Art as Struggle

Yin and Yang, light and dark, love and hate. Conflict is the child of duality, which rules our world. A healthy animal relies on instinct to deal with it, while the unsound soul denies conflict and creates a maddened beast.

Then there is the artist. Tuned into the Greater Soul, the spirit of his age, he devotes himself to expression of the ineffable. In moments of clarity, he transcends cause and effect, and renders the sublime. When this inner quest clashes with external realities, the conflict can shatter him.

Thus the artist, master of his inner world, and the politician, master of public life, are enemies, the former seeking expression of the greater truths we share, the latter to control them. At other times, they are two sides of the same coin. In the case of Jiang Feng, they were two sides of the same man.

Engraved Indignity

A group of Communist cadres examined the posters ruefully, careful to refrain from unseemly bursts of outrage. In the fight for the minds of China, the Japanese had resorted to using block print rendered in classic Chinese style. Even the subject, the Kings of Hell, was a Chinese concept, employed in these posters to promise divine retribution to any sons of Han foolhardy enough to resist the self-proclaimed rulers of Asia.

Still, the Communists were not so incensed as to ignore the cunning of the Japanese approach. In response, they adopted the nianhua style for their printed pictures. Nianhua referred to New Year’s prints, a style nearly as old and ingrained in the Chinese heart as the turn of the lunar calendar.

Unphased by a dearth of Communist artists proficient in the rustic craft of nianhua, top cadres prevailed on two skilled peasant artisans to teach a group of select recruits. Among them was young Jiang Feng, a firebrand in the Shanghai Leftist movement. As politically charged as he was talented, by 1940 Jiang Feng found himself in charge of the Lu Xun Academy, half school and half factory, but entirely dedicated to art as an instrument of revolution. Jiang Feng was charged with gathering and training an artist’s army. Their weapon – nianhua.

New Beginning

The Japanese had surrendered by 1945, but of course now the struggle came down to Communist vs. Nationalist, a War of Liberation, and the artist’s role, to frame the fight in ideological terms that all could understand, was as important as ever, and just as perilous.

In emulation of their glorious leader, artists undertook long marches to consolidate Communist control.

In September of 1945, a group of artists left Yan’an, the Long March’s endpoint, and made for Northeast China. Traversing Nationalist territory, they struggled along, mostly on foot, sometimes by sea, and reached Shenyang, a thirteen hundred kilometer journey, in thirty-six days. There the brave artists established a new Lu Xun academy.

Simultaneously, Jiang Feng and his cohorts undertook a similar expedition from Yan’an. Their destination: northern Hebei province, approximately one hundred and sixty kilometers northwest of Beijing. Their seven hundred kilometer hike made possible the opening of the North China United Revolutionary University. The hardships suffered by both groups, and the zeal with which they implemented Communist art programs and production, guaranteed them eventual positions of power in the post-liberation bureaucracy, Jiang Feng chief among them.

In With the Old, for Now

Chairman Mao viewed all art as class and culture specific, therefore vilifying Western models and the Chinese artists who emulated them. Jiang Feng, too, saw the utilitarian value in promoting a Chinese folk art that was not only deeply familiar to, but also easily understood by the proletariat. Nevertheless, Jiang Feng was nothing if not a reformer, convinced that the People’s artists, while using simple folk designs, would manifest their Socialist convictions and create “National Forms”, a phrase that gained more and more cache in circles of power.

Nianhua and ink paintings, anti-imperialist by their very nature, had been enjoyed by the People for hundreds of years. They would be the perfect platform for creating National Forms. They would not, however, serve as a long term program. Obviously versed in dialectics, Jiang Feng saw that the tension between tradition and modern Socialist thinking would have to be resolved in a synthesis that would necessarily involve National Forms.

Besides, he reasoned, there was nothing wrong with Western techniques of perspective and graded color. And the People remained open to aesthetic adaptation, traditional or no. Jiang Feng pointed to Jiangsu and Zhejiang, provinces where tobacco companies employed calendars featuring yuefenpai girls, iconic beauties rendered in Western style, as marketing that reached the walls of even non-smokers. Peasants in the region had even taken to having their ancestor portraits painted in the yuefenpai style.

His conclusion: adhering to realism, even over nationalism, would bridge the gap between the People and high class art. This was no small stand, especially when the Chairman himself favored rustic Chinese simplicity.

Long Live the Central Academy of Fine Arts

But Jiang Feng knew politics as he knew art, when to paint with broad strokes and when to white the canvas. In Tiananmen Square, on April 1^st, 1950, Mao himself declared, “Long live the Central Academy of Fine Arts!” waving their banner as CAFA members marched by. The previous July, Jiang Feng had been elected to the National Committee of All-China Literary and Arts Circles. His voice would now be one of a few guiding art style and policy for the world’s most populous country. Wisely, he called for continued practice of the folk art approach.

