The Cultural Revolution and “No Name Painting Association”
This is Chapter Three of my book Tales of Their Time — about Chinese artists who immigrated to New York in 1980s and 1990s for freedom of expression in speech and art. Before this chapter, there will be an overview of Chinese artists in New York now and back then, the reasons why they left their country, and part of the background of the Cultural Revolution.
The Courtyard House
Wei Zhang’s family lived together in a big courtyard house in his childhood. In the early Minguo era — the time of the Republic of China — his grandfather had studied in Japan for ten years. After he returned to China, he built factories in Beijing and a bank in Shandong, becoming one of the first capitalists in China.
The home was the kind often owned by a large and wealthy family: two connected courtyards surrounded by buildings on four sides. When Zhang was a boy, it was heaven to live in. There were covered walkways connecting different buildings. There was the porch, the front courtyard, and the “moon gate” standing between the front and the inner courtyard. A small garden sat behind the principal room, the room facing south in a typical courtyard house, where Zhang’s grandparents lived and where many invaluable paintings and works of Chinese calligraphy and pieces of antique furniture were kept. Zhang lived in the west room with his parents and siblings. The east room was originally the dinning room, but Zhang’s grandfather later let a Beijing Opera actor live there as a permanent guest. Zhang’s grandfather was a fan of Beijing Opera; Zhang still remembers him lying on a cane chair, putting his hands behind his head, humming Beijing Opera melodies, when Zhang was about eight.
In spring, flowers from the two cherry-apple trees in the courtyards covered the grounds in pink and white. In summer, rain ran along the eaves and dripped, gathered and became a small stream, taking the fallen flowers and leaves to the front courtyard.
Zhang lived there when the Cultural Revolution began, changing everything.
To preserve “true” Communist ideology and to reimpose Maoist thought as the dominant ideology within the Communist Party of China, the Cultural Revolution was launched in May 1966. Capitalists, landlords and established intellectuals were regarded as “the right wing” — the enemy of the country. To the party, some of them needed to be reeducated — educated youths were sent to countryside to learn manual farm work. Some needed to be punished — many capitalists, teachers and scientists were publicly denounced, humiliated, and beaten.
Zhang’s grandmother — the wife of a capitalist — was beaten to death in 1986. “Every day the Red Guards went to my grandparents’ courtyard house and beat my grandma. My grandma was beaten nearly dead. She lay on a wooden board for three days, and then died. Nobody dared to come close and save her,” Zhang would later recount.
Zhang’s mother taught Russian, the language of the country that China openly denounced during the Sino-Soviet split, and was beaten everyday at school. “She came home with wounds and cuts here and there. The blood made her shirt stick to her skin and she couldn’t take it off,” Zhang recalls.
Zhang’s home — that big courtyard house — was destroyed by the Red Guards. They went there in trucks, searched every room, pried off most of the floor tiles, and stole furniture. The books, paintings and Chinese calligraphy were burned in a big fire in the house that lasted for days.
Zhang’s grandfather was protected by his old workers. Unlike the Red Guards and young workers, the old ones regarded him as a good leader after years of working in his factory, not a bloodsucker as people would describe a capitalist back then. They kept Zhang’s grandfather in a room in the factory so that the Red Guards couldn’t touch him. In 1976, when the armed struggle was finally over, Zhang’s grandfather was released and returned to the ruins of the courtyard house.
But everything had been swept away. His children and grandchildren had moved away; his wife had died. He had lost his home and his family.
Zhang was then 16. He went back to the courtyard house once to visit his grandfather in 1986. He couldn’t understand what his grandfather had lost and suffered. When Zhang visited, his grandfather didn’t talk to him — his favorite grandson among all grandchildren. Was it because his grandpa was blaming him not paying a visit soon enough? Was it because of his grandmother? Zhang still doesn’t know. That day, they sat in the house for 40 minutes, in awkward silence. Very depressed, Zhang left. Several months later, his grandfather died.
Picking Up The Paintbrush
Zhang grew up with labels such as the child born in a “bad” family and the child of the “Five Black Categories,” — landlords, rich farmers, counterrevolutionaries, bad influences and rightists. Long afterward, he remembered how he was isolated, insulted and bullied in school. Schools were no longer functioning as schools; teachers and principals were sent to clean toilets and the playground. It was the Red Guards who managed the schools.
Who were the Red Guards? They were fanatic students of age 11–17; they were an army of children and young adults attacking anyone not in line with Mao’s ideology. They dared to challenge courtesy, which belonged to the “Four Olds” — old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas that were to be abandoned during that crazy era.
There were no regular lessons anymore. Instead, the Red Guards made students gather around to read Quotations From Chairman Mao Ze Dong. Sometimes the students were asked to go to the playground and stand in lines. Zhang and other students from “bad” families had to stand far from those with “good” backgrounds. The “good” sort could curse and beat the “bad” sort at their pleasure.
After that, Zhang, being a privileged urban youth, was sent to a remote area to learn from farmers. He was one of the approximately 17 million young adults to get this treatment during the “Up To The Mountains And Down To The Countryside Movement.”
