Her independent ideas about the proper place of women in the world clearly came from her mother. After a modern elementary school education, Wei Yixing attended the Provincial No. 9 Middle School, where she excelled in her studies. She was one of three graduates recommended to study at the Guilin Kindergarten Normal School, but before she could complete her degree, the school was bombed and destroyed by the Japanese. Her school disbanded, and she had no choice but to return home.
In 1946, Yixing, at the age of 27, married. Over the eleven years of her married life, she gave birth to three daughters and two sons. Following the birth of her daughter in Liuzhou, in 1949 she moved back with her husband, Mengyuan, from Liuzhou to Wuming, where he became principal of the Wuming No. 2 Middle School. In the memory of his family, Mengyuan was a romantic character, a very good poet and writer who enjoyed drinking and entertaining friends, but was entirely uninvolved in family life. His eldest son, Shan Zuo, was born May 2, 1952, in the back room of the Jinghua Bookstore. [Fig. 3] The baby’s maternal grandfather selected the name Wuxing (Flourishing Wuming), but his father returned from his travels to rename him Shaoli (Ambitious Youth). On March 7, 1957, the second son and youngest child of the family, Da Huang, was born. [Fig. 4] His father named him Shaoning (Calm Youth). Despite his name, he cried so constantly and loudly as a newborn that his three-year old sister was terrified and came down with a fever. The baby’s wails seem to have predicted the disasters that awaited the family.

Guangxi had not surrendered to the Communist regime when Mao Zedong declared the founding of the new People’s Republic of China in Beijing on October 1 of
1949, but over the course of the next decade the centralized political and economic policies of the Chinese Communist Party were disseminated to Wuming, as to every part of China. Political campaigns were a constant aspect of life for China’s intellectuals during the first decade of the new Communist government. Ostensibly aimed to root out opponents of the new economic and administrative policies, political campaigns might also be used by CCP officials to criticize colleagues for questionable administrative decisions, professional activities, or even personal behavior. A phenomenon that became more prevalent as time passed, once the early opponents of the regime had been silenced, was use of political campaigns by the unscrupulous and ambitious to attack colleagues against whom they held a personal grudge or with whom they competed for administrative power.

DIFFICULT YEARS
A main thrust of the first few years of the PRC was the gradual abolition of private business and private property. Following the success of the CCP’s rural collectivization drive in 1955, Mao Zedong began planning for rapid economic development on a Soviet model. It was apparent that utilization of the managerial and technical talent of educated Chinese would be necessary to attain this goal, and a policy shift was undertaken. Bureaucrats were urged to relax controls over non-party intellectuals, a policy reinforced by the “thaw” in the Soviet Union
following Stalin’s death. On May 2, 1956, Mao Zedong enunciated a slogan for the new policy: “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” The campaign thus came to be known in China as the “Double Hundred” policy and in the West as the “Hundred Flowers.” Mao’s view was, in Merle Goldman’s words, that “a genuine exchange of ideas and the criticism of repressive officials would ultimately lead to ideological unity.” The Hundred Flowers campaign, however, turned against Mao himself by the end of May. Anti-party posters and demonstrations were widespread. Either in alarm at the unexpected vehemence of the anti-communist feeling remaining in China or as a cynical response to a well-laid trap, on June 8 Mao Zedong and the other party authorities moved to silence the critics it had flushed into the open. A nation-wide purge of intellectuals and party officials, the Anti-Rightist campaign, began in the summer of 1957.

The Zhou Brothers’ father, Mengyuan, was a man who enjoyed his liquor and the company of friends. He was accused of having drunkenly proclaimed an anti-party statement, “non-specialists can never lead experts.” As a result, he was sent to remold his ideological consciousness at a thought-reform class in the provincial capital of Nanning. While in the city he continued, whether naively or stubbornly, to criticize the Communist Party leadership and to expose the many problems in local school administration he believed the party needed to rectify. He apparently was rather proud of his performance, and thought he honestly expressed the valid opinions of a concerned intellectual. Upon the conclusion of the session he happily bought a little sweater for his baby son Shaoning and returned home. What was awaiting him, however, was not the warm embrace of his family but the cold steel of the policeman’s handcuffs. He was jailed, and from that time forth his wife and family blamed him for the hardships they believed his uninhibited boasting had brought upon them. Mengyuan was sentenced in 1957 to a labor-reform camp at Dalu, in Chongzuo county, Guangxi, from whence he never returned home. The children lost not only their father but also a sister in the hardships that would follow.

It would be an understatement to say that the Anti-Rightist campaign, which sentenced intellectuals to labor camps for expressing opinions about their profession, offends Western standards of law. Rehabilitation of rightists in the late 1970s indicates that the post-Mao Chinese authorities recognized the resentment it created within China. Not only were the results unfair and idiosyncratic, but the process of “proving” the “crimes” violated all standards of justice. The Anti-Rightist campaign was a tragedy that befell an entire generation of Chinese, but the suffering it caused this family was extreme. It is particularly ironic that their father was named Mengyuan, which is homophonous for a Chinese term meaning “to bear unjust accusations.” Although the political movement removed him permanently from the lives of his wife and children, this loss did little to lighten the burden of blame his family bore on his behalf for the next twenty years. The unexpected seriousness of the charges against the so-called “Rightists,” and the intensity with which the “evidence” was publicized, convinced most ordinary people that the “Rightists” were terrible people who deserved to be put away. In some cases, the campaign of character assassination even persuaded family members, although more often, as in this case, the family blamed Mengyuan for his selfishness and irresponsibility in speaking out. His wife and mother-in-law never forgave him, and the children were brought up to believe that he was a useless, selfish, and irresponsible romantic who had contributed nothing to the family. The children’s mother renamed them after her mother’s family, Zhou, and their relationship with their father was severed before Shaoning had learned to walk or talk. Nevertheless, from this time forward, they were marked as the children of a criminal.

In the years immediately preceding the Anti-Rightist Campaign, all private businesses, such as bookstores, were either taken over by the Communist government or closed. Thus, the family business that had supported the three Zhou women through past hardships, the Jinghua Bookstore, would no longer have been possible to operate. With her husband imprisoned, their mother left her hometown and took a teaching job in Ningming at the town elementary school. She was forced to support her entire family, including her five children, her mother, and her aunt, on a salary of only 40 yuan. The family planted vegetables in the back garden for food, but even so their economic circumstances were so desperate that Wei Yixing was forced to give away one of her daughters. Even this difficult time did not destroy the determination and optimism of the family. Their grandmother, hopeful for an eventual change in their fortunes, continued to educate the remaining children, teaching them calligraphy and to copy plum blossom, bamboo, orchid, and chrysanthemum paintings from the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, a famous painting text originally dating to the seventeenth century. “After dinner we had performances in the family, sometimes drama,” Shan Zuo, then called Shaoli, recalls. “The food was very simple, but we were very happy in the family because of art.” Da Huang, then called Shaoning, also remembers, “On summer evenings, my grandmother often sat outside the house on a big granite stone, and always told all kinds of stories.

Wuming was a very beautiful town—the most beautiful town in the province. A lot of architecture was from the Qing dynasty. At that time the whole town had no electricity. At night there were no electric lights and a lot of smoke came from every house, from people cooking, and lights from candles and oil lamps. For me it was very mysterious—the memory is so beautiful.” In those early years, Shaoli was an excellent student in all subjects, winning numerous prizes in their locality. [Fig. 5] One essay he wrote won the first place in a major literary competition. His dream was to become a scientist. The younger brother, Shaoning, practiced calligraphy in the style of Liu Gongquan, a Song Dynasty calligrapher, for two hours every day, and also showed his multiple talents in art, music, and sports. [Fig. 6]

THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
The Anti-Rightist Campaign, as devastating as it was, was only the beginning of the family’s troubles. In 1966, the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was launched. It took place between 1966 and 1976 and is referred to by many Chinese people as the “ten lost years.” In fact, time was not merely lost, the lives, families, and careers of many people were completely ruined. Even the official analysis of the Cultural Revolution by Chinese Communist Party historians is now extremely negative, an opinion most Western observers share. In the official jargon it was declared: “History has proved that the Cultural Revolution was erroneously launched by the leadership, was used by a counterrevolutionary group, and was an internal disturbance that brought severe suffering to the nation and to the people of all its nationalities. The lives of the Zhou Brothers and their family during this period were no exception. The political history of the Cultural Revolution may be more complex than that of any other period in recent Chinese history, but a schematic summary will help understand how this bizarre movement occurred. Most historians agree that the movement was launched by Mao Zedong with the goal of removing his rivals in the party. [Fig. 7] Because he came to view his chosen successor, Chairman Liu Shaoqi, as an opponent, yet was unable to rally support for his purge within the communist party, he mobilized millions of students to destroy the party apparatus. His goals were not known to most of his supporters in 1966, and his failure to control the activity he set in motion led to massive human suffering and loss of life.

Late in the spring of 1966, the party, at Mao Zedong’s command, issued a paper referred to as the May 16 circular. It criticized Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping for “having let all of the ox-ghosts and snake-demons out of their cages,” for “stuffing up our newspapers, broadcasts, periodicals, books, textbooks, performances, works of literature and art, films, plays, operas, art, music, dance, and so forth,” and for refusing to accept the leadership of the proletariat. On June 1, Mao approved broadcast of a text that, in subsequent hagiographies, was considered his personal launch of the Cultural Revolution.Student activists, garbed in faded army uniforms, marched from school to school in demonstrations against academic administrators [Fig. 8]. Wide leather belts with heavy buckles, a standard part of the costume, were used by some students as weapons against classmates and teachers. By mid-June, all schools were closed. On June 4 some middle school students at Qinghua University wrote a big-character poster with the slogan “Rebellion is Justified!” By late July, students took charge of all schools. The name “Red Guard” was recognized by Mao on August 1 as the name for student activists who supported him.

To the Zhou Brothers’ family, the Cultural Revolution brought an end to all dreams. Only with great difficulty had the Zhou family weathered the Anti-Rightist Movement, but the Cultural Revolution, coming less than a decade later, now turned their lives upside down. Although their mother had won awards over many years for outstanding teaching, and had also received a prize from the county government for Special Contributions to Education, under the Cultural Revolution ideology she was blamed for her husband’s “crimes” and therefore considered unsuitable to a teaching position. She was considered an enemy of the people and punished on a number of counts: not only was her husband an imprisoned rightist, her mother was a “capitalist” bookstore owner, and the family was classified as “landlord class,” to be hated as oppressors. As a result, Wei Yixing was incarcerated in a makeshift prison in the elementary school where she had worked. Locked in solitary confinement by the Workers Propaganda Team who took over the school, she was beaten to force her to confess to crimes. She was fired from her job and henceforth received only 15 yuan government stipend to support her entire family of eight people. In her absence, their seventy-six year old grandmother, Zhou Jinghua, tried to supplement the family’s income by making straw sandals, paper cuts and embroidery patterns, which she sold on the street. The youngest brother, Shaoning, who was then only ten or eleven, collected glass bottles to earn a little recycling money. The names of all family members, from their grandparents to their parents, were repeatedly publicized on “big character posters” displayed prominently in their town, making them targets of attack for the movement.

Unlike many unjustly condemned teachers and administrators, who found suicide the only means of escape from the constant humiliation and torture, their mother silently resisted. She was eventually released. Her oldest daughter had departed for art school in Guangzhou immediately before the Cultural Revolution, and her aunt died during the Cultural Revolution. The entire family, which now consisted of herself, the two Zhou Brothers, their grandmother, and one daughter, was sent away to a small village called Qingjiang near Mount Daming. The family became peasants, working full-time on a farm in the people’s commune. This harsh life failed to destroy the family’s faith. Even twelve-year old Shaoning wrote at that time “in this world, successful people are those who never surrender, even when their heads are broken and blood pours out everywhere…should I be content with this situation now? Can I stop struggling?” In January of 1969 Shaoli, like most school graduates of the time, was sent away from his family for reeducation. [Fig. 10] The small mountain village at Mount Daming, where he and his classmates were assigned to work, was about one hundred miles from his old home. With the encouragement of his grandmother, Shaoli had become fond of painting. However, during the Cultural Revolution, the only
acceptable subject for art was the portrait icon of Mao Zedong. Shaoli thus expressed his love for painting in the only acceptable form, and as though in a frenzy, painted huge numbers of Mao portraits. His father’s imprisonment guaranteed that he would be labeled a member of the “Black Five” social class, to be treated with contempt by the virtuous peasants, workers, and soldiers.

Rather than feeling hopeless or discouraged, he worked extremely hard in all ways he might compensate for his “bad class background.” In the fields, he labored tirelessly, and learned to carry loads up to 140 pounds, more than his own weight, up and down the mountains on shoulder poles. Once he fell from a pine tree in which he was cutting firewood and very nearly died of blood loss. His effort to prove that he was a good worker and his willingness to paint Mao portraits for everyone in the village earned him the respect of the peasants.

On September 13, 1971, Marshal Lin Biao, Mao ’s chief spokesman, strongest supporter of the Cultural Revolution, and anointed successor, died suddenly under mysterious circumstances. The government’s explanation of the sudden death of Mao’s close comrade-in-arms was that he tried to murder Mao and establish an alternative power center. After he failed, it was alleged, he tried to flee to the Soviet Union, China’s primary enemy of the time, and was killed in a plane crash on the way. Up to that time, the years of Communist education had inculcated China’s young people with faith in the Communist party and belief that good deeds would bring good results. The Lin Biao affair caused a crisis of faith and led to the disillusionment of an entire generation, Shaoli’s generation. The purported betrayal by Mao’s close comrade-in-arms of the leader’s trust, of the party, and of the nation’s people did not make sense. If true, Lin Biao, the revolutionary model who had led them into the Cultural Revolution, had lied about his purposes. If false, Mao himself might be lying. Whatever the explanation, China’s youth felt betrayed. Their sacrifices, the forced abandonment of all normal activities, including their educations, were for no purpose whatsoever. If Mao’s close ally could so betray the cause, was there a problem with the entire ideology of Maoism? This earth-shattering event, in all its murkiness, destroyed the faith in the party for an entire generation.
Shaoli wrote in his diary at that time, “Our generation is still young, only in our 20s. This is a whole generation of people, a whole generation of twentieth century China’s youth. Does our country no longer need its youth to be the pillars [of the nation, as Mao had said] but instead only to waste the best years of their lives struggling to get a mouthful of grain…or in pursuit of the barest survival?” Demonstrating the strength of character and idealism that had characterized his grandmother throughout her life, he wrote, “…What kind of image will our nation have to show in the next decade? If the nation is to be healthy and strong, it must ask us not to be people who are simply satisfied with the way things are now.”

After Lin Biao’s death the country and elements of its leadership realized the economy was on the edge of collapse and that it was necessary to return people’s lives to a normal track after the frenzy of political movements. Some educated youth were called back to the cities and towns during the years after Lin Biao’s demise. However, because of his family background, and therefore officially categorized as politically untrustworthy, Shaoli was over and over denied the opportunity to go back to the city. [Fig. 12] In 1972 and 1973, when some colleges and universities reopened to accept worker-peasant-soldier college students, Shaoli applied twice to art school, but his hopes were once again smashed when, because of his family background he received a cold rejection from the school both times. Finally, with no legitimate means of leaving his mountain village, he decided to take the dozen or so yuan he had saved and travel by himself to see the real world. He slept in the railway station waiting rooms, sometimes hungry, but with his warm and optimistic personality, he made many new friends on his journey. Many people helped him during his wanderings as he traveled to Shanghai, Jiangxi, and Guangzhou. In his family, Shaoli is the only one who looks like his father. His family saw potential dangers—they thought his adventurous character resembled the romantic disposition of his father that had brought them all such pain.

The two brothers did not see each other for four years, until their family was able to reunite, returning from the countryside to the town of Wuming in 1973. They, however, were dismayed to see that their grandmother’s house and bookstore were totally transformed. The paint was peeling, the walls streaked, and the attic room was totally gone. The happy place of their memory image was gone. Their dear grandmother had passed away two years earlier, but left the brothers with a mantra: to become an artist one must possess the highest spirit. After they resettled, the drawings and sketches that the two brothers pinned to the old house’s walls were what brought it new life. The youngest son of the family, Shaoning, inherited the family artistic tradition and loved to paint. [Fig. 13] Although he was five years younger than Shaoli, he always watched his brother paint and tried to follow his example. [Fig. 14]

BEGINNING OF ARTISTIC CAREER
After years of painting Mao’s portrait in the countryside, Shaoli was finally rewarded by an invitation from the county cultural bureau to join the creative work team charged with preparing the “Class Struggle Exhibition.” His assignment was to create a life-size clay sculptural grouping on the theme of “Zhuang Minority Rises Up in Fury,” which was presumably intended to be similar to the nationally famous Rent Collection Courtyard, which was the best-known model of socialist realist sculpture during the Cultural Revolution period. Although the political implications of the event were of little interest to him, he took his first opportunity to join a professional art group very seriously. He wrote two thick notebooks filled with notes about sculptural techniques, composition, and other research in preparation for the creative work. He knew that this might be his only chance to reach
the goal of becoming a professional artist, so he took the assignment very seriously. He developed his own long-term plan. He would study the basic art curriculum by himself for two years, and would apply to art college again. He borrowed a plaster cast called “Crying Baby” and a bust of Voltaire to learn drawing.

During this period Shaoning followed his brother every step of the way. In the same year, 1973, the two brothers created their first collaborative work, an oil seascape depicting a small sailboat struggling amidst crashing waves. This 1973 painting, The Wave, remains very important to the Zhou Brothers as the first one they painted together. Over the more than thirty years since that time, almost all their work has been collaborative. As natives of a remote inland township, this maritime painting must be based purely upon their imaginations, and perhaps on pictures they may have seen in books. Nevertheless, it seems to reflect their attitude toward life. Although far from the coast and with little or no experience of the sea, their idea of the world seems to have been an expansive one. In this painting the two brothers seem to leave behind their isolated county, showing both the ambition to venture far away, into unknown territories, and the resolve to brave whatever challenges these adventures might require. They did not know when they painted this lonely sailboat struggling through high billows that the career in front of them would be so tortuous, but the painting seems prophetic in hindsight.

Now beginning to develop a record of successful completion of artistic projects, Shaoli was able to earn a temporary assignment to work in the provincial capital of Nanning, Guangxi, as a set designer for the local opera troupe (Caidiaotuan). In this era, the Chinese household registry system required that every person live only in the locality to which they had been assigned. This way of life, enforced in China from the 1950s through the late 1980s, may be unimaginable to readers who have not experienced it. The primary purpose was to prohibit country people from moving to the city and to control people’s movements. Travel and permanent relocations were very tightly controlled and for most people were impossible. This system was a huge burden to any person who sought a career different from that to which his or her parents had been assigned. The assignment of place of residence and social class based upon the accidents of one’s birth was one of the greatest ironies of the supposedly egalitarian Maoist regime. The rigidity of the Maoist household registry and employment system was one of the most onerous restrictions imposed upon anyone not born in the city during that era. Untold ingenuity was deployed simply trying to get to the place where one might possibly find opportunity to have a career, for a young person could not simply move to an urban area and try to succeed based on talent and hard work.

For a young artist who hoped to move out of his small hometown to a place with an artistic community, it was necessary to first be hired as a permanent staff member by a professional art organization in the city. There were three levels of household registration, rural, township, and city, with urban registration the most difficult to obtain. The only way a rural person might change his or her status from rural to township or urban was through a good job placement after college graduation. This required years of struggle, first to get into college, and then to not only excel in one’s studies but to favorably impress every person who might influence placement decisions after graduation. It was also difficult for a township person, such as the Zhou Brothers, from Wuming, to move to a city such as Nanning. Even marriage to a city person would not change the household registry of a non-urban Chinese, and many married couples would live apart for years, if not decades, because of their inability to upgrade the registration of one spouse. The system was enforced by the requirement to use local ration tickets to purchase any commodity. Without local ration tickets, issued in one’s place of household registration and invalid in other places, one was effectively deprived of access to food, clothing, daily goods, medical care, housing, and virtually all other essentials of existence if one left one’s assigned locale. Thus, to be an artist, with the rights to acquire art materials and to submit works for important exhibitions, the only route was to be hired as a professional artist by an urban “work unit” (i.e. employer) that had been approved to hire an artist.career, for a young person could not simply move to an urban area and try to succeed based on talent and hard work.

In this period, however, talented workers with special skills might be “borrowed” by a work unit in the city for a special project. A borrowed worker would remain registered in his former home, with little hope of a permanent change in status, but would have professional opportunities and would be issued a limited number of food tickets for the period of the assignment. Shaoli, unable to enter college because of his father’s condemnation as a rightist, had no hope of the university as a route to an urban job as an artist. One can only imagine how hard it was for him, even with his talent and ambition, to obtain and keep his temporary jobs in the provincial capital.

