the CPC. In the eight years following the crushing of warlord power during the Northern Expedition, there were many significant achievements and considerable progress made in the Chinese intellectual world. Led by Hu Shi, the voices of liberal-minded intellectuals were widely heard; and Lu Xun, the vocal representative of left-wing intellectuals who died in 1936, was posthumously awarded the title “Soul of the Nation.” Most of the great cultural icons were at the height of their creative powers, and in spite of the relentless civil wars since the 1911 revolution the lives of people in the big fast-modernizing urban centers like Beijing and Shanghai remained unaffected. The relatively quiet life of learning enjoyed by

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intellectuals was not seriously disrupted until mid-1937 with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident and then, following immediately afterwards, the full-scale invasion of China by the Japanese imperial forces. Brothers and Sisters showcases the top elite in various fields during the Republican era, but there are unavoidably omissions at the next level of elites. I exercised my privileged position as artist and creator, so some of the figures were not chosen on the ground of historical importance, but because of personal preference. Thus, the work is partly history, but also partly creative. These 300 or so figures can be roughly divided into three groups. In the first group are the political and military leaders of the KMT government, as well as opposition political commentators and leaders of national salvation organizations. In the second group are people belonging to cultural and other circles. The third group is made up of people in the communist camp. Because each person can only appear once in the painting, people like communist Chen Duxiu, who was also the flag bearer of the May Fourth Movement, having appeared in the communist group could not be placed alongside his old friend Hu Shi. Brothers and Sisters is a historical narrative with the characters appearing sequentially from left to right. In Part I of this visual trilogy titled Revolution, communist revolutionaries are portrayed but because of the pivotal role of the Xi’an Incident in the narrative, KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek, who should appear in Part II, appears here in Part I. Of course, when Part II of the trilogy is lined up alongside, Chiang Kai-shek is reunited with the members of his KMT government. Part II is titled National Salvation and includes key figures from the National Revolutionary Army, the KMT government, political opposition groups, as well as soldiers and citizens fighting the Japanese in Manchuria. Emperor Puyi of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and communist fighter heroine Zhao Yiman also appear here. Part III, titled Enlightenment, portrays intellectuals from all walks of life. Some CPC members like Feng Xuefeng, Tian Han, and Xian Xinghai also appear here, but the

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prominent figures of this group of course include Hu Shi, Lu Xun, and Cai Yuanpei. The last person in this painting is Buddhist Master Hongyi (a.k.a. Li Shutong). For me the narrative mode means that the artist adopts the historian’s strategy of excavating facts but refraining from making moral or ethical judgments. Only images are presented, and members of the audience are left to form their own opinions. In my works, those who are usually regarded as leaders or soldiers, heroes or traitors, high officials or ordinary citizens, friends or enemies are all reduced to the common denominator of “individual,” and as such are afforded the same space and dignity. Over the past year, I read the first and second volumes of the Chinese edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece The Red Wheel. What impressed me most was that despite his unambiguously extreme political views, he casts aside his role as political commentator in this historical novel. He said he had based the novel on real historical figures with real names, as well as on ordinary people. Of course, as a novel, there are many passages containing psychological descriptions of characters and dialogues that are naturally fictional. In several chapters, he relates the story of Stolypin’s agrarian reforms and intersperses them with descriptions of the czar’s inner conflicts. There are chapters describing the life of Stolypin’s young assassin and on Lenin’s psychology. When he wrote about a character, it was always based on the character’s viewpoints and values: even if the third-person pronoun was used, it was as if the narration was in the first person. So, the story surrounding each character was logical and evoked sympathy in the reader. This was also the case in his treatment of Lenin, which for me surpasses any literary work on Lenin, even though Solzhenitsyn can hardly be regarded as politically sympathetic towards Lenin. In terms of structure and narration, Brothers and Sisters is somewhat like a visual Chinese version of The Red Wheel. Whereas Solzhenitsyn used literary narration to recreate his historical figures, I have used visual portraits for my narration. In preparation, like Solzhenitsyn, I

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read huge amounts of material to understand the lives of each character. I also searched widely for as many of their photographs as possible: the images of all my characters are based on actual photographs. Using my experience of more than twenty years of portrait painting, and my understanding of people’s anatomy and facial expressions, I allowed my characters to emerge from the black-and-white world of photography of those historical times into the world of rich oil colors, and in this way to vie for a place of prominence in art galleries and museums. Modern Chinese history, especially the official history of the CPC, was totally distorted during the Cultural Revolution. While some archival material remains inaccessible, today, more than thirty years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, historians in China are making great strides in discovering historical truth. The most outstanding work I have read is Gao Hua’s groundbreaking work How Did the Red Sun Rise in Yan’an. The works of others such as Yang Kuisong, Yang Jisheng, Dai Qing, Gao Wenqian, Shen Zhihua, Shan Shaojie, Yuan Weishi, Zhu Xueqin, Xie Yong, Li Hui, Ding Dong, Zhi Xiaomin, Lin Xianzhi, He Fang, Wang Guanquan, and Qin Feng taken together give us a true composite outline of the history of this period. The large amount of first-hand material, such as letters, diaries, documents, photographs and memoirs, are helping today’s readers understand the reality of that bygone era. At the same time, many works by overseas historians have also been published in translation for Chinese readers. However, this new trend in scholarship has not been reflected in the genre of history paintings. There has been an official push for history-painting projects that has resulted in a history-painting craze, but there are few professional painters who study history. The modus operandi is that project leaders choose the topics, and project painters are appointed to execute the paintings, and this is very like the mode of art production used during the Cultural Revolution. Twenty-five years ago, in my painting Red Star over China, I broke away from that mode. In my present painting, Brothers and Sisters, I seek to demonstrate the

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progress that has been achieved by scholars and researchers on China’s modern and contemporary history. My own long-term study of history through examining both textual and visual archives is coupled with my equally long-term passion for exploring the aesthetic possibilities of creating a visual portrayal that approximates the truth of the history of the Republican era. During the early 1930s, Japanese forces occupied the Three Eastern Provinces (Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang) that they renamed Manchukuo and used as a base for further encroachments on China’s territorial sovereignty. The title Brothers and Sisters alludes to how the Chinese population put aside political differences and unified to fight the onslaught of the Japanese Imperial Army. The Red Army of the CPC and the National Army of the KMT government had been locked in a fierce civil war, but from 1935 onwards CPC official pronouncements began quoting this line from The Book of Songs to call for the cessation of the civil war and to join in the fight against the foreign invaders. Interestingly, in Chiang Kai-shek’s recently published diary, the same quotation is also recorded. Therefore “Brothers quarrel within the walls, but unite against outside threats” was a common sentiment that resonated loudly in the Republic of China during the period cross-sectioned in my painting. Brothers and Sisters is a visual epic painted in the twenty-first century, and the individual parts of the trilogy—Revolution, National Salvation, and Enlightenment—as well as the entire painting is a visual narrative. The Chinese title that uses only the first half of that line of ancient text, “Brothers Quarrel within the Walls,” may be regarded as reflective. My standpoint, as was Solzhenitsyn’s, does not affect the realistic narration of my painting, or my position of neutrality as an observer of history. II I have only completed Part I of the trilogy: Revolution. Parts II and III will be painted later. This means that Revolution will be exhibited by itself, and can be regarded as an independent and complete work or as a

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sister work to Red Star over China. The title Revolution here refers to the ten-year “Soviet movement” in China that began in 1927 and ended in 1937. The commanding power behind the revolutionary movement was the Comintern with its headquarters located in Moscow—the Leninist International established in 1919 by the Bolsheviks. Led by Lenin, its purpose was to promote world revolution to counter Engels’s Second International. Lenin, Trotsky, and others believed that if world revolution failed, the Russian Revolution would not be sustainable. At that time, at least in theory, the Comintern was above the Russian Communist Party and the headquarters of a host of communist parties located in various countries. Sun Yat-sen had enlisted Comintern help to reorganize and revitalize the KMT, and members of the CPC were admitted into the KMT to fight in the National Revolutionary Army against the northern warlords who were causing the fledgling republic to disintegrate into warlord kingdoms. However, following Sun Yat-sen’s death in 1925, Chiang Kaishek assumed control of the KMT, and from 1927 he proceeded to purge both the KMT and the whole country of communists. The CPC followed Comintern directives and regarded Chiang Kai-shek as its archenemy until 1935. During roughly the same period, in the Soviet Union, following the death of Lenin in 1924, the Bolsheviks also split. Through intrigue and violence, Stalin expelled Trotsky from the Russian Communist Party and later had him assassinated. He also executed most of the old comrades of the Lenin era and began to enforce his personal dictatorship. Stalin maintained that the Soviet Union could succeed in realizing communism within Russia itself, so during the 1930s the Comintern was reduced to being a subordinate department of the Russian Communist Party that was charged with managing communist activities in other countries, but with Stalin exercising overall control. Following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, by 1933 the fascist axis of Germany, Italy, and Japan began to take shape. The Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov successfully defended himself at the Leipzig Trial of

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1934 for complicity in the famous Reichstag Arson Case. Afterwards he went to Moscow, became a Soviet citizen, and headed the Comintern to carry out Stalin’s policies. The rise of fascism caused a policy adjustment in Moscow. A popular front was called for, and a broad-based, antifascist alliance was forged with former enemies, including Socialist Party members of the Second International and some petit bourgeois parties. At the same time, Stalin brutally suppressed those who were regarded as deadly enemies within the Russian Communist Party—the Trotskyites. Because of the policy shift, Wang Ming, head of the Chinese delegation in the Comintern, drafted the August First Declaration. The document was so named because it was published on 1 August 1935 in the National Salvation Times in Paris. The declaration advocated the establishment of a nationwide, broad-based, anti-Japanese united front and a halt to opposing Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang immediately searched for a channel of communication with the CPC through his secret service, while still holding out hope of forcing the communists to surrender on the battlefield. The Central Committee of the CPC, arriving in northern Shaanxi at the end of the Long March, did not reestablish contact with the Comintern until November 1935. At the time, the KMT forces engaged in fighting the Communists were the Northeast Army that had lost its homeland and were strongly anti-Japanese, and the Northwest Army that had always retained contact with the CPC. By the beginning of 1936, a truce basically existed between the two sides. The leader of the Northeast Army, Zhang Xueliang, arranged to secretly meet with CPC leader Zhou Enlai, and several months later he applied to join the CPC. Existing documents in the Comintern reveal that Moscow opposed his application, but he was accepted by the CPC. The leader of the Northwest Army, Yang Hucheng, had applied to join the CPC as early as 1928, but his application was rejected because of the decision of the Sixth National Congress to adopt a “closed door” policy. However, in 1930, while in Japan on a study tour, he again applied for membership. This time, his application was approved. By the time the decision reached the Tokyo branch of the CPC, Yang

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had returned to China and could not be notified, but by then he was in fact already a member of the CPC. At the time the Red Army in the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region and the forces of the Northeast Army and the Northwest Army had secretly formed an alliance to stop the civil war, and to “force Chiang Kai-shek to fight the Japanese.” Moscow wanted Chiang to lead a proposed united front. The impulsive Zhang Xueliang staged a coup on 12 December 1935 and, together with Yang Hucheng, kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek to force him to comply. The Moscow directive was to resolve the incident peacefully. During Sun Yat-sen’s leadership of the National Revolutionary Army against the warlords in the early 1920s, Zhou Enlai had served as deputy of the Whampoa Military Academy headed by Chiang Kai-shek, so a verbal agreement was reached. Zhang Xueliang, like a scholar-general of bygone times, personally escorted Chiang Kaishek back to the national capital of Nanjing, whereupon Chiang had him placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. The arrest of Zhang Xueliang resulted in internal strife within the Northeast Army, during which the youth faction shot their most important leader, General Wang Yizhe (who had joined the CPC in secret some time earlier). Yang Hucheng was forced into exile overseas but was later imprisoned and executed. So, the grand alliance in the northwest collapsed. However, Chiang Kai-shek fulfilled his promise. By the end of spring and early summer of 1937, the CPC achieved legal status. The ruling KMT government sent an investigative team to the Soviet region, and in the summer of 1937 the Red Army was reorganized into three divisions of the National Revolutionary Army and renamed the Eighth Route Army. A year later, the remaining Red Army in the south was reorganized into the New Fourth Army. On 7 July 1937, Chinese and Japanese armies exchanged fierce gunfire in the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, and the eight-year War of Resistance against Japan formally began. This is the historical setting of Brothers and Sisters, Part I, titled Revolution.

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Revolution consists of six canvases, with two canvases forming a unit. The three units are introduced from left to right: “Comintern,” “Soviet Region and Red Army” and “United Front.” “Comintern”: The two canvases of the “Comintern” unit were added after I had completed the basic sketch, but this unit now precedes the other two units. The addition of this unit provides Revolution with a more complete picture of the communist revolution of that time. The left half of the “Comintern” unit is made up of a group of rather special people. For a long time, they were outside the Stalin-Mao orthodox communist camp; however, they were regarded as “communist elements” by the KMT government and were persecuted and imprisoned. They were intellectuals, and almost all had a strongly humanist conscience. However, they had chosen a difficult path and were called Trotskyites. In 1988, the USSR Communist Party eventually overturned the historical declaration that Trotsky was a traitor,2 but three years later both the USSR Communist Party and the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. As a result, Russian historians have little interest in Trotsky. The opposite was true in China where all Trotskyites in the country were imprisoned in 1952, and it was not until 1979 that those still alive were released. To date there has been no official announcement of their rehabilitation, and I am probably the first painter to document their images. The central figure of the Trotskyites is, of course, Trotsky himself. He was one of the founders of the Comintern, so I have included him in this painting. However, I have not portrayed him as an ordinary intellectual during the 1936–1937 period, but instead as a soldier inspecting his troops for the last time in 1924. This is to emphasize his standing as second in command during the October Revolution and as one of the founders of the Red Army. The Chinese Trotskyite organization frequently splintered, but it was at the insistence of Trotsky that Chen Duxiu was recognized as leader. Chen Duxiu occupies an extremely important position in Chinese history. He was the flag bearer of the New Culture Movement that began around

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1915 and had the May Fourth Movement of 1919 as its landmark. Two years later, this Peking University professor of Chinese literature became one of the founders of the CPC and a major political leader during Sun Yat-sen’s national revolutionary movement. In 1927 when the movement failed, Stalin held Chen Duxiu responsible and his status as leader of the CPC came to an end. When Chen discovered that it was Stalin who wanted him to take the blame for the failure, Chen became a follower of Trotskyism. Chen Duxiu and many other Trotskyites were imprisoned by the KMT government in 1931 and not released until the beginning of the War of Resistance against the Japanese, so I have painted Chen as a prisoner. However, he could write letters to his girlfriend and even allowed meetings with her. By that time, Chen had given up on communism and returned to being a democrat. In his old age, he resisted the enticement of officialdom and died in poverty. He was an exemplar for many Chinese intellectuals. The Chinese Trotskyites attracted the sympathy of a young American, Harold Isaacs, who presented a Trotskyist viewpoint in China Forum, the journal that he founded. Prior to that he had actively participated in the Human Rights Alliance of China founded by Song Qingling. There is a famous photograph of him, together with Bernard Shaw, Lu Xun and others, taken in front of the Song residence. However, the image of Isaacs was erased in all the airbrushed versions of the photograph subsequently reproduced. The appellation “Trotskyite” referred to a criminal offense for a long time in China, and to be named such was the equivalent of being named a “historical counterrevolutionary.” One of my mathematics teachers at high school was accused of being a Trotskyite and forced to undergo reform through hard labor. A fellow classmate was responsible for dealing with the case, and he told me in secret: “When the Trotskyites held their secret meetings, they also sang The Internationale.” That was my first encounter with Trotskyites, and at the time I was eighteen.

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Numerous fine young intellectuals lost their lives after being labeled a Trotskyite. For example, in the 1942 Huxi Purge of Trotskyites that took place in the anti-Japanese Shandong base area, the local CPC killed more than 200 party members. The most prominent murder was of noted writer Wang Shiwei, who fell victim of the Yan’an Rectification Campaign and was executed in 1947 when he, in fact, just happened to be a friend of the Trotskyites Wang Fanxi, Zheng Chaoling, and Chen Qichang. Through Kang Sheng and others, Stalin accused the Trotskyites of colluding with the fascists, but the famous Trotskyite Chen Qichang was killed by the Japanese military police. I failed to find any photographs of Chen and unfortunately could not include him in the painting. The Comintern agent sent by Lenin to help the Chinese found the CPC was Hendricus Sneevliet (a.k.a. Maring), who later became leader of the Trotskyite faction of the Dutch Communist Party. Afterwards, he was tortured to death by the Gestapo. Of course, huge numbers of Trotskyites died in the gulags scattered throughout the USSR. In the “Comintern” unit of the painting, the person representing Stalin orthodoxy is Dimitrov. He twice directed the CPC to consolidate Mao Zedong’s leadership position in the CPC, so he played the role of kingmaker. Wang Ming, as a member of the standing committee of the Comintern, should in theory have been in the upper echelon of the CPC leadership. However, because he had not taken part in the Long March, his credentials had little value either in the army or in the party. Moreover, in the Yan’an Rectification Campaign, Mao Zedong thoroughly discredited Wang, after which his status within the CPC was totally diminished. A leader of the Far East Bureau of the Comintern, Hilaire Noulens, was arrested with his wife by the KMT government in 1931, and the couple were sentenced to life imprisonment. Moscow ordered Richard Sorge, its secret agent in Shanghai at that time, to secure the couple’s freedom. At the same time, Song Qingling was instructed to organize a worldwide campaign to call for their release. Sorge later led a spy group in Japan and warned Stalin of Hitler’s intention to invade the Soviet

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Union. The Japanese authorities later executed Sorge and his Japanese comrade Ozaki Hozumi. Song Qingling (a.k.a. Soong Ching-ling, Madam Sun Yat-sen) was in fact a secret member of the Comintern. She passed intelligence to the party by hiding notes in her cigarette case. In the mid-1930s, after CPC members had retreated from Shanghai, she played a very special role. Most of the foreign journalists and communist sympathizers portrayed in my painting Revolution were either her friends or comrades. When Chiang Kai-shek wanted to get in touch with the CPC, it was through Song Qingling that the communist secret agent Dong Jianwu was dispatched to Bao’an in the soviet area. On Song Qingling’s recommendation, the young American doctor George Hatem went to serve in the Red Army. She also provided the introduction for Edgar Snow that facilitated his visit to northern Shaanxi. Another American journalist, Agnes Smedley, was Song’s comrade and collaborator. When Smedley revealed a secret agreement between the KMT and the CPC, Song wrote a letter of complaint to Wang Ming, who was in Moscow. On another occasion, Song had sent US$50,000 for the Red Army that Mao Zedong had requested, but Zhou Enlai mentioned this to Song Ziwen in the Chiang Kai-shek camp, leaving Song Qingling in an invidious position. Song Qingling was an extraordinary person who valued humanist values above the party. She alerted Trotskyite Harold Isaacs to the danger of agents sent by Stalin, even though she herself belonged to Stalin’s camp. After 1949, she was forced to remain in Beijing for a long time, but she continued writing to Mao Zedong to oppose many of his policies. When Noulens and his wife were released from prison, Song Qingling helped facilitate their return to the Soviet Union. The Noulens are portrayed in the “Comintern” unit of this painting. Facing great difficulties, Song Qingling’s Human Rights Alliance of China (later renamed China Welfare Foundation) worked hard to improve the treatment of political prisoners. The other famous person portrayed in the “Comintern” unit of the painting is the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune. In 1937, on the battle-

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front of the Spanish Civil War he was the first to set up a blood-transfusion unit. However, the anti-espionage organization of the Republican government that was controlled by Stalin suspected him of being a spy, so he was denied permission to return to the Spanish battlefront. This was why he ended up in China, where he died in 1939 during the Japanese invasion, and later became a household name throughout China. Behind Bethune in the painting is Xie Weijin, who had organized a contingent of more than 100 Chinese men to fight in the International Brigade in Spain. At that time, he was political commissar of the artillery unit. Behind Dimitrov is Shi Zhe, a member of Stalin’s secret police, who later became Mao Zedong’s interpreter. He also served in Kang Sheng’s enforcer machinery within the CPC. In the two large-scale purges launched by Mao—the Yan’an Rectification Campaign and the Cultural Revolution—Kang Sheng was the main executioner. Seated on the ground are Harold Isaacs and Ye Ting. A fine military commander, Ye Ting was a tragic figure because he failed to win the trust of the Comintern and was never given the chance of realizing his potential. In 1946, soon after his release from a long period of incarceration by Chiang Kai-shek, he died in an air crash. “Soviet Region and Red Army”: Most of the people in this two-panel unit appear in my earlier painting Red Star over China. One of the additions is Hu Yaobang, who at the time was a political cadre. Around 1980, he became the leading reform leader in the CPC. The interpreter in the long conversation between Edgar Snow and Mao Zedong is the party intellectual Wu Liping. The founder of the northern Shaanxi soviet region, Gao Gang, also appears alongside his comrade Xi Zhongxun. Taken directly from historical photographs are “three sisters” and “three brothers.” The former are three unknown female Red Army prisoners, and the latter are three Red Army officers, including Zhang Aiping. These parallel the “three sisters,”—three female Chinese communist prisoners in the “Comintern” unit of the painting—and the “Three Musketeers” of the Northeast Army youth faction in the next unit of the painting, “United

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Front.” These are all ideal groupings supplied in historical photographs. The stories of the people portrayed in “Soviet Region and Red Army” are detailed in chapter 2, “Red Star over China.” “United Front”: The composition of this unit flows naturally from the previous panel. At the extreme left is Tu Sizong, who headed the KMT investigative team to the soviet region, and together with the young dancers in red, blue, and white costumes, they represent the emergence of the united front of KMT and CPC forces to fight the Japanese. Smedley is wearing a Red Army uniform, and behind her is a “KMT officer,” who is in fact the communist composer Zhang Hanhui, who had just joined the Northeast Army. In 1936 Zhang wrote the famous song “On the Songhua River” (a.k.a. “On the Sungari River”), which is a modern retelling of the ancient legend “Chu Songs on All Sides” and tells of being isolated and surrounded by the enemy. “On the Songhua River” became the most popular song in China from around the time of the Xi’an Incident and continued to be sung throughout the decade of the War of Resistance. The Shanghai communist group of which Smedley was part kept in close contact with Song Qingling. Behind Smedley is the German communist Hans Shippe, who was killed while interviewing the New Fourth Army during a Japanese attack. The New Zealander and WWI veteran Rewi Alley later founded industrial cooperatives with Edgar Snow and his wife to help the Chinese government establish industrial systems for the war effort. In early 1936 Alley took in the Red Army engineering expert Liu Ding, who had just been released from prison. At the time, Zhang Xueliang was secretly looking for a communist adviser, so Liu Ding was recommended to Zhang Xueliang’s headquarters in Xi’an. Following a night-long conversation, Liu Ding accompanied Zhang on a flight to Yan’an for a meeting with Zhou Enlai. Liu Ding became a good friend of Zhang Xueliang and played a vital role in changing Zhang’s political beliefs. Another important CPC secret agent, Pan Hannian, was sent by the Comintern in 1936 to meet the KMT secret agent Zhang Chong to

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negotiate cooperation between the KMT and the CPC. Zhang Chong later became the main negotiator between the two parties; he died in 1940 of illness. In 1963 Pan Hannian was sent to prison, accused in the high court of having surrendered to the KMT and engaging in KMT espionage activities. However, CPC fighter Yan Huanglin’s memoirs of Yan’an times, recently published in Tides of a Century magazine, reveal that Zhang Chong had secretly joined the CPC. I have painted both these unfortunate men together here. The Australian involved in the Xi’an Incident was William Henry Donald, or “Donald of China” as he has been called. Twelve years younger than his compatriot “Morrison of Peking,” he too was a journalist, and he served as a political adviser to several Chinese leaders. When the Xi’an Incident occurred, he was an adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. Having formerly been adviser to Zhang Xueliang he became the two men’s gobetween. His report of the Xi’an Incident made the New Zealand student James Bertram famous overnight. I have used Bertram’s photograph of Donald interviewing Sun Mingjiu and others of the Northeast Army youth faction, the so-called “Three Musketeers.” On two occasions, in 1979 and 1983, I interviewed Sun Mingjiu, who was by then very old. However, he described how he had taken Chiang Kai-shek from his hiding place on Mount Li and carried him on his back down to the car that drove to Xi’an. He also told me how Chiang had used qigong to calm himself. After successful negotiations with Chiang Kai-shek, Zhou Enlai flew a military aircraft back to Yan’an to report, so he was dressed as a flyer. This photograph of him became a unique image of that historical turning point. As my painting is a group portrait that transcends time and space, and not a record of the actual happening, I have given Chiang Kai-shek the dignity of being dressed in his generalissimo uniform, instead of the night robe he was wearing at the time. I did so to emphasize his status as the supreme commander of China’s entire armed forces that was recognized during the War of Resistance. Nonetheless, in the painting I have him

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sitting on a mountain rock to suggest the circumstances of his kidnapping. Chiang’s face shows controlled anger, and the protruding veins at the corner of his eyes are based on archival photographic materials. This is also the case with the wrinkles on Mao Zedong’s forehead when he raises his head. These two men are the most important figures in the history of twentieth-century China. Their images are the two major focal points of Brothers and Sisters, Part I: Revolution, and viewers are invited to consider them. At a later stage of the painting, I placed before Chiang Kai-shek’s feet the image of a destitute old woman from a photograph by Jack Birns. The image of the woman picking up grains of rice from the dirt appears to float beyond the elite of this “group photo,” and is a reflective coda that I have added to this narrative painting. The woman serves as a stark reminder that large numbers in the population were starving at the time, and that desperation from prolonged famine and fighting was a primal motive and driving force for revolution, and this probably contributed to the victory of the CPC. However, because of Mao’s overweening ambition for supreme power, his man-made catastrophe resulted in more than 36 million people starving to death. IV Fourteen couples are portrayed in Revolution, and their fates reflect the turbulent nature of the times. (1) Chen Duxiu and Pan Lanzhen. Chen lost both sons in the national revolutionary movement of the 1920s, and his wife died of illness. Later, Pan Lanzhen, who worked in a cigarette factory and was more than twenty years his junior, fell in love with him. It was only when he was imprisoned in 1931 that she realized he was a great scholar and a revolutionary. The pair lived in a dilapidated house provided by a friend, and she was his companion in the last ten years of his impoverished life when he was afflicted with illness.

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(2) Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan. Both were central figures in the early years of the CPC; each had studied in the Soviet Union at different times. Attracted to Trotsky’s ideals, both left the CPC in 1929 and organized an opposition party. Peng Shuzhi was imprisoned at the same time as Chen Duxiu in 1931, and he too regained his freedom in the summer of 1937 at the beginning of the War of Resistance. Peng Shuzhi and Chen Bilan left China in 1949 and spent the rest of their lives engaged in political activities of the Fourth International. (3) Li Lisan and Li Sha. In 1930 Li Lisan became one of the leaders in the highest echelons of the Central Committee of the CPC. However, his radical “adventurism” led to his expulsion from this position, and he was forced to remain in the Soviet Union. Later, accused of being a Trotskyite he was imprisoned for two years and almost executed. The love of a Russian woman, Li Sha, helped him through his predicament, and they remained a loving couple until the end. Li Lisan’s persecution during the Cultural Revolution led to his death. (4) Chiang Ching-kuo and Faina Chiang Fang-liang. Chiang Chingkuo was sent by his father, Chiang Kai-shek, to Moscow to study. He opposed his father’s split with the CPC in 1927, and by joining the Russian Communist Party he became Stalin’s hostage. In 1931 one of the important leaders of the Comintern’s Far East Bureau, Hilaire Noulens, was arrested together with his wife. Acting through Song Qingling, Moscow proposed that Chiang Kai-shek release the Noulens in exchange for Chiang Chingkuo. Chiang Kai-shek refused. Stalin would later reenact this scenario. When Hitler held Stalin’s son Jacob captive, he proposed an exchange for General Paulos. Stalin refused. In the Soviet Union, Chiang Ching-kuo captured the heart of a Russian woman, Faina Ipat’evna Vakhreva (Chiang Fang-liang), who became first lady when Chiang Ching-kuo succeeded his father as president of the Republic of China in Taiwan, 1978–1988. (5) Sha Wenhan and Chen Xiuliang. Both were CPC underground workers who had for a time worked for the Comintern. Chen Xiuliang made an extraordinary contribution to the CPC victory in 1949. When

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one million PLA troops crossed the Yangtze and “liberated” the KMT capital of Nanjing, the CPC underground led by Chen Xiuliang had already secured the defection of many key figures of the KMT’s army, navy, and air force, as well as its police and judicial departments. This meant that the PLA had prior knowledge of the KMT Yangtze defense plans, and this resulted in the KMT troops surrendering with little resistance. Nanjing was, in effect, in the hands of defectors even before the PLA entered the city. However, in the 1950s, members of the CPC underground suffered in large-scale purges. In 1957 Mao denounced Zhejiang Provincial Governor Sha Wenhan and his wife Chen Xiuliang as “rightist elements.” The couple suffered twenty years of injustice, and Sha Wenhan was hounded to death. (6) Hilaire Noulens and his wife, Tatyana Moiseenko. Both were Soviet Union citizens working as a team in the communication department of the Comintern’s Far East Bureau. They were responsible for the transmission of international documents, intelligence, and money. Their identities were revealed in June 1931 when an agent working under them was arrested in Singapore. They were extradited from the foreign concessions in Shanghai and arrested by the KMT authorities. Both were given life sentences but were released at the beginning of the War of Resistance. Most of their comrades had returned to the Soviet, and all lost their lives in Stalin’s great purge, 1936–1938. By returning to the Soviet Union in 1939, the couple probably escaped execution. (7) Bo Gu and Zhang Yuexia. Bo Gu was once the top leader of the CPC, but in the timeframe of this painting he had already lost his position to Luo Fu (a.k.a. Zhang Wentian) and Mao Zedong. In my painting, Zhang Yuexia is still in prison. After her release, she worked in the CPC South China Bureau and married Bo Gu, who died in an airplane crash in 1946. Zhang single-handed brought up six children: two with Bo Gu and four from a previous marriage. (8) Chen Changhao and Zhang Qinqiu. Chen and Zhang, and Zhang’s previous husband, Shen Zemin, had all been students at Sun Yat-sen

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University in Moscow. After returning to China in 1930, all three were sent to the Hubei-Henan-Anhui area to establish a soviet region and a red army. Shen Zemin was the leader until Zhang Guotao was sent to serve as chairman. The Hubei-Henan-Anhui Soviet Region was the largest and strongest soviet region and red army base outside of the Central Committee’s Soviet Region. Following Shen Zemin’s death from illness in 1933, Chen married Zhang Qinqiu and also became Zhang Guotao’s main assistant. Zhang Qinqiu founded the women’s regiment of the Fourth Front Red Army, and Chen Changhao became the political commissar of the Fourth Front Red Army. In 1936, they led the Western Route Red Army and were defeated by the Muslim Cavalry in the Gansu corridor. Zhang gave birth to a son in the desert and was captured, but she was released soon after because of the united front against the Japanese and returned to Yan’an. Chen Changhao lost the trust of the Central Committee and was sent to Moscow to work as an editor in a publishing house where he married a Russian worker. During the Cultural Revolution, both Zhang Qinqiu and Chen Changhao were persecuted, and each committed suicide. Chen’s Russian wife was imprisoned for eight years, and eventually migrated to Sydney. (9) Mao Zedong and He Zizhen. Mao Zedong was married to Yang Kaihui when he began to live with He Zizhen soon after he led a rebel army to Jin’gang Mountains in 1927. Yang Kaihui was subsequently killed by the KMT in 1930. Mao and He Zizhen were together for ten years and had several children, but only one survived. During the Long March, He Zizhen was wounded, and in 1937 she went to Moscow for treatment, remaining there until 1949. In her absence, Jiang Qing became Mao’s partner. (10) Zhu De and Kang Keqing. In 1922 Zhu De sent away his wife and concubines, resigned from his military post, and went to Germany where he joined the CPC. After the Nanchang Uprising of 1927, he became a founder of the Chinese Red Army. His wife during the Jin’gang Mountains period was Wu Ruolan, who died on the battlefield. Afterwards, he

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married the seventeen-year-old fighter Kang Keqing, and they lived together till the end. (11) Edgar Snow and Helen Foster Snow. Both were very committed professional journalists. Each had traveled separately to China where they met and were married in 1932. In 1935, both were in Beijing (then known as Beiping) teaching at Yanjing University. Snow visited the soviet region in Yan’an in 1936, and Helen Foster Snow later during the spring– summer of 1937. Later, under the name Nym Wales, she published Inside Red China that became as famous as Snow’s Red Star over China. The couple separated in 1944. (12) Liu Ding and Wu Xianqing. Wu Xianqing was the widow of the early CPC member Xuan Zhonghua. In 1927, she married Liu Ding in the Soviet Union. Leaving their baby behind, they returned to China to work in the underground forces. Liu Ding was ordered to work in the Red Army in the Soviet region in 1933, and they became separated forever. Wu Xianqing worked in Comintern intelligence but, betrayed by a turncoat, she escaped to the Soviet Union only to be arrested as a “Japanese spy” and executed. Liu Ding was twice arrested and released but was always under investigation. However, because of his role in the successful execution of the Xi’an Incident, he enjoyed a peaceful life to the end. (13) Wang Bingnan and Wang Anna. CPC member Wang Bingnan traveled to Germany to study with the financial backing of Yang Hucheng, where he met and married Anna, an anti-Hitler German scholar. They returned to China in 1936, just when Yang Hucheng had reestablished his connections with the CPC. The couple became Yang’s assistants, and both played an active role in the Xi’an Incident and subsequent political events. Wang Anna became Song Qingling’s assistant, and Wang Bingnan became Zhou Enlai’s assistant. In 1949 the two parted amicably, and in 1956 Anna returned to East Germany. The title of the Chinese edition of her memoir is Married to Revolutionary China.

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(14) Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling. When Chiang Kai-shek married Soong Mei-ling, the younger sister of Song Qingling, it was considered a political marriage at the time, but later events indicate that they loved and admired each other. Soong Mei-ling had a good American education, and was a great help politically to Chiang. She also introduced him to Christianity. 22 September 2012

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Notes 1. The documentary produced by Storm Production and sponsored by Screen Australia and SBS television, has gone to air on SBS television many times. 2. New York Times, 15 January 1989.

Chapter 10

Spain 1937 Towards the end of 2007, the “Mexican Suitcase” arrived at the New York office of the International Center of Photography. It contained three boxes packed with 127 rolls of photographic negatives and other documents. These shots of the Spanish Civil War were the work of three photographers—Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim (a.k.a David Seymour)—who had long since perished on various battlefields. The “Mexican Suitcase” disappeared in 1940 when Paris fell to the Nazis but, entrusted to a military attaché of the Mexican Embassy in Paris, had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and then passed through various hands. Robert Capa’s brother Cornell founded the International Center of Photography, and when the suitcase arrived sixty-seven years later it can be said to have come home. The events surrounding these recently unearthed black-andwhite photographs have been publicized in retrospective exhibitions and publications, and they serve as stark reminders of the wanton bloodshed of the Spanish Civil War that took place over seventy years ago. The Spanish Civil War has occupied a position on the periphery of my mind for decades because my reading has focused on the international communist movement, World War II in Europe, and the development of modernism in art. In recent years, my attention was drawn to the Spanish

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Civil War by George Orwell’s writings, André Malraux’s autobiography and biographies, and the works of two Chinese women: Lin Da’s Spanish Travelogue and Hong Ying’s prize-winning novel K: The Art of Love that resulted in a lawsuit brought against her. Moreover, in Australia, SBS Television has shown several excellent films on the period, such as Javier Cercas’s Soldiers of Salamis. While in Barcelona in 2008, I tried to imagine a civil war such as that experienced by George Orwell: a conflict between the security forces and the militia forces of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). I looked up at the Alcazar Fortress high up on the hill that has become the Mecca of my mind because of El Greco. The government forces never captured this rebel stronghold. Of course, the most exciting moment for me in Spain was when I saw Guernica in the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. For me this poignant work was the pinnacle of Pablo Picasso’s art. In 2006 while working on the historical mural Merdeka that commemorated Malaysia’s independence, I had the opportunity in Bangkok to meet with the legendary Chin Peng, the secretary general of the Malayan Communist Party. I learned that the salute of Malayan communists was the Spanish salute: a raised right fist to the eyebrow. Chin Peng said that a comrade soldier from China had taught them the salute, and they had adopted it: the salute was a distant echo from the Spanish Civil War. The Red Army in China did not use this salute. The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, coincided with Stalin’s purge of Leninists, so it was known as the civil war within a civil war. Francisco Franco’s army had the support of Nazi Germany’s air force and Fascist Italy’s tanks, whereas the major democratic countries such as England, France, and the United States remained neutral. The Republican government forces could rely only on the arms supplied by the Soviet Union and the international column organized by the Comintern. However, Stalin’s secret service was at the same time directing the purge of POUM militia that was the mainstay of the Republican government forces. The POUM leader Andreu Nin—who had been Trotsky’s secretary—was killed, and

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the militia disarmed. Soon after, Stalin executed the Soviet advisors who had carried out his orders, including their leader Vladimir AntonovOvseyenko, who had been an ally of Trotsky. Head of the secret service Alexander Orlov had transported 600 tons of gold from the Spanish Treasury to the Soviet Union on Stalin’s orders, but afterwards, discovering he was redundant and disposable, he fled to the United States. Stalin utilized the Spanish Civil War to eradicate international Trotskyite volunteers, and at the same time disbanded the old Comintern founded in the Leninist era. By using those who had betrayed their comrades to save themselves, he organized a new Comintern that would take orders from him; six years later, he disbanded that as well. For the naïve idealists who had volunteered to fight against fascist forces, it was like the line of The Internationale: “This is the final struggle …” George Orwell escaped death twice. First, he was shot in the neck by Franco’s forces. He survived, only to find himself being hunted as a Trotskyite by the Republican government. At a critical juncture, he was forced to hide in a cave in some ruins in Barcelona. His experiences in Spain allowed him to see through all forms of extremism—Germany’s Nazi fascism as well as the Soviet Union’s Stalinism—and he went on to write his landmark works Animal Farm and 1984. The complex nature of the Spanish Civil War was such that after establishing his dictatorship with the help of German and Italian fascist forces, Franco decided not to join in World War II. He eventually handed his reign over to the royal family when he died in 1975, and King Juan Carlos brought democracy to Spain. This was a strange paradox: the dream of democracy was destroyed by a dictator, but afterwards was turned into a reality by a king. In reflecting on the legacy of those naïve idealists who had joined to fight in the Spanish Civil War, noteworthy are Picasso’s Guernica, and volumes of famous anti-utopian writings, Capa’s iconic photograph The Falling Soldier and Dr. Norman Bethune’s theory and practice of blood transfusion, and many more. These idealists were the first to resist the tanks of extremism with their own bodies.

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It was only in recent years that I learned about Gerda Taro, the first female war correspondent to die on the battlefield. Gerda Taro was a German Jew of Polish decent. At the age of twenty-four she was arrested for taking part in left-wing activities. Released from Nazi police detention, she took refuge in Paris, where she happened to meet a Hungarian Jew called Endre [André] Friedmann. He was three years younger than Taro, and it was from him that she learned the art of photojournalism. She gave André the ingenious name of Robert Capa, and she changed her own name from Gerta Pohorylle to Gerda Taro, and the two of them went off to Spain to take photographs for various news agencies. Their photographs of Republican forces fighting alongside the International Brigade against Franco’s forces quickly became famous throughout the world. Taro was killed in an accident while retreating from a battle scene, crushed to death by a Republican tank. Her body was taken back to Paris, and the French Communist Party gave her a solemn funeral and had her buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, where the martyrs of the Paris Commune were buried. The sculptor Alberto Giacometti created a monument for her grave. Gerda Taro died five days before her twentyseventh birthday. While she had taken numerous photographs, there are few photographs of her. In these rare shots, she appears as a lively woman of slight build with a beautiful oval face and short hair that, it is said, she dyed red herself. She appears smoking, making faces at the camera, coaxing a stubborn mule to walk, hiding behind a soldier in an air raid, and also sleeping soundly while wearing a man’s shirt and looking like a boy. Her last words were: “Where’s my camera? It’s still new …” Seventeen years later, Capa was killed by a land mine in Vietnam. And two years after that, in the 1956 war over the Suez Canal, a soldier shot their former companion, Chim. The first book I read about the Spanish Civil War was The Scalpel, the Sword: The Story of Dr. Norman Bethune. I was twenty at the time. One of the authors of the book was Ted Allan, who was only nineteen years old in 1937. He was a handsome young man who worked as an assistant in the blood-transfusion unit that Bethune ran in the Spanish

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Civil War, as well as working as a war correspondent. Allan and Gerda Taro, this luminary of the battlefield known as “The Little Red Fox,” had gone to the front and had been injured by the same tank that killed her; he had witnessed her death. He returned to Canada and was treated by Dr. Bethune, and later lived to a ripe old age. Research on Comintern archives indicate that Norman Bethune’s dedication to his profession had aroused the suspicion of the Spanish Republican government because of his requests for maps and battle reports. These were to give him quick access to battlefronts where casualties would have been greatest; a Swedish female journalist was suspected of being his collaborator. Bethune was sent back to Canada, ostensibly to raise funds. He was not allowed to return to Spain, and so he went to China instead. This was yet another example of the farreaching consequences of Stalin’s directives. The French writer André Malraux was a restless adventurer. Soon after the outbreak of civil war, he raised funds to buy airplanes and organized a volunteer flying squadron to go to Spain to fight for the Republican government. According to the testimonies of several memoirs, he was a squadron leader even though he did not know how to fly a plane. The Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg recalled: “In Valencia, the only thing he talked about was bombing the fascists. Whenever I mentioned literature, he would become impatient and not say a word.” Malraux later worked in the French Resistance to fight the German occupation forces. He was wounded and captured and became famously known as “Colonel Berger.” Ernest Hemingway was as much of an adventurer as Malraux, and he too was in Spain during this time. He was not a soldier; he went there with the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens to make the documentary The Spanish Earth. Hemingway later received the Nobel Prize. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who later received the same prize, was also in Spain at the time as a consular official. He was deeply saddened when soon after the outbreak of war rebel troops killed his good friend, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. Neruda was well known for his love poems, but

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now he used his poetry as a weapon to serve the cause of the Republican government. He became a communist and, although he later abandoned it, he was for a while a Stalinist. Neruda witnessed the coup of 11 September 1973 by Augusto Pinochet, the Franco of his country. He died ten days later, and some suspect he had been murdered: he had experienced two kinds of fascism. I have now introduced almost all the people in this painting. The limitations of the composition did not permit me to include people such as the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler, whose anti-totalitarian novel Darkness at Noon is as well-known as Orwell’s anti-utopian novel. He too was in Spain at the time, and was captured and sentenced to death. Winning a reprieve, he later went to live in England. I have no option but to have illustrious colleagues in the painting represent people like Koestler and Chim. But there is someone who must be included. Spain is represented in the painting by a surrealistic motor vehicle trimmed with the red, yellow, and purple of the Spanish, Republican and Catalonian flags. The body of the car is painted with Picasso’s Guernica, and a photograph of García Lorca, who had already been killed, is attached to the front windscreen. But who is driving the car? I gave the job to Julian Bell, who drove an ambulance for the International Brigade and was killed in a Nazi air-raid attack. Julian Bell was the nephew of English writer Virginia Woolf and the son of her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. He was a poet in Cambridge and a favorite of the Bloomsbury circle. He lived for only twenty-nine years. Some of my friends thought I had painted a work that was totally unrelated to China. This is, in fact, not the case. Norman Bethune has much to do with China, as discussed at length in chapter 4. While Bethune was in China, Joris Ivens and Robert Capa were there in 1938 to film the Chinese victory in the Tai’erzhuang Battle against the Japanese. It was a great pity that Gerda Taro had died by then, otherwise she certainly would have been there as well. Before leaving China, Ivens presented his movie camera to his Chinese colleague Wu Yinxian, saying repeatedly to

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him: “Yan’an! Yan’an!” Wu Yinxian took the camera to Yan’an and made the documentary Yan’an and the Eighth Route Army that included a scene of Bethune saving the lives of wounded Eighth Route Army soldiers. Later the film was sent to the Soviet Union for processing, during which it was lost. Ivens traveled to China several times to make documentaries and became known as the “Flying Dutchman.” Neruda went to China with Ivens in the 1950s and became friends with the poet Ai Qing, who was later branded a “rightist” by Mao Zedong and sent to do menial work in Xinjiang. In his memoir, Neruda frequently mentions Ai Qing. Of those in the painting, Malraux was the first to go to China. When he and Orwell were in their early twenties, they traveled to colonies of their respective home countries. Orwell went to Burma, while Malraux went to Indochina. It was said that Malraux also went to Canton (now known as Guangzhou) at the time. In 1931, he did in fact land in China, and the next year wrote his famous work Man’s Fate in which he describes China’s revolution and the political coup of 12 April 1927. In 1965, when China and France established diplomatic relations, Malraux visited China as the Minister of Cultural Affairs in the de Gaulle government, and he met with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Chen Yi. Finally, we come to Julian Bell. After teaching for two years at Wuhan University, he left China and went straight to the battlefields of Spain. He died in battle a few months later, just days before Gerda Taro. Historical sources note that Julian Bell said on his deathbed that he had wanted two things in life, and that he had accomplished both: to have a beautiful lover and to fight on a battlefield. When he was teaching at Wuhan University, he was said to have had a two-year affair with Chen Xiying’s wife, Ling Shuhua, who was a talented writer and painter. Hong Ying’s novel K: The Art of Love tells of the love affair between Julian Bell and Ling Shuhua, and apart from the intimate details of their lovemaking, the novel is based largely on Bell’s letters to his mother and aunt archived in England. However, Ling Shuhua’s daughter took the author to court,

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and won a defamation case that led to a 100-year publication ban being imposed on the book in China. These historical figures mentioned have since all departed. In the picture, I painted the sky completely black. This group of innocent idealists got into this red motor vehicle, never to return, disappearing into the black hole of history. 26 October 2012

Chapter 11

Peking Treaty Bookshops and libraries in the West basically shelve books in the humanities under two categories: fiction and nonfiction. In history books —classified as nonfiction—one often sees history paintings that have been created over various centuries. History paintings generally are not treated as works of art but rather as supporting visual documents or supplementary materials for the reader. In fact, before the advent of photography, the primary function of history paintings was to present history visually. However, this does not mean that history paintings do not contain fictional elements. To fictionalize is the prerogative of history painters; otherwise they would not be able to create. Yan Liben’s The Imperial Palanquin (circa 641) is China’s first history painting, and it is one of the world’s greatest history paintings. The work possesses a degree of veracity rarely found in history paintings. The painter had witnessed the historical event depicted, and given his position in the imperial court, there is no question about him being present for it. Yan Liben was a long-serving adviser to the painting’s protagonist, Emperor Taizong of Tang. Nonetheless, in an obvious and unmistakable way he demonstrated signs of fictionalization, and this was in his treatment of the size of his characters. This is neither the

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Western perspective we later came to know, nor is this the linear method of ancient Eastern art. Instead, the size of the characters is determined by their political and social status. From the tallest to the smallest, the thirteen characters are Taizong of Tang (emperor), courtiers of the Tang court (high-ranking officials), Mgar stong-btsan yul-srung (envoy from Tibet), interpreters (low-ranking officials), and maids (servants). While it is conceivable that Yan Liben had adjusted the height of his characters according to their status may have been required by tradition, the elimination of background and the composition suggest that he was exercising his right to fictionalize, and the result is an artistic feat. The painting provides rare information about the costumes of the time. Even though the painter may have simplified the details of the costumes, he would never have painted costumes that belonged to a later age (the most common mistake made in modern paintings and films). Furthermore, compared to another of his works, Emperors through the Ages, this masterpiece gives us a more reliable image of Li Shimin, Emperor Taizong of Tang. In his life, Yan Liben could have known at most three emperors. Therefore, most of the characters in Emperors through the Ages were necessarily imagined and inevitably painted with not much veracity. One of the exceptions was Li Shimin, who was his superior but not a “Son of Heaven” in the clouds, so his features are based on the real person. Similarly, the envoy from Tibet is also truthfully portrayed. If we consider the early masterpieces of history painting in the West, Raphael’s The School of Athens (1509–1511) depicts the scholarly debate between the two schools of philosophers in ancient Greece. In the center of the painting are Plato and Aristotle. Plato died at the age of eighty around 348 BCE, and at the time Aristotle was only thirty-six years of age, so it is highly improbable that such a major confrontation took place. In fact, the artist used his imagination and the right to fictionalize to paint what he “saw” of an event that had taken place over 1,800 years before. However, the exquisite painting and the majestic composition succeeded in convincing

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viewers that it was the practice of ancient Greek philosophers to recline on cushions or stroll about in a grand temple setting to think and debate. The work thus became an eternal memorial to ancient Greek philosophy. In fact, because history painting with biblical themes became mainstream in Western art, history painters of the West became adept at fictionalization. So, in Adoration of the Magi the people depicted in the paintings of Florence are Italian, and those in the paintings by the masters of the Netherlands all wear northern European clothes. In this tradition, it is not surprising to see gods and humans alongside one another in Peter Paul Rubens’ paintings of Marie de Medici, the wife of Henry IV of France. The masterpiece that immortalizes the French Revolution is without doubt Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. This was prior to the advent of photography, so the work would have been like today’s news reports. Delacroix started the painting a month after fighting at the barricades on 28 July 1830. Incredibly, but quite appropriately, central to the painting is not the people but a divine being. The goddess Liberty has a rifle in one hand and the tricolor flag in the other, as she summons the revolutionaries to charge forward over their fallen comrades. One can but conjecture whether, if the work would have yielded the same power had it been merely a realist depiction of the barricades battle without the goddess. It was in the eighteenth century that history painting received its highest accolades in Europe, with Joshua Reynolds of the Royal Academy of Arts, Britain, regarding it as the highest of all artistic genres. During the nineteenth century, history painting declined in Europe, but it continued to reverberate throughout the twentieth century in the art world of the Soviet Union and China. Of course, the decline of history painting was directly related to the advent of photography, cinema, and television. News photography replaced history painting in the role of recording events, and then cinema and television began re-creating history with movement and immediacy, which history painting could not.

