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

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-middle