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

metal tower. In the bitter cold of -30 degrees Celsius, I stood on the ladder of the watchtower for an hour, sketching and taking notes. When Liu turned a telescope onto the Soviet side, he said a Soviet soldier was watching my every move. The man was clearly puzzled by what I was doing. Liu and I also sketched the landscape around Raohe City, which later became important in both our paintings. One evening on our way back to our lodgings, suspected of being Soviet spies, we were detained for questioning by the Raohe County authorities.

I spent a month working on various compositions. It was impossible to sketch or photograph the watchtower at a high altitude from a distance, so I had to use perspective to approximate it. I once spent a week in 1969 trying to understand the principle by reading a book given to me by my maternal uncle, The Study of Perspective, which was published by the Commercial Press in Shanghai back in 1917. This was during the Cultural Revolution, and I was trying to find some point of equilibrium between official ideological requirements—which, in terms of the arts, included the “three prominences” principle of the Eight Model Plays and the combining of “revolutionary realism” and “revolutionary romanticism”—and my secret passion for Russian art.

China’s Cultural Revolution aesthetics lay in using “revolutionary romanticism” to overthrow Soviet Russia’s “socialist realism.” In technique, Russian “socialist realism” had grown from the legacy of realism evolving from the French artist Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) to the Russian artist Ilya Repin (1844–1930). However, the defining characteristics of revolutionary romanticism in China were the qualities of “red, bright, and shining.” The teachers at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts seemed to accept this and insisted on my using vermilion and chrome yellow to paint faces, but I was not convinced. During the First National Art Exhibition in 1972, I saw the works of artists such as Chen Yifei¹¹ and Wei Jingshan¹² that retained the tonal scale of traditional realist painting, and I greatly admired their works. The main influence on my painting was this group of Shanghai painters, and I also followed the principles of