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In art museums, history painting was given the minor role of illustrating explanations: its demise was virtually complete. If painters wanted to resist this trend, their only recourse was to fictionalize. Of course, cinema also makes use of fictionalization. So, to compete with cinema, the strategy was to rely on “stillness.” It is movement in cinematic art, aptly described by the English word “movie,” which captivates the audience. In contrast, a painting just hangs there. The audience stands in quiet contemplation before a painting for a few minutes, or for ten minutes or so, and this evokes all kinds of emotions. It is in this respect that other art forms cannot replace paintings. My work Peking Treaty #1 (2005) makes use of fictionalization and stillness, with the main aim of combining two unimaginable components. After the initial shock, this will reveal itself to be totally reasonable. Viewers will be induced to contemplate the time under consideration, and the painter will have achieved his aim. The work combines two famous images. One is the official photograph taken in 1901 after representatives of the eleven Allied Powers and the Qing court have signed the Peking Treaty: this image has been reproduced in every history book dealing with the Boxer Movement. As a photograph, it captures everything at the time: the faces, expressions, dress, actions of those involved and the atmosphere of the signing ceremony. Nonetheless, it is just a record of several seconds in time. Compared with real history, what has been lost? This is where the painter enters and introduces an image by the famous Italian Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna: Lamentation over the Dead Christ. The original painting uses the perspective from the feet to show a compressed figure of the dead Christ, and it is this image that I transposed to the empty center of the large Peking Treaty table surrounded by cups of tea and sheets of paper. The work was exhibited at the 2005 Beijing Biennale and evoked strong reactions especially amongst Italian, French, and Latin American artists. I painted a variation, Peking Treaty #2, that was the same in every respect except color: it was made to look more like an old photograph.

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This was exhibited in Australia in 2006 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where it won the Sulman Prize for best subject or genre painting. After the award ceremony, the judge of the competition, eminent Sydney artist Janet Laurence, asked me to explain the historical event behind the painting. In fact, artists who were moved by the painting at the Beijing exhibition had also made the same request. Of course, the initial impression is that the painting is about the clash of civilizations: the body of Christ lies on the table, but the people from all parts of the world around the table are taking no notice. This increases the dramatic impact of the painting. To portray this period of history using a realist approach would require at least three paintings: (1) the signing of the Peking Treaty, (2) the Boxers burning churches and killing foreign missionaries and Chinese converts, and (3) the foreign soldiers in Peking pillaging, killing, looting, and raping. Even if these three paintings could achieve a high degree of realism, they would not be able to achieve the same impact as this painting. In my Peking Treaty #1 and Peking Treaty #2, I have created a new form of history painting that strictly speaking should not be categorized as history painting. It would be more accurate to denote it as “a discussion of history,” in which the artist uses images to pose questions to viewers and at the same time to himself. It also allows viewers to have different responses. The painter does not play the role of teacher but rather as a discussant. This type of history painting cannot be replaced by photography or movies; and if history museums are too strict with their criteria on what they will show, they may not accept it. However, its place in art cannot be subverted. It possesses its own life, and is, of this instant, in a contemporary art world where postmodernism has subverted modernism and is sweeping aside all antecedents. The glory days of history painting two centuries ago cannot be repeated, and artists committed to this genre must find their own solutions. Bernhard Heisig was a great exponent of this kind of “commentary on

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history,” while Werner Tübke found another way to create new and great art. Both artists used fictionalization as their weapon. 2 February 2009

Chapter 12

1966 Beijing Jeep There is a story about Mao Zedong that has been circulating over the years: Mao once asked Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi how they would get a cat to eat a chili. Zhou replied: “You coat the chili with sugar and then feed it to the cat.” Liu said: “You grab the cat’s neck and force the chili down its throat.” Mao shook his head and smiled: “You chop up the chili and smear it on the cat’s bottom. It will lick it all up trying to stop the pain.” I believe this to be a true story. Many such Mao stories have been recorded both in China and abroad, but it would have taken a genius to make up this story. If we put together all the books about Mao, they would amount to a painting of a dragon without eyes. This story portrays the eyes of the dragon and completes the picture of this historical figure. It pinpoints Mao’s very essence, which are his wisdom as well as his sadistic nature.

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On 18 August 1966, Mao Zedong held his first review rally of Red Guards in Tiananmen Square. Up to that point the Red Guards had been an illegal extremist political organization of middle-school students in Beijing. Over the next several months, there was a total of ten such review rallies of enthusiastic Red Guards from all over the country. Back then, I was eighteen and a final-year high-school student in a small town in southern China. On hearing the news broadcast of the 18 August Tiananmen rally, I immediately got my classmates together and we organized our own Red Guards to go out on the streets to stop the destructive chaos caused by marauding groups of Red Guards who were mostly junior-middle-school students. It seemed to us that these youngsters were not following the directives of the Central Government, and they were going around seizing property and smashing temples. Two weeks later, two bona fide Red Guards arrived by train in our town and organized “pure bloodline” Red Guards (i.e., students with a “red” family lineage). I was criticized, stripped of my red armband, and sent to the countryside to do hard labor under supervision until the end of the year, when the political situation changed and students could organize their own Red Guards. This meant that I did not have the chance to be present at any of Mao’s ten Tiananmen review rallies, and I missed seeing the Great Leader in person. I only ever saw images of the Great Leader in a Beijing Jeep in newspapers and newsreels. I have loved jeeps since I was a child. Of course, growing up in China, this meant that I liked seeing jeeps, even if I did not see a real one and only saw pictures of them. If I were to encounter a real jeep, I would certainly sketch it. In any case, I could distinguish US jeeps from Soviet Union jeeps because of what I saw in books and magazines. It was not until I saw Mao Zedong sitting in a Beijing Jeep at a review of Red Guards that I realized China had its own jeeps and that they were manufactured in a factory in Beijing. One of my uncles had studied in the Soviet Union, and when he returned to China he became one of the few engineers at the Changchun Number One Car Plant, which in 1958

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began producing the Red Flag sedans used by the leaders of the Central Government. In fact, Mao was at first driven in a Red Flag sedan to review the Red Guards. Decades later I learned from photographs and a participant’s memoir that during Mao’s second review rally, overzealous Red Guards had stopped the car and the security guards who jumped onto the car to protect Mao had damaged the bonnet. The Red Flag sedan was then replaced with a jeep that had been recently designated as a military vehicle. Everyone in China was familiar with this military vehicle; it was slightly larger than its American counterpart, and it became known as a political symbol for Chairman Mao and the Red Guards. The vehicles we saw in street parades in the late 1960s were Liberation trucks that were manufactured in the factory where my uncle worked. These trucks were usually loaded with unfortunates who had been labeled members of the “five black categories”: landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightist elements. Then a new category called “capitalist roaders within the ruling clique” was created to label communist cadres amongst the local officials. All these unfortunates were forced to hang a large placard on their chest with their name and crime written in black paint, overwritten with a bright red “X” to symbolically cross out their existence. Some were also forced to wear a dunce’s cap. The cap is like that worn by a demon called Wu Chang found in the illustrations of an ancient text. In his Little Red Book, which was compulsory reading for everyone, Mao mentions Wu Chang when praising the 1927 peasant revolt against the landlords in Hunan Province. Some of us Red Guards knew Marx’s famous saying about history tending to repeat itself: the first time it is drama, but the second time it is farce. Of course, I did not dare express such thoughts, not even to my best mates; otherwise I, too, would have been wearing a dunce’s cap and paraded around town on the back of one of those Liberation trucks. Twenty or thirty years later, I found out that a farce like the Cultural Revolution had already happened during the Yan’an Rectification Movement, between 1941 and 1944. It was one of the political movements that

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bore the imprimatur of Mao’s tactic of smearing chili on a cat’s bottom. However, at that time the territory under his control was limited so it was not on as grand a scale as the Cultural Revolution. During his political career spanning several decades, Mao used two strategies to consolidate his authority within the party and in the eyes of his political opponents: one was to kill them, and the other was to torment them by toying with them. In cruelty, he was no different from Stalin, but Stalin only knew about killing people, whereas Mao also liked to play cat and mouse with his victims. When a cat catches a mouse, it has the option of either killing and eating it, or letting it go. There were two famous political campaigns during which huge numbers were killed. One was the Futian Incident of 1930 when, for the first time, Mao went on a killing spree within the party. After killing several thousand local communists and Red Army officers in Jiangxi, he took control of the Jiangxi soviet region. Then, during the decade of the Red Army’s soviet movement, there were numerous internal purification campaigns that resulted in 100,000 Red Army officers and soldiers dying at the hands of their own comrades. Most of these purges were driven by the fear of traitors, KMT infiltrators, as well as party disobedience by members of the political protection bureau who had trained in the Soviet Union. However, the Futian Incident that occurred prior to these later internal purges was the execution of Mao’s strategy to get rid of those he distrusted within the party. The idea must have come from the episode “Revolt against Wang Lun” in Shi Nai’an’s classic novel All Men Are Brothers. The other large-scale killing spree took place in 1950, and it is recorded in history as the Suppress Counterrevolutionaries Movement. I only found out about this bloody event when I was a teenager. One day my parents had put our winter clothes outside to air, and I saw an old 1950’s newspaper that had been used to line the drawers. There were three pages listing the names and crimes of counterrevolutionaries who had been executed. They were mainly low-ranking soldiers who had served in the

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KMT Army. That the names of this small section of the tens of thousands executed had been listed clearly meant that the aim was to warn others. At that time, the new regime was very stable, and such large-scale killing was clearly not to contain chaos but to establish authority. Mao Zedong did not formulate the aforementioned killing scenarios: these were typical in China’s history of authoritarian government. It was the toying with the enemy that was conceived by Mao during the Yan’an Rectification Movement. In Gao Hua’s definitive study How Did the Red Sun Rise in Yan’an: A History of the Rectification Movement (2000), archival material of events that had taken place more than half a century earlier were published to reconstruct the most important chapter in the history of the CPC. Significantly, the book notes that the so-called KMT secret agents who had been exposed at the height of the movement were not executed as in Stalin’s purges or during the Futian Incident. Instead, they were paraded around like model workers to encourage more people to give themselves up. Later, these people were not executed but allowed to continue to work for the party. In fact, Wang Shiwei’s killing three years after the end of the movement had been brought about in error by a subordinate and was not at all Mao’s intention. In fact, Mao is purported to have famously said: “Return Wang Shiwei to me!” Of course, the Wang Shiwei mentioned in this directive from the highest echelon, while locked away in jail, had been tortured to such an extent that he had been reduced to a living corpse. There were deaths during the Yan’an Rectification Movement, and many real or imagined secret agents and counterrevolutionaries, especially Trotskyites, were secretly executed. However, the aim of the campaign was not to kill but to secure loyalty. To secure political power, Mao needed large numbers of cadres, and he needed to draw in the welleducated urban youths in the population. How could their loyalty be secured? The answer was to toy with the enemy, and this was precisely the method used by the purification expert Kang Sheng, who, on returning

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from the Soviet Union, took charge of arresting secret agents. The method used was the same as that used in the Futian Incident: one person was tortured and forced to bring down a whole bunch of people. In this way, almost everyone was a potential suspect. People feared for their lives, and large numbers unable to endure the anxiety ended up committing suicide. Just when everyone was succumbing to utter despair, Mao would emerge from behind the stage curtains like an actor and announce that the movement had been successful and that everyone was a good comrade. In my mind, Mao would have said something like this: “I, Mao Zedong, take my hat off and bow to all of you. I hope none of you will bear a grudge, and you will all continue to work for the party.” This astonishing sleight of hand was highly effective, and the lucky survivors thereafter would shout: “Long live Chairman Mao!” The worship of Mao within the CPC started in 1945, after the end of the Yan’an Rectification Movement. Prior to the gloriously successful Yan’an Rectification Movement being upgraded to the Cultural Revolution, Mao had used his tactic of toying with the enemy several times. He had used it on a large scale during the Rectification Movement of 1957, also known as the Anti-Rightist Movement, and by then he was already a supreme master of his highly effective tactic. With apparent sincerity, he appealed to people from outside the party to make suggestions on how party discipline could be improved. He repeatedly appealed for people to voice their ideas and to be forthcoming with criticisms of the party. Afterwards, he announced that his exhortations had been a ploy to lure out the enemy, and he proceeded to attack so-called “rightists.” Figures published by the Central Statistics Bureau give the number of rightists as over 550,000 but the real number was probably several times this figure. In one fell swoop, he got rid of almost all independent-thinking intellectuals. From then on, fearing for their lives, people no longer dared speak the truth. Having achieved his goal, Mao then announced that the conflicts between the enemy and the party were internal conflicts, and that the rightists should be sent to the countryside to undergo labor reform. A few years later,

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he announced that some of the rightists would have their rightist label removed and would be welcomed back into the ranks of the people. By the time of the Cultural Revolution, Mao could execute his strategy of toying—seizing and releasing—with great spontaneity. Of the more than one billion people in the country, at least one hundred million had been “rectified” at least once, and there were several million deaths, largely from suicide. Yet when Mao died, most people in China still felt genuine grief. They had been successfully trained as Chairman Mao’s loyal subjects. So-called capitalist roaders were responsible for everything bad that had happened. Chairman Mao had truly served the masses (i.e, the workers and peasants). After thirty years of political movements, the population was used to living with lies. Through toying with his enemy in successive mass movements, Mao had successfully remolded people’s characters. They were not the promised “new people” of communist society portrayed in propaganda broadcasts through loudspeakers, but instead people who had been systematically stripped of instinctive moral values: mutual trust was missing in society, and individuals had lost their sense of honesty. Mao had used his tactic of toying with the enemy because he recognized that everyone possessed an evil side, which he effectively developed in people. Mao had used his trick of smearing chili on a cat’s bottom on Liu Shaoqi, as well as on Zhou Enlai and many others. In the summer of 1966, Mao arranged for Liu to deal with university students who were fired up by Mao’s call to criticize capitalist roaders in positions of power. Using the strategy he had acquired during the Rectification Movement and the Anti-Rightist Movement, Liu sent a work party to arrest reactionary students. However, Mao suddenly appeared and posted a big-character poster that he himself had written. Only then did Liu realize that he was the number one capitalist roader that Mao wanted attacked. Lin Biao replaced Liu Shaoqi as Mao’s next close comrade, successor, and second-in-command during the Cultural Revolution, but Lin Biao

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was no fool. However, his fate was sealed right from the beginning. He attempted to escape by plane, but by then it was too late. Zhou Enlai was the last person to meet with a tragic end. However, death ended the farce for him on 8 January 1976, and Mao himself also died on 9 September 1976. During the 1990s, a new generation of Chinese painters established a contemporary art style known as political pop; and when I painted 1966 Beijing Jeep, some people thought I was starting to paint political pop. I admit to adopting the irony and artificial smiles of political pop, but I strongly maintain that the focus of my painting is historical. Exercising my right as an artist to fabricate, I merged two contemporaneous dramas that were being enacted in different locations by placing them into the one jeep. One drama was that of Mao, Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, and Jiang Qing reviewing Red Guards; and the other was that of Liu Shaoqi at Zhongnanhai and Peng Dehuai at Beijing Aeronautical University being attacked by Red Guards. When these two dramas are merged, the effect is powerful. Viewers cannot fail to commiserate with Lin Biao and Zhou Enlai because both men were keenly aware that they would be Mao’s next victims. In the early 1980s, I was suddenly enlightened while reading a newspaper. Peng Dehuai had been exonerated and hailed as a hero, while at the same time Mao was still being praised. An article recalling the past wrote that in November of 1965, Mao called Peng Dehuai to his office to placate him and to announce that he would again make use of this commander who had been out of favor for many years. Peng Dehuai was told he would take charge of national defense construction, so he was grateful to Mao. The two old comrades shook hands in friendship, and the article praised the two old revolutionaries. However, in another memoir I read that in November 1965 Mao had gone to Shanghai secretly to ask Yao Wenyuan to write an article criticizing the historical play Hai Rui Resigns from Office. This was to be the start of the Cultural Revolution. The target of attack was ostensibly the play, but the real target was Peng

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Dehuai. When I put these two articles alongside one another, I clearly saw the real Mao exposed in a very strong light. In my painting 1966 Beijing Jeep a reluctant Zhou Enlai is behind the steering wheel, while Lin Biao sits alongside holding his copy of the Little Red Book. Behind them, a jubilant Jiang Qing stands next to Mao, who is wearing a dressing gown. In the background, a shadowy Kang Sheng is seeing off his two most famous prisoners: Liu Shaoqi and Peng Dehuai. Going against three-dimensional spatiality, on the fictional twodimensional flat surface of the canvas, directions are established with wellknown Cultural Revolution slogans. A sign on the left reads: “Liberate the whole of mankind,” even though the liberators themselves are soon to become prisoners. On the right is a sign with “Moscow” written on it in Russian. The sign at the top is Mao’s famous saying: “No law and no heaven.” Edgar Snow had misunderstood the saying, and his translation, “I am a lonely monk holding up an umbrella,” somehow wrongly endowed Mao with an air of melancholy. Snow had failed to understand the boundless determination and heroic bravado of the great leader: manmade laws or even the gods in heaven could not restrain him. At the bottom is a sign with words most often seen in old photographs of Empress Dowager Cixi, words that were appropriated by the Red Guards to present to “the reddest sun” in their hearts: “Wishing you long life forever! Wishing you long life forever!” However, careful observers would notice that the second “forever” is missing in my painting, and this would certainly have seen me executed during the Cultural Revolution. Finally, I was inspired to paint onto the body of the jeep the legendary work A Thousand Li of the Homeland by Wang Ximeng, the eighteen-yearold genius painter of the Northern Song dynasty. I completed the painting in 2001, but I was not satisfied with the result because the red background turned out darker than expected. So, in 2002 I painted a variation: 1966 Beijing Jeep #2. This time I used a pure crimson for the background, and to the front of the jeep I added a redsun design copied from a court robe of the Qing dynasty. The design

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was as popular as the “Long life” slogan during the Cultural Revolution, and usually above it in Lin Biao’s calligraphy were the words: “Sailing the sea depends on the helmsman. Making revolution depends on the thought of Mao Zedong!” The second version became the final version and was exhibited in September 2002 at 4A Gallery in Sydney. During the three weeks it was shown, most of the people who came to view it were visiting cadres and Chinese students. Their excitement reminded me of the great excitement of people in China in the years immediately after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Many years later, I saw on the internet that some people in Guangdong had put this painting next to another painting which had the old revolutionaries Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, and Zhu De sitting together in a row, as in a popular Cantonese children’s song. It made me reflect that art may not be able to change reality, but it can still change some little things. 1966 Beijing Jeep #2 is held in the collection of a New Zealand couple. I have painted a portrait of the couple, and we have become good friends.1 27 November 2012

1966 Beijing Jeep

Notes 1. See the Preface to this work.

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Third World I began working on Third World in the middle of 2001 and completed it in early 2002. I had not started for very long when the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 in New York and Washington shocked the world, so a scene that initially no one could have imagined now occupies the centertop part of the painting, and of course the previously virtually unknown Osama Bin Laden is present. Later, because of the war in Afghanistan, I also painted a fifteen-year-old anti-Taliban tribal chief. My Third World is probably the first historical painting to depict the events of 9/11, and it also grew in tandem with subsequent world events. The painting began as a depiction of the history of the world in the second half of the twentieth century that also parallels my own life experiences. I was born in 1948, the year in which Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, so I made him the starting point of the painting. I was a rebel faction member of the Red Guards in 1967. We had complete faith in Chairman Mao, but we still believed in Marx’s dictum of “doubting everything.” For example, although Cuba belonged to the Soviet Union camp that was at odds with China, we secretly worshipped Che Guevara. During that year, I read about his death in Reference Materials,

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an important publication for high-ranking cadres that was surreptitiously circulated amongst keen readers. Most Chinese had no idea who Che Guevara was, but for a small number of Chinese youths like me he was a contemporary Robin Hood. While the authorities blocked information about him, this did not stop them from denigrating him. This served to increase our sympathy for him. If the authorities had proclaimed him to be a great hero like Norman Bethune, maybe we would have been suspicious of him, but it was the exact opposite, so we respected him even more. This situation continued for many years, and it was only after I became an adult that I gradually forgot about him. After the 9/11 attacks, I kept asking myself how I should think about Che Guevara. If the 9/11 terrorists who had hijacked the planes wore T-shirts printed with Che Guevara’s portrait, should they deserve our support? I concluded that while Che Guevara’s lofty aims were beyond reproach, he had chosen the wrong path to achieve them. He is now dead and cannot be held responsible for those who claim to be fighting under his banner, just as Marx cannot be held responsible for the actions of so-called Marxists like Lenin and Mao Zedong, even though flaws in Marx’s analysis had the potential to mislead later generations. As a humanist revolutionary Che Guevara was clearly different from the Islamist extremists. He did not kill at random or murder civilians to threaten his political opponents. His mistake was simply that he had chosen the path of violent revolution. Violent revolution is not necessarily incompatible with humanist goals. In 1975, the Indonesian military crushed the Republic of East Timor and in the process murdered five Australian and English journalists, so the military resistance of Xanana Gusmão was of course justified. Unfortunately, history has proven that when a new regime comes to power through violent revolution, it is caught in a vicious cycle of violence. Today, East Timor is still struggling to gain freedom, equality and democracy.

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Che Guevara is the main theme explored in my painting Third World. The news photograph of him after his death is well known, as is the fact in many of his biographies that after the nuns had cleaned his body, his eyes had opened again. In the photograph, his body reminded me of the painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein the Younger, while the officer pointing at Che’s body reminded me of Rembrandt’s Dr. Tulp in his painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. Of course, the only person capable of correctly “dissecting” Che Guevara was none other than Mao Zedong, even if the relationship between the two was not an equal one. Mao saw Che as just a child playing with some idea of a “guerrilla center,” whereas his own thinking was based on a “people’s war.” He fully understood that it was not possible for isolated individuals to achieve a revolution. Che Guevara’s first wife was a Mexican communist of Chinese descent, and it was she who had introduced him to Mao Zedong’s writings. Che Guevara worshipped Mao. I happened to have had the opportunity of interviewing the secretary general of the Malayan Communist Party, Chin Peng, in 2006. This old guerrilla fighter also worshipped Mao. Moreover, he and Che Guevara were both born in the 1920s and were in a generation after Mao’s. The main theme of my painting had been settled. It was Mao Zedong “dissecting” Che Guevara’s corpse to enlighten his students Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, and others. Of course, rather than being a genuine dissection, the painting is a palm-reading session, so I would follow the traditional Chinese rule of “men on the left and women on the right” in depicting my characters. Mao would be painted holding up the left hand of Che Guevara’s corpse while pointing at it with his right hand saying: “Now look, here we have an opportunist!” My imagination was racing. To the right of Chairman Mao would be the quintessential capitalist beauty: Mrs. Imelda Marcos. Youthful memories are hard to erase. In 1974, I saw an unbelievable scene in a newsreel: Chairman Mao was bending to kiss the hand of Mrs.

