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

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