Painting History: China’s Revolution in a Global Context By Jiawe ...

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.