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Marcos. Mrs. Marcos looked pleased, but all of us were shocked. Here we were fighting the revisionists at your behest, yet there you were kissing the hand of a capitalist woman. Of course, whatever Chairman Mao did was correct. A quarter of a century later, I am no longer bothered by this, but I still think of Imelda Marcos’ 2,000 pairs of shoes and her shoe exhibition. So, Marcos would be holding a shoe in her hand that could even be a glass slipper. I looked up the documentary footage that had made such an impression on me. Imelda Marcos would be wearing the same white gown bearing the decoration of an embroidered double lotus, while her husband would be crouching at the foot of her long gown. A woman completely different from Imelda came to mind: Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar. And who should be the male equivalent of Aung San Suu Kyi? Of course, it would have to be Nelson Mandela! Behind the two of them would be Imelda’s archenemy, Mrs. Aquino: Maria Corazon Aquino. Mandela is casting his vote, and Mrs. Aquino is being sworn in as the president of the Philippines. The composition therefore has two balanced focal points. Highlighted are the two diametrically opposed methods of political struggle that have been employed to achieve the goals of two different types of political theory. In both cases, war had been declared against an unjust political system or totalitarianism. However, whereas violent revolution replaced the old regime with a new totalitarianism or a dictatorship of the proletariat, nonviolent revolution replaced totalitarianism with democracy. The main theme of the painting developed into multiple themes with many internal meanings. Eventually, a clear picture emerged, and this took place during one very long night. For months, I had not been able to take the work any further than the theme of The Anatomy Lesson, but that night everything suddenly became crystal clear, and all the characters found their right location in the work. At the front of the painting Gandhi is weaving cloth, Pol Pot looks stunned and is holding a skull, Mother Teresa is praying for everyone, and Aung San Suu Kyi stands with her

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back straight in her characteristic pose. It is Idi Amin, not a Burmese general, kneeling by Aung San Suu Kyi begging for forgiveness. The outstretched corpse of Che Guevara of course occupies a large part of the composition, and above is his friend President Salvador Allende: the two men respected and understood one other. Close by, with blood on his hands, is the twentieth-century Judas, General Augusto Pinochet. Portrayed in the work are famous personalities of Asia, Africa, and Latin America dating from the time of my birth to the present, and the painting bears the obvious title Third World. Apart from in China, people generally see the two great superpowers—the United States and Soviet Russia, together with their allies—as the First World and Second World respectively, and the rest of the world as the Third World. Another interpretation is that the two great superpowers—the United States and Soviet Russia constitute the First World, while Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and other developed nations constitute the Second World, while the rest of the world constitutes the Third World. Chinese in the Mao era remember Mao’s definition: Asia (excluding Japan), Africa, and Latin America are the Third World. Whatever the definition, poor countries constituted the Third World, and Chairman Mao was the revolutionary leader and guiding teacher of the Third World. That night, I worked until daybreak, using charcoal to make sketches on a large piece of paper.1 At the time I had only sketched twenty or thirty figures, but later I more than doubled that number. For two months, I desperately searched for material in libraries, because at the time I neither had access to the Internet, nor did I know how to use it. Fortunately, I succeeded in finding fifty years of Time magazine issues in the Fisher Library at the University of Sydney. Finally, I made a pair of frames and mounted the canvas on it. The width of the double frame was 356 cm, and the height 220 cm. I sketched directly on the canvas using charcoal and continued adding new characters. I was particularly pleased to have found a picture of the socialist David BenGurion, doing a yoga headstand semi-naked. Placed in the foreground,

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he blocks out Gandhi’s weaving loom. Ben-Gurion acts as a counterpoint to Che Guevara and Gandhi, who likewise are also semi-naked, and give the composition a certain unity. Ben-Gurion’s headstand is a metaphor for the difficulties and the vulnerability of the state of Israel, while the toes of this socialist poke at the nose of Pinochet, as if to sympathize with his Chilean comrades. At the center of the painting are Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yasser Arafat, the signatories of the Oslo Peace Accord. The 1990s was a decade full of hope and, like people around the world, I rejoiced for the Israelis and the Arabs: a peaceful resolution to the conflict was in sight. But the assassination of Rabin filled me with grief. Suddenly, large groups of Palestinian youngsters started throwing rocks at the Israeli soldiers, keeping it up until some of the youngsters were shot dead. There must have been adults egging on the youngsters, but why were they getting the youngsters to fight on their behalf? The experts saw this as a return to armed conflict. The last few years of the twentieth century were not devoid of positive developments. The sudden democratization of Indonesia led to East Timor’s independence, and in this Australia played an important role. Xanana Gusmão became a celebrity. He wanted to retire, but José RamosHorta persuaded him otherwise, and he became president of this small nation. His return to East Timor from an Indonesian prison shouting “Viva Freedom!” was a truly emotional moment for me. Soon after, a young Australian artist asked if I would donate a painting to help raise funds for the rebuilding of East Timor. Based on a photograph, I made a pastel drawing of Gusmão embracing an old man. The drawing sold for $9,000 and was bought by Gusmão’s daughter as a gift for her father. Several months later, when the young artist came again to visit, he took out a high-quality print of my drawing that was the same size as the original. In the brown background, some lines of writing in white had been added. Gusmão liked my drawing and had written a poem on it. A limited edition of prints was to be made and auctioned together with the

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original for the national fundraising effort. In my painting Third World, Gusmão appears with the old man, exactly like in my sketch. As in the case of Gusmão, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua also followed Che Guevara’s path of revolution. However, he accepted the democratic process when he lost to a right-wing opponent. It was with great panache that he kissed his opponent to congratulate her, and I have recorded in my painting that moment that captures my ideal for politics. Ortega lost quite a few elections before finally being elected president sixteen years later. Half of the Third World nations are Islamic. In 1979, the Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah. Afterwards, the hardline religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini suppressed the liberal faction that had taken part in the revolution, and established a fundamentalist regime. This was a milestone, because all anticolonial movements of the Third World previously had been associated with Marxism. From this point in history, fundamental Islamism became the dominant driving force in popular movements. In the painting, Khomeini is behind Mao Zedong, and countering the pair is Megawati Sukarnoputri, who had proven that it is possible for Islamic countries to choose the path of democracy. As my research progressed, and my archival materials grew exponentially, I realized that the painting would need many more than fifty figures. The upper part of the composition also needed to be expanded. In the end, I added two more canvases to accommodate what now amounted to ninety-four historical figures. By that time, the tragic events of 9/11 had occurred so in my expanded painting the Twin Towers occupy the top central position. I was on the brink of completing the work when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict escalated, and I despaired that peace would ever reach that part of the world. Eventually, I painted Noah’s dove with an olive branch that had been shot by an arrow and lay on the ground. When the painting was shown at 4A Gallery in Sydney as part of my Zai-jian Revolution

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exhibition, an excited Jewish youth came to view it. He introduced himself, saying that he was the younger brother of Mordechai Vanunu, who had told the world about Israel’s nuclear weapons program. What the young man then said had a lasting impression on me: “Hitler made the Jews unhappy, the Jews made the Arabs unhappy, and the Arabs have made the whole world unhappy …” When Mordechai Vanunu was finally released from prison, that younger brother was right behind him in the newspaper photograph. Earlier on, when the painting had just been completed and before it came down from the easel, my long-time sponsor Lim Sen came with the art critic John McDonald for a viewing, and he immediately bought the painting. The major newspapers all commented on this work when reviewing the Zai-jian Revolution exhibition. But one of the critics failed to understand the work and questioned how I had dealt with perspective in the painting. John McDonald admired the work and strenuously defended it. Moreover, when the National Trust S.H. Ervin Gallery called for nominations from prominent critics for a retrospective exhibition of the best works of the year, John recommended the painting. Lim Sen later took Third World to Malaysia and it was exhibited at the Twin Tower Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, and John was present at the launch. The relationship between the work and its two special admirers does not end there. The painting was temporarily housed in Lim Sen’s empty topfloor apartment in the middle of Sydney, and as John had just resigned from a senior position at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and was back in Sydney to resume working as an art critic, Lim Sen invited him to stay in the apartment. So for three years John shared the apartment with the painting. Unexpectedly, three critics—including John McDonald—all pointed out that the thematic composition of the painting bore similarities to the cover of the Beatles record album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. There was a clear culture gap for me. When I first arrived in Sydney in 1989, I had not heard of the Beatles until we were taught to sing Yellow

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Submarine in our English class. During the 1960s and 1970s in China, we only knew how to sing revolutionary songs. When I saw that the three critics had referred to the cover of that Beatles album, I looked for it, and saw it for the first time. 28 November 2013

Characters and Items in Third World: 1. Gandhi (India) 2. Che Guevara (Argentine/Cuba) 3. Mao Zedong (China) 4. Imelda Marcos (Philippines) 5. Pol Pot (Cambodia) 6. Ben-Gurion (Israel) 7. Idi Amin (Uganda) 8. Nelson Mandela (South Africa) 9. Aung San Suu Kyi (Myanmar) 10. Mother Teresa (Albania/India) 11. Boy soldiers (Africa) 12. AK47 assault rifles (originally from the Soviet Union) 13. Winnie Mandela (South Africa) 14. Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe) 15. Dalai Lama (Tibet, China) 16. Óscar Romero (El Salvador) 17. Leopoldo Galtieri (Argentina) 18. Óscar Arias Sánchez (Costa Rica) 19. Eva Perón (Argentina) 20. Juan Perón (Argentina) 21. Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua)

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22. Violeta Chamorro (Nicaragua) 23. Corazon Aquino (Philippines) 24. Manuel Noriega (Panama) 25. Jonas Savimbi (Angola) 26. Subcomandante Marcos (Mexico) 27. Alberto Fujimori (Peru) 28. Megawati Sukarnoputri (Indonesia) 29. Samora Machel (Mozambique) 30. Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya) 31. Kenneth Kaunda (Zambia) 32. Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire) 33. Jean-Bédel Bokassa (Central Africa) 34. Ahmed Ben Bella (Algeria) 35. Haile Selassie (Ethiopia) 36. Patrice Lumumba (Democratic Republic of Congo) 37. José Ramos-Horta (East Timor) 38. Desmond Tutu (South Africa) 39. Kofi Annan (United Nations) 40. F.W. de Klerk (South Africa) 41. Aqa Humayun (Afghanistan) 42. King Hussein (Jordan) 43. Bashar al-Assad (Syria) 44. Anwar al-Sadat (Egypt) 45. King Faisal (Saudi Arabia) 46. King Fahd (Saudi Arabia) 47. Moshe Dayan (Israel) 48. Golda Meir (Israel) 49. Ariel Sharon (Israel) 50. Hosni Mubarak (Egypt)

Third World 51. Yitzhak Rabin (Israel) 52. Shimon Peres (Israel) 53. Yasser Arafat (Palestine) 54. Augusto Pinochet (Chile) 55. Salvador Allende (Chile) 56. Menachem Begin (Israel) 57. Ahmed Yassin (Palestine) 58. George Habash (Palestine) 59. Fidel Castro (Cuba) 60. Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam) 61. Osama bin Laden (Saudi Arabia) 62. Khun Sa (Myanmar) 63. Hassan Nasrallah (Lebanon) 64. Saddam Hussein (Iraq) 65. Abu Nidal (Palestine) 66. Muammar Gaddafi (Libya) 67. Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal (Venezuela) 68. Kim Il Sung (North Korea) 69. Kim Jong Il (North Korea) 70. Gamal Abdel Nasser (Egypt) 71. Norodom Sihanouk (Cambodia) 72. Sultan Qaboos (Oman) 73. The Shah of Iran (Iran) 74. Nehru (India) 75. General Zia-ul-Haq (Pakistan) 76. Benazir Bhutto (Pakistan) 77. Ayatollah Khomeini (Iran) 78. Sirimavo Bandaranaike (Sri Lanka) 79. Zhou Enlai (China)

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80. Nguyen Van Thieu (South Vietnam) 81. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Pakistan) 82. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (Bangladesh) 83. Rajiv Gandhi (India) 84. Indira Gandhi (India) 85. Kim Dae-jung (South Korea) 86. Chiang Kai-shek (China) 87. Mahathir Mohamad (Malaysia) 88. Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore) 89. Deng Xiaoping (China) 90. Sukarno (Indonesia) 91. Xanana Gusmão (East Timor) 92. Park Chung-hee (South Korea) 93. Suharto (Indonesia) 94. Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines)

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Notes 1. In 2006, I took that draft sketch to Ray Hughes Gallery in Sydney, and a collector immediately purchased it.

Chapter 14

Absolute Truth Karl Marx established his theories in the mid-nineteenth century. A byproduct of the industrial revolution in Europe that created a capitalist system of production was an impoverished working class. This period also saw the rise of nationalism. After the European revolutions of 1848, the Prussian government enforced harsh censorship on newspapers and other publications. A warrant was issued for Marx’s arrest, so he was forced to flee to neighboring countries and finally ended up dying in England. Marxism advocates democracy, freedom, equality, justice, and human rights that today are generally regarded as universal human values, but it differs from liberalism and various types of socialism because of its emphasis on class struggle and its promotion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, Marxism bore no semblance to the man-eating machines masquerading as the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that were spawned during the twentieth century. Lenin’s actions provoked criticism even from his German comrades. Rosa Luxemburg, a founding member of the German Communist Party, wrote to remind him of a view held by most Marxists: “Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently.” Unfortunately, not long after writing the letter she was assassinated by

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right-wing militants. Luxemburg’s notion of freedom is the demarcation line between Marxism and Leninism. Lenin of course disagreed with Rosa Luxemburg, and the Soviet Union regime established in 1922 was the enemy of “freedom” that later historians refer to as a totalitarian state. Leninism had declared itself to be the successor of Marxism; and because the Marxist classics were highly revered, a new Rosa Luxemburg was required. If there were none in that generation, there would be in the next generation. Inheriting the spiritual legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, Mikhail Gorbachev gave freedom to opponents of the government that he led, even though it meant the collapse of his government. For Lenin’s successors, this was traitorous and certainly not the normal behavior of a “man” of flesh and blood. However, above political power stands the nation, above the party the race, and above nation and race are the people. The interests of the people are higher than that of party or regime. However, the people consists of individual citizens and the rights of individual citizens are above the interests of the people. A ruler who has no compunctions about suppressing a citizen for the private interests of a party is not a “man” of flesh and blood, but a brutal killer. The Soviet Union led by Gorbachev is no more, but the land still exists, and the people on that land still live, and live with freedom. Now they can hold elections and choose their own president and prime minister, and they can form different political parties to express different political ideals. Like countries everywhere, their society is not perfect, but at least they are free. New democratic Russia is a modern version of a phoenix rising from the ashes of the old Soviet Union. I watched closely Gorbachev’s reforms that he called glasnost. When the people of the Soviet Union enjoyed intellectual freedom, freedom of expression, as well as freedom of the press, logically the Soviet regime that had been constructed on a foundation of lies could no longer exist. I had been living in Sydney, Australia, for a couple of years when in August 1991 I learned of the coup in the Soviet Union and that Gorbachev was under house arrest in the city of Sochi by the Black Sea. Two days

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later while on my way home after a day’s work of drawing rapid portrait sketches for tourists at Darling Harbour, I saw newspapers everywhere with the headline: “Tanks Roll Through the Streets of Moscow as Coup Fails.” Six months later, on the cover of Time magazine was a photograph of Gorbachev with the headline: “President, Without A Country.” The Soviet Union had been dissolved, and Gorbachev had completed his historical mission. Most people of the former Soviet Union could not forgive Gorbachev. This reminded me of one of Maxim Gorky’s stories that I had read as a youth. Some people were lost in a forest, and a young man took out his heart and held it up as a torch to light the way. There was rejoicing after the people got out of the forest, but everyone had forgotten about the young man whose blood soaked the soil where he lay. The last decade of the twentieth century brought many changes from which even what was generally regarded as the bastion of conservatism, the Roman Catholic Church, was not exempt. The pope at the time was Polish, and Poland was at the forefront of the Cold War. The Communist Party had ruled Poland for forty years, so a large part of the population was communist. However, at the same time over 90% of the population was also Roman Catholic, indicating that many Polish communists were at the same time Roman Catholics. Because the international communist movement is founded on atheism, the Church is therefore its natural enemy, but somehow the Poles managed to overcome this contradiction. When the Independent Self-Governing Labor Union, “Solidarity,” emerged on the political scene it undoubtedly had the full support of the Roman Catholic Church. The political confrontation between Solidarity and General Wojciech Jaruzelski that lasted ten years finally ended with a peaceful resolution. Jaruzelski was the Gorbachev of Poland. He handed over power to the Solidarity Movement that had mass support in the population, while he himself went into retirement. Interviewed after stepping down from power, he was sanguine.

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Pope John Paul II also interested me. Not long after becoming pope, he was attacked by a Bulgarian Muslim youth. After recovering, he visited his would-be assassin in jail where they had a private conversation. His Holiness was a person with a great generosity of spirit. In September 1994, I was invited to take part in a one-off art competition to commemorate the beatification of Mary MacKillop and had the good fortune of winning the Mary MacKillop Art Prize. I received the award on 18 January 1995. The following morning, when asked to stand next to my painting because the pope was coming to view the competition entries, my initial reaction was that I had not received a political clearance. Accompanied by his cardinals, the pope viewed each of the exhibits, and mine was the last one. He stopped before me, extended his right hand, and asked: “Chinese?” I quickly stepped forward to shake his hand, and said: “Yes.” The bishop standing behind him handed him a box that he placed in my hand. After the pope departed, the nuns who had accompanied me wanted me to show them the contents of the box: it was a commemorative gold medallion. The reverse showed the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus, and the obverse showed the head of John Paul II. What happened at that time gave me much food for thought. The members of the judging panel, that included the prime minister’s wife, would have seen me as a foreigner, yet they did not hesitate to award me first prize according to the rules of the competition. As far as the pope was concerned, I was an atheist, yet he received me cordially and conversed with me. Little wonder that a journalist from the French News Agency declared to the world: “This is a victory for multiculturalism!” The pope left a deep impression on me, and friends suggested that I should paint a portrait of him. I was later inspired to paint that portrait in 1999 after watching a televised documentary called Absolute Truth. In one section, there was footage of President Gorbachev’s visit to the Vatican in late 1989, and it shows him being warmly received by Pope John Paul II. This touched a chord in my heart. An image emerged in my mind. I would locate their meeting in front of Michelangelo’s Last

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Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. This theme sparked a strong creative urge that resulted in the large-scale work that I named Absolute Truth. In copying Michelangelo’s mural in my painting, I made some changes. First, I removed the coverings over the private parts of the divinities that had been added under the instructions of various popes after Michelangelo’s death and restored it to how it originally looked by referring to the drawings of experts. Secondly, imitating Michelangelo, I included my own image in the painting. Michelangelo’s Thinker being dragged by demons to Hell is clearly wearing my head on his shoulders: who else but me would go to Hell? The third change was to add a Red Cross helicopter in the sky, to help the angels take the purified souls up to Heaven. The fourth change transformed the Devil into Hitler. The fifth change transformed the ferryman of the River Styx into Stalin. The sixth change I made was painting a mushroom cloud in the distance of Hell. The pope was painted according to newspaper photographs taken during his visit to Australia. Gorbachev’s image is from newspaper photographs of him taken when he attended his first news conference after the coup, but the script he was holding has been omitted. As the head of their respective states and at the same time being reformers, what are they thinking at this moment? Are they praying? A few weeks after the work was completed, when I learned from news reports that the pope had issued an edict to apologize to the world for the mistakes that the Vatican had committed over the past two thousand years, I felt that he and I were of the same mind. My painting Absolute Truth was purchased from Ray Hughes Gallery by Kerr and Judith Neilson and became part of their collection in the White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney, Australia. 29 November 2013

Chapter 15

Russia 1917 In chapter 14 that discussed my painting Absolute Truth, I refer to the essential difference between Marxism and Leninism—their understanding of freedom. The German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg accused Lenin of destroying freedom, and, responding to his comrade who had sacrificed her life for the cause, Lenin used what has become a famous comparison. At a meeting of the Communist International, he described leaders of the Second Comintern such as Karl Kautsky as a bunch of chickens, and Rosa Luxemburg as an eagle. In alluding to her criticism of him, he said: “An eagle may swoop lower than a chicken, but a chicken will never fly as high as an eagle.” Russia 1917 is a new work in my motorcar series The Century on Wheels. As is the case with other works of the series, the car symbolizes both the era and political power. The car portrayed comes directly from a photograph taken during the February Revolution. It is a small sedan with three revolutionary soldiers crouching at the front mudguards (two on the right and one on the left), and a university student standing on the running board in front of the right rear mudguard. The details of the soldiers’ caps are interesting: one has a badge, another has the badge missing, and the third has a red ribbon sewn onto it. Significantly, I opened

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the top of the car and changed all the occupants. At the steering wheel, and in control, is Lenin in disguise. In the summer of 1917, he shaved off his famous beard and donned a wig to escape arrest by the provisional government: I copied this famous photograph from his identity papers. Sitting next to Lenin is Maria Spiridonova, the honorary chair of the left faction of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which until the summer of 1918 had been allied with Lenin. Typical of populists of the past century, she was a teacher by profession and had an aristocratic family background. She was sentenced to death by the czarist government because of her involvement in assassinations, and later she was in and out of Bolshevik prisons, before Stalin finally had her executed. The person standing at the front shouting is, of course, Leon Trotsky. Not long before this, he was the mediator between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. Following the February Revolution, Trotsky returned to Russia after Lenin, and discovering they shared the same aim, the best partnership in the socialist revolution came into being. They accomplished the coup of the October Revolution, but the monster created by the revolution eventually swallowed up the unfortunate Trotsky. Maxim Gorky is in the back seat, behind Lenin. As a long-standing member of the Social Democratic Labor Party, Gorky used the fees from his writings to support the Bolsheviks. His common-law wife for a time, the actress Maria Andreyeva, had inherited a fortune from the philanthropist Arseny Morozov when he committed suicide, and she spent most of it financing the Bolshevik cause. Therefore, throughout the whole of 1917 and the early part of 1918, only Gorky’s newspaper succeeded in strongly criticizing the destruction of freedom and the perpetration of wanton violence by the Bolsheviks. Gorky and Luxemburg belonged to the kind of Marxists who clung onto humanist values. The person standing at the back making a speech to an anonymous audience is the prime minister of the provisional government, Alexander Kerensky, a lawyer who believed in socialism. A star of the February Revolution, he insisted on continuing the war against Germany, and at the

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beginning of summer 1917 he was already in opposition to Lenin. When the Bolshevik soldiers attacked the Winter Palace, he escaped from St. Petersburg, and afterwards lived in the United States until a very old age. The other old man in the back seat is Georgi Plekhanov, godfather of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, and early mentor of Lenin: he parted company with Lenin in 1903 to become leader of the Mensheviks. After his death in 1918, and eighty years later, a document titled “Last Will of Plekhanov” came to light. It accused Lenin of being a one-eyed dictator and predicted that Russia under Lenin’s rule would face disaster and collapse after a few decades. Some people believe the document to be a fake, nonetheless the Central Translation Bureau in Beijing quickly had it translated into Chinese. A soldier who has returned from the front line has also squeezed onto the car, and he looks happy. On a piano accordion he is playing Kalinka, the most popular folk tune of the time. The side of the car shows Petrograd’s advertising posters of the time. The layer beneath shows a prerevolution picture of the empress and the princesses as volunteer nurses. The layer on top is campaign posters of parties in the constitutional assembly election alongside the painting Reaper on Red Background by the talented avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich, as well as a corner of one of his wartime cartoon posters. The wheels of the car are red, because of Solzhenitsyn’s great work The Red Wheel. While working on the painting, I was waiting for the Chinese edition of the third volume of this great work, but it was not released until after I had completed the painting. The third volume consists of ten huge chapters, yet it describes only the first month of the February Revolution. Having completed the painting, I was able to enjoy reading the book. The eagle facing in the opposite direction is, of course, Rosa Luxemburg, who could fly lower than chickens. I painted the name onto the clothing of each of the main characters: in Russian if the person was Russian and in German if the person was German. Rosa was Polish.

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The background of the painting is an amalgam of three famous paintings of the time. The bright spheres are from Konstatin Yuon’s painting A New Planet; Death, portrayed as a giant skeleton, comes from Boris Kustodiev’s cartoon Revolution and Death; and the Russian village and the floating man and woman are from Marc Chagall’s painting Above the Town. These contradictory images hint at the strong contradictions between the utopian ideals of revolution and cruel reality. Revolution is glorious, colorful, but deadly. A final point of interest for the art historian is that while Chagall and Malevich were two of the most talented Russian artists of the time, they did not get on. Appointed head of the art school in his hometown of Vitebsk, Chagall had employed Malevich as a member of the teaching staff, but Malevich afterwards got rid of Chagall. This happened a few years after the October Revolution. Anatoly Lunacharsky, a Bolshevik, was education commissar at the time, and he acted as the protector of this group of egotistical artists. After his death in 1930, there was no one to speak for them. Had Lunacharsky lived for a few more years, he would have become yet another of Stalin’s victims. 29 November 2013

Chapter 16

Wise Men from the East The inspiration for Wise Men from the East is the second chapter of the Gospel According to Matthew from the New Testament: “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, saying, where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.” I am familiar with the famous artworks inspired by these words that come under the common title Adoration of the Magi. In English usage “wise men” had become “Magi.” I found in a dictionary that “Magus/ Magi” refers to “priests and monks in ancient Persia,” and that in the Bible “the Magi” refers to the three wise men from the east. A question occurred to me: why should “the east” refer to Persia? Why can’t it be “an east” further away? Moreover, in these famous paintings the Magi all look very prosperous, unlike the usual image of “wise men.” So, I thought of playing a joke on art history. When Jesus was born, the most venerated wise men in the east were Laozi and Confucius from China and Buddha from India. They would have been around 500 or 600 years old at the time, and they should have been the “three wise

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men” who had traveled from afar to worship the infant Jesus, later the foundation of Christianity. Encouraged by this line of thinking, I found two famous paintings to serve as the basis for my new work: Leonardo da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi (1482), and Ding Yunpeng’s undated work Explication of the Three Religions. Ding Yunpeng was born in 1547 during the Ming dynasty, and da Vinci was born in 1452, so there is a difference of a century between them. Da Vinci did not complete his work, so it is of uniform color and contains numerous lines. For this reason, it was relatively easy to combine it with Chinese paintings that rely on lines to form shapes. In Ding Yunpeng’s painting the three wise men—the founders of Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism—are seated under a big tree discussing philosophy. In da Vinci’s painting, there is a similar tree, so I merely replaced da Vinci’s Magi with the three figures from Ding’s painting. My Wise Men from the East was first shown in 2002 at 4A Gallery in Sydney as part of my exhibition Zai-jian Revolution, and then it was shown for a second time at the 2003 Beijing Biennale. This work investigates the fusion of several civilizations. However, a scholar friend pointed out that I had adopted a Eurocentric stance because representatives of Asian civilization were surrounding the holy newborn infant of the West. However, it is easy to refute this charge because the painting clearly shows that Western civilization is 500 or 600 years younger than its Eastern counterpart. Therefore, the two arguments negate one another. Nonetheless, possibly this issue warrants further discussion by cultural critics from both the East and the West. In recent times, a debate on so-called “universal values” has emerged in China. Universal values are denigrated because they are “Western values,” and this view clearly receives official support to the extent that directives have been issued banning the spread of universal values. The theoretical basis for this is patently flawed because central to Confucianism is the notion of “benevolence” and its dictum “Don’t do to others what you don’t want done to yourself.” So, these irrefutably “universal” values are

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indigenous to China. Buddhism has been in China for over 1,500 years, and its tenet to “save the masses” is another expression of universal values. These values and ways of thinking are deeply ingrained in the Chinese psyche. The “universal love” of Christianity was promoted by the Father of the Nation Dr. Sun Yat-sen, as well as by countless Christians and non-Christians living in China. In fact, universal love, equality, and freedom were basic aims of the 1911 Revolution. 1 December 2013

Chapter 17

The Last Communist Merdeka is a visual epic of the birth of Malaysia. I designed it and invited my friend Wang Xu and my wife Wang Lan to work with me as collaborating artists in painting this large work that was exhibited in Kuala Lumpur in September 2008. The work is 30 square meters in size and depicts 261 historical personalities. Chin Peng appears twice in the painting, both as a twenty-two-year old and as a sixty-five-year old. This legendary figure had fought for the independence of Malaya, and my painting of Merdeka that led to my meeting him prompted me to write this essay. Who was Chin Peng? In February of 2006 a new documentary The Last Communist by young Malaysian director Amir Muhammad was screened at the Berlin Film Festival. Screenings followed at the Canadian International Documentary Film Festival, Toronto, in March, and then in Singapore in April. In April, the Film Censorship Board of Malaysia authorized public screenings without cuts, but in May the screening of the film was banned because it told the history of the Communist party of Malaya (CPM) and was primarily about Chin Peng.