Zhang returned to Beijing in 1971, and was assigned to his first job in December 1972 when he recovered from a leg injury that he suffered on the farm. In the same year, he started painting, teaching himself. It was the beginning of his using the paintbrush to express himself and to fight against the real world.
His first job was repairing bungalows at Beijing Xicheng District Construction Team. All registered students including Zhang had to attend a training session before starting their job. The only thing they did during the training session was express their appreciation for Mao and the party for allowing them back to Beijing and giving them a job. Zhang refused to talk. After a week, people noticed the young man had never talked, and demanded Zhang to say something.
“I was born in Beijing, and sent to the rural area. My leg broke and couldn’t get cured in the countryside, so the local farmers sent me back. My Hukou (a record in the system of household registration in China that determines where citizens are allowed to live) transferred back to Beijing as the farm didn’t want an injured laborer anymore. I don’t think what I’ve experienced is a gift from anyone. Now I have this job, all I want to do is to earn a salary by working hard. I’m not receiving money for doing nothing, so I don’t think I should be thankful to anyone.”[1]
Chaos erupted. Some of the others in the class stood and scolded Zhang for being an ungrateful man, some stood by Zhang as they thought what he had just said was frank but true. Both sides argued intensely, and the quarrel nearly turned into a fight.
The leaders of the Construction Team thought it was Zhang’s fault, and Zhang lost his first job. After half a year, Zhang was assigned to a car factory. His job was to transport construction waste to a suburb and building materials back to the city.
It was the heaviest work at the car factory, but Zhang’s colleagues — with similar backgrounds to Zhang’s — were nice and understanding. Sometimes Zhang would ask his co-workers to load the materials and give him about 20 minutes to sketch the scene.
No Name Painting Association and The Underground Exhibition
In the 1960s and 1970s, on Xiang Mountain or The Great Wall or near Beihai Park in Beijing, you could see people with wooden boxes. They picked a view, stood or sat on a stone or the ground, and opened the boxes. They could sit there for several hours, with the box lid hiding what they were doing.
They were sketching secretly. During that period, art, painting, and literature were tainted as bourgeois elements that could erode Communist ideology.
The Cultural Revolution started with “Attacking The Four Olds” in 1966. That summer, another artist, Kelu Ma and his sister joined a group selling books. They had a big trolley with books stacked on it like a small mountain. Shakespeare’s Complete Works, Russian literature, ancient books, Lu Xun’s Essays, even reference books. Many of them had been treasure in the past, but keeping them at home would put the family in danger. Any book, painting, relic related to the past and the bourgeois were sold or destroyed, there was no other way out. That day, all books were sold for five cents per half kilogram.[2]
While paintings were destroyed, painters were persecuted and brainwashed during that time.
One of Ma’s friends — a frail and harmless guy, like the stereotypical artist you can always find in Paris and New York — used to invite some men to be nude models for his paintings. His oil paintings were dreary yet fascinating, his style a bit like Amedeo Modigliani. He was exposed and denounced by his neighbors. The government came and sent him to a labor farm, accusing him of being a “bad element.” After three years of “labor reform,” he was released. Ma came to visit him after that, asking him what was he doing. He said he was practicing classic Chinese calligraphy. He then showed Ma a pile of Mao Ze Dong’s Three Old Essays that he had hand-copied, using officially acceptable texts to practice the technique.[3]
This was the fate of anyone who dared to paint freely. Painting was not a way to express one’s individual thinking, but a tool to propagandize Mao’s ideology. Once you picked up a paintbrush, all you were supposed to paint was the portrait of Mao or a big-character poster glorifying the Communism ideology. Painting anything else would be regarded as a sin and could put you in danger.
Zhang started his painting life in 1970 — the dangerous time for any painter in China. He also had his wooden box — during that time, it was easy to find a neighbor who could do carpentry, and he asked one to make a customized box — a bit larger than the paper, with drawers containing paintbrushes.
He also began to meet other painters with the same type of wooden boxes. They later formed a group called “No Name Painting Association.”
Ma met Zhang in 1972. After a snowfall, Ma went outside to paint. Sunshine illuminated the snow through the humid, cold air. Ma closed his wooden box. Zhang — whom Ma described as “a tall and thin young man with tan skin and curly hair” — asked if he could look at his paintings. Ma noticed that Zhang was wearing a long, black cotton-padded jacket, and carrying a wooden box. They exchanged paintings to look at each other’s work. As Ma remembered, Zhang’s painting of that day had a grey tone. He sketched the trees in the snow at noon with unrestrained strokes. Ma’s painting was small, but the lines were thick. His favorite part of his own painting was the contrast between a red wall and yellow tiles under the sun and the shadows, especially the bluish violet color of the snow in the shadow. They walked together all that afternoon, talking about painting.
Ma described the members of “No Name Painting Association” as a group of dreamers and artists who treated art as a way to escape, to have independence of personality, to protect the purity of art.
“During that time, people were poor, society and politics were mad, only the young people still had passion and a dream for art,” Ma recalled. [4]
Ma and Zhang began a friendship that lasted ever since, from Beijing to New York and back again. Coincidentally, they moved to New York one after another, and went back to China in the same year. When people talked about “No Name Painting Association,” they always mentioned “Wei Zhang and Kelu Ma.”
Ma admired Zhang’s early sketches from life — “Bright or misty, very concise,” he later said of them. On a rainy day in 1972, after a round of drinking, Ma and Zhang went crazy, sketching in the rain on Xiaguang Street behind Beijing Restaurant — at the heart of the city, with Tiananmen Square and The Forbidden City were less than 1.5 miles away. Ma’s sketch was gloomy and depressed. Zhang was murmuring throughout. He drew a tram in red and put it in the sky.
In 1974, Zhang invited Ma to meet Wenliang Zhao, Yushu Yang and Zhenyu Shi at Shi’s home near Beixin Bridge. Ma got to see their paintings. He’d never seen those kinds of paintings before and for the first time, he experienced the possibility of precise expression, refulgence of colors using hue and strokes.
At that time, Zhao was 17 years older than Ma, and Yang and Shi were nearly 10 years older than Ma. A group of 20 to 30 young people became followers of the three veteran artists. This group went out to paint every day. They changed to boxes that were smaller and more portable. They often use one hand to hold the box and the other to sketch. Under the influence of the older artists, they learned to become organized — the palette became clean, with more than 35 pigments put in order.
No one in this group received formal art training in an academy. They developed their style by practice during the 1970s. Zhang’s home near Baita Temple became the room where they drew. They often came back to Zhang’s place after painting. The first thing they’d do it to pin their paintings on the wall and view each other’s work.
After 1975, the Beijing Library and The Central Technology Academy both imported the Completed Series Of World Fine Arts. Through a personal connection in Beijing Library, the artists dared to take them home to view those 60 volumes of the art works when the Cultural Revolution was still going on. It was their first opportunity to view print versions of Western art in such great number. They were all very excited. A group of artists studied and imitated works of the masters including Cezanne, Matisse, Gauguin and Van Gough. Impressionism has been popular in the United States, but “Impressionism” in China of 1970s had a completely different connotation. It was called a decadent bourgeois form of art. Masters of Impressionism such as Monet, Renoir and Pissarro were regarded as the representatives of Western bourgeois reaction.
That didn’t impair the passion of this art group at all. The group-painting practice of the artists painting lasted for years at Zhang’s place. They compared their works and learned from each other. Zhang’s mother and sister were open-minded and supportive.
They tolerated and cared for these young people who had nothing but their dreams.
During Chinese New Year in 1975, the group held its first exhibition at Zhang’s home. The artists and a limited audience celebrated this event secretly.
Zhang’s apartment was in the tallest residential building in Beijing that time. You could see that 1950s Soviet-style building from a long distance. Zhao and Zhang proposed the exhibition, and a friend of the artists, Le’an Bao, organized it by collaborating with each participant and helping move the paintings to Zhang’s place. More than 13 artists including Zhang and Ma participated in the exhibition. They invited only their friends to come — but it was dangerous enough. Bao told everyone that they should have a code word to let people in.
As Ziyan Zheng later described the underground exhibition, “Zhang’s family undertook enormous risks to put up this exhibition. Looking back, people may not understand how risky it could be to have an exhibition. But everyone from that era would never forget the fear from that turbulent time, the society with no law and order… Even those famous artists could be persecuted due for ridiculous reasons, let alone us.”[5]
The artists had different styles. Among the paintings on display were “The Rain in Zhongshan Park” by Yushu Yang, the Fauvism painting “Backlight Still Life” by Wanhua Kang, “The Pavement in Rain” by Kelu Ma. In the room of merely 193 square feet, the artist Xixi Shi recited his favorite poem — “To The Sea” by Pushkin; a visitor recited a poem written by revolutionary Ting Ye in prison in 1942:
The door for people was locked
the hole for dogs was open,
a loud voice was saying:
’Crawl to the outside! I give you freedom!’
It was risky for Zhang’s mother, Yunniang, to host the exhibition, given that she had been humiliated and beaten for being a Russian teacher. That night, Yunniang joined the adventure of those young people and sang a Russian song.
Until then, the artists’ group was informal, without a name. Until 1979, when one of the members, Zhao, told the group that Xun Liu, the president of China Artists Association, had heard about them when he was in prison. When Liu was released, he returned to work for the China Artists Association and looked for the artists’ group immediately. Liu hope they could put up an exhibition.
That’s when the artists sat together discussing about the name of the association. They brainstormed many ideas, but the names were either vulgar, or obscure, or literary. Choosing was difficult. Zhenyu Shi proposed “Godot Painting Association,” based on the play, Waiting for Godot. After more debate, Godot was also vetoed.
At last, they agreed to call their group “No Name Painting Association.”
[1] From an interview with Wei Zhang
[2] From Kelu Ma’s memoir “The No Name Years,” posted on jintian.net
[3] From an interview with Kelu Ma
[4] Wrote Ma in Mandarin in his memoir, “The No Name Years”
[5] From Ma’s memoir “The No Name Years”
