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

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