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The Chin Peng highlighted in Amir Muhammad’s documentary was born Ong Boon Hwa in Perak, Malaya, in 1924. He was the son of a migrant father from Fujian Province, China. As a young teenager he began reading Marx, as well as Mao Zedong’s essays on guerrilla warfare. When he was recruited by the CPM, he left home in 1940 and was duly sworn in with the party name of Ong Ping. He later assumed many aliases, but people outside the party, wrongly but consistently, referred to him as Chin Peng, so this name came into general usage. He held the position of secretary general of the CPM from 1947 to 2013. The British authorities awarded him both the Burma Star and the 1939–1945 Medal in 1945. He was notified that he would receive the Order of the British Empire, but because he failed to respond this did not eventuate. Two years later he was declared Public Enemy No. 1, and he was wanted dead or alive with a bounty on his head, by both the British Empire and the Malayan Government.

Tracing History (1) Chin Peng joined the CPM at the age of fifteen, and eight years later, at the age of twenty-three, he held the position of secretary general. His meteoric rise was tied to the early history of the CPM. A decision by the Far East Bureau of the Comintern led to the founding of the CPM at a meeting in April 1930 chaired by the Comintern delegate, Ho Chi Minh. Four years later, a Vietnamese by the name of Lai Teck arrived on the scene, claiming to have Comintern credentials. Over the next five years, senior leaders of the CPM were arrested, killed, or extradited; and Lai Teck became the undisputed leader as secretary general for eight years. Regarded by the younger generation of party members as “Malaya’s Lenin,” Lai Teck was in fact a traitor to the Communist Party of Vietnam and was at the time an informer for the British. When the Japanese occupied Malaya, he became a Japanese collaborator and again helped to trap and kill many senior CPM members. It was only after Lai Teck

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disappeared with the CPM’s funds that his true identity was uncovered. He was eventually tracked down in Bangkok and killed by local assassins. In the interim, Chin Peng became secretary general of the CPM in 1947. Steadfast in his commitment to the party, Chin Peng also possessed extraordinary organizational and political skills. At the age of eighteen he organized an anti-Japanese guerrilla unit, and at nineteen he was the most senior CPM member in charge of liaising with and providing safe conduct for the British Army intelligence personnel of Force 136. Arriving by submarine or parachute, Force 136 personnel would infiltrate Japanese-occupied Malaya, in order to train, arm, and recruit units to attack Japanese communication lines.

Tracing History (2) When the War of Resistance against the Japanese started in China in 1937, thirteen-year-old Chin Peng wanted to join the Chinese military forces to fight for his motherland. His sense of Chinese national identity was shared by most Chinese living in Malaya. Prior to the outbreak of World War II, the Malay Peninsula was under the direct rule of the British as a part of the Straits Settlement that included the cities of Penang, Malacca, Singapore, as well as other sultanates that were fully or partially controlled by the British. The Chinese made up more than one-third of the population of Malaya; they had been migrating from China for a hundred years to work in the tin mines or rubber plantations, but up to that time the Chinese were not entitled to Malayan citizenship. The Japanese attacks in China on 18 September 1931, prior to full-scale invasion, aroused fierce anti-Japanese sentiments amongst Chinese in all parts of the world, and the Chinese in Malaya became the natural enemies of the Japanese invasion forces in Southeast Asia. The CPM was the first political party to promote the making of Malaya into an independent and democratic republic, so it was the enemy of the colonial authorities, apart from a brief alliance during the Japanese

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occupation. In that same period, the CPM grew in numbers and became a political party with a predominantly Chinese membership. Unlike the Chinese, the Malays had no reason to hate the Japanese and in fact saw the British as the worse exploiter of the two. Moreover, the Japanese had promised the Malays national independence, so most Malays were happy to cooperate. When the Japanese had occupied the Malay Peninsula as well as Singapore, the strongest resistance came from the Chinese who were targeted in brutal killings. By 1941 the British authorities realized that Malaya was about to fall to the Japanese, so all the communist political prisoners were released and dispatched to special weapon-training schools before being sent behind enemy lines to fight. On battlefields where the British had been routed, the Malayan communists collected the abandoned weapons and formed guerrilla units. Of course, there were also bandit types in the Chinese community who collected weapons that were used in robberies. In Malaya, the real KMT anti-Japanese force at the time was intelligence personnel in Force 136 of the British Army, where the highest-ranking person was Lim Bo Seng. He was Chin Peng’s comrade in war, and it was Chin Peng who safely escorted him from a submarine to the jungle base. Lim Bo Seng spoke glowingly of the KMT. Chin Peng was not interested, but his intense feeling of repugnance for the KMT did not prejudice his assessment of Lim Bo Seng, who subsequently died under Japanese torture. Many years later, Chin Peng told me that at the time they thought Lim Bo Seng, who came from a rich Singaporean family, would crack under Japanese torture and betray them. They were wrong. Chin Peng said emphatically: “He was a very brave man.” During decades of armed struggle, betrayal within the CPM was commonplace, and there was an understanding within the party that a person could endure only so much torture, so a person who had succumbed after enemy capture was later allowed to work for the party again. But there were conditions attached to the rehabilitation process, and the person would not be allowed to

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rejoin the party. From this, we can appreciate the importance Chin Peng attached to his comment about Lim Bo Seng. On the eve of victory against the Japanese, Chin Peng and his party comrades believed that the Malayan Democratic Republic was about to be realized and Malaya would then be able to stand alongside other independent nations. At the time, the CPM consisted of more than 5,000 armed personnel and was the largest military force on the Malay Peninsula. The Malays who were armed and trained by the Japanese wanted to join with them to resist the British. Interestingly, the Japanese Army also suggested joining with the CPM to resist the British forces that were about to land. If this had become a reality, Malaya would have become a second Vietnam, or a second Indonesia. However, the secretary general, Lai Teck, gave orders to welcome the British return to Malaya, giving up the demand for independence and a democratic republic. Directed by the British authorities, Lai Teck disbanded all the regular armies of the CPM and in so doing robbed the CPM of its only chance in history to form government in Malaya. Having disposed of the triple-spy secretary general Lai Teck in 1948, the CPM resumed its armed struggle for national independence. This cruel war lasted twelve years but was never recognized as a war, and in the end the CPM gained nothing. Alarmed by the Malaya independence movement, the British authorities followed the strategy they had employed in India, Burma, the Middle East, and other colonies: a time schedule was fixed for independence, and power was handed to the political party they trusted to achieve independence. The British strategy stripped the CPM struggle of momentum and caused the larger part of moderate supporters to desert. Furthermore, the success of the “new village” military strategy meant it was no longer viable for the CPM to remain in Malaya. The CPM was forced to withdraw to the fringes of southern Thailand and finally, in 1960, to give up its weapons and abandon politics. After securing general agreement within the party, Chin Peng left the jungle and for the first time in his life went to China, via Vietnam. As secretary general

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of the CPM he lived in China for twenty-eight years, but he no longer took a direct part in frontline action.

Appointment with History (1) I have enjoyed a long friendship with Yap Lim Sen who is the president of the Ipoh Garden Group of Australia. Of Chinese heritage, Lim Sen was born in Malaya and is deeply attached to the country of his birth. Some ten years ago he asked if I would paint a historical work about Malaysia for him, and in early 2006 he took me to lunch to discuss a time for a visit to Malaysia. During our discussions, he mentioned a certain “Chin Peng,” who was his friend. Did he mean Chin Peng the secretary general of the CPM? Surely a major capitalist and a communist leader would not have anything to do with one another. “Our fathers were good friends. They came from the same village, so we are family friends.” He said he had recently dined with Chin Peng in Bangkok. I immediately asked if he could arrange for me to meet Chin Peng during my trip to Malaysia. Lim Sen agreed straight away, and subsequently arranged a meeting. Before this, I knew nothing about Malaya, Malaysia, or the history of the CPM. Then why did I know the name “Chin Peng,” and why was I so interested in him? Because a brief newspaper item lodged in my memory. At the end of 1989 I read that the secretary general of the CPM, Chin Peng, had reached a peace agreement with both the Malaysian and Thai governments. He was to give up arms and return to normal society. I was elated by the news because this was a rare example in the international communist movement. However, the newspaper had no further details, so for me the name “Chin Peng” was still shrouded in mystery.

Tracing History (3) As far as the international communist movement is concerned, the year 1989 was more momentous than 1917. In June 1989, the killing of student

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demonstrators started in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, and by the end of the year there was fierce fighting in the streets of Bucharest. All this bloodshed indicated that the people of socialist states were abandoning communist ideals in vast numbers. However, apart from in two or three cities, the people in the socialist bloc of Eastern Europe did not have to pay with their lives to break through networks of fortresses to enter a new era of democracy and freedom. The first communist governments fell in the three Baltic states at the beginning of the year, then Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria in spring and summer, and finally there was the Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia in early winter. The destruction of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 provided a full stop. The entire process seemed to have been orchestrated by a great playwright, with successive crescendos to excite audiences. There was a prelude and then a finale. For communists who were unable to come out from the shadow of Stalinism, these events were, of course, a nightmare. But for communists who accepted the new thinking of Mikhail Gorbachev, it was the logical outcome that they had hoped to achieve. From the viewpoint of the West, this was the dramatic year when the giant tower that was communism collapsed. It looked like victory for one side, but looked at from a broader angle, 1989 was a year of various significant reconciliations for the entire human race. In February 1989, Hungary lifted the ban on political parties, and in April, Andrei Sakharov and others with different political views were elected into the Congress of the People’s Deputies. In June 1989, Poland lifted the ban on Solidarity, and Solidarity defeated the Polish Communist Party to take government. The leader of the Polish communists, General Jaruzelski, shook hands with his opposition to declare peace, and in the same month Gorbachev predicted that the Berlin Wall would one day no longer exist. In August, the pro-US rebels in Nicaragua disbanded, paving the way for democratic elections the following year; in September, Hungary opened its borders to the West; in October, East Germany was forced to begin political reforms; in November, Alexander Dubček

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returned to politics in Czechoslovakia; and on 9 November, the gates of the Berlin Wall were opened. That year, it was the government of South Africa that initiated a significant reconciliation: F.W. de Klerk, the newly elected president, released six leaders of the African Congress and began dismantling the policy of apartheid. A series of actions directly resulted in complete reconciliation and the release of Nelson Mandela. In December 1989, a series of major reconciliations took place in the world. On 1 December, Gorbachev met with Pope John Paul II, and these two world leaders established a relationship on friendly terms; on 2 December, the Malaysian and Thai governments and the CPM signed a three-party peace agreement, with the CPM agreeing to destroy all its weapons and to disband its armed forces, thus declaring an end to the 41-year armed struggle. On 3 December, US and Soviet leaders met on board a ship off the coast of Malta. After the meeting, the Soviet spokesman Grasimov declared that the Cold War had ended at 12:45 p.m. that very day.

Tracing History (4) The CPM had in fact unsuccessfully initiated overtures for reconciliation from 1 May 1955 when it became clear that the British intended to leave Malaya. It was not until months later that Tunku Abdul Rahman, leader of the United Malay National Organization (UMNO), agreed to peace negotiations arranged by the British. On December 28 and 29 in 1955, a conference was held at the Baling English School. The delegates from the governments of Malaya and Singapore were Tunku Abdul Rahman, David Marshall, and Dato Tan Cheng Lock, while the CPM delegates were Chin Peng, Abdul Rashid bin Maidin, and Chen Tien. It was a meeting that captured the attention of the whole country. Chin Peng, who had been described as the head of terrorists, appeared for the first time in front of the media. A newspaper report described the 31-yearold secretary general of the CPM as “handsome and upright.” It was only his comrade from the Japanese Occupation, John Davis, the former British Army officer of Force 136, who noticed that Chin Peng’s slim

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figure was swollen from malnutrition. Davis knew that he always shared hardship with his followers. The Baling Talks ended in failure. The CPM guerrilla forces were in a militarily defensive position and lacked bargaining power. They wanted an honorable end to their armed struggle but adamantly refused to surrender. However, Tunku insisted that weapons be handed over and the CPM be dissolved: he could adopt this hard line because of British backing. The refusal of the CPM to capitulate meant that it was forced to retreat to the mountainous regions of southern Thailand. In 1961, when Chin Peng traveled to Beijing via Vietnam, he discovered that while the CPM had decided to give up weapons and search for a political path, his Vietnamese comrades were ready to cross the seventeenth parallel to begin a military struggle to liberate South Vietnam. The international Cold War had also propelled the two camps into a confrontation. In July that year, when Chin Peng and other CPM leaders formally met with the CPC secretary general Deng Xiaoping, Deng urged the CPM to seize the opportunity for communism to sweep through the whole of Southeast Asia and not to change policy at this critical moment. Chin Peng recalled later that he was stunned to hear this. The CPM had spent many months reviewing the situation and had painfully concluded that the only hope of survival for the party was through political means. Yet now the CPC was promising financial assistance, and most members of the CPM political bureau endorsed Deng Xiaoping’s suggestion. Chin Peng had no choice but to accept the majority decision, and so began the armed struggle that was destined to fail, and would last until 1989. In this 28-year period, there was a temporary expansion of CPM membership during the 1969 race conflicts between Malays and Chinese. However, there were also serious internal conflicts because of party purification campaigns, so much so that by the end of the 1970s, the CPM had returned to its position of self-preservation in the borderlands of southern Thailand. When Deng Xiaoping assumed leadership of the CPC after the Cultural Revolution ended, party policies underwent radical changes as China

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began to open to the outside world. This had repercussions for the CPM and Chin Peng. When Deng Xiaoping visited Kuala Lumpur in 1978, he dismissively referred to the CPM as being historically redundant. In December of 1980 Chin Peng was instructed to dismantle the Hunan-based Voice of the Malayan Revolution radio station that had been broadcasting in Mandarin, Tamil, and English to Southeast Asian countries since 1969. Lee Kuan Yew had proposed the closure of Voice of the Malayan Revolution as a precondition to ASEAN support of the Khmer Rouge in the United Nations. In 1981 Chin Peng was instructed to find a peaceful solution for the CPM, given notice that China could not finance the CPM indefinitely, and financial aid was forthwith progressively wound back. History had played a cruel joke on the CPM. After decades of hardship, their achievements amounted to a resounding zero. Their members were still confined to the jungles of southern Thailand, and no political future was anywhere in sight. The only changes for the CPM were that Chin Peng had become an old man and most of his comrades had died during various conflicts. His adversaries were also now of a new generation. The prime minister of Malaysia was now Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who regarded fighting drugs as a priority over fighting the communists. Peace talks resumed in 1988.

Appointment with History (2) By 2006 I had drafted my ideas of the historical mural on Malaysia that I would paint for Lim Sen. Wang Xu and Wang Lan, my artist collaborators for this large multipanel work, were to travel with me on research trips to Malaysia to ensure that we captured the atmosphere of the country and the people. In mid-September, a few days before Wang Xu and I were to set off on the first of these trips, Lim Sen’s secretary in Ipoh contacted me to call on Ian Ward and his wife, Norma Miraflor. The couple had written Chin Peng’s memoir, My Side of History, and happened to be staying in their Sydney home at the time. They would arrange our meeting with Chin Peng. Wang Xu, Wang Lan, and I were warmly received, but we

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sensed that we were being subjected to a friendly “political investigation.” Chin Peng wanted to know what kind of people we were and the nature of our intentions. We stated our purpose and succeeded in winning the couple’s trust. Ian Ward’s long hair and Karl Marx–like beard were completely white, but unlike Marx he had straight eyebrows and piercing eyes. He declared that he was not a Marxist and in fact belonged to “the right.” He had worked as principal war correspondent in Southeast Asia for twentyfive years with The Daily Telegraph in London and had reported on the Malayan Emergency and the Vietnam War. After retiring, he had a strong desire to understand the enemies whom he had not been able to interview during his career as a journalist. Ian sought out Chin Peng, who was living in seclusion in Thailand, and persuaded him to allow him to write Chin Peng’s memoir. The project lasted several years, and the recordings of Chin Peng’s story run for hundreds of hours. Ian and Norma also arranged for Chin Peng to visit London and Canberra to check British government archives, so that Chin Peng himself came to understand the inside story of his former adversaries. Chin Peng’s My Side of History was released simultaneously in Chinese and English editions, and it was published by a company the couple established in Singapore. A Filipino intellectual, Norma was certainly not “right wing,” and refused to tolerate our criticisms of Mao Zedong. I wondered if their extraordinary relationship with Chin Peng had changed the politics of this couple, or whether they were typical liberal intellectuals who always fought for justice. However, Chin Peng’s special friendship with this couple meant that our meeting him depended upon their approval. Ian later said Chin Peng had reservations about meeting us, but that Ian had persuaded him otherwise. Following our short “political investigation,” Ian dialed an international number, and immediately asked me to speak with Chin Peng. I was flustered, and after I spoke in English to greet him and introduce myself, Chin Peng suggested that we converse in Mandarin Chinese: he was fluent, and I thought he must have picked

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it up while living in China. Later, I discovered that he had a talent for languages. He had learned to speak Malay and Thai in the jungle, and he was also fluent in English, Hokkien, and Cantonese. After listening to me talk about my background in China, Chin Peng laughed: “You must have heard plenty of bad things about me, because I often quarreled with one of the top persons in China.” In fact, whether there were good or bad things said about him, ordinary Chinese like me would never have heard about it. Matters between the CPC and its “brother parties” around the world were regarded as top secret. This was especially the case after the CPM had been removed from the political chessboard, and even positive reports were no longer available. During our telephone conversation, we agreed to meet in Bangkok. Ian said our meeting with Chin Peng would take place in the Oriental Hotel.

Reflecting on History (1) The transcript of the Baling Talks reveals Chin Peng to be courageous and inflexible in his rejection of the humiliating terms of surrender offered. The transcript also indicates Chin Peng’s wariness and suspicion that the British colonialists would thwart any genuine Malayan drive for national independence. Yet over the years Chin Peng had established extraordinarily close friendships with British individuals who were decidedly not communists: Ian and Norma are testament to this, and another is British Army Liaison Officer John Davis. During the Japanese Occupation of Malaya, John Davis and Chin Peng worked together in Force 136 of the British Army, and during this time they forged a strong comradeship in the jungle camps. However, from 1948 each was dispatched to opposing camps that were engaged in a bloody war. For the 1955 Baling Talks, to guarantee Chin Peng’s safety and to encourage him to cooperate, the British invited Davis to participate as an “observer.” At the end of the two-day discussions, Davis accompanied Chin Peng and the others to their camp at the edge of the jungle, and he asked Chin Peng if he could camp there with him. In his memoir, Chin Peng describes the

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night he spent “sleeping with the enemy.” They talked until morning, and it was as if they had returned to the time when they fought together during the Japanese Occupation. Most of the British intelligence officials of Force 136 were alive and well, but most of Chin Peng’s CPM comrades of the time had died during the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960).

Appointment with History (3) On 19 September 2006, when I contacted Norma late at night to finalize the details of our meeting with Chin Peng, tanks were rolling through the streets of Bangkok: a coup had just taken place. Would the meeting go ahead? Feeling unsettled, Wang Xu and I boarded our flight for Kuala Lumpur. Lim Sen had arranged for a good friend and former classmate, a Mr. Chen, to take us to see the sights and to meet with two prominent Chinese intellectuals. In a single day, we collected a great deal of material and bought many history books from various Chinese bookshops. We found that bookshops were selling many works reviewing the history of the CPM, including Chin Peng’s memoir, as well as analytical studies of the current political situation in Malaysia. Freedom of expression and publication was much greater than we had imagined. Once the half-century ban on discussions of the history of the CPM was lifted, Malaysian intellectuals wanted to find out the real facts about the CPM and make their own assessment of its contribution to Malaysia’s development. Perhaps perversely, most tend to sympathize with the CPM’s struggle and to view its achievements in a positive light. This inclination for perverse sympathy is also seen in China. After restrictions on the discussion of history relaxed, Chinese intellectuals are researching the KMT’s role in the War of Resistance against the Japanese and there appears to be a general tendency to take a positive view of the KMT’s anti-Japanese war effort and contributions to China’s modernization. Lim Sen’s secretary informed us that the meeting with Chin Peng would go ahead as scheduled, so we quickly read up on Chin Peng and

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the memoirs of other CPM members to prepare ourselves. On our third day in Kuala Lumpur, we were taken to visit the former deputy head of the political department of the Malaysian Police department, Mr. Yau Kong Yew. Mr. Yau Kong Yew is mentioned in Chin Peng’s memoir. Regarded as an experienced official, he had contributed to the peace agreement of 1989. During dinner, when I mentioned Chin Peng, Yau put down his chopsticks and said emphatically: “Chin Peng is a morally upright person of the highest order.” Back at our hotel, he explained the process of the peace negotiations. As a senior police officer engaged in fighting the communists for many years, Yau found that every time the CPM was defeated and retreated into the jungle, it reemerged even stronger. So, peace talks rather than force would be more effective in resolving the conflict, and Prime Minister Mahathir gave his unambiguous support to peace talks. Yau was sent to the headquarters of the Thai Army in southern Thailand to make the necessary arrangements. A wounded senior cadre of the CPM was secretly sent to a hospital, and then a message was sent to the CPM about a peace talk. A prominent person was needed to begin negotiations with the CPM, so Yau asked Guo Huonian, the CEO of the Shangri-la Group, to act as the go-between. Soon after, at a large banquet in the Shangri-la Hotel in Hong Kong, Yau was led to a quiet corner to meet an official from the Central Liaison Department of the CPC from Beijing. Chin Peng directed a female member of the political department of the CPM, Ah Yan, to meet with Yau. Peace talks thus began. Several months later, the government delegates of Malaysia and Thailand met with members of the CPM on Phuket Island in Thailand. After four rounds of meetings an agreement was close to being reached. The Thai government was hoping for a signed peace agreement before 5 December 1989, so that it could be presented to the King of Thailand on his birthday that day. However, at the final stage there was an impasse

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concerning weapons. Chin Peng arrived at that point and the problem was resolved. The peace accord came into effect on 2 December 1989. Later, Chin Peng invited Yau, as the sole representative of the Malaysian government, to visit the CPM base in southern Thailand. Yau showed us the large album of photographs he had taken on that visit. When I saw the photographs, I was reminded of the KMT representatives under the leadership of Zhang Chong visiting the Red Army area in northern Shaanxi for the first time in 1937. During that visit, Zhang Chong and Zhou Enlai became close friends. These photos were different from 1937 photographs because they were in color. When I saw the red stars on the caps of the fighters, I thought I was looking at frozen frames from a movie. The women fighters training with their rifles looked just like the ballet dancers in Red Detachment of Women. It was difficult to believe that these shots had been taken in 1989. Yau was surprised that there were still so many young fighters in the CPM. He was also surprised by the discipline in the camp and the presence of medical personnel, including a dentist. The dentist had even checked his teeth. Yau was invited to watch a performance by the fighters, and he said when he saw so many beautiful young women he was rather reluctant to leave. Chin Peng afterwards fulfilled all the promises he had agreed upon, and this was why Yau admired him. There was no more fighting resulting from CPM activities. However, the Malaysian government still refused to let Chin Peng return to Malaysia, not even to visit the tombs of his parents. While we were in Malaysia, Chin Peng’s application to return was still being delayed in various courts. Yau said it was because most of the government representatives who had taken part in the peace accord had retired. A new generation was handling the case, and there was little chance of success. Later, when we saw Ian and Norma in Sydney, they expressed their anger with Yau for refusing to speak up for Chin Peng. In their view, he did not want to offend the government in case it would jeopardize his

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pension. Nonetheless, he had played a critical role in making the peace accord become a reality in 1989.

Appointment with History (4) On the morning of 24 September 2006, Wang Xu and I arrived at Bangkok airport where one of Lim Sen’s friends, Ahbijar, picked us up and drove us to the Oriental Hotel in the city center. Overlooking the Menam River and a Catholic church, the new wing of the hotel is next to the old wing that used to belong to the British East India Company. Lim Sen had booked rooms on the twelfth floor of the hotel, and after settling in, we were brought to an adjoining room. The door opened, and an elderly man wearing a long-sleeved batik shirt greeted us in Mandarin. In recent months, I had seen so many photos of the legendary Chin Peng that his gentle face was already familiar. He introduced his new personal aide Li Guojian, who had arrived from Guangzhou the previous day. Ian later said that Li Guojian was probably a descendant of one of Chin Peng’s comrades. Over the past fifty years many ethnic Chinese of the CPM sent their children to China for schooling, and these families remained intensely loyal to him. At his venerable age he needed someone to look after him, and there was still always the danger of assassination attempts. I asked Chin Peng how we should address him, and he said that everyone called him “Chief,” despite his protest that only people like Marshal Chen Yi and Marshal Zhu De were called this. But times have changed, and even company bosses were called “Chief,” so people just called him “Chief.” He had been the secretary general of the CPM for almost sixty years, and certainly qualified to be called “Chief.” We tried addressing him like that, but it felt uncomfortable and we quickly changed to calling him “Chief Chin.” We then introduced ourselves. Wang Xu and I had severed our ties with the CPC after the 4 June 1989 events, and that was the starting point

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of our conversation. Chin Peng’s memoir states that he supported Deng Xiaoping’s actions following the events, but he did not argue with us. He only said that when he looked at the area around Fuxingmen, Beijing, where he was living, there were many bullet holes on the upper parts of tall buildings, indicating that the soldiers were in fact firing into the air. Wang Xu said he was at Fuxingmen at the time, and there were many retired cadres who were either wounded or killed at the time. When he heard this, Chin Peng fell silent. I said that the Central Committee of the CPC had lost a great opportunity to make history. On 4 June in Tiananmen people carried red flags and sang The Internationale. All they wanted was to stop bureaucratic corruption. If the CPC had listened to the people, then history might have been different. Chin Peng nodded in agreement. We then dropped the subject. While chatting we turned to the Cultural Revolution. In his memoir, he had discussed how he, like many others, sank into the political quicksand of the Cultural Revolution and how in 1969 he had struggled to extricate himself from it. I regretted not having read this part of his memoir and was not able to ask him specific questions about his actual experiences. Chin Peng voiced a criticism of Liu Shaoqi: he should not have sent his wife, Wang Guangmei, to initiate the “four purifications” campaign or have her set up as an exemplar. I understood that Chin Peng meant that wives of high-level leaders should not be given such tasks. His own approach was different. His wife was an experienced fighter, but she had always been involved in work such as taking care of the educational needs of the CPM members’ children in China. I said that Liu Shaoqi’s most serious mistake was not this but how he failed to save a friend when he could have done so. When Liu was arrested in 1926 and fell into the clutches of the military governor of Hunan, a friend and former classmate who was not a member of the CPC worked hard to secure his release. However, after the CPC had established government that stalwart classmate of his was arrested as an oppressor landlord during the campaign to destroy so-called counterrevolutionaries.

