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Foreword
Mabel Lee
Raised in China under the red flag, Shen Jiawei 沈嘉蔚 (a.k.a. Jiawei Shen; b. 16 September 1948, Shanghai) was a firm believer of communism and an erudite reader of Russian literature and art which he greatly admired. When China severed relations with the U.S.S.R. in 1961 due to ideological differences, and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) began soon after, he was persecuted for his pro-Soviet leanings. The Cultural Revolution closed all schools, colleges, and universities; and as Shen had just graduated from high school it seemed that his ambition to pursue a career in art had irretrievably evaporated. Nonetheless, a series of coincidences suggest that even in those tumultuous times somehow it had been preordained that he would succeed in pursuing his ambition. In writing the chapters of this book, Shen himself intuited how certain individuals in life or in books had served to develop both the courage as well as the intellectual, ethical, aesthetic, and analytical skills that have been indispensable to his life and art creation.
It was coincidence that, as a member of the “rebel faction” of the Red Guard Third Command, Shen was part of the Zhejiang Joint Provincial Headquarters based on the campus of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine