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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