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He begged to be treated leniently because he had once saved Liu Shaoqi’s life. The Public Security Bureau wrote to Liu to check the veracity of the man’s claim, but Liu denied that this had happened, and his classmate was duly executed. As the second most important leader in government, he could easily have repaid his friend’s kindness. Chin Peng listened to me quietly. Li Guojian said that after the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976 the Central Committee of the CPC proclaimed that the Cultural Revolution had caused the near collapse of the Chinese economy, but in his view this overstated the case. He also said the current Chinese Constitution was not as good as that adopted at the Tenth Congress because the laws back then allowed workers to go on strike. I said that was on paper. If one tried to stage a strike, what would have happened? My view was that workers did not strike back then but instead engaged in go-slow action on a large scale. A former classmate of mine worked in a textile mill where all the workers turned up for work and received their pay, but they did not do any work. In the entire factory only one machine was operating, and this had taken place in 1975. We all had very different views about politics and history, but we were voicing our views in camaraderie. After lunch, Chin Peng needed to take a nap, so Wang Xu and I went to visit the Royal Plaza where the military coup had taken place some days ago. We were amazed to find a carnival-like atmosphere where suntanned soldiers were happy to have photographs taken with the public. Coups seemed to be a common occurrence in Thai politics, and during our visit, there were explosions resulting in civilian casualties. At three o’clock in the afternoon, Lim Sen arrived at the hotel, after flying in from Europe. He went with us to see Chin Peng. Chin Peng asked Lim Sen what he had in mind. We outlined the plan for our painting Merdeka and said that the contributions of the CPM to the anti-Japanese and anticolonialist struggles would certainly be highlighted. Lim Sen asked Chin Peng who in the CPM should be included. After thinking carefully for a while, Chin Peng replied that there were four persons:

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two Malays and two Chinese, and that Yeung Kuo must be included. He made no mention of the names of the other two persons, but I knew that they would be the Malay leaders who had been signatories of the peace accord in 1989: Abdul Rashid bin Maidin and Abdullah C.D., who was the party chairman and the founder of the Malay Tenth Company. There is a middle-school graduation photograph of Yeung Kuo in Chin Peng’s memoir. He was good-looking and the same age as Chin Peng. The two of them were responsible for exposing the spy identity of the former secretary general Lai Teck. Yeung died in the late 1950s. After talking about Yeung Kuo, Chin Peng became silent and turned to look out of the window. Suddenly he changed the topic and told us that when he died he wanted his ashes scattered in the jungle.1 Most of the afternoon was taken up with sketching Chin Peng’s head and taking photographs. I drew a frontal sketch and Wang Xu made sketches from various angles. When he was young, and even from the photo of him at age twenty-two receiving his medals and honors from Lord Mountbatten, he had a “baby face.” In middle age he had grown portly, and in front of us was an old man. He was almost completely bald, the thick eyebrows of his youth had become thin and grey, and his gentle eyes were partly hidden behind his hooded eyelids. However, his thinking and reactions had not deteriorated. Later, when I examined the photographs, I found that whenever we were talking or discussing a topic that interested him, his eyes would light up and his eyeballs would bulge as if they were about to pop out. I asked Chin Peng why the CPM cap was pentagonal, when they were clearly copying the octagonal Chinese Red Army cap. He explained that during the War of Resistance a Chinese comrade arrived from the Guangdong-based Dongjiang Column, so both their cap and their salute were adopted. I was fascinated to learn this and later had a close look at the uniforms of both the Dongjiang Column and the CPM. There were subtle differences. During the CPM struggle against the Japanese, the center of the cap had three red stars instead of one, and these represented

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the three ethnic groups of Malaya: the Malays, the Chinese, and the Indians. Lai Teck afterwards added four stars to the left and right corners of the cap and to the shirt collar. From the photographs, these looked like red stars set against a round yellow background. A yellow tassel was also added to the rim of the cap. However, by the time the CPM was engaged in the anti-British struggle, only a single red star was used on the pentagonal cap. The CPM salute was a raised fist to the eyebrow. This was the standard leftist salute used all over the world and dates back to 1936 or even earlier to the popular front of the Spanish Civil War. At that time the Republican forces, the Stalinists and Trotskyists of the communist camp, and the international column of the Anglo-American liberals all used this salute. When the Spanish volunteers came to the battlefields in China, the Chinese saw this style of salute for the first time. For example, Dr. Norman Bethune used this salute. It is likely that the Dongjiang Column adopted the salute and took it to Southeast Asia. South Africa’s African National Congress that included communists and other left-wing allies still salute in this way. Following the release of Mandela, the salute gained a new lease of life. When I told Chin Peng the origin of this salute, it seemed as if he was hearing about it for the first time although he could have already known about it long ago and was simply humoring me.

Reflecting on History (2) The CPM was inextricably linked to the CPC, and the relationship largely involved Chin Peng and Deng Xiaoping. I observed that whenever Chin Peng mentioned Deng Xiaoping he would appear to struggle with a mixture of complex emotions. In 1962 after the CPM had decided to abandon armed struggle in favor of political solutions, it was Deng Xiaoping representing the CPC who instructed the CPM to continue the military struggle. Then in 1981, when the CPM wanted to carry on with the military struggle, it was Deng Xiaoping who instructed the CPM to seek a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Therefore, it seemed that

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whether the CPM adopted a policy of war or peace totally depended on Deng Xiaoping. However, Chin Peng declared that the Deng Xiaoping of 1961 was not the Deng Xiaoping of 1981: the earlier Deng Xiaoping had just been the mouthpiece of Mao Zedong, whereas the later Deng Xiaoping was the real Deng Xiaoping. It was very early on that he became aware of the large-scale suffering that Mao Zedong’s maniacal policies had perpetrated on the population: for him the Great Famine and the Great Leap Forward were disasters. However, Mao Zedong had for many years generously financed the CPM to continue its armed struggle. The CPM had accepted the financial support, and Chin Peng certainly did not make any disrespectful remarks about Mao Zedong in our presence. Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping had diametrically opposed views about how to deal with Southeast Asia. Mao supported armed revolution led by local communists to overthrow the existing governments, whereas Deng wanted the communists to lay down their arms, negotiate for peace, and withdraw to the sidelines without affecting the close economic ties between China and the local governments. From my reading of Chin Peng’s My Side of History and from what he said, he clearly belonged to the peace-oriented faction of the CPM: he was pragmatic like Deng Xiaoping. However, in the final twenty-eight years of its existence, the CPM received financial aid and other tangible and nontangible support in accordance with directives issued by Mao Zedong. So, in addition to admiring Mao Zedong’s brilliance as a military strategist and guerilla fighter, Chin Peng was also undoubtedly indebted to Mao Zedong. However, Deng Xiaoping ultimately terminated the financial assistance, which caused much hardship and suffering for the CPM. I wondered if it had ever occurred to Chin Peng that it had come at great cost to the CPM to follow Mao’s directive to continue the armed struggle. It seemed to me that Chin Peng was ambivalent about both Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. He obviously admired their strong leadership but was understandably deeply resentful about their patently cavalier treatment

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of the CPM. He condoned Deng Xiaoping’s military suppression of the student demonstrations on 4 June 1989 and added that China was now on the right track: “China’s is the only remaining form of communism.” In my view, what remains is an empty “communist” label: China is traveling along the road of capitalism. It is only when suppressing opposition or criticism that communist dictatorship strategies are implemented. As an old warrior who had devoted his life to the communist cause, Chin Peng was perhaps unwilling to face this reality. I also wondered whether his former position as secretary general of the CPM led to his repressing certain views in his memoir. Judging by various things he said, and especially his reaction to the actions of Pol Pot and his concern for his fellow Chinese in Cambodia, I suspect that he might not have been frank in what he said about the 4 June military crackdown on protesters. The special relationship of the CPM with the CPC was due to the fact most CPM members and its followers were ethnic Chinese. This blood relationship was undoubtedly a significant factor in the CPM siding with the CPC when China severed ties with the Soviet Union. During the Cultural Revolution in China, the CPM’s blind following of the CPC tied it to Mao Zedong’s leftist extremism and to Mao as the guiding light of revolution in the Third World. The CPM was simply a pawn in the diplomatic games played by the CPC in Southeast Asia. In times of conflict the CPM was a foot soldier, but in peace it was redundant. There was never the possibility of self-determination, so a tragic fate was inevitable. According to Chin Peng, the CPM’s return to armed struggle in 1961 came in the wake of liberation wars initiated by the southward expansion of the Vietcong. In 1975, when communist parties victoriously formed government in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the Western world mistakenly feared that the whole region would fall to communism in a domino effect. By agreeing to play the loyal foot soldier of China, the CPM was exposed to the front line of punitive measures taken by the West and driven out of Malaya.

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The fact that the CPM was finally able to find reconciliation is to be celebrated, although from the CPM’s point of view, it had ended its own political life by the act of reconciliation. Yet this self-sacrifice achieved peace and resulted in the development of the region, and all this was in accord with the original intention of Chin Peng and his comrades in taking up arms. Chin Peng may be consoled by the fact that had the CPM not taken up arms in 1948, Malayan independence would not have been won as early as 1957. This view of the CPM is one that is gaining increasing acceptance.

Appointment with History (5) On the day he arrived in Bangkok, Lim Sen hosted a dinner party for us at the hotel restaurant by the river. He and Chin Peng chatted happily in English, while Li Guojian, Wang Xu, and I discussed in Chinese the problems of communism. Li Guojian brought up the topic of the Malaysian ban on the screening of the documentary The Last Communist. Chin Peng had, of course, seen a DVD version, and the banning of the film was naturally tied to the Malaysian government stopping Chin Peng from entering the country. The morning we left Kuala Lumpur for Bangkok a Chinese newspaper reported that Chin Peng’s application to return had once again been set aside by the High Court. Chin Peng smiled sardonically when I told him this. We met again at breakfast the next morning. Our discussion of the previous day had drawn us closer, and when I happened to mention that my Chinese astrological sign was the rat, Chin Peng said he too was a rat. He was born in 1924, exactly twenty-four years earlier than me. Chin Peng ruminated on whether he still believed in communism, and he thought that in the distant future there would be a communist society and that it would produce “new people.” This surprised me because over dinner the previous night I had declared that the “new people” of communism would never appear. Chin Peng was talking with Lim Sen then, so maybe he had not heard me. Anyway, he had pushed the

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possibility into the distant future and had given up on using violence to create “new people.” Following breakfast, we spent another three hours sketching. This time I sketched a profile of his head. Throughout, Chin Peng just stared at the Menam River outside the window. Li Guojian took good care of Chin Peng and reminded him when it was time to take his high blood pressure and gout medications. I told Chin Peng that the Penang-born Dr. Wu Lien-Teh, who practiced medicine in Ipoh even in old age, was more famous in China than in Malaysia. He had helped to control the rat plague in Northeast China in 1910 and was one of the pioneers of modern medicine in China. Smiling apologetically, he said that his followers once kidnapped the doctor. He saw my astonishment, and went on to explain that they did not know what the man had done in China and had only seen him behaving arrogantly towards the poor. He was kidnapped for ransom to help fight the Japanese, and he was released when the ransom was paid. I later read about this episode in the Chinese edition of Wu Lien-Teh’s Plague Fighter: The Autobiography of a Modern Chinese Physician. After the CPM released him, he was arrested by the Japanese military police and charged as a communist collaborator. Fortunately, the senior officer of the military police was one of his patients and believed that he had in fact been kidnapped, so they let him go. Once I completed my sketches, I presented Chin Peng with a sketch I had made the previous day. I then took out three copies of the Chinese edition of his memoir for him to sign. He signed all three, addressing us as “comrades.” My copy was inscribed “For Comrade Shen Jiawei.” I also asked him to sign a copy of The Mountains Are Forever Young, a book that gives an objective account of the history of the CPM. It has a preface by a friend of mine in China, the liberal thinker Zhu Xueqin. Chin Peng had obviously read the book and, after signing it, he tried to find something in the book. Li Guojian found it for him. It was a reference to the superiority of the British intelligence service as the main factor for the defeat of the CPM.

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I turned to the photographic plates in the book. There was one of Chin Peng in military uniform with his old comrade Adbullah C.D., and I was puzzled by the fact that both he and Abdullah C.D. were wearing boatshaped caps instead of the pentagonal caps. Chin Peng said that his Malay comrades did not like the pentagonal caps, so he told them to design their own cap, and they came up with this boat-shaped cap. I asked if he still had some of these caps, and whether he could give me one. Afterwards we went downstairs for lunch. Lim Sen had booked the most lavish V.I.P. dining room in the hotel. There was a long table with four chairs on either side, and the buffet table was outside the V.I.P. dining room. Lim Sen declared that we would eat “communist style.” He would arrange for the plates of food to be brought for everyone, because the previous night we had not tried the best things on offer. The lunch lasted over two hours, and the gourmet meal was top class. This was the first time I tasted foie gras. While we were having dessert, Lim Sen’s old friend Madam Ankanya, who managed the V.I.P. dining rooms, came to join us. She sat down on the left of Chin Peng and told us that she had been working there for sixty years and looked after difficult customers. She asked Chin Peng how old he was, and he said he was 82. To this she bantered that he was her younger brother by two years. She was a real comedian, and she spoke perfect English. When Lim Sen said that Chin Peng was a communist, she replied: “No one is perfect. People have their good and bad sides, and it depends on time. It could take a long time, but people who are not popular may later become treasures.” She said she had lived too long and had experienced a great deal. When she was young she liked playing in the forest, and people warned her about crocodiles and communists, and asked her which of these she would like to meet. After saying this, she looked at Chin Peng, and he broke into loud laughter. Lim Sen then suggested the ideal criteria for CPC leadership: “A good leader should have the brain of a capitalist and the heart of a socialist.” Chin Peng again laughed heartily.

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I asked Chin Peng, “In wartime Yan’an, the proportion of males to females among the Chinese communists was eight to one. When the CPM was in the jungle, what was the ratio of males to females?” After careful thought, he said that it was about half and half. He said that if both parties loved one another, they could get married when the marriage application was approved. However, married couples could not necessarily sleep together every night. At three o’clock, it was time to say goodbye. Chin Peng told us he was living in a house in the suburbs of Bangkok that had been provided by one of his supporters. In the lobby, we made our farewell. Chin Peng was wearing a finely woven Panama hat. He saw that I was curious, so he said it was a gift from a Japanese friend. He said that in 1945 following the Japanese defeat, he was sent to the town of Taiping in northern Perak to oversee the repatriation of Japanese nationals. At the time the Japanese military police headquarters had relocated from Singapore to Taiping, and the commander was very cooperative. He had even suggested joining forces to resist the British, but this did not happen. The Japanese military police considered the CPM to be very friendly, and many years later one of them came to see him. The man was now doing business in Bangkok, and he had given the hat to Chin Peng as a present. We had been together for less than two days, yet I was somewhat sad to say goodbye to this person of my father’s generation. Chin Peng was a communist who was most unlike a communist. He was also the most sincere and steadfast communist I had ever met. This was a true communist, the last of his kind.

Reflection on History (3) Stalin died on 5 March 1953. In China on the morning of 9 March, a mother took her five-year-old son to kindergarten. As we entered the gate, sirens began sounding everywhere in the city. My mother and I,

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and all those around us, adults and children alike, bowed our heads to express our grief on Stalin’s passing. At that moment, communist leaders all over the world and the people they governed paid their respects in the same fashion. The only exception was the 29-year-old secretary general Chin Peng of the CPM and his followers who had been under heavy bombardment by RAAF squadrons for three hours. Chin Peng’s two bodyguards were killed in the attack. Had the RAAF not missed its target and leveled the other side of the valley, the history of the CPM would have been written differently. This small detail is of considerable significance because it clearly accentuates the different eras to which each of us belonged. I lived in an era without Stalin, but with Mao Zedong, while Chin Peng had fifteen years of experience fighting under Stalin’s banner. Virtually from my birth, I had lived under the dictatorship of the proletariat that was established by the CPC after endless years of war. In contrast, Chin Peng’s whole life was spent in military action in a world ruled by his enemies, and he never experienced life in government. Circumstances had him living for twenty-six years in the People’s Republic of China that had been established by his communist comrades of the same ethnicity but different nationality. That was the country where I grew up and received my education. Later, Chin Peng was forced to adopt Thailand as his place of residence, while I became an Australian citizen. In our respective adopted country, each can enjoy freedom of thought and action. Over dinner Lim Sen suddenly asked me in English: “Are you communist or anticommunist?” Without hesitating, I replied: “I am a child of the CPC, but I am keen to reflect on what previous generations believed, and how they acted.” Both my parents were ordinary party members who had joined the party in the mid-1950s. However, the thought behind my reply was to emphasize that I belonged to the generation that had grown up under communist ideology. In 1984, in a party rectification meeting, I opposed a ridiculous slogan put forward by some party members that “the party is our mother, and our mother will have her children’s interests in

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mind even when she beats them.” I argued that the party was a political party founded by a group of people with common beliefs, and they called each other comrade. The relationship between the organization and its members is definitely not the same as that between parents and children. Today I emphasize my relationship with the party to discuss the difference between different generations of communists. I believe that my generation of “communists” may be the last generation of “communists” in our lifetime. The communist movement was established with the aim of creating a new society in which there would be no exploitation and no oppression of fellow human beings, and it drew in countless fine young idealists like Chin Peng. However, to realize this goal of mass social engineering resulted in Lenin’s strategy of violent revolution to achieve regime change, which in turn triggered the need to use violence again to maintain the new regime. Hence the initial aim was progressively further and further removed from becoming realized. Yet the reality is that several generations have lived under this regime that was characterized by exploitation, oppression, and a total lack of freedom, equality, and democracy. In many respects, and to varying degrees, it was even worse than the previous society. The irony is that at the same time in many countries, including Australia, Marxists of the social democrat variety have used nonviolent means—and economic development—to establish societies that have made the transition from exploitative capitalism to modern capitalism, in which there is greater equality in the distribution of wealth, reduction of absolute poverty, and establishment of freedom of expression. A small minority of communists, such as Gorbachev, remain uncorrupted by financial gain and possess a genuine sense of idealism. Recognizing the failure of communism as a social experiment, they began dismantling their own parties, or reformed them as social democratic parties. The communist movement that ended in 1989 as a failed experiment in social engineering had perpetrated crimes of vast proportions

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against humanity because violence was its basic strategy. However, while communism was born in an age of violence, violence did not originate with communism. World War II, which killed millions of people, gave communism the opportunity to mount the world stage. The kings, presidents, and prime ministers responsible for World War II were not communists, but enemies of communism. Violence is not a hallmark of communism; violence has existed since the beginning of a human history that is marked by conflict and wars. The claim that violence is endemic to barbaric societies is refuted by the fact that advanced civilizations still use violence to resolve problems, as in the case of Iraq. The first generation of communists used domestic revolutions to end World War I and to bring peace to their countries. However, they became accustomed to using violence to achieve their means, and this meant killing their own comrades and innocent civilians. The second generation of communists, including Chin Peng, was forced to take over the arms of their enemies to resist invading fascist forces. They began their careers as communists because they had to resort to violence. People of a later generation have no right to criticize their use of violence to fight for their right to exist. Their struggles created the world order of the second half of the twentieth century. Without the antifascist contribution of communists who made up the great majority of the victims of World War II—in the Soviet Union, over forty million died, more than half of them Red Army soldiers—the democratic countries of Europe, including Great Britain, would have come under the rule of Hitler’s Third Reich. The problem with communism is its use of violence against certain groups of its own people after having defeated invading forces. Cruel class struggles were implemented which bore similarities to the racial purity of the anti-Semite policy of the Nazi regime. The theory of class struggle and Leninist type centralization of power resulted in personality cult and dictatorship. The fact that political oppression and economic

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disasters occurred in all socialist states is evidence that these outcomes were not solely the result of the character of the leaders. Theoretically, communism aspired to create “new people” in a utopian communist society in which everyone was selfless. Yet in China, for example, corrupt officials were of plague proportions, and these selfish people had all grown up after the CPC came to power. This reality testifies to the failure of that social engineering project. In human history, a small number of idealists who would qualify as selfless “new people” can be found at any stage of social development, in any social environment. Among the early communists, there were many such people, including Chin Peng. However, when such “new people” appeared in communist states, they found themselves in jail or a labor camp, if they had not already been executed. In China a few, such as Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, managed to assume high-leadership positions, yet they too were unable to avoid a tragic fate. Political dissidence was erased, and even Yu Luoke, whose comments did not go beyond the framework of Marxism, found himself immediately silenced. Mao Zedong introduced Lei Feng as a “new people” prototype. Lei Feng was willing to serve as a cog in the socialist machine, and he unquestioningly professed loyalty to the CPC and Mao Zedong. Pavel Korchagin, the protagonist of How the Steel Was Tempered, written by Soviet Union writer Nikolai Ostrovsky during the 1930s, was superior to Lei Feng because Korchagin did not simply parrot the teachings of party leaders. At the time when I started questioning everything I had been taught at school, I read a book with the title Everything for the Party that told of a Chinese revolutionary fighter who was like Korchagin. It turned out that Luo Gongliu was the artist who had illustrated Everything for the Party as well as the Chinese edition of Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered. It was almost half a century later that I discovered that He Jiadong had authored Everything for the Party, and it turned out that he had died in Beijing just a few weeks after I interviewed Chin Peng.

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He Jiadong was himself a veteran fighter of the CPC. He was one year older than Chin Peng. He also joined the revolution at the age of fourteen, and fought as a guerrilla against the Japanese invaders. Later he became an editor and writer, and his works were the educational materials that shaped and developed my ideological beliefs as a young teenager. He gave unstintingly to the CPC but was persecuted first as a “rightist” and then for belonging to an “antiparty clique.” His mother and son both died as a result of unrelenting, punitive persecution and torture. Reflecting on the problems of the communist movement during the last decades of his life, He Jiadong became an idealist fighting for democracy. He believed that the CPC had become alienated from the core principles of communism, and saw himself as a genuine communist. He considered his peers to be outspoken intellectuals for freedom of expression, democracy, and human rights, individuals such as Li Rui, Li Shenzhi, and Liu Binyan. Around the time of the death of He Jiadong, I heard on BBC that Markus Wolf, the head of the foreign intelligence division of the former East German General Intelligence, had died. Wolf was born in the same year as He Jiadong, and he had been a veteran fighter in the war against fascism. He was one of the few people who earned the respect of their enemies in the Cold War. Wolf wrote in his memoir how those of his generation were confident in the belief that they would realize the dream of Marx and Engels, and they would found a free, equal, and caring society. According to Wolf, they had failed not because their belief in socialism was too strong but because they had deviated from the theory of socialism. He saw the crimes committed by Stalin not as the inevitable outcome of the theory of communism but as the corruption of communism. Wolf also wrote of the importance of freedom of thought and speech in a modern society, yet having charge of international intelligence, he must have been aware of the merciless treatment meted out to those who dared to express dissent. After a lifetime of struggle, Chin Peng never had the chance to become part of government. As secretary general and a popular leader, had he

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won the power to govern would he have been able to avoid committing the mistakes, or crimes, of his comrades in other countries? In all communist regimes, without exception, there has been brutal oppression of the population and huge numbers of innocent victims have died as a direct result of persecution. In my view, the reason is not to be found in the character of communist leaders but in roles they were expected to undertake. Even though the CPM did not assume power, its internal purges suggest that a similar outcome was inevitable. Chin Peng would not have been able to change a dynamic that was already in place. I am twenty-four years younger than Chin Peng and grew up in the sort of society that Chin Peng had sought to establish in Malaya. From personal experience, I came to understand the sheer hypocrisy of the grand labels of democracy, freedom, and equality that were promoted in the socialist country of my birth, but my perception of reality was something Chin Peng could not accept. In the concluding remarks of his memoir he states that he remains a socialist and still believes in the equal distribution of wealth, although he acknowledges that this will only come about in the indefinite future. He also continues to believe that people should exert themselves to the best of their ability. However, he concedes that the dictatorship of the proletariat is not the best administrative model for modern Malaysia. To abandon the dictatorship of the proletariat means that he is no longer a communist, and it seems that Chin Peng has been reflecting hard on the implications of the ideology he had believed in for most of his life. Both of us had taken part in building a modern Tower of Babel that has now been abandoned. The story of the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament tells of ancient times, but the story of communism’s Tower of Babel tells the history of humankind in the twentieth century, and its builders are scattered all over the world. As a common bricklayer working on this modern Tower of Babel, I encountered a person of an earlier generation, who had been one of the foremen of this building

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project. There is a sense of poignancy in the fact that we had addressed one another as comrade.

