Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages

Chen Danqing was sent to the countryside in Jiangxi in 1970 when he was seventeen years old. As an educated youth from the city, he initially struggled to interact with the local farmers alongside whom he lived and worked. Once the harvesting season was over, however, he was able to immerse himself in reading and sketching outdoors. His most common subjects from this period include farmland, peasants, and domesticated animals.

In 1972, Shanghai authorities commissioned a group of young artists, including Chen Yifei, to create paintings based on the Yellow River Cantata, a piece of music written by composer Xian Xinhai and poet Guang Weiran in 1938. During the Cultural Revolution, pianist Yin Chengzong had adapted the original music into a piano concerto, which earned praise from Mao’s wife Jiang Qing. The title of Chen Yifei’s painting, Eulogy of the Yellow River, is drawn from the lyrics of the original music. The work was first publicly exhibited at the National Art Exhibition of the People’s Liberation Army in Beijing in 1977.

At the age of twenty-six, Shen Jiawei was sent to Heilongjiang province in the far northeast of China and was assigned to work with a division of the People’s Liberation Army. The military base was very close to China’s border with Russia, and border conflicts with the Soviet Union were common. This painting portrays three heroic Chinese soldiers guarding the border against Soviet threat. The work was singled out for praise by Mao’s wife Jiang Qing and became immensely popular. It was reproduced in newspapers, magazines, posters, and even on a ten-meter-high tower that faced the Soviet Union.

In 1975, at the age of twenty, Xu Bing was sent to the countryside for three years with his schoolmates. The experience was mostly a positive one as he was free to pursue art and spent much time drawing from nature after his day of work in the field was over. His exposure to local cultures, propaganda art, and calligraphy during the Cultural Revolution had a strong influence on his artistic philosophy and methodology. He reflects:

I gained the skills as a painter and artist at this time. . . . It was also the time when
I started to become a “contemporary artist,” although I had no idea what contemporary art was. But in a sense, lots of things that we did gave us the skills necessary to be artists, and also the spirit of “avant-gardism.”

Xu Bing grew up in Beijing and studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts where he now presides as Vice President. Today, he is one of the most well-known Chinese contemporary artists, and is known for his “square calligraphy” and language-based installations.

In 1969, Zhang Hongtu’s entire school was sent to Hebei province in northern China for “reeducation.” During his third and final year in the countryside, Zhang Hongtu completed a series of small oil painting—exhibited here for the first time—of rural life and the peasants with whom he lived and worked.