But his dedication to reform precluded bureaucratic maneuvering. He mandated the continuing education of artists, and the expression of their intellectual and political attainments in their subject matter. There would be no pictures of peasants dividing landlords’ ill-gotten plunder. Instead, they would redistribute farming implements and livestock, a scene apropos to the agricultural reform number one on the Central Committee’s priority list. Only an obdurate artist would depict a PLA assault with smoke and flames, for such liberating sieges were primarily non-violent, since rational people saw the eminent good sense in welcoming the revolutionary advances of the People’s Army.

Repainting China

Politically correct art was far from a foregone conclusion in the early days of the Republic. Tianjin alone turned out one hundred million feudalistic nianhua prints and yuefenpai pictures on a yearly basis. Shanghai was the national capital of lianhuanhua, storybooks glorifying bourgeois themes like adultery and rags to riches. The city by the sea was distributing over fifteen million copies of about five thousand lianhuanhua titles when Jiang Feng assumed his post of authority.

He settled on the First National Art Exhibition, held at the North Beijing Arts College in October of 1949, as an appropriate venue to herald the new era of Socialist art. A catalogue of three hundred and one artists’ work depicted the stark contrast between the dismal, backwards Old China and modern, scientific, brilliant New China.

Alas, artistic genius is not easily commanded. Only a few of the artists had mastered the nianhua style; most had been working in Nationalist-controlled portions of China. But Jiang Feng viewed a cooperative attitude as more valuable than artistic skill, which could be honed. Besides, the few outstanding works could guide errant painters, such as Dong Xiwen’s Liberation of Beijing, and Yan Han’s Down with Feudalism. China’s new art would be forged in the ashes of the old.

Golden Ideals Guide the Painter’s Hand

As an idealist, Jiang Feng held true even as an administrator. Revolution must inform art, not political expediency. If it did not serve the People, it did not merit existence. Political education justified popular art, nothing more. Therefore, as a politician, Jiang Feng disdained artists who had studied or taught in neutral academies while the storms of change had raged. After all, he and his compatriots had risked their lives, offering their art as a weapon to a sacred cause.

Little wonder, then, that artists unproven in times of struggle found little solace during times of peace. Jiang Feng issued peremptory decrees aimed at incorporating neutral artists into the ongoing campaign for the People’s minds and hearts. If it meant relocation, reeducation, or deprivation, so be it. Predictably, art instruction at the point of a bayonet produces few masters, and no lifelong converts. Of particular objection to those found revolutionarily deficient were the classes they had to attend, taught by peasants with skills far inferior to theirs, but with sparkling records of sacrifice and devotion to the People.

In fact, ideal informed Jiang Feng’s artistic opinion to the extent that he denigrated modern masters and their Chinese followers as late as 1978. In a letter to a contemporary, he ridiculed what he saw as an obsession with “fruit and women’s thighs”, juxtaposing his friends in Shanghai’s Leftist Movement who, whatever their painterly merits, had worked in the pure spirit of revolutionary passion.

The Heart Bleeds Red

To avoid simple conclusions, it must be remembered that Jiang Feng grew up confounded by colonial exploitation and the cheapness of the peasant’s life. Back when the Communist campaign consisted of no more than ragged students, he risked his life for essentially humanitarian purposes.

This empathy shines through in instances in which those less given to integrity than political expediency would never have pursued his course.

Back in Yan’an, Jiang Feng’s friend Mo Pu once arrived looking for fellow comrade Sha Ji Tong. This was during the “Salvation Movement”, a rigorous purging of Nationalist spies. Unbeknownst to Mo Pu, his friend had suffered a breakdown under questioning, and died as a result. Nonetheless, Jiang Feng arranged for Mo Pu to collect his suspect friend’s few belongings, and exhorted him to perform the rituals of Qing Ming, Tomb Sweeping Day, at Sha Ji Tong’s grave. Jiang Feng knew his actions would be perceived as passive condemnation of the leaders who had conducted the purge, but had not let such a misperception dissuade him from following his principals.

Jiang Feng also cherished the principal of political progress, coming ever closer to the Communist ideal. In 1979, a group of dissident youth artists known as the Xingxing [star] group had set up street exhibits. Viewed as radical and anti-party policy, they could find no more dignified home for their work. Hearing of this, Jiang Feng, by this time the Grand Old Man of China Art Policy, ordered that their exhibit be brought into the Chinese National Art Gallery. He went so far as to approve further Xingxing exhibits. These young firebrands possibly put him in mind of his youth, and had obviously overcome the artistic setbacks of the Cultural Revolution far more effectively than most government-approved artists.

Thus, although beset by conflicts that shook his external world to its very foundations, and immersed in a political climate that fed on internal tension, Jiang Feng managed to synthesize this duality into a value system that rang true with his soul. A two-sided coin that claimed both artistic and political value, Jiang Feng was stricken in the flames of revolution, whose face and obverse were the imprimatur of a new currency.