Appointment with History (6) The day I arrived back in Sydney, Norma phoned. Chin Peng had sent by express courier the cap he had promised, so we paid a visit to his old friends again. The hand-sewn cap was made from regulation-issue PLA green cloth from China, but it was modeled on the World War II British Army field service cap. The fold-back flaps were faded, and there were two cloth-covered buttons at the front. In the spot for pinning the badge was a bright red five-point star that had been hand embroidered with colorfast thread. Such caps were popular back then, and the armed forces of the United States, Soviet Union, Germany, Britain, Austria, and Italy each had their own style. The CPM’s choice of the British model could be considered a vestige of its link with its colonial past. The cap had probably been made by one of the women soldiers during the two decades the CPM spent in the jungles of southern Thailand. When Chin Peng disbanded his forces, there were 1,188 soldiers, and these 1,188 hand-embroidered red stars were probably his only consolation. 31 December 2006

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Notes 1. I wrote this essay on the last day of 2006, three months after my trip to Malaysia that included my meeting with Chin Peng in Bangkok. Seven years later, Chin Peng died on 16 September 2013, the day of my sixtyfifth birthday. His relatives did not comply with his wish to have his ashes scattered in the jungle where his comrades were buried, but want to bury his ashes in his hometown, of Sitiawan in Perak. He died in Bangkok, and was cremated according to Buddhist rites. It appears that his ashes are kept in the secret sanctuary of a monastery, for fear of antagonistic vandalism by his enemies; even today the Malaysian government refuses Chin Peng’s reentry to the country of his birth, not even his ashes.

Epilogue Mabel Lee Most artists tend not to write about their art, although most are likely to have adopted an aesthetics that had attracted them during their initial awakening to artistic impulses, and subsequent experimentation, training, practice, and explorations to gratify these impulses. Born in 1948 in Shanghai, on the eve of Mao Zedong’s declaration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, artist Shen Jiawei is one of a small number of artists to have written extensively on their art practice. In the chapters of Painting History: China’s Revolution in a Global Context, he details the aesthetics and technical strategies he has adopted to execute his major artworks in the history painting genre. Despite the demise of the genre in Europe following the advent of film documentaries, the genre flourished for some years in Russia and China, but with the establishment of the socialist dictatorships of Stalin and Mao, all artists were turned into salaried conscripts with no option but to paint the prescribed political propaganda. Nurtured from infancy in Mao Zedong’s social engineering project to create “new people,” Shen graduated from high school just as the Cultural Revolution was unleashed on the population: all high school and university students were sent to learn by living and working with the poor and middle peasants. It seemed that Shen’s dream to become an artist had suddenly evaporated, but fate had decreed otherwise. The extraordinary political developments in China, plus Shen’s love of reading, especially translations of Western writings, and his strong interest in intellectual and cultural developments in human history, would facilitate his development as an artist. In early 1989 he travelled to Australia to study English and to learn for himself about the “decadent”

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capitalist West. He has settled in Australia since then, and has established himself as one of the most highly sought portraitists in Australia. Painting portraits earns him a livelihood, but he is committed to the genre of history painting, and resolute in his desire to gratify his intellectual exploration of history in this genre. The chapters of Painting History document the artistic career of Shen Jiawei, but it also tells much about cultural interactions via literary translation, despite restrictive environments in China during Mao’s authoritarian rule. The translation of Western literature has been a dynamic industry in China since the late nineteenth century, and remains the case today. Shen’s prolific reading and bibliophilic tendency, is coupled with his intellectual curiosity, the literary bent of a historian, and the visual insights of an artist in this book. At the same time, the book is a testimony of one individual’s search for intellectual and creative fulfilment.

The Paintings

Figure 1. Roderick Disciplines the Pups while Gillian Sits for Her Portrait.

2001, oil on canvas, 167 x 153 cm. Private collection, New Zealand.

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Figure 2. Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland.

1974, oil on canvas, 189 x 158 cm. Collection of the Long Museum, Shanghai, China.

The Paintings Figure 3. Tasting Snow on the Wanda Mountains.

1972, oil on canvas mounted on board, 130 x 160 cm.

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1987, oil on canvas, 198 x 1098 cm (six panels). Collection of the National Art Museum of China.

Figure 4. Red Star over China.

210 Painting History

The Paintings Figure 4a. Red Star over China (panel 1).

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Figure 4b. Red Star over China (panel 2).

The Paintings Figure 4c. Red Star over China (panel 3).

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Figure 4d. Red Star over China (panel 4).

The Paintings Figure 4e. Red Star over China (panel 5).

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Figure 4f. Red Star over China (panel 6).

The Paintings

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Figure 5. Tolerance.

1988, oil on canvas, 198 x 179 cm. Collection of the National Museum of China.

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Figure 6. Wounds: The Story of Dr. Norman Bethune.

1984, oil on canvas, 198 x 186 cm. Collection of the National Museum of China.

2002, oil on canvas, 200 x 400 cm. Collection of the White Rabbit Gallery, Australia.

Figure 7. 1972 Imperial Palanquin: After Yan Liben.

The Paintings 219

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Figure 7a. 1972 Imperial Palanquin: After Yan Liben (part 1).

The Paintings Figure 7b. 1972 Imperial Palanquin: After Yan Liben (part 2).

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Figure 8. Laocoön: After El Greco #1.

2004–2012, oil on canvas, 267 x 336 cm.

The Paintings Figure 9. The Opening of the Fifth Seal: After El Greco #2.

2004–2012, oil on canvas, 300 x 260 cm.

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2012, oil on canvas, 137 x 411 cm.

Figure 10. Eileen Chang’s Family.

224 Painting History

The Paintings Figure 10a. Eileen Chang’s Family (part 1).

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Figure 10b. Eileen Chang’s Family (part 2).

The Paintings Figure 10c. Eileen Chang’s Family (part 3).

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2009–2012, oil on canvas, 6 panels, each 198 x 137 cm.

Figure 11. Revolution.

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The Paintings Figure 11a. Revolution (part 1).

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Figure 11b. Revolution (part 2).

The Paintings Figure 11c. Revolution (part 3).

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Figure 11d. Revolution (part 4).

The Paintings Figure 11e. Revolution (part 5).

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Figure 11f. Revolution (part 6).

The Paintings Figure 12. Spain 1937.

2011–2012, oil on canvas, 220 x 300 cm.

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Figure 12a. Spain 1937 (part 1).

The Paintings Figure 12b. Spain 1937 (part 2).

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2006, oil on canvas, 183 x 459 cm.

Figure 13. Peking Treaty #2.

238 Painting History

The Paintings Figure 13a. Peking Treaty #2 (part 1).

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Figure 13b. Peking Treaty #2 (part 2).

The Paintings Figure 13c. Peking Treaty #2 (part 3).

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Figure 14. 1966 Beijing Jeep #2.

2002, oil on canvas, 198 x 198 cm. Private collection, New Zealand.

The Paintings Figure 15. Third World.

2002, oil on canvas, 259 x 356 cm. Private collection, Malaysia.

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Figure 15a. Third World (part 1).

The Paintings Figure 15b. Third World (part 2).

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Figure 16. Absolute Truth.

2000, oil on canvas, 259 x 244 cm. Collection of the White Rabbit Gallery, Australia.

The Paintings Figure 17. Russia 1917.

2013, oil on canvas, 213 x 213 cm.

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Figure 18. Wise Men from the East.

2001, oil on canvas, 224 x 229 cm.

2008, oil on canvas mounted on board, 244 x 1464 cm. Private collection, Malaysia.

Figure 19. Merdeka.

The Paintings 249

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Figure 19a. Merdeka (part 1).

The Paintings Figure 19b. Merdeka (part 2).

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Figure 19c. Merdeka (part 3).

The Paintings Figure 19d. Merdeka (part 4).

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Figure 19e. Merdeka (part 5).

The Paintings Figure 19f. Merdeka (part 6).

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Figure 19g. Merdeka (part 7).

The Paintings Figure 19h. Merdeka (part 8).

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Figure 20. Chin Peng: The Last Communist.

2006, charcoal pencil, pastels, on paper, 42 x 29 cm.

Index

A-bomb, 29 Above the Town, 166 Absolute Truth, xvi, 160–161, 163, 246 abstract painting, 59 activist, 37, 48, 88 Adoration of the Magi, 127, 167–168 aesthetics, 8, 43, 56, 67, 91, 205 Afghanistan, 70, 76–77, 143, 152 Africa, 147 African National Congress, 190 South Africa, 151–152, 178, 190 Age, The. See under newspaper agricultural production, 4 Agricultural Reclamation Corps, 4 Ai Qing, 31, 123 aircraft, 3, 108 Al Qaeda, 70, 76 All Men Are Brothers, 134 Allan, Ted, 54, 63, 120–121 Allende, Salvador, 147, 153 Alley, Rewi, 107 Allied Powers, 128 America. See United States of America Amin, Idi, 147, 151 Amur River, xiv, 4 Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, The, 145–146 Andreyeva, Maria, 164 anti-bourgeois-liberalism campaign, 42 anti-Japanese, 35, 38, 58, 100, 104, 173–174, 183, 188

anti-Japanese (continued) See also Japan anti-Manchu revolutionary cause, 43 anti-spiritual-pollution campaign, 42 Antonov-Ovseyenko, Vladimir, 119 Aquino, Maria Corazon, 146, 152 Arafat, Yasser, 69, 148, 153 Archibald Prize, xvii army general, 21–22, 26, 28–32, 34, 37–38, 40, 86, 88, 94, 101, 110, 118, 145, 147, 153, 159, 172–173, 175–179, 183, 186, 189, 192, 197, 201 arrest, xv, 3, 11, 14, 32, 40, 101, 104, 110–111, 113, 120, 137, 157–158, 164, 172, 187–188, 194 art bureaucrats, 60 art critic, 10, 14, 150 Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), xvi–xvii, 11, 129 Art Research, 61 artworks, 56, 61, 167, 205 forbidden subject matter, 22 Renaissance, 45, 128 rework by government, 9–10 signing by artists, 5 Asia, 13, 147, 173, 179, 181, 190–192 Asian civilization, 168 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 180 August First Declaration, 100 Aung San Suu Kyi, 146–147, 151 Australia, xvi–xviii, 11, 24, 41, 46,

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Australia (continued), 55, 79–80, 91–92, 108, 115, 118, 129, 144, 147–148, 150, 158, 161, 176, 197–198, 205–206, 219, 246 Ayatollah Khomeini, 149, 153 baby, 32–33, 58, 60, 113, 160 Bada Alley, 44 Bai Qiu’en, 52–53, 55 Baling Talks, 179, 182 Bangkok, 118, 173, 176, 182–183, 186, 193, 196, 204 Bao’an, 19, 25, 94, 105 Barcelona, 118–119 Beatles, the, 150 Beidahuang, xiv, 4 Beijing, xv–xvi, xix–xx, 2, 9, 13, 21, 29, 35, 38–40, 46–47, 60–61, 66, 94, 105, 113, 129, 131–132, 138–140, 165, 177, 179, 184, 187, 200, 242 Beijing Biennale, 128, 168 Bell, Julian, 122–123 Ben-Gurion, David, 147–148, 151 Berlin Wall, 177–178 Bertram, James, 108 Bethune, Norman, xvi, xviii, 51–59, 61–63, 105–106, 119–123, 144, 190, 218 Bilboa, xvi Bin Laden, Osama, 69–70, 143 Bo Gu, 28, 111 Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, The, 145 Bolshevik, 99, 164–166 book banned, 15, 20–21, 54 book burnings, 20 Book of Revelation, 75 Book of Songs, 93, 98 Little Red Book, 133, 139

Borodin, Mikhail Markovich, 36 Boxer Movement, 86, 128–129 Braun, Otto, 16, 27, 37 British. See under Great Britain Brothers and Sisters, xvi, 91, 93, 95–98, 101, 109 brutality, 15, 17, 19, 158, 174, 202 Buddha, 167 Buddhism, 96, 168–169, 204 Bulgaria, 99, 160, 177 Burma, 123, 172, 175 Bush Administration, 76 Cai Yuanpei, 42–46, 96 Cambodia, 151, 153, 192 Camus, Albert, 35 Canada, xviii, 54, 63, 105, 121, 171 Canberra, 92, 150, 181 Canton. See Guangzhou cap, 133, 189–190, 195, 203 Capa, Robert, 58, 63, 117, 119–120, 122 capitalism, 5, 133, 137, 145–146, 157, 176, 192, 195, 198, 206 Carlson, Evans F., 21, 38, 94 cartoon, 11, 67, 165–166 Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), 2, 13–14, 21, 39, 58–61, 81 Central Military Commission, 25, 28 Central Translation Bureau, 165 Century on Wheels, The, 163 Cercas, Javier, 118 Chagall, Marc, 166 Chairman Mao at the South Lake First National Congress, 51 Chairman Mao Attends the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party at South Lake, xiv, 2

Index Chang, Eileen (Zhang Ailing), 79, 224–227 Book of Change, 80 Contrasts, 80–81, 85–87, 89 Eighteen Springs, 84 Fall of the Pagoda, The, 80 Little Ai, 84 Little Reunion, 80–81, 84 Love in a Fallen City, 82 Lust, Caution, 84–85 Earth, 38, 84, 121 “Remembering Hu Shi,” 83 Rice Sprout Song, 84 See also Eileen Chang’s Family Chang’an, 65 Changsha, 88 Changting, 27 Che Guevara, 143–145, 147–149, 151 Chen Bilan, 110 Chen Changhao, 25, 33, 111–112 Chen Duxiu, 32, 34, 43–45, 47, 83, 95, 102–103, 109–110 Chen Geng, 29–31 Chen Qichang, 104 Chen Xiuliang, 110–111 Chen Yi, 123, 186 Chen Yifei, 8, 10, 14 Cheng Fangwu, 27 Cheng Zihua, 30 Chiang Ching-kuo, 110 Chiang Fang-liang, Faina, 110 Chiang Kai-shek, 16–17, 25–26, 29, 31, 40, 94–95, 98–101, 105–106, 108–110, 114, 154 Chile, 70, 153 Chim (David Seymour), 117, 120, 122 Chin Peng, 118, 171, 173–176, 178, 182–186, 188–189, 193–196,

261 Chin Peng (continued), 198–199, 201, 203–204, 258 and Deng Xiaoping, 179–180, 187, 190–192 and Joseph Stalin, 197 equal distribution of wealth, 202 and Mao Zedong, 145, 172, 181, 191, 197, 200 My Side of History, 180–181, 191 China Artists Association, 6 “China: 5000 Years” exhibition, xvi, 11 China Forum, 103 Chinese Communist Party (CPC), xiv, xxi, 2, 6, 13–15, 17–19, 21, 23–28, 32–33, 35, 37–40, 42–43, 46–47, 51, 94–95, 97–101, 103–113, 135–136, 179, 182, 184, 186–188, 190, 192, 195, 197, 200–201 CPC Central Committee, 22, 30 CPC Politburo, 22 Chinese living in Malaya, 173 Chinese Notes, 16 Chinese People’s Revolution Military Museum, 61 Chongqing, 82 Chuankang, 25 CIA, 70 Cold War, xvii, 66, 70, 159, 178–179, 201 Comintern, 16, 25, 27, 35, 37, 40, 63, 99–100, 107, 110–111, 113, 118–119, 121, 163, 172 “Comintern,” 102, 104–106 Commercial Press, 8, 15 communists, xiv, xxi, 2, 15, 17, 21, 31, 34, 37–40, 42, 55–56, 61, 68, 85, 105–107, 122, 133–134, 137, 163, 195, 199–200, 258

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communists (continued) anticommunist, 84, 197 Chinese Communist Party. See Chinese Communist Party (CPC) communist heroes, xviii, 95 communist movement, xvii–xviii, 16, 117, 159, 176, 198, 201 Communist Party of Malaya (CPM), 118, 145, 171–176, 178–180, 182–194, 196–197, 202–203 Communist Party of Vietnam, 172 communists who are humanist, xvii Dutch Communist Party, 104 French Communist Party, 120 French Communist Party, 120 German Communist Party, 157 last generation, 198 Polish Communist Party, 177 Russian Communist Party, 99–100, 110 USSR Communist Party, 102 comrades, 17, 28–30, 33, 48, 56, 99, 105–106, 111, 118–119, 127, 134, 136–138, 148, 157, 163, 174–175, 178–180, 183, 186, 189, 193–195, 197–199, 202–204 concubine, 32, 44, 88, 112 Confucianism, 70, 167–168 corruption, 19, 86, 187, 200–201 counterrevolutionary, 20, 63, 84, 103, 133–135, 187 Courbet, Gustave, 8 Crown Publishing House, 80 Cuba, 143, 151, 153 Cultural Revolution, xiii, xv–xvi, 1–3, 6, 8, 13, 15, 19–23, 26–28,

Cultural Revolution (continued), 31, 33, 41, 43–44, 51–52, 54, 61, 67–68, 91, 97, 106, 110, 112, 133–134, 136–138, 140, 179, 187–188, 192, 205 Cultural Revolution slogans, 139 Czechoslovakia, 37, 177–178 da Vinci, Leonardo, 168 Dadu River, 16 Dai Qing, 97 Daily Telegraph, The. See under newspaper Daoism, 168 Darkness at Noon, 122 Dato Tan Cheng Lock, 178 Davis, John, 178–179, 182 Deane, Gillian and Roderick, xix–xx, 207 Delacroix, Eugène, 127 democracy, 18–19, 38, 42, 83, 118–119, 144, 146, 149, 152, 157–158, 164–165, 173, 175, 177, 198–199, 201–202 Deng Fa, 26, 28 Deng Xiaoping, 24, 26, 28, 30–31, 34, 39, 47, 66, 154, 187 and CPM, 179–180, 190–192 Deng Yingchao, 24, 27, 39 devil, 27, 161 Dimitrov, 99, 104, 106 Ding Dong, 97 Ding Ling, 27, 31, 82–83 Ding Yunpeng, 168 doctor, 27, 31, 53–54, 57, 105, 194 Donald, William Henry, 108 Dong Biwu, 28, 34 Dongfeng Paper Factory, 20 Dubček, Alexander, 177 Dutch Communist Party, 104 East Timor, 144, 148, 152, 154

Index Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies, 45 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 121 Eight Model Plays, 8 Eighth Route Army, 26, 29, 54, 57, 101, 123 Eileen Chang’s Family, 85–86, 224–227 El Greco, 59–60, 69–71, 75–77, 118, 222–223 emperor, 20, 35, 41, 56, 68, 88, 95 emperor-subject feudal relationship, 23 Emperor Taizong, 65–67, 125–126 Emperors through the Ages, 126 Empress Dowager Cixi, 139 Engels’s Second International, 99 Enlightenment, 95, 98 Europe, xvii, 35, 42, 45, 85, 89, 117, 127, 147, 157, 177, 188, 199, 205 Everything for the Party, 200 Explication of the Three Religions, 168 extremism, 69–71, 119, 132, 144, 192 eyewitness, 15–16, 26, 49 Fairbank, John K., 94 Falling Soldier, The, 119 fascism, xvii–xviii, 55, 59, 63, 70, 99–100, 104, 118–119, 121–122, 199, 201 February Revolution, 163–165 Feng Xuefeng, 49, 95 Feng Youlan, 44 feudalism, 42 First Front Army, 24–25, 29 five black categories, 133 Flower in a Sea of Sin, A, 87 foreign exchange, 4

263 4A Gallery, xix, 140, 149, 168 Four Veterans, 28 Fourth Front Army, 24–26, 32–34 France, 8, 34, 87, 118, 120–121, 123, 128, 160 French Revolution, 127 Franco, Francisco, xvii, 118–120, 122 Franklin, Miles, 79 Fu Lianzhang, 27 Fujian, 24, 27, 37, 172 Futian Incident, 17, 30, 33, 37–38, 134–136 Gaddafi, Muammar, 69, 153 Gandhi, Mahatma, 143, 146, 148, 151, 154 Gang of Four, 3, 11, 188 Gansu, 24–25, 39, 92, 101, 112 Gao Gang, 106 Gao Hua, 97, 135 Gao Wenqian, 97 García Lorca, Frederico, 121–122 Germany, 32, 37, 71, 99, 107, 112–113, 118–121, 157, 163–165, 177, 201, 203 Giacometti, Alberto, 120 glasnost, 158 god, 35, 70–71, 75, 127, 139 Goodman, David S.G., xxi Gorbachev, Mikhail, 158, 177 Gorky, Maxim, 159, 164 Great Britain, 27, 37, 40, 127, 172–175, 178–179, 181–183, 186, 190, 194, 196, 199, 203 Great Famine, 191 Great Leap Forward, 191 Great Northern Wilderness Printmaking Studio, xv, 5 Great Road, The, 21, 38 Greek tragedy, 70 Gu Hongming, 43–45

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Gu Zhun, 19–20, 38 Guan Xiangying, 31 Guangzhou, 123, 186 Guardian, The. See under newspaper Guernica, 118–119, 122 guerrilla, 27, 145, 172–174, 179, 201 Guggenheim Museum, xvi, 11 gulag, 36 Gusmão, Xanana, 144, 148–149, 154 Hai Rui Resigns from Office, 138 Han Shangyi, 10, 14 Han Xin, 85 Hangzhou, xiv, 1, 13, 53 Hao Boyi, xv, 5–7, 13 Harbin, xv, 5, 11 Hatem, George, 27, 105 Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, xix He Fang, 97 He Jiadong, 200–201 He Kongde, 10, 14 He Long, 21, 30–31, 39 He Zhihua, 32 He Zizhen, 27, 112 Heilongjiang, 10, 12, 98 Heilongjiang Production and Construction Corps, xiv, 4, 13, 20, 55, 57 Heilongjiang Provincial Artists Association, xv, 5, 11 Heisig, Bernhard, 129 hell, 35, 83, 161 Hemingway, Ernest, 121 Hilter, Adolf, 99, 104, 110, 113, 150, 161, 199 historical figures, 91–93, 96, 124, 149 historical truth, 97 history distorted, 97 history painting, xvii, 22, 41, 57, 61,

history painting (continued), 85, 91, 206 as “a discussion of history,” 129 biblical themes, 127 demise, 128, 205 fictionalization, 125–130 Western art, 125–127 Ho Chi Minh, 145, 153, 172 Holbein, Hans, 145 Hollows, Fred, xviii, 55 Hong Kong, 31, 39, 80, 82, 84, 88, 184 Hong Xiuquan, 35 Hong Ying, 118, 123 hostage, 31, 110 How Did the Red Sun Rise in Yan’an, 97, 135 How the Steel Was Tempered, 200 Hu Jinkuai, 27 Hu Lancheng, 82–85 This Life, 80–81 Hu Shi, 42–46, 83, 94–96 Hu Yaobang, 17, 21, 23, 38–39, 47, 106, 200 Hu Yuelong, 2, 13 Huang Hua, 27 Huang Kan, 43, 46 Huang Suqiong, 88 Hulin County, 7 Human Rights Alliance of China, 103, 105 humanism, xvii–xviii, 55–56, 92, 102, 105, 144, 164 Hunan, 13, 25, 88, 133, 180, 187 Hungary, 120, 122, 177 Hussein, Saddam, 76–77, 152–153 Huxi Purge of Trotskyites, 104 Ilyushin Il–10, 3 Imperial Palanquin, The, 125 imperialism, 42, 67

Index “In Memory of Dr. Norman Bethune,” 52–53 India, 37, 151, 153–154, 167, 175, 186 Indochina, 123 Indonesia, 70, 148, 152, 154, 175 industrial revolution, 157 Inside Red China, 21, 38, 113 intellectual, xiii, xvii, 16, 19, 28, 31, 36, 38, 43, 49, 91, 94–95, 102–104, 106, 136, 158, 181, 183, 201, 205–206 intellectual awakening, 42 Internationale, The, 103, 119, 187 Iran, 149, 153 Iraq, 76–77, 153, 199 Isaacs, Harold, 103, 105–106 Islam, 69–71, 112, 149, 160 Israel, 148, 150–153 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 149 Italy, 99, 118–119, 127–128, 203 Ivens, Joris, 121–123 Japan, xvii, 4, 14, 19, 25–26, 29, 35, 38–40, 54, 57–58, 83–84, 94–95, 99–101, 103, 105–107, 112–113, 122, 147, 172, 175, 188–189, 201 Japanese Imperial Army, 15, 98 Japanese military, 59, 104, 194, 196 Japanese occupation, 82, 173–174, 178, 182–183 See also anti-Japanese Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 159 jeep, xix–xx, 131–133, 138–140, 242 Jiamusi, 5, 13 Jiang Zhaohe, 21, 39 Jiaxing, xiv, 2–3, 13, 20, 51–52, 86 Jilin, 98 journalist, 15, 17, 37–39, 94, 105, 108, 113, 121, 144, 160, 181 Ju’ou, 86–88

265 Jung Chang, 16–17, 37 Kalinka, 165 Kang Keqing, 27, 32, 112–113 Kang Sheng, 104, 106, 135, 139 Kautsky, Karl, 163 Kerensky, Alexander, 164 Khmer Rouge, 180 kidnapping, 25, 101, 109, 194 killings, 3, 17–18, 24, 28–31, 33–34, 70, 75, 81, 104, 107, 112, 118, 120–122, 129, 134–135, 144, 158, 172–173, 176, 187, 197, 199 Kim Il Sung, 145, 153 King Juan Carlos, 119 Kissinger, Henry, 66, 68 Koenig, Fritz, 71 Koestler, Arthur, 122 Konstantin Maksimov, 2, 13 Korchagin, Pavel, 200 Korean War, 4 Kuomintang (KMT), 16, 18–19, 24–25, 27, 29, 32–33, 37, 40, 42, 95, 98–105, 107–108, 111–112, 134–135, 174, 183, 185 Kustodiev, Boris, 166 L’Homme révolté, 35–36 labor camps, 4 Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 128 Laocoön: After El Greco #1, 70, 76, 222 Laozi, 167 Last Communist, The, 171, 193, 258 Latin America, 147 Lei Feng, 200 Leipzig Trial, 99 Lenin, Vladimir, 34, 96, 99, 104, 144, 157–158, 163–165, 172, 198 Leninism, 16, 42, 158, 163 Leninist International, 99

266

Painting History

Li Dazhao, 43, 46 Li Guojian, 186, 188, 193–194 Li Hongzhang, 80, 86–88 Li Hui, 97 Li Kenong, 28 Li Lisan, 110 Li Rencai, 46–47 Li Rui, 20, 38, 201 Li Sha, 110 Li Shenzhi, 20, 38, 201 Li Shimin, 126 Li Xiannian, 26, 33, 40 Li Zhen, 32 Li Zicheng, 34–35 Liang Shuming, 43, 45–46 Liao Chengzhi, 33 Liao Zhongkai, 33 Liaoning, 22, 98 Liaoning Provincial Artists Association, 60 liberalism, 38, 42–43, 83, 157 Liberty Leading the People, 127 Lim Bo Seng, 174–175 Lin Biao, 3, 13, 22, 26, 29, 53, 137–140 Lin Boqu, 28 Lin Da, 118 Lin Xianzhi, 97 Lin Yutang, 44 literary revolution, 46 Little Red Book. See under book Liu Bannong, 46 Liu Binyan, 201 Liu Bocheng, 25–26, 34, 39 Liu Ding, 107, 113 Liu Shaoqi, 24, 28, 39, 131, 137–140, 187–188 Liu Shipei, 43, 45 Liu Wenhui, 16–17, 37 Liu Yulian, 7, 14 Liu Zhidan, 24–25, 30, 39

Long March, 21, 24–26, 31, 33, 37, 39, 100, 104, 112 Long March, The, 21, 26, 39 Long Museum, xvi, 208 loyalty, 30, 67, 135, 200 Lu Dingyi, 28 Lu Dongsheng, 31 Lu Xun, 22, 42, 44–46, 49, 60, 81–82, 94, 96, 103 Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, 22, 60 Luding Bridge, 16 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 166 Luo Gongliu, 200 Luo Ruiqing, 29 Luxemburg, Rosa, 157–158, 163–165 Madam Mao (Jiang Qing), xv, 6, 9–12, 54, 112, 138–139 Malaya, 171–176, 178–179, 182, 189–190, 192, 195, 202 Malayan independence, 193 Malayan Emergency, 181, 183 Malaysia, xvi, 118, 150, 154, 171, 176, 178, 180, 183–185, 193–194, 202, 204, 243, 249 Malevich, Kazimir, 165–166 Malraux, André, 118, 121 Man’s Fate, 123 Manchu dynasty, 34 Manchukuo, 4, 95, 98 Manchuria, 31, 39–40, 84, 95 “Manifesto of the Citizens of Peking,” 47 Mantegna, Andrea, 128 Mao Zedong, xiv–xv, 1–4, 6, 14–20, 22, 24–35, 37–38, 40, 42, 47, 49, 51–56, 66–68, 79, 83–84, 94, 102, 104–106, 109, 111–112, 123, 131–133, 135–140, 143–147, 149, 151, 181, 197, 200, 205–206

Index Mao Zedong (continued) post-Mao era, 23 and CPM, 172, 191–192 strategies, 134 Mao: The Unknown Story, 16, 37 Marco Polo Bridge Incident, 95, 101 Marcos, Imelda, 145–146, 151–152, 154 Marshall, David, 178 Marxism, 3, 38, 42, 118, 133, 143–144, 149, 157–158, 163–164, 172, 181, 198, 200–201 Marxism-Leninism, 42 Mary MacKillop of Australia, 91 Master Hongyi (Li Shutong), 96 Maugham, Somerset, 44 May Fourth, 35, 42, 45, 47–48, 82–83, 95, 103 McDonald, John, 150 Melbourne, 16 memoir, xvi–xvii, 16–17, 22, 37–39, 44, 49, 80, 82, 97, 108, 113, 121, 123, 133, 138, 180–184, 187, 189, 192, 194, 201–202 Mensheviks, 164–165 Merdeka, xvi, 118, 171, 188, 249–257 Mexico, 145, 152 “Mexican Suitcase,” 63, 117 Mgar stong-btsan yul-srung, 65–66, 126 Michelangelo, 160–161 Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution, 10 Ming dynasty, 35, 168 Minister of Propaganda, 28, 47 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 27 minorities, 71 Miraflor, Norma, 180–183, 185, 203 missionary, 27, 31, 40 model, xiv, 5, 7–8, 41, 45, 55, 57,

267 model (continued), 59–60, 67, 92, 135, 202–203 Mohamad, Mahathir, 154, 180 Moiseenko, Tatyana, 111 Moment in Peking, 44 Morality Advancement Society, 44 Moscow, 32–33, 39–40, 85, 99–101, 104–105, 110, 112, 139, 159 Mother Teresa, 146, 151 Mountains Are Forever Young, The, 194 Muhammad, Amir, 171–172 mural, 41, 56, 59, 92–93, 118, 161, 180 Museum of the History of the Chinese Revolution, 46 Muslim. See Islam My Memoirs, 22, 39 My Side of History, 180–181, 191 Myanmar, 146, 151, 153 Nanchang Uprising, 32, 112 Nanjing, 33, 44, 87–88, 101, 111 National Art Exhibition, xv, 6, 8–10, 46, 60 National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), xv–xvi, xx, 9–12, 23–24, 47, 92, 210 National Arts Association for the Sixth National Arts Exhibition, 61 National Exhibition Celebrating the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Founding of the PLA, 23 National Heritage, 45 national identity, 173 National Museum of China (NMC), xvi, 46, 61, 217–218 National Portrait Gallery, xvii National Salvation, 95, 98

268

Painting History

National Salvation Times. See under newspaper National Trust S.H. Ervin Gallery, 150 Nazi, 118–120, 122, 199 Nelson Mandela, 146, 151, 178 Neruda, Pablo, 121–123 New Culture Movement, 82–83, 88, 102 New Fourth Army, 29, 101, 107 New Planet, A, 166 New Testament, 75, 167 New Wave Art, 60 New York, xvi, 11, 13–14, 38–40, 69, 76, 83, 115, 117, 143 New Youth, 45–46 New Zealand, xx, 55, 107–108, 140, 147, 207, 242 New Zealand National Te Papa Museum, xix newspaper, xv, xxi, 132, 134, 138, 150, 157, 159, 161, 164, 176, 178, 193 Age, The, 16 Daily Telegraph, The, 181 Guardian, The, 31 National Salvation Times, 100 Sydney Morning Herald, 16 Weekly Critique, 46 Wenhuibao, 10 Nicaragua, 149, 151–152, 177 Nie Rongzhen, 29, 56 Nin, Andreu, 118 9/11, 69–71, 76–77, 122, 143–144, 149 1911 Revolution, 28, 88, 93–94, 169 1972 Imperial Palanquin: After Yan Liben, xvi, 66, 219–221 1966 Beijing Jeep, 138 1966 Beijing Jeep #1, xix

1966 Beijing Jeep (continued) 1966 Beijing Jeep #2, xix–xx, 139–140, 242 Ningxia, 24–25, 39, 92, 101 Nixon, Richard, 66 No. 5 Air Corps, 2–3 Northeast Army, 100–101, 106–108 Northern Song dynasty, 139 Noulens, Hilaire, 104–105, 110–111 October Revolution, 102, 164, 166 oil painting, xv, 2–3, 6, 10, 13–14, 59, 89 On a Chinese Screen, 44 “On the Songhua River,” 107 Opening of the Fifth Seal, The, 70, 75–76, 223 Orlov, Alexander, 119 Ortega, Daniel, 149, 151 Orwell, George, 61–62, 118–119, 122–123 Oslo Peace Accord, 148 Ostrovsky, Nikolai, 200 Ozaki Hozumi, 105 pagoda, 52–53, 55, 80 “Pallid Moon, The,” 56, 58 Pan Hannian, 107–108 Pan Lanzhen, 109 peasants, xiv–xv, 2, 4, 6, 35, 52, 58, 88, 92, 133, 137, 205 Peking Treaty, 86 Peking Treaty #1, 128–129 Peking Treaty #2, 128–129, 238–241 Peking Treaty 1901 #2, xvii Peking University, 42–47, 103 Peng Dehuai, 23, 29, 39, 138–139 Peng Shuzhi, 110 Peng Xuefeng, 28 People’s Liberation Army (PLA), xiv, 4–5, 7, 10, 23, 39, 111, 203

Index Peres, Shimon, 148, 153 Persia, 167 Peter the Great, 67 photography, 8, 12, 46, 104, 108, 120, 128, 133, 148, 150, 161, 185, 188, 190 before the advent of photography, 125, 127 Norman Bethune, 56, 59, 119 Cai Yuanpei, 44–45 Eileen Chang, 79, 81, 86 Che Guevera’s death, 145 Chin Peng, 189 as documentation, 80, 97 Empress Dowager Cixi, 139 during February Revolution, 163 Miles Franklin, 79 Federico García Lorca, 122 Mikhail Gorbachev, 159 Gu Hongming, 44 historical photographs, 21, 106–107 history painting, 127, 129 Hu Shi, 44 International Center of Photography, 117 Harold Isaacs, 103 Vladimir Lenin, 164 paintings based on, 97, 109 Peking University, 44 photographers. See Capa, Robert; Taro, Gerda; and Chim Picasso, Pablo, 118–119, 122 Pinochet, Augusto, 70, 122, 147–148, 153 Plague Fighter, 194 plein-air painting, 9 Plekhanov, Georgi, 34, 165 Pol Pot, 146, 151, 192 Poland, 120, 159, 165, 177

269 Polish Communist Party, 177 political surveillance, 20 Pope, 20, 35, 159–161, 178 Princess Wencheng, 65 propaganda, xiv–xv, 1, 3, 5, 15, 28, 47, 137, 205 propaganda poster, 10 protester, 36, 47, 192 Provincial Revolutionary Committee, xiv, 2, 53 purification campaign, 33–34, 134, 179 Qi energy, 59 Qian Xuantong, 46 Qianjin Opera Troupe, 11 Qin Feng, 97 Qin Shihuang, 67 Qincheng Prison, 29, 33 Qing dynasty, 35, 42, 139 Qingming Festival, 19 Rabin, Yitzhak, 148, 153 Railway Engineering Corps, 4 Ramos-Horta, José, 148, 152 Raohe County, 7–8 Raphael, 45, 126 Ray Hughes Gallery, 155, 161 Reaper on Red Background, 165 rebel faction, xiii, 1, 143 rectification team, 10 Red Army, xx, 16, 18–19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 31, 33–35, 37–38, 41, 57, 92, 98, 101–102, 105–107, 113, 118, 134, 185, 189, 199 Central Red Army, 24, 30 Fourth Front Red Army, 17, 22, 26, 112 Red Army University, 36 Women’s Red Army, 32 Red Detachment of Women, 185 Red Dust, 84 Red Guard, xiii, 1, 3, 13, 36, 51–52,

270

Painting History

Red Guard (continued), 79, 92, 132–133, 138–139, 143 Red Guard armband, 20 Red Star over China, xvi, xx, 15, 17, 23–24, 27, 41, 45, 91–93, 97, 99, 106, 113, 210–216 Red Wheel, The, 96, 165 red-light district, 44 Reed, John, 15, 37 reeducation, xiv, 3 Reference Materials, 143 Refugees, 21 regiment, xiv, 4, 10, 112 Reichstag Arson Case, 100 Rembrandt, 145 Ren Bishi, 25, 30–31, 39 Repin, Ilya, 8 Republican China, 32, 40, 57–58, 61, 94–95, 98, 106, 118–122, 190 resistance, 25, 29, 35, 54, 58, 94, 101, 103, 107–108, 110–111, 121, 144, 173–174, 183, 189 Revolution, xvi, xix, 13, 91, 93, 95, 98–99, 101–102, 105, 109, 149–150, 166, 168, 205, 228–234 Revolution and Death, 166 Revolutionary Committee, xiv, 2, 51–53 revolutionary realism, 8 revolutionary romanticism, 8 Roman Catholic, 159 Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 66 Royal Academy of Arts, 127 Rubens, Peter Paul, 127 Russia, 2–4, 7–8, 13, 15, 25, 27, 31, 33–34, 37, 67, 70, 83, 102, 112, 139, 147, 158, 163–166, 205, 247 Russian Communist Party, 99–100, 110 Russian literature, xiii, 1

Russia 1917, 163, 247 Saint John, 75, 77 Sakharov, Andrei, 177 Salisbury, Harrison E., 21, 26, 39 salute, 57–58, 118, 189–190 San Mao, 84 Sang Hu, 83–84 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 84–85 satire, 66–68 Scalpel Is the Weapon, The, 55 Scalpel, the Sword, The, 54, 120 scholar, 33, 41, 43–44, 63, 83, 87, 98, 101, 109, 113, 168 School of Athens, The, 45, 126 Second Front Red Army, 21, 30 secret service, 28, 100, 104–105, 107, 118–119 Seven Self-Portraits, 91 Sha Wenhan, 110–111 Shaanxi, 25, 27, 30, 39, 92, 100–101, 105–106, 185 Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region, 92, 101 Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 45 Shan Shaojie, 97 Shandong, 4, 13, 104 Shanghai, xiii, xvi, 13, 15, 31–32, 45, 49, 51, 54, 81–85, 93–94, 104–105, 107, 111, 138, 205, 208 Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Studio, 10, 14 Shanghai painters, 8 Shanxi, 24 “Shanxi Kid,” 27 Shanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region, 24 Shen Jiawei, xiii, xv, xvii, xix, 194, 205–206 father’s arrest, 11 dissertation, 61

Index Shen Zemin, 32–34, 111–112 Shen Zhihua, 97 Shenyang, xvi, 22, 60 Shenyang Military Region, xiv, 4, 10–11 Shi Nai’an, 134 Shi Zhe, 106 Shippe, Hans, 107 Sichuan, 16–17, 21, 24–25, 34, 37, 60 Singapore, 111, 154, 171, 173–174, 178, 181, 196 Sino-Soviet border, 7 Smedley, Agnes, 21, 26–27, 38, 40, 105, 107 Sneevliet, Hendricus, 104 Snow, Edgar, 15, 27, 38, 94, 105–107, 113, 139 Snow, Helen Foster, 21, 26–27, 38, 113 Social Democratic Labor Party, 164–165 social engineering, 198, 200, 205 socialism, 8, 100, 147–148, 157, 164, 177, 195, 200–202, 205 socialist realism, 8 Socialist Revolutionary Party, 164 soldier, xiv–xv, xvii, xx, 2, 4, 6–9, 11, 16–18, 25–26, 29–32, 34, 38, 54–55, 57–60, 71, 92, 95–96, 102, 118–121, 123, 129, 134, 148, 151, 163, 165, 187–188, 192, 199, 203 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 96–98, 165 Song Qingling, 56, 103–105, 107, 110, 113–114 Songhua River, xiv, 4, 107 Songtsän Gampo, 65 Soong Mei-ling, 114 Sorge, Richard, 104–105 Sound of Bells at Peking University, The, 47

271 South Africa. See under Africa South Lake, xiv, 2, 51–53 Southeast Asia, 173, 179, 181, 190–192 Soviet movement, 99, 134 “Soviet Region and Red Army,” 102, 106–107 Soviet Russia, 2, 4, 8, 25, 70, 147 Soviet school of painting, 9 Soviet Union, 1, 4, 10, 15, 31, 33, 99, 102, 104–105, 110–111, 113, 118–119, 123, 127, 132, 134, 136, 143, 151, 158–159, 192, 199–200, 203 Spain, xvii, 121–123, 235–237 Spanish Civil War, 58, 61, 63, 106, 117–120, 190 Spanish salute, 57–58, 118 Sphere, The, 71 Spiridonova, Maria, 164 spy, 8, 27, 33, 104, 106, 113, 175, 189 Stalin, Joseph, 15, 17, 29, 33–36, 63, 66, 99–100, 102–106, 110–111, 118–119, 121, 134–135, 161, 164, 166, 197, 201, 205 death, 196 Stalinists, 190 Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland, xv–xvi, 1, 6–7, 9–12, 57, 208 Stilwell, Joseph W., 94 Storm, Esben, 93 student, 1–6, 10, 19, 27, 31, 35, 38, 59, 108, 111, 132, 137, 140, 145, 163, 176, 192, 205 student protesters, 36 Study of Perspective, The, 8 Suharto, 70, 154 suicide, 14, 33, 112, 136–137, 164 Sukarnoputri, Megawati, 149, 152

272

Painting History

Sulman Prize, xvii, 129 Sun Mingjiu, 108 Sun Yat-sen, 36, 48, 99, 101, 103, 105, 111, 169 superpowers, 147 superstition, 52, 61 Suppress Counterrevolutionaries Movement, 134 Surikov, Vasily, 67 Suzhou, xxi, 52 Sydney, xvi–xvii, xix–xxi, 11, 16, 34, 46, 54, 86, 93, 112, 129, 140, 147, 149–150, 155, 158, 161, 168, 180, 185, 203 Sydney Morning Herald. See under newspaper Tai’erzhuang Battle, 122 Taiwan, 37–38, 40, 84, 110 Taliban, 76, 143 Tang dynasty, 52, 65–66, 82, 125–126 Taro, Gerda, 63, 117, 120–123 Tasting Snow on the Wanda Mountains, xv, 6, 209 Ten Days that Shook the World, 15 terrorism, 69, 71, 76, 143–144, 178 Thailand, 175, 179–181, 184–185, 197, 203 Third World, xvi, 70, 73, 143, 145, 147, 149–151, 243–245 Thousand Li of the Homeland, A, 139 Three Eastern Provinces, 98 Three Pagodas Brigade, 52–53, 55 three prominences, 8–9 Tian Han, 95 Tiananmen Square, 36, 47, 132, 177, 187 Tibet, 25, 37, 65, 126, 151 Tolerance, xvi, 41–43, 45, 47, 217

totalitarianism, 15, 122, 146, 158 Tower of Babel, 92, 202 Tower of Babel, The, 92 traditional realist painting, 8 Travel Notes from a Trip to the West, 15 Trotsky, Leon, 34, 94, 99, 102, 110, 118–119, 164 Trotskyite, 29, 100, 102–105, 110, 119, 135, 190 Tu Sizong, 107 Tübke, Werner, 130 Tunku Abdul Rahman, 178–179 Twin Stars of China, 21, 39 “United Front,” 102, 106–107 United Malay National Organization (UMNO), 178 United Nations (UN), 152, 180 United States of America, xvi, 5, 15, 17, 27, 36–39, 51, 53, 56, 61, 66–67, 69–71, 76, 83–85, 97, 103, 105, 114, 118–119, 126, 128, 132–133, 146–147, 165, 177–178, 181, 183, 185–190, 193–197, 202–203 universal values, 168–169 Ussuri River, xiv, 4, 7 Ussuri River Fishing Song, 7 van Loon, Hendrik Willem, 43 Vanunu, Mordechai, 150 Vietcong, 192 Vietnam, 37, 120, 153–154, 172, 175, 179, 181, 192 violence, 99, 144, 164, 194, 198–199 Voice of the Malayan Revolution, 180 Wang Anna, 113 Wang Bingnan, 113 Wang Chengyi, 2, 13 Wang Fanxi, 104

Index Wang Guanquan, 97 Wang Jiaxiang, 28 Wang Lan, 22, 60, 171, 180 Wang Mantian, 10–11, 14 Wang Ming, 100, 104–105 Wang Shiwei, 104, 135 Wang Wei, 45 Wang Ximeng, 139 Wang Xu, 171, 180, 183, 186–189, 193 Wang Yizhe, 101 Wang Zhen, 31 war, xvii, 4, 26, 38, 40, 57, 60–61, 63, 66, 70, 76–77, 84, 86, 98, 106, 118, 120–121, 143, 145–146, 159, 164, 174–175, 178–179, 181–182, 190–191, 197, 201 Sino-French war, 87 War of Resistance, 25, 29, 35, 54, 58, 94, 101, 103, 107–108, 110–111, 173, 183, 189 World War II, 21, 39, 117, 119, 173, 199, 203 Ward, Ian, 180–181 warlord, 16–17, 31–32, 37, 40, 94, 99, 101 watchtower, 7–9 Weekly Critique. See under newspaper Wei Ershen, 45 Wei Jingshan, 8, 14 Wenhuibao. See under newspaper Western world, xvii, 35, 42–43, 92, 126, 168, 192, 205–206 China’s westernization movement, 86 Western art, 127 Western Route Army, 25–26, 32–33 Whampoa Military Academy, 29, 101 White Rabbit Gallery, xvi, 161, 219,

273 White Rabbit Gallery (continued), 246 Wolf, Markus, 201 Workers, Peasants and Soldiers Pictorial, 2 Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), 118 World Can Be Changed and the Seas Transformed into Mulberry Fields, The, 2 Wounds: The Story of Dr. Norman Bethune, xvi, 218 “Wounds,” 56–58 writer, 16, 27, 31, 37–38, 42, 44, 79–82, 84, 104, 121–123, 200–201 Wu Lien-Teh, 194 Wu Liping, 106 Wu Ruolan, 32, 112 Wu Shanming, 3, 13 Wu Xianqing, 113 Wu Yinxian, 122–123 Wuhan University, 123 Xi Jinping, 28 Xi Zhongxun, 27–28, 106 Xi’an Incident, 25–26, 39, 92, 94–95, 107–108, 113 Xia Xi, 30 Xia Yan, 84 Xian Xinghai, 95 Xiao Ke, 31 Xie Juezai, 28 Xie Weijin, 106 Xie Yong, 97 Xin Guancha Weekly Magazine, 23 Xu Feng, 52–53 Xu Haidong, 30 Xu Teli, 28 Xu Xiangqian, 34 Xuan Zhonghua, 113 Yan Liben, xvi, 65–67, 125–126,

274

Painting History

Yan Liben (continued), 219–221 Yan’an, 18–19, 23, 33, 39, 53–54, 97, 107–108, 112–113, 123, 196 Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, xv, 6 Yan’an Rectification Campaign, 104, 106 Yan’an Rectification Movement, 133, 135–136 Yan’an and the Eighth Route Army, 123 Yang Hucheng, 25, 40, 100–101, 113 Yang Jisheng, 97 Yang Kaihui, 112 Yang Kuisong, 40, 97 Yang Shangkun, 28, 30, 40 Yao Wenyuan, 138 Yap Lim Sen, 150, 176, 180, 183, 186, 188, 193, 195, 197 Yau Kong Yew, 184 Ye Jianying, 28 Ye Ting, 106 Yellow River, 25–26, 36 Yenching University, 27, 35, 38 Yuan Guoping, 29 Yuan Weishi, 97 Yugoslavia, 70 Yuon, Konstatin, 166 Zai-jian Revolution, xix, 149–150, 168 Zhang Aiping, 106 Zhang Chong, 107–108, 185 Zhang Guotao, 17, 22, 24–28, 33–34, 37, 39, 94, 112 Zhang Hanhui, 107 Zhang Hao, 25, 28, 39

Zhang Maoyuan, 88–89 Zhang Peilun, 86–88 Zhang Qinqiu, 32–33, 111–112 Zhang Renjun, 88 Zhang Wentian, 28, 40, 111 Zhang Xueliang, 25–26, 39–40, 100–101, 107–108 Zhang Yongsheng, xiv, 2–3, 13, 53 Zhang Yuexia, 111 Zhang Zhiyi, 88 Zhang Zijing, 88–89 Zhao Yiman, 95 Zhao Ziyang, 23, 39, 200 Zhejiang, xiv, 51, 81, 88, 111 Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, xiii, 1–3, 8, 13, 53 Zhejiang Joint Provincial Headquarters, xiii, 1 Zhenbao Island, 7 Zheng Chaoling, 104 Zheng Shengtian, 2, 13 Zhi Xiaomin, 97 Zhong Acheng, 81 Zhongguo Academy of Fine Arts, 3 Zhou Enlai, 19, 22, 27–28, 30, 32, 38–39, 66–68, 100–101, 105, 107–108, 113, 123, 131, 137–140, 153, 185 Zhou Zuoren, 46 Zhu De, 24, 27, 32, 112, 140, 186 Zhu Houze, 47 Zhu Rui, 31 Zhu Xueqin, 97, 194 Zhu-Mao Red Army, 32 Zunyi Conference, 24 Zuo Quan, 29–30

About the Author

Shen Jiawei, celebrity artist in China from the mid-1970s, relocated to Australia in 1989. Becoming a leading portraitist, he painted official portraits of dignitaries such as Pope Francis, Princess Mary of Denmark and Australian Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove. Seventeen of his history paintings are held in Beijing at the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) and the National Museum of China (NMC); other history paintings are held in public or private collections in Australia, China, USA, Vatican, New Zealand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and the European Union.

About the Editor Mabel Lee, PhD, Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, taught modern and contemporary Chinese history and literature at the University of Sydney, 1966–2000. She is concurrently adjunct/ honorary professor in the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences at The University of Sydney and at The Open University of Hong Kong, and is best known for her translations of Nobel Laureate of Literature Gao Xingjian’s writings, and as coeditor of The University of Sydney East Asian Series (1986–2000).