During this period, Shaoli frequently traveled back and forth between the family home in Wuming and the provincial capital. Constant worry about finding his next job assignment and his drive to continually improve his artistic abilities made this a frenzied period. Meanwhile, Shaoning had similar hopes but as yet no opportunity. In China at that time, even access to paint and canvas was restricted to professional artists and art school students. Shaoli helped Shaoning by bringing art supplies home for his brother to practice.
Even as he struggled to succeed in his own job, Shaoli never forgot Shaoning’s dreams of becoming an artist himself. When Shaoli heard that the Guangxi Dance Troupe production team needed a set painter, he immediately recommended his brother to the troupe. With the recommendations of Shaoli and a well-known local artis, the Guangxi Dance Troupe “borrowed” Shaoning as a temporary worker for a major production called “Dagewu.” Shaoning did not disappoint his brother or mentor, and his obvious talent later led to a permanent position as an artist in the troupe.

During this period, the brothers traveled frequently to see ancient cave paintings, folk art, and scenery. [Fig. 12, fig 15, fig 16] Among the works their travels inspired is a series of four paintings, including Cradle of Life and Song of Life. The brothers worked day and night for months to complete this series. The paintings were in a format like ancient Chinese handscrolls but in a much larger scale, and referred to cave mural paintings they saw during their travels. The mysterious human and animal images in compositions were obviously inspired also by Han stone reliefs and cliff paintings. The cooperation between the two brothers in the painting
process was also maturing during this period, and they often revised and covered over each other’s brushwork and even compositions to achieve the best results. “We enjoy spending time together, talking about art together, and we feel this is a way that we can make something different,” Shaoning said. By 1976, they completed a painting entitled The Feathers from a Hundred Birds, which was selected for a museum show and reproduced in magazines.

THE YEARS IN SHANGHAI
Time passed quickly in those busy years as the two brothers sought opportunities to develop their artistic careers. China’s political world experienced another cataclysmic change after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, which would eventually give them their big chance. Once universities began accepting students based upon ability and achievements, not their family background. Shaoli decided to try for the third time to gain admission to art school. This time, he set his sights on Shanghai Drama Academy. With support from his theater in Nanning, he was able to take the entrance examination and earned admission to the first training class accepted after the Cultural Revolution. As the first entrance competition in more than a decade, it was the highly competitive. His acceptance from a national pool to a small class of only a dozen students was the recognition for his talent, and opened the door to a stable career as an artist. November 7, 1978, was a memorable day for him, as with great excitement he moved to Shanghai, to begin his first formal art studies and start his career as a professional artist.

After struggling constantly to maintain his temporary status as an artist in Nanning, his life now promised to enter a period of stability. The Caidiao Troup had helped with his relocation to Shanghai, thus guaranteeing that upon his return from art school his household registry would be transferred back to the provincial capital, and he could be assured a professional position. With the very limited opportunities available to a young man from China’s hinterland, this was the greatest ambition he could have.
It was only at the age of 26 that Shaoli realized his longtime and almost impossible dream, to enter art college to formally study art. This was to be the most important turning point in his life. Soon after arriving at the Shanghai Drama Academy, he wrote to his sister, “ among my classmates, none has had such a difficult and complicated life as mine, but I know my potential. I will catch up with and surpass them… in studying, one must rely on oneself… Especially, for someone like me, who has been frustrated in my desire to have this opportunity for so many years, how can I not cherish this [opportunity] now?”
In Shanghai he was sucked completely into his studies, and spent days and nights on his work. Thirty hours of class time were spent drawing from a plaster cast of Michelangelo’s David, thirty more on his Slave, and thirty more on the Laocoon. These classical and Renaissance masters’ works seemed to fill all his time. A triangular circuit of the classroom, dormitory, and library defined his life in that period. He had no time to enjoy parties and barely any to talk to his classmates. He felt constant pressure to complete every assignment perfectly. He knew that this opportunity was so rare that he should redouble his efforts. Although once in Shanghai, art seemed to be his only concern, but the one person who never left his mind was Shaoning. The words from Shaoning’s letter always echoed in his mind. “Since you went to Shanghai, what is left for me is only loneliness. I constantly feel I have lost something. When I wander around the places we always walk together, anxiety about my future, my career, and my fate seems to strangle me…We two brothers must walk on the same path to the new world. Both you and I will work to our utmost for our vocation.”

In response to the excited letters Shaoli sent home about his academic life in Shanghai, he soon received another letter from Shaoning. His younger brother had apparently decided that, no matter what, he would come to Shanghai, too, and he asked Shaoli to request permission for him to enroll as an auditor in Shaoli’s program. Although Shaoli knew that approval of this request would be almost impossible, he still tried to help his brother achieve this goal. Shaoning, however, could not even bear to wait for an answer. On March 18, 1979, he arrived at his brother’s dormitory ready to begin his studies, and unconcerned that the school had not admitted him. He was so eager to join his brother in Shanghai that he told the Dance Troupe in Nanning that he was going to Shanghai to study. Young Shaoning showed even more enthusiasm for study than any regular student in the school. The two brothers had only one bed, Shaoli’s single bottom bunk in the dormitory. According to the plan they devised, Shaoli would attend his daytime classes and sleep in the bed at night, as usual. Shaoning would take his brother’s classroom key at bedtime, after all the classmates had left the studio, and would draw plaster casts all night until
the wake-up bell. After the students got up and left the dormitory, he would sneak into Shaoli’s bed and hide all day.

This scheme did not last long before it was discovered. Shaoli’s roommates and teachers soon figured out that Shaoning had not come to the city just to visit the various Shanghai drama troupes, as he claimed. However, they were very moved by his dedication to his art and allowed him to join the regular class, and even to participate in the class critiques. They were impressed by his talent and even talked about helping him go along with the entire class on their planned field trip to Sichuan. This unconventional, if fragile, arrangement worked very smoothly until an unforeseen incident destroyed it. A TV set was stolen from the school, and the administration decided to increase security and to tighten dormitory regulations. Henceforth, non-students were prohibited from staying in the dorm. Shaoning had to move out of his brother’s room. For these impoverished brothers, however, any hotel was unimaginably expensive. The cheapest place they could find was the public bath, which would, for a fee, permit Shaoning to sleep in one of their lounge chairs between their 10 pm closing time and 6 am opening for business. Between 6 am and Shaoli’s first class, all Shaoning could do was wander the streets of Shanghai. Once, in exhaustion, he tried to sit on a newspaper on the sidewalk, but was soon chased away by the police. He finally discovered that the playground equipment at the children’s park near the Bund was not patrolled at night, and made himself comfortable in the playhouse at the top of the slide. This difficult living situation did not reduce his enthusiasm for his art studies. He crazily absorbed everything he could see, just as did his brother.

At that time, the Shanghai Drama Academy was one of two college-level art programs in Shanghai. Although it was supposed to focus on set design, in fact the art department curriculum essentially followed that of all China’s major art academies. Students went through the same fundamental training in drawing and painting as that offered elsewhere. The faculty at Shanghai Drama Academy were considered particularly open-minded in that period. Some, such as Li Shan, Wang Bangxiong, Lü Zhenhuan, and department head Kong Boji, went well beyond socialist realism, which was still mainstream, in their teaching. This group of faculty organized several exhibitions of work in the modernist style that were considered very avant-garde or experimental at the time. Probably the most famous was the 12 Man Exhibition of Shanghai Drama Academy faculty and graduates, which was held at Shanghai’s largest comprehensive university campus, Fudan University in 1979. The exhibition, at Fudan’s Student Union, was open for only three days before it was closed amidst accusations that abstract art conveyed bourgeois ideology. Nevertheless, this exhibition, the first modernist show in Shanghai since 1949, was eagerly visited and discussed by the Shanghai art world. The school and its faculty thus created an atmosphere that was more open and relatively freer than that of many other schools in China. It was the Zhou Brothers’ good luck to have studied there in that period.
The period of 1978 and 1979 was very important throughout the Chinese art world. Although the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death in 1976, his hardline ideology was carried on by his successor, Hua Guofeng, for almost two years. In the spring of 1978, a so-called discussion (actually a political campaign) called “practice is the only measure of truth” was launched by Deng Xiaoping and his followers to criticize the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s hard line. This was the first time since Mao’s death that people in China could openly criticize the Cultural Revolution. China experienced a short period of free expression called in the West the “Beijing Spring.” The result was that Mao’s hand-picked successor, Hua Guofeng, was forced to step down, and Deng Xiaoping came back to power.
In the literary and art worlds, many criticisms of Cultural Revolution policies and abuses were spoken and published. This was the first time, as well, that Communist China had encouraged its citizens to look favorably at the entire world outside its borders. In the art world, many art exhibitions were brought from abroad between 1978 and 1980, when Shaoli and Shaoning were in Shanghai. When Shaoli arrived, his classmates were still talking about the French landscape exhibition held in the spring at the Shanghai Exhibition Hall, only a few blocks from Shanghai Drama Academy. An excellent exhibition of early and mid-20th century expressionist oil paintings from Romania was shown in 1980 at the Shanghai Art Gallery. That a fraternal socialist nation would exhibit distorted “formalist” figural depictions rather than socialist realism had a very powerful impact on Chinese artists who saw the beautiful paintings. In the same year, 1980, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts showed its collection at the Shanghai Museum, to great fanfare. The exhibition included realistic works, such as those of John Sargent, as well as abstract expressionist paintings, including one by Jackson Pollack. These events were the first time this generation of Chinese artists had first-hand contact with Western originals.
The environment of the Shanghai Drama Academy and the city of Shanghai itself was very important for art students during this period. Before that time, the only permitted style was socialist realism, which emphasized figural motifs painted in a particular bombastic style. The Shanghai Drama Academy, because of the particular needs of stage set design, had been able to nurture artists who had studied landscape painting in the Soviet Union. Faculty members Li Shan and Kong Boji, for example, belonged to a non-mainstream group. Li Shan’s teacher, Zhou Benyi, was trained in the Soviet Union, whereas Kong Boji was self-taught. Li Shan, a member of the class of 1969, had formally studied at the academy for only one year, in 1965 and 1966, before the Cultural Revolution brought classes to a halt. Nevertheless, Li Shan was able to earn a reputation as not only talented but
somewhat avant-grade. It was quite daring of the academy, in 1971, to retain him as an instructor. However, because stage design did not require figures, his modernist eccentricities did not immediately cause a problem.

In 1973-1974, a large scale translation of modernist Western plays and novels was undertaken in Shanghai and Beijing. The texts were not publicly circulated, the distribution instead strictly limited to high-ranking officials and professionals within the art and literary worlds, including art academy professors. The texts were labeled “internal materials for use in criticism.” Some faculty, however, discussed them in less than negative terms with their students. Moreover, as their existence became well-known to art students, many were able to borrow or read them in the homes of classmates whose parents had access to them.

The environment of the Shanghai Drama Academy was thus remarkably open and filled with knowledge of modern trends even in this early post-Mao period. Faculty were surprisingly well-informed about contemporary international artistic trends, and do not seem to have felt the need to hide this knowledge of the “bourgeois capitalist” world from their students, as was the case in other places.

For artists during that period, imported reproductions provided another way to fulfill their desire to learn about art outside China. Shanghai had been China’s publishing center since the end of the nineteenth century, so it was not surprisingly that the city led in reopening the industry to foreign trends. The Shanghai Book Import/Export Company held several exhibitions of imported art books in the Foreign Language Bookstore on Fuzhou Road. The entire canon of world art, from ancient to modern, could be found on the pages of these deluxe publications. The shows were not open to the public, but art college faculty and students, as well as other art professionals, were eligible for tickets. The exhibited books were purchased by three Shanghai institutions, the Shanghai People’s Art Press, the Shanghai Artists Association, and the Shanghai Drama Academy. The hundred volumes of the “Masters of World Art” series, bought by the Drama Academy library, was particularly treasured by the Zhou Brothers. They copied several hundred compositions from the books. There were also several other Japanese art book exhibitions, which displayed many of the deluxe multi-volume reproduction sets reproducing ancient to modern Western and Japanese art, lavishly produced volumes that were fashionable among Japanese bibliophiles and art collectors in that period. The Zhou Brothers returned to these exhibitions day after day to study and make notes on the artworks reproduced in the Japanese publications.

It may be difficult for those of us living in a world with a free press to imagine the thrill experienced by young people in China as restrictions on what artists could see and read were slowly and cautiously reduced, and to understand the profound impact a first exposure to completely new artistic images and ideas might have on young artists who grew up in the material wasteland of the Cultural Revolution. While very few people will remember a shopping experience or even a museum visit that took place 25 years ago, the thirst for knowledge was so intense in that period that many artists can tell you exactly which book shows they attended and what they saw. Thus, the Shanghai book shows, along with exhibitions of original art, were extremely important for the development of Chinese art in the early post-Mao period. China’s door had been closed for three decades, and China’s young and middle-aged artists had no direct exposure to Western art. A handful had studied in Leningrad or Liepzig in the late 1950s, but even before Sino-Soviet relations soured in the 1960s, very few reproductions of Western art were made available in China. Suddenly, by means of these exhibitions, the entire history of Western art was on display to young artists who thirsted for just such a comprehensive knowledge. Moreover, many
of the art books sold in these exhibitions made use of the highest quality color reproduction technology of the time, and permitted those who sought it to develop quite good visual understanding. Typically, the Zhou Brothers made the best use of their opportunity. Or, one might say in the case of Shaoning, made an opportunity for himself where there was not one.During this period, the brothers painted many collaborative works in a bold non-representational style that was popular among non-academic artists of the period. Largely avoiding the figural subjects that dominated academy painting, they concentrated on increasingly abstract landscapes. Their work became known for its bright, free color and non-realistic treatment of subject matter.

Shanghai, which had dominated the Chinese art world in the century before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, continued to possess a unique atmosphere for art even under the Maoist policies aimed to suppress the economic foundations of its art market and private colleges. The Zhou Brothers thus experienced the particular way the Shanghai art world responded to the end of the Cultural Revolution. At the same time, as sojourners in the city, they were also caught up in the important cultural trends that swept the entire nation in the Post-Cultural Revolution era.

Spring BreezeIn
June of 1979, Shao Dazhen, editor-in-chief of World Art, the most authoritative publication of Chinese research on international art, published an article entitled “A Concise Introduction to Modern Movements in Western Art,” which introduced a variety of different styles of painting, beginning with Post-Impressionism, but with particular emphasis on expressionism and abstract art. Shao, a Soviet-educated art historian, was a professor of Western art history at China’s premier art school, the Central Academy of Fine Arts. In the same month, a French-trained painting
professorat the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts, Wu Guanzhong, published an essay entitled, “Formal Beauty in Painting,” in the Communist party’s official art journal Art. His article stimulated an enormous debate by arguing that formal beauty, even if not considered by everyone the most important quality in art, should at least be granted equal status with the content of painting. [Fig. J] On this basis he strongly implied that the value of previously taboo abstract styles should be reconsidered. Such an idea was radical at the time—it directly contradicted the arts policy defined by Mao Zedong in his Yan’an Talks on Art and Literature in 1942, which mandated that a politically correct theme was more important than any other criterion for art, and that the form taken by a work of art must first and foremost serve the theme. Wu Guanzhong thus advocated, at least implicitly, overturning thirty-five years of Communist art policy, and caused a sensation among young artists.

During the same period, exhibitions in Beijng and other cities by artists who pushed the boundaries of allowable art received national publicity. As though in response to the relatively open political atmosphere of the time, a now notorious dissident exhibition, the Star-Star (or, more accurately, the Sparks) show was hung on the fence outside the National Art Gallery in Beijing on September 27, 1979. The Sparks, like the Zhou Brothers, were not members of the national Chinese Artists Association, nor recommended by the CAA, and thus did not have the right to exhibit in the national art gallery. Of course, the modernist (and sometimes amateurish) nature of their work would have made it impossible for their paintings to be exhibited in any case. A few works by members of the Sparks group, such as Wang Keping’s Blind and Silent [Fig. F], directly criticized the Cultural Revolution and the Communist state apparatus. The majority, however, such as paintings by Mao Lizi, Ai Weiwei, and Ma Desheng, were simply modernist experiments. The show was closed after only two days, but news and rumors about it spread nationwide, including to Shanghai. Skillfully using the media, the core members of the Sparks attracted attention to the difficulties of non-party, “outsider” artists in a centrally administered arts bureaucracy. This undoubtedly resonated with faculty and students in the Shanghai Drama Academy, who were painting in modernist styles, but had no place to safely exhibit them.
The following year, a different but no less powerful challenge to Socialist Realism emerged from western China, brought into being by college students who shared many of the same painful experiences as the Zhou Brothers. These young artists, classmates at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in Chongqing, had entered art school in 1977 after years of hard labor in remote mountain villages, where they had been sent to “receive reeducation” during the Cultural Revolution. Their subject matter reflected their direct personal knowledge of the hardships of China’s people, and none of the so-called glories of socialist society. Their paintings were in no way idealized, but used the realistic technical skill prized in China’s art schools to depict the results of human suffering. One trend within the group was called by appreciative critics in China the “Scar” movement, a label borrowed from the title of a short story by Lu Xinhua that describes the experiences and suffering of young people during the Cultural Revolution. Cheng Conglin’s A Snowy Day in 1968 [Fig. E] similarly depicts the aftermath of a battle between Red Guard factions, with wounded teenagers helping one another leave the scene of the carnage. The theme very directly exposed the evils brought into being by Mao Zedong and his lieutenants when they used China’s naive young people to launch the political struggle against his personal rivals. Believing their battles to follow Mao’s will, students tried to eradicate those identified as class enemies through any means, including violence. Ten years later, they realized that it had all been a trick.
Luo Zhongli’s Father similarly depicts a harsh reality. In this case, the glorious example from whom educated youth were expected to learn, the Peasant, was a broken-down man, old before his time, who had enjoyed nothing more from his twenty years under Maoism than a continuation of his back-breaking labor. A party official who saw the painting shortly after it was completed complained that the painting was incorrect because the Peasant looked like one from the “old society.” Upon his request, the artist added an inconspicuous ballpoint pen behind the peasant’s ear, thus illustrating his supposed literacy, the only progress in his life that might be implied from the socialism. Pen or no pen, using realism, rather than socialist realism, to create an ambiguous image was exactly the artist’s point. He depicted what he saw, not what he had been told he would see, an experience echoed by the millions and millions of rusticated youth in his own generation.

To a viewer today, Luo Zhongli’s stylistic reference is to the work of Chuck Close, which he had seen in reproduction. However, Luo Zhongli did not follow the post-modern clinical detachment that earned Close’s portraits their fame, but instead imbued his work with a measure of sympathy. Furthermore, the gigantic scale of this bust portrait had only one vivid Chinese counterpart in 1980—the standard portrait of Chairman Mao. Mao’s image had been displayed everywhere in China during the Cultural Revolution, and in 1980 a carefully painted version still hung aloft on Tian’an Men gate, at the north end of Tian’an Men Square. It was shocking to find a wizened peasant with dirty hands depicted in the same iconic format as the customary images of China’s leader, and it seemed to make a democratic statement, that China’s image was not that of her political leader, but of her people, even her poorest.
Both Cheng and Luo reveal the artists’ profound disillusionment upon realizing
that they had wasted the most important years of their youth at hard labor in the countryside, abandoned by Mao to an impoverished exile. The purpose of the Cultural Revolution’s movement to send all China’s middle and high school graduates to the countryside was not reeducation, as the propaganda said, but instead to exile the entire generation–a desperate measure aimed at solving the urban unemployment crisis caused by Mao’s fatally flawed political movement.

Luo Zhongli’s work was typical of certain games played, consciously or unconsciously, by the most acute artists of his generation. Father satisfied certain Maoist demands—it depicted the “peasant-worker-soldier class,” and with the sympathy Mao had required of the urban intelligentsia. It used realistic techniques, and thus did not venture into the forbidden modernist territory. It might thus satisfy even the most conservative party leaders of the older generation. At the same time, it depicted an unvarnished reality as it was known to Luo’s own generation—and in its implications it was profoundly subversive. Its appeal to young artists was in its absolute rejection of the falseness and hypocrisy that characterized the propaganda with which they had grown up. Luo Zhongli’s victory in this work was, in part, his success in exploiting the official art establishment as a platform to freely express his own feelings. The strategy Luo Zhongli and others used to deal with the official art world was typical of their generation. We will see that the Zhou Brothers also overcame the same constraints in their career, and their early success was the product of a similar multi-layered appreciation of their work.

The Cultural Revolution itself was officially condemned by the new Deng Xiaoping government, opening the door to direct more criticism. Thus, Cheng Conglin’s A Snowy Day in 1968, along with Gao Xiaohua’s Why? were exhibited in the exhibition to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China at the National Art Gallery in October, 1979. In October of the following year, they joined with other young Sichuan artists to show the works again at the Sichuan Youth Art Exhibition in Chengdu. Then late in 1980 Luo Zhongli’s Father won a gold medal in the First China Youth Exhibition in Beijing. These exhibitions brought the young Sichuan artists to national prominence
.
The January, 1981, issue of Art, the journal of the Chinese Artist’s Association and at that time the only nationally distributed art magazine, reproduced Luo Zhongli’s Father, along with a series of realist paintings of Tibetans by the Shanghai-born rusticated youth Chen Danqing. The latter subject matter, the lives of China’s minority peoples, was not part of the “Worker, Peasant, Soldier” triad stipulated in Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Talks, but it was heavily promoted by the government in the early post-Cultural Revolution period. The Deng Xiaoping government, aware of how fragile China was politically in the wake of the massive dislocations of the previous decade, sought to emphasize unity and harmony among all China’s peoples. One area of political continuity among virtually all the governments to rule China in the twentieth century was the commitment to acknowledge the place of non-Han peoples in the Chinese nation. Thus, the unity of all China’s peoples was considered, at least within China, to be non-controversial, and indeed came to stand for unity in many other areas. Washing away the local enmities resulting from the factional strife and violence of the Cultural Revolution would take time, as would breaking down the rigid class barriers established in that strange time, but the oneness of all China’s people became a happy alternative value on which public attention might be focused. Indeed creative works focusing on minorities were considered to help the cause of Chinese peace.
For artists in the early and mid-1980s, this provided unexpected opportunities for visual exploration. For many urban artists, particularly from the coastal areas of China, minority people and the rustic areas where they dwelled possessed an exotic attraction. Whereas Han Chinese material culture, particularly in the cities, had been stripped of virtually all color and aesthetic charm during the spartan years of the Cultural Revolution, minority peoples were generally not subjected to such totalitarian measures. Particularly in the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution, when consumer goods remained in short supply, painters might travel inland garbed in factory-made khaki or navy blue cotton suits that were the virtual uniform of all Chinese, male or female in those years. They would arrive to find that in some minority communities people still wore brightly colored traditional garb, made by hand from elaborately dyed or embroidered fabric, that they still celebrated traditional holidays, and that they still produced beautiful folk crafts.

Thus, at one level the material culture of the minority peoples filled a psychological and spiritual need, as artists sought to find remnants of Chinese visual traditions after so much had been destroyed in the preceding decade. China officially recognizes fifty-six separate minority cultures, some closely related to the Han in cultural terms, and others far more different in religion, custom, and even race. It was therefore possible to find almost anything within the general parameters of “minority culture.” For artists of a romantic temperament, the customs of some rural minority peoples charmed by their “primitivism,” and the boldness and simplicity of their folk art formed a powerful alternative to the bare concrete, political slogans, and slick propaganda images that surrounded urban people. For artists who knew the works of Gaugin or Picasso, artists who forged original new styles inspired by the appearance and art of peoples of Africa or the South Pacific, the exotic beauty of China’s own “other” cultures was a powerful stimulus. Rejecting socialist realism even more forcibly than Gaugin and Picasso overthrew European academicism, Chinese artists in the 1980s turned to images from minority cultures as vehicles for their own aesthetic and psychological needs. They rejected the puritanical nature of Maoist society, finding alternatives on China’s borders. At the same time, they pursued the values that Wu Guanzhong had so effectively promoted, a search for formal beauty in art.

A major project in interior decoration, painting murals for the refurbished Beijing International Airport, was assigned to the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts in the late 1970s. The wall paintings were thematic and decorative, some dealing with vividly imagined ancient Chinese myths and others with the colorful lives of China’s border peoples. When completed, the project was hailed as a major achievement. The most famous of the wall paintings, Water-Splashing Festival, by Yuan Yunsheng, [Fig. I] depicted minority girls bathing and frolicking in a folk festival of the Dai people of southwestern China. Reviving an art nouveau aesthetic commonly seen in the Shanghai area in the 1930s and 1940s, the artist clearly sought to create an image imbued with formal and decorative beauty, including the beauty of the nude female form. Official objections to nudity, however, brought notoriety to the project, and ultimately led to one section of Yuan’s mural being covered by curtains and eventually a wall. Still, the beauty of his depiction of minority peoples made the airport murals very famous, and misguided attempts to censor them only increased the reputation they gained through word of mouth.

As ethnic minorities themselves, the Zhou Brothers could hardly have helped thinking about the significance of this theme in mainstream art of the early 1980s.

As artists sought to find truth outside the Maoist political arena, the Zhou Brothers turned not only to contemporary folk art for inspiration, but also to art of China’s own tradition. However, by this period the acceptable canon had been very radically narrowed to art that was not considered to be the product of elite artists, and was thus limited to objects and paintings that could be attributed to anonymous folk or professional artists. Religious mural paintings by workshop painters, such as the ancient Buddhist murals at Dunhuang or the Daoist murals at Yonglegong were visited, studied, and sometimes copied by art students at the Shanghai Drama Academy and elsewhere. Similarly, archaeological sites were of great interest, and the objects found within them transformed into motifs in painting.

Upon completion of their studies in Shanghai, the Zhou Brothers took the opportunity to travel across the ancient northern Silk Route to some of the best known archaeological sites in China in order to experience ancient art at first hand. Of particular interest to art students and artists in that period were monuments preserving early examples of China’s figurative art, much of it profoundly mysterious and moving to the eyes of painters in the process of throwing off the bonds of socialist realism. The Zhou Brothers undertook their journey to examine China’s cultural treasures and to better understand their heritage as Chinese artists.
The thousand-year old Buddhist caves of Dunhuang and Longmen, with their serene and highly stylized images of Buddhist deities, provided inspiration for them, as for many young artists in that period. They continued their journey along the Yellow River, retracing the path of China’s ancient route of cultural contact with the West, the Silk Route, [Fig. 22, fig 23] before returning to their home in southwestern Guangxi. The two years they spent outside Guangxi were extremely important to the Zhou Brothers as artists, both for them personally and because their stay in Shanghai coincided with a critical era in the development of modern Chinese art. As the new Deng Xiaoping government worked to stabilize its control in the late 1970s and early 1980s, based in part on a policy of gradual opening to the international community, artistic experimentation was encouraged, heated debates ensued, and the new trends that appeared established the potential directions for Chinese artistic development over the next decade. It was in this period that modernist painting, which had flourished after its introduction to China in the 1920s, but had been totally suppressed in the 1950s, reemerged in China. This was a period also when a new, apolitical form of decorative painting emerged. Seeking formal beauty, artists like Yuan Yunsheng and those involved in the airport mural project, as well as those at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts, where Wu Guanzhong was a professor, sought to produce a new art enlivened by motifs and images from folk art, archaeological references, and references to China’s traditional artistic heritage. Motifs were abstracted, distorted, and reworked in search of their intrinsic aesthetic qualities, producing a new painting that was not modernist, in any western sense, but was also very clearly a rejection of socialist realism. [Fig. 24] References to the past very intentionally evoked the lost splendors of China’s ancient civilization, as well as the values that had been so irrationally suppressed during the Cultural Revolution. Although apolitical on the surface, underlying opinions about the state of contemporary China and Chinese culture could easily be inscribed by the viewer between the lines.

SONG OF LIFE
Upon the Zhou Brothers’ return from the lively atmosphere of the Shanghai Drama Academy to their home province of Guangxi, they experienced a kind of culture shock. No one at their respective work units in Nanning understood what they were hoping to do with their art, nor in fact did anyone at all. In response, the two brothers painted even more prolifically than before. They set up a secret studio in a dusty storehouse belonging to the Guangxi Cultural Bureau, where they painted day and night. Despite the unpleasant surroundings, they completed more than a thousand lotus paintings during that period. At first, they felt lost, their lives and surroundings so different from the exhilaration of their Shanghai period. There was really no one, except each other, with whom they could communicate.

Finally, they turned to an old artist in Nanning, Liu Luye, who had supported them years before in their initial efforts to obtain employment in the city. [Fig. 25] He had studied with the well-known art educator Xu Beihong (-1953), who trained in Europe. The brothers were delighted to find that he understood what they were striving for in their painting and in their hopes for artistic careers, and actively encouraged them. Similarly, He Tielong, a middle-aged artist of the city, appreciated their creativity, ambition, and energy and encouraged their enthusiasm for painting. Subsequently the two men would serve as mentors in many crucial ways. The two older artists advised that the Zhou Brothers really needed a better teacher, and arranged an introduction for them to the most distinguished senior artist in Guangxi, a man named Li Luogong. Li was a graduate of the Shanghai Art Academy who had studied in Japan, and had served as chairman of the Tianjin Artists Association in the early 1950s. His artistic pedigree should have guaranteed him a good job in one of the major urban art academies, but Li, like the father of the Zhou Brothers, had been declared a rightist in 1957 and had been exiled to China’s remote southwest. With no studio or art materials, he was unable to paint while in exile, and essentially gave up the art he loved. He did, however, take up the more private art of seal carving, and eventually emerged as a quite famous master in this traditional art. After his period of punishment, when all rightists nationwide were rehabilitated, he remained in his place of exile, where he assumed the Vice-Chairmanship of the Guangxi Artist’s Association.
The brothers traveled the width of Guangxi to Guilin to visit Li Luogong, and were very happy to be met with enthusiasm about their work. When they first met Li Luogong he asked their names. When they answered that their name was Zhou, he said, “So, then, you are the Zhou Brothers,” applying the label by which we know them today. He then said, “I expect you have brought some paintings?” They responded in the affirmative, and he asked to take a look. After viewing several paintings, Li exclaimed on their excellence, and commented that he had not seen such good paintings in Guangxi for many many years. He then asked the brothers what they did in Nanning. They responded that they were backdrop painters for theater companies. Li responded, “Oh, so you are backdrop painters. No wonder you can paint so well. During the Cultural Revolution no one else was allowed to paint except painters in theater troupes.” Li, a man who had lost almost everything because of irrational Maoist political movements, was very sympathetic to their situation, and decided to do everything possible to encourage them. The Zhou Brothers were delighted when he told them that he would recommend them for an exhibition at the Guilin Museum. Thus encouraged, the Zhou Brothers returned to their dirty warehouse and worked even harder.

At just that time, however, the two brothers ran afoul of local officials in a situation unique to the period of economic transition in which they lived. Private sales of art were forbidden after establishment of the full socialist economy in China, and private commerce only reintroduced in selective areas with the changes in policy under Deng Xiaoping. The brothers had, in a perfectly legal manner, placed four of their paintings with a state-run hotel’s art gallery, which then sold them to foreign guests and turned over a tiny portion of the sale price to the artists. Ironically, it was when they were in Guilin visiting Li Luogong that their troubles burst forth. Someone from the Guangxi Cultural Bureau who was visiting the city at the same time was surprised to see the brothers, who had not gone through proper channels to request official permission to travel, on the streets of the city. An investigation was launched into what they were doing and how they had paid for the trip. When it was revealed that their paintings had been sold to foreigners at the hotel gallery, the Cultural Bureau officials demanded that the brothers turn over all the money they had been given by the hotel to the Cultural Bureau and undergo a criticism session for their multiple infractions of socialist ethics. The social pressure applied by the local party administration in cases like this is unimaginable, and from this point on, their reputation in their native place was destroyed, as the event was presented to the local cultural world as though it were a serious economic crime.

Rather than being discouraged by the political troubles, their ambition to succeed as artists became even stronger. They realized that only their own work could speak for them. They needed to create their own artistic language and produce some real creative work.

Thinking back to their travels with the Shanghai Drama Academy to see ancient Silk Route sites, the Zhou Brothers realized​that their own artistic consciousness had been strongly affected by imposing archaeological monuments in their home town that were little-known outside Guangxi. Near their grandmother’s house was a mountain of local fame called “Balai” in the local dialect, or “Huashan,” as it is called in Mandarin Chinese. Along the rock mountainside was a long cliff decorated with primitive paintings and engravings. The name Balai in the Zhuang language refers to the pits in the surface of the mountain’s stone. When translated into Chinese, this becomes “hua de shi shan,” and the term acquires an unexpected ambiguity. In the intended translation, Huashan would mean pocked or spotted mountain, but a more common assumption, for those who did not know the origin of the term, and based on usual Chinese practice, would be to interpret it positively as “splendid” or “flowery” mountain.

The so-called Huashan Cliff Paintings are actually spread for 130 miles across the four counties of Ningming, Longzhou, Chongzuo, and Fusui in the Zuo River valley of the Guangxi Autonomous Region. Among them, Huashan, in Ningming, along the Ming River, is most famous. For this reason, the popular appellation for all the cliff paintings in the region has become “Huashan Cliff Paintings.”

In Ningming, on Mount Balai, more than sixty sites with cliff paintings extend along the river for a distance of about seventy miles. No one knew when these images, which depict the lives of the local people, were etched or painted, but they form one of the few pre-modern examples of the art and life of the Zhuang minority people. The largest and most famous site covers an expanse of cliff about 500 feet wide and 150 feet tall. There are 1300 figural images. The largest human figures depicted on that cliff wall are about ten feet tall and the smallest about one foot high. Some are in rows, some isolated as single figures. Some stand with legs open and two hands raised in the air, some look like dancers or drummers. The tallest often appear to be leaders, and stand on the backs of wild beasts, with knives at their waists.

They seem to have been drawn with bamboo sticks or straw pens, and colored with red pigment. The color has fused into the rock with age. On the side of the steep cliff are no traces of supports for scaffolding or walkways. Underneath is a sheer cliff that falls down sharply to the river. There is no record whatsoever in the local gazetteers for Ningming of who painted them, when they were made, how they were created, or what contents are depicted. Some experts now believe that they date to the Warring States or Western Han periods, around the fourth or third centuries b.c.e. However, only myths tell of the origins of the cliff paintings.

When the Zhou Brothers were young their grandmother told a story about how the Huashan cliff paintings came into being. According to her, an immortal visited a Zhuang painter and asked him to paint soldiers and horses for the benefit of his people. The immortal told him that after one hundred days the images in the painting would become real and would help the Zhuang by eradicating troubles, preventing disasters, and bringing happiness. So the painter closed his door for three months and painted many soldiers and horses. On the ninety-ninth day, a stranger unexpectedly opened the door and came into the painter’s room. Suddenly, all the images in his paintings flew out the door and attached themselves to the Huashan cliff. But they never became real.

This beautiful legend stimulated the boys’ imaginations from childhood. Now that they had returned from the city after learning more about other places, they were excited to look at them with fresh eyes.
In February of 1980, the brothers went again to study the cliff paintings. Some parts were best seen from a boat in the river, others from a tall bamboo ladder, but all 1300 ancient figure drawings offered untold nourishment for their creative work. They spent days atop ladders and floating in the water, producing dozens of sketchbooks of details from the cliff face. They memorized the images on the cliff so that they even appeared in their dreams. As they slept in their small boat and made food on the beach, living on raw fish, wild plants, and rice wine, they imagined that they were recreating the lifestyle of the Luoyue people (as the Zhuang were known in olden times), the creators and subjects of the cliff paintings.

Soon after returning from China’s urbanized coast, the two brothers found their imaginations filled by these simple, naive, and yet powerful images of human figures. All art students at this time would have known that reference to mysterious ancient imagery or primitive scripts was by a well-accepted part of the modernist vocabulary. Whether consciously or not, they followed the footsteps of Paul Klee, of the Parisian artist Zao Wouki, and of a host of other modernists who enlivened their abstract paintings with such motifs.
Now aware of the source of their own art, the Zhou Brothers were completely drawn into the study of Huashan cliff paintings. When they returned to Nanning, they worked incessantly in their dilapidated storeroom-studio, sleeping only two or three hours a night.

There was a unique aspect to the Zhou Brothers choice of motif, however. The Huashan cliff paintings depicted the lives of the Zhuang, the same ethnic group from which the Zhou Brothers themselves came. It was probably only after leaving their native region that their own consciousness of this ethnic identity became sharp. First copying the simple depictions of daily life, mythological stories, and religious activities quite faithfully, the Zhou Brothers​ thoroughly​ explored the visual possibilities of the ancient cliff paintings as a way to find their own artistic language. The initial excitement of copying the vivid images gave way to a desire to do more, however, and the Huashan cliff painting images were gradually worked into their abstract paintings rather than painted simply as copies.

The Heaven and Earth series [Fig. bz1485], on which they were working most of that year, was quite abstract, influenced by the modernist trends they had experienced in Shanghai. At the same time, images from the cliff paintings frequently appear, some as direct copies and some more abstract, providing a direct reference to the source of their own art. This synthesis was extremely successful. In addition to the enormous Heaven and Earth series, they launched a more ambitious project—a ninety foot long mural painting of Huashan. They composed drafts of about 4000 paintings based on themes or motifs from their sketchbooks of the cliff paintings, and eventually incorporated the primitive figure drawings from the cliffs into their own work.

During this period, people from their work units came to check what they were doing. They saw all the images taken from the cliff paintings, and particularly noted that all the figures, whether male or female, were depicted in the nude. This was reported to the local leadership which criticized them, in stereotypical terms from the Cultural Revolution, for painting bourgeois images. They stated that this was not an artistic problem, but was a much deeper problem caused by the distorted world view of the two young men. Shaoning’s name was even added to the list of workers who would be fired when the next wave of staff reductions took place.

Their mentor, Li Luogong, however, was very pleased with their work and particularly sympathetic to their plight. He knew that his support could not waver through their
political crisis, and he helped them to find the loopholes and opportunities for personal artistic expression in an art world still dominated by the meddling habits of the Maoist art bureaucracy. Just as he recognized the special opportunities backdrop painters enjoyed during the Cultural Revolution to paint apolitical subjects, he was able to steer the brothers into another area of freedom in the early 1980s.
With the widespread construction of new hotels, airports, and other public facilities aimed at the newly welcomed international community, designers, architects, and artists all agreed on the importance of mural painting as an essential aspect of any public building. This promotion of an architectural practice common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century West, and essentially obsolete there by the time it was established in China, was a unique moment in the history of Chinese painting. Very few of the major commissions executed during the late 70s and early 80s survive today, but painters all over China were kept busy covering vast expanses of wall with images of Chinese historical and mythological themes, as well as pictures of exotic minority customs.
Of great importance in offering the artists an unprecedented zone of freedom is that most of the mural projects were not supervised by the cultural authorities who had regulated Chinese art for the preceding three decades. Instead, the Ministry of Light Industry or other non-cultural entities commissioned, funded, and approved the works. Not specialists in art, these officials were unconstrained by the obsession with politically correct iconography and styles in painting, and approved anything that was not ugly and that common sense dictated was politically unproblematic. While the completed projects often passed through the same contentious process of popular criticism that any work of public art in the world may suffer, with the ultimate banning of Yuan Yunsheng’s decorative nudes perhaps most notorious, the artistic activity that surrounded the early stages of any commission was very lively and exciting to the artists involved.
Indeed, once the value and importance of the mural painting format had been accepted at the highest levels of government, artists and art administrators were able to undertake a wide range of artistic experiments in the name of research on mural painting. One widespread practice was to rework motifs from China’s ancient tradition of Buddhist and Daoist mural painting into new decorative compositions. Stripped of their original meaning, these artistic forms, rendered in exoticizing terms, were considered to represent China’s glorious ancient artistic traditions. Before the problems in the Chinese economy had been tackled, with the everyday lives of the people still spartan by contrast to standards of living in developed countries, this claim to ancient greatness provided, at least for a time, a distraction from the realities of the present day.

The Zhou Brothers’ obsession with Zhuang cliff paintings fit very well into this trend. Artists familiar with Western modernism would understand that they were operating within the still-prohibited modernist tradition. However, all would speak publicly in very different terms—relating such work to revival of China’s glorious ancient traditions. That the Zhou Brothers had found motifs that were both ancient and from their own ethnic minority was, by coincidence, perfectly in line with cultural policies of the period. In addition, as minority artists themselves, with a body of work that glorified the heritage of the Zhuang people, the work was very suitable to the thematic concerns of the day. Their talent and enthusiasm made it possible to expose these antiquities to all Chinese.

Whether or not they ever seriously intended to make their compositions into mural paintings, their association with the mural painting movement gave them opportunities to exhibit and to develop as artists. This realm of safety provided some protection during the political movement of 1982 and 1983, the Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign. Many developments in the art world paused during this period as artists, fearful that another Cultural Revolution might be on the horizon, kept out of the limelight.
1The Turning Point
The Zhou Brothers were extremely fortunate that their mentor had sent them to see an influential friend in Beijing, Zhang Ding. Zhang Ding, then director of the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts, who was the major figure in the mural painting movement and also supervised the airport mural project, played an essential role in the next step of the brothers’ artistic careers. In October of 1982, the brothers traveled to Beijing to meet Zhang Ding. Li Luogong had supplied a letter of introduction, which his friend Zhang Ding took very seriously. This was fortunate, because their arrival in Beijing was preceded by a condemnatory letter from someone in Nanning who knew both of the gallery scandal and of their plans to go to Beijing. Zhang Ding had already brought many artists, including Yuan Yunsheng, who had unjustly been condemned as rightists to Beijing to work on the airport mural project, and was unafraid to support worthy artists regardless of past political problems. He appreciated the work of the Zhou Brothers, and believed the testimony of Li Luogong, rather than their attackers. Director Zhang immediately agreed to exhibit their work in the school art gallery. With Zhang Ding’s great influence and the effort he put into notifying major figures in the art world about the Zhou Brothers’ exhibition, it was a great success. The show was widely reviewed in newspapers and magazines to high praise. Their work was extremely influential in the art world of the time. Typical of the era, it was publicized as the work of Zhuang minority artists.

Li Luogong [Fig. bz4026] was right on target when he recommended the Zhou Brothers to the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts. Not only did it have the only mural painting department in China, and solid experience in the new mural painting movement, it had also sheltered many artists who held slightly subversive modernist views at odds with those of the mainstream socialist realism. Like the Shanghai Drama Academy, the CAAC artists were able to emerge quickly from the dominance of socialist realism because they had never been as deeply involved in it as their colleagues at the Central Academy of Fine Arts or the other major art schools.

Moreover, Vice-Director Pang Xunqin, a French-educated painter who had been one of the major forces in 1930s Shanghai modernism, had become strongly interested in the art of the southwestern minorities during his exile there during World War II, and had himself made paintings that referred to their folk art. The CAAC was more than happy to welcome the Zhou Brothers to Beijing. The Guangxi Huashan Mural Painting Exhibition was held at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts gallery from Oct. 14-16, 1982. [Fig. 27] With Zhang Ding’s personal involvement in the show, it attracted many members of Beijing’s artistic elite to view the innovative work. [Fig. 28] In the October exhibition, the Zhou Brothers displayed paintings that were a draft for a larger mural project, mounted as four large horizontal scrolls. The first of the four scrolls they exhibited was called “The Gleam of Ancient Murals,” a work executed with red pigment similar to that on the cliffs. It consisted of direct copies of the cliff paintings, with some exaggeration, and strong reddish tonalities. The second section was “The Cradle of Green,” about the farming, harvesting, and hunting of the ancient Luoyue people. The images also consisted of winged figures, deer, and mysterious creatures. Its name was reflected in the overall green tonality of the scroll. The third scroll, “The Eternal Sound of the Golden Drum,” was about battles and victory celebrations, while the fourth and final scroll, “The Happy Song of the Luoyue,” depicted the dancing and singing of the ancient Zhuang people.

Zhang Ding wrote an inscription for the show that read “The Past Serves the Present,” a slogan long promoted by the Chinese government, and thus providing a measure of political protection for the brothers. Another well-respected old artist, Li Kuchan, whom they had visited in Beijing in February, also wrote very encouraging words on the occasion of their exhibition. Li, a senior professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and one of the foremost practitioners in Beijing of ink bird and flower painting, was famous for his works that resembled the style of a famous seventeenth century individualist painter,
Zhu Da, and worked to revive the style for modern times. He praised the Zhou Brothers for achieving in their work the goal that he himself had been seeking throughout his career, but had not attained, and believed that they had the talent to “continue the past and create the future.” He also praised their perseverance and determination, and urged them to keep a clear focus for their energy, to work quietly, and to ignore distractions to their art.

The resonance of their show went beyond the art world. A Shanghai Music Conservatory student, Xu Jixing, who saw the Beijing show, composed a modern symphonic composition entitled After Viewing the Huashan Murals. The piece, which featured traditional Zhuang instruments, such as drum and a stringed instrument called a maguhu, in a symphonic setting, won first prize in the Third National Music Competition in Beijing.
With encouragement of older generation artists and enthusiastic reception by their peers, they returned to Nanning. The recognition of their work by the Beijing art world obviously helped their situation in Nanning. Even more important, they themselves felt more confident that they were going in the right direction with their art. From a practical point of view, Zhang Ding’s encouragement, particularly as director of the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts, changed their lives. After the show, he called a special meeting of the CAAC administration to admit the two brothers to the school as irregular students. Zhang Ding’s admiration for their work was extremely important—he went so far as to successfully argue to his colleagues that the very difficult admissions examination to the school should be waived for the Zhou Brothers. They agreed when he stated that “their artwork is [comparable to] the very best examination paper,” and thus accepted the paintings themselves served as evidence of their accomplishments. The brothers determined to return to Beijing for a special training class to be held the following year.

After returning to Nanning, the brothers worked feverishly to revise their draft compositions. In December they returned Picture
Fig. 26. The Zhou Brothers, with mentor Li Luogong, at their 1982 exhibition at the Guilin Art Museum. to Beijing to exhibit them at the gallery of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, which had just established a mural painting department. The academy held a small conference at which art professors, the artists, and a supportive cultural official from Guangxi discussed the work. The show was then moved to the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts where it received even more attention. It opened Dec. 23 under the title The Mysteries of Huashan. On the second day of the show the Central People’s Radio Station broadcast a favorable report, and many major national newspapers, such as People’s Daily, China Youth Daily, and Worker’s Daily also ran features about the exhibition.

On Dec. 26, the entire faculty of the Mural Painting Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts sent a letter praising the draft compositions to the Guangxi Autonomous Zone Cultural Bureau, which had co-sponsored the exhibition. The letter was signed by important artists of the day, including Hou Yimin, Zhou Lingzhao, Zhang Shichun, Wang Ximin, Li Huaji, Wang Wenbin, Lou Jiaben, and Sun Jingbo. They urged the Guangxi officials to provide support for the project, on the grounds that it was important to the development of Chinese mural painting nationwide. On December 27, the entire faculty of CAAC’s mural painting department followed suit, with a letter to the Guangxi Cultural Bureau expressing strong support for the Zhou Brothers and encouraging further study of the Huashan murals. When the brothers returned home this time, they received a hero’s welcome. They were immediately elected to membership in the Guangxi Artists Association and the major news media in Guangxi reported their show and the warm response it received in Beijing. The Guangxi Museum held a special exhibition of the Zhou Brothers’ work, which received wide media coverage and praise from the top leaders. The Central Documentary Film Company in Beijing even came to Guangxi to make a feature about the brothers.

In response to the letters from Beijing, the Guangxi Autonomous Zone propaganda chief visited their pathetic studio to look at their work. The vice-chair of the autonomous zone government, Zhang Shengzhen, organized a team of people to begin study of the cliff murals. The Zhou Brothers set for themselves the goal of holding another exhibition in Beijing the following year.
In February 1983, they moved to Beijing to start their studies at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts. Once in Beijing, they enthusiastically undertook projects assigned by the CAAC faculty. It was the first time they had the opportunity to systematically study ancient Chinese painting, and they threw themselves into their work, carefully copying such Song dynasty outline paintings as Li Song’s Knick-Knack Peddler in the Palace Museum and the scroll of Daoist immortals known as Eighty-seven Immortals in the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum collection. They also had the chance to travel with their classmates and teachers to view many sites in northern and western China, including the Yinshan Cliff Paintings in Mongolia, the Daoist murals at Yonglegong, Shanxi, and the terracotta warriors at Xi’an, and the Buddhist caves at Datong, in Shanxi, at Dunhuang in Gansu, and at Dazu in Sichuan. The first class they took was traditional Chinese decorative painting. They also studied early Chinese calligraphy, and they frequently went to the Central Academy of Fine Arts to attend public lectures. Among them they heard one on American mural painting by an American artist and one on contemporary Russian art by a visiting Russian painter. They spent most mornings taking classes and afternoons either at lectures or in the library. They also studied Asian art history and world art history. During this time they came to know many helpful faculty at Beijing art schools, including muralist Hou Yimin and sculptor Wang Zhaowen. The first half year they spent their time in the classroom, lecture hall, or library. In the second halear they traveled to eleven provinces on a research trip organized by the school.

One extremely positive element of the 1980s art school curriculum in China was the extended research trip undertaken by every class and usually organized every semester. In the era before Chinese were permitted to engage freely in tourism, young artists thus had privileged access to major sites and monuments. Shaoning was extremely excited by his travels. He wrote to his sister that all along the route he would find himself profoundly moved by the ancient works of art he saw. The journey confirmed the rightness of the Zhou Brothers’ artistic direction, and filled him with a sense of the vast heritage that he had inherited as an Asian artist.

Inspired by their studies in Beijing, they decided to devote more time to researching the history of Huashan and to completing a final draft for their Huashan murals once back in Guangxi. They searched libraries throughout Guangxi for information about the Luoye tribe and the Huashan cliff paintings, as well as consulted scholars of anthropology and literature who studied them. Although the date and the contents of the Huashan cliff murals remain obscure, after their study at CAAC of cliff and cave paintings in other countries of the world, they felt better able to understand cliff painting as a whole. They felt then that their painting would be a contribution to understanding the Huashan images themselves as well as an artistic contribution. In 1984, the brothers were commissioned to make a mural Light of Wisdom at the Chinese Museum of History. [Fig. 29]
Triumph in Beijing
On Feb. 5, 1985, their exhibition opened at China National Art Gallery. [Fig. 30] Zhang Ding inscribed the title for the show, which was Guangxi Huashan Mural Art Exhibition. This was the first time a Zhuang artist had been individually exhibited at the China National Art Gallery. Their exhibition should perhaps be seen less in such ethic or local terms, but in the context of other major events in the Chinese art world of the day. The Sixth National Exhibition of 1984 was something of a setback for the Chinese art world. Based upon the movement to eradicate Spiritual Pollution, held in 1982 and 1983, the party tightened censorship policy over art. The Communist party sought to eradicate what it labeled “bourgeois liberal thinking” and to promote adherence to four conservative political principles, namely, to persist in: 1. upholding the path of socialism; 2. the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. the leadership of the Communist party; and 4. Marxist-Leninist, Mao Zedong thought. At the end of 1983, this retrogressive movement was in full swing, and seriously disrupted the selection of art works for the Sixth National Exhibition. As a result, the 1984 National Art Exhibition, the first since Deng Xiaoping’s liberalizing government had assumed power, was quite boring. The selection committee had excluded anything they feared might be labeled bourgeois, so all abstract and even slightly distorted figural images were left out. What was shown was monotonous painting primarily in realistic style, with nothing at all new.

The tide did not turn for another year, until January 1985, when the Fourth National Writers Association Congress was held in Beijing. The secretary of the Communist Party Executive Committee, Hu Qili, gave a speech in which he advocated creative freedom. This was interpreted by everyone in the cultural world as a correction to the excesses of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Movement. The Zhou Brothers’ exhibition, held only one month after this congress, opened at a fortunate time. In contrast to the oppression felt by artists in Beijing, the freshness of the abstract paintings brought from faraway Guangxi seemed to perfectly fit the call for creative freedom. It was almost as though the exhibition was planned for just this purpose. The lavish praise heaped upon their art responded both to the quality of the work and to the great relief everyone felt in being able to publicly enjoy it. Thus, Yu Feng and Huang Miaozi stated that the Zhou Brothers’ show was much better than the Sixth National Art Exhibition of the previous year. The elderly Li Keran, [Fig. 31] who came with his wife and son to see the exhibition in a pre-opening preview, stated that their paintings reached a very high artistic and technical standard. [Fig. 32] Chang Shuhong, a French educated oil painter who was for many years director of the Dunhuang Institute, also expressed public admiration, and stated his desire to know more about Huashan cliff paintings. Even Wu Zuoren, Chairman of the National Chinese Artists Association, came to the show and invited the brothers to visit his home. [Fig. bz4027] Thus, the art world was very excited to see the Zhou Brothers’ exhibition, which displayed many qualities lacking in the National Exhibition. Ironically, two paintings in the Zhou Brothers’ show had been rejected by the jury for that very same National Art Exhibition of the previous year. Now, in the new atmosphere, and also because they were Zhuang artists painting a Zhuang subject, no one dared to criticize them on ideological or formal grounds.

On February 17, the ninety-year old art educator Liu Haisu, then in Beijing, went to see the show. Liu Haisu was probably the most important advocate in China of modern cosmopolitan art styles. [Fig. 34] He had been involved in founding China’s first private art academy, in 1912, and served as director of the school, Shanghai Art Academy, throughout much of its history. Although the school was disbanded under the Communist administration in 1952, and Liu himself declared a rightist in 1958, several of the Zhou Brothers’ teachers at Shanghai Drama Academy were Shanghai Art Academy graduates and Liu Haisu students. In addition, Liu had devoted his career to encouraging ambitious young artists. He had been very active fifty years earlier in supporting the efforts of Pang Xunqin to establish a modernist art community in 1930s Shanghai and was no doubt interested in the activities of the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts, the Beijing school co-founded by Pang.

Upon seeing the Zhou Brothers’ exhibition, Liu Haisu became extremely excited by what he saw. [Fig. 35] In his exuberant way he exclaimed that he saw in this show that the forms of Chinese art were changing. He wrote a calligraphic inscription in the gallery that began with praise for the brothers: “Open-minded and broad thinking, creating a new trend.” He went on to remark on how much vitality he felt in the Zhou Brothers’ work. He felt that the brothers realized his own artistic ideal of continuously creating new styles. He was so happy with what he saw that he immediately decided that the work should be shown in Shanghai and Nanjing. Liu personally called Shen Roujian, chair of the Shanghai Artists Association, as well as the Jiangsu Provincial Art Museum in Nanjing, to arrange shows in those cities. After writing his laudatory inscription to hang in the exhibition gallery, he strongly encouraged the two brothers to work hard according to Liu’s own educational philosophy for art, to study more, and to research ancient art and foreign art.

Upon seeing the Zhou Brothers’ exhibition, Liu Haisu became extremely excited by what he saw. [Fig. 4028] In his exuberant way he exclaimed that he saw in this show that the forms of Chinese art were changing. He wrote a calligraphic inscription in the gallery that began with praise for the brothers: “Open-minded and broad thinking, creating a new trend.” He went on to remark on how much vitality he felt in the Zhou Brothers’ work. He felt that the brothers realized his own artistic ideal of continuously creating new styles. He was so happy with what he saw that he immediately decided that the work should be shown in Shanghai and Nanjing. Liu personally called Shen Roujian, chair of the Shanghai Artists Association, as well as the Jiangsu Provincial Art Museum in Nanjing, to arrange shows in those cities. After writing his laudatory inscription to hang in the exhibition gallery, he strongly encouraged the two brothers to work hard according to Liu’s own educational philosophy for art, to study more, and to research ancient art and foreign art. This show was reviewed or reported in more than 50 newspapers and journals, and was broadcast nationally and internationally on Central TV, Central People’s Radio, and China International Radio. Almost all reviewers characterized the exhibition as representing the springtime of Chinese art, as it reawakened from its cold slumber. Huang Mengtian, a Hong Kong critic and editor of the journal Meishujia, reviewed the show in the Hong Kong newspaper Mingbao. He wrote, in part, “From the title, I originally thought that this show consisted of copies of the Huashan cliff paintings. Actually, however, with the exception of a few drawings that are direct copies, all other paintings are creative works of art… These paintings are by modern artists and filled with the feelings and thoughts of modern people…They use the forms of ancient cliff paintings, but reorganize and restructure them to represent the lives of their ancestors, mainly scenes of the Luoyue tribe in their relationship with nature… What is interesting is that the Zhou Brothers use oil paint, this imported foreign material, to serve the needs of Zhuang painting. As painting, their obviously unique style is very impressive. Their creative process seems to be to transform the cliff paintings into something new, to use the ancient figures to express their own feelings. One obvious characteristic is that a relatively concrete image is surrounded by an abstract background. So their presentation is not direct, but is by implication. The audience must, through their own imagination and deep thinking, understand the secrets of the artists’ hearts. I don’t know if the Zhou Brothers have absorbed any modernist Western color and brushwork to enrich their own work, but in looking at their paintings, the answer would be yes. If we say that many parts of the painting are abstract, I think it is for the purpose of making [themes] conspicuous by contrast. The color of the original cliff paintings is very monotonous, basically using ocre (tuhong), with occasional touches of mineral blue. The Zhou Brothers do not limit themselves to these simple colors, however, but very effectively use the rich palette of the oil painting medium. They also absorb the special qualities of other peoples’ art and of ancient Buddhist mural paintings. All these influences, however, have been unified into their Huashan cliff painting style.”

The success of this show pushed the Zhou Brothers to the peak of their career in China, and as young Zhuang minority people, there was no greater goal to which they could aspire in China. First, they had an exhibition at the National Art Gallery, an honor usually reserved for famous old
painters, and thus earned the highest degree of recognition possible in the Chinese art world of that time. Second, they received praise and encouragement from almost all the old masters in China’s senior generation of painters. Third, they received every possible kind of coverage from the national Chinese media. On the surface, this was their great success.

Why did this happen? The first element was the policy toward minority peoples in art at that time. To most ethnic Han artists, the lives of minorities were attractive subjects because of their exotic flavor. However, on another level, drawing and painting the daily lives of minority peoples, in their reality and color, was a powerful alternative to the politically manipulated images of the Han people that had become standard in the “thematic” paintings required for artists since 1950 in China. They felt a kind of authenticity in the lives and scenery of the people living in remote areas that urban Chinese lacked. Minority subjects, then, became extremely popular among Chinese artists in all regions, as artists used these images to express hopes and desires that could not be expressed in the other approved subjects of the time.

However, the Zhou Brothers, as members themselves of a minority, had a greater sense of mission to represent their own cultural tradition. Other Chinese artists and critics were happy to see these themes painted by artists of the minority group themselves, as they hoped to see greater originality appear in such paintings. This, as well, was a reason their work was so intensely appreciated by the art world of the mid-1980s.
Secondly, in the early1980s, after almost thirty years of isolation, China finally opened its doors to the rest of the world. A major concern of the Chinese art world then, as part of a program of internationalization, was how to combine Western art and Chinese art. Whether from a technical or a cultural point of view, the difficulties of implementing this ideal were enormous. That the Zhou Brothers were able to use the oil painting format to represent themes of the ancient lives of the Zhuang minority people seemed to provide one answer to this dilemma. Moreover, the Zhou Brothers very effectively represented the texture of the rough surface of the Huashan cliffs on the rough surface of the oil painting canvas. The third element was the liberalizing cultural environment after the Fourth Writers Congress, which openly advocated “creative freedom.” Because the Zhou Brothers’ work is obviously filled with abstract elements, which had been criticized officially as influenced by Western bourgeois liberalism, encouraging and advocating this new style had large significance. By referring to it as the “spring of modern Chinese art,” the artists and critics who praised it, especially members of the older generation, made a strong statement that they hoped the contemporary Chinese art world could accommodate more variety and pluralism in forms of artistic expression. Many of the key older artists, including Liu Haisu, Li Keran, and Pang Xunqin, had been strong advocates and practitioners of modernism in the 1930s and 1940s. Their support was crucial to the Zhou Brothers’ success, but also to redefining the direction of the Chinese art world in the post-Mao period.

When the Zhou Brothers returned to Guangxi, they were warmly received. Awarded new job titles, they became the only professional artists in the Guangxi Cultural Bureau Art Creation Center, and a new studio was set up for them under the name Huashan Cliff Painting Creation Center. Their only responsibility was to make paintings on the theme of the Huashan Cliff paintings.

From this time on, they had an active exhibition schedule. Their first international exhibition, in Japan, was held in 1986, followed by shows in Italy, Germany, and Greece in the same year. At the same time they developed a plan to develop art publications and establish a school. They had achieved the highest possible status to which an artist of their background might aspire. With a prestigious title, a comfortable studio, a state salary, and access to a research budget, there was virtually nothing more in China that they might want. Other provincial artists in a similar situation during that period would settle into this comfortable life, and might live out their days as a local notable, with few challenges and little stress. Of course, nothing was entirely predictable in China in that transitional period. The brief liberalization of 1985 and early 1986 was followed in the end of 1986 by a short-lived crackdown on bourgeois liberalism.
Once again, fear of punishment for free expression ripped through China’s cultural world.

It was at this moment that an opportunity appeared that would change their lives. The owner of a gallery called East-West Contemporary Art in Chicago, Guangxin Qian, saw their work in a publication and invited them to participate in an exhibition called Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Art, to be held in Chicago. He also told them that he would hold a solo show for them in November, 1986, at the gallery, and recommend them to participate, with European and U.S. artists, in an international exhibition in May in the United States. He also promised to find an agent to circulate their solo show around the U.S.
This invitation was appealing for the brothers, who were always excited by a new opportunity. However, accepting it would mean leaving behind all the worldly benefits that they had attained over the past few years, not only their titles, salaries, studios, and reputations, but also their plans to set up a school and a journal. This loss was to be in exchange for a completely unknown world, but one definitely filled with new challenges, opportunities, and as it turned out, hardships.

In the transitional years of the 1980s, Chinese regulations on passports and exit permits were designed to deter private travel. In order to gain the required permissions, private citizens were required to resign their jobs, give up their urban residence permits and return their state-owned dwellings to the government. Thus, whether by government policy or by bureaucratic mistake, there was little possibility of return to China for those who traveled abroad on private business or for pleasure. Individuals who wished to see the world outside were almost forced by government restrictions to emigrate. The brothers thought seriously about what it would mean to leave Guangxi, but it was not in their nature to avoid risk, particularly one that promised new opportunities to develop their art.

While the Zhou brothers were busy establishing their new research center and completely immersed in work on their large mural painting project, the Chinese art world underwent a radical opening to new ideas made possible by the looser political environment following the Fourth National Writers Association Congress. The new art movements, which began in late 1985 and continued in 1986, have been variously called the New Wave Art Movement or the ’85 Art Movement. During this period of about a year, the Chinese art world embraced in a single massive convulsion the entire history of Western modernism from nineteenth century post-impressionism to 1970s conceptual art. Although the Zhou brothers were not directly involved with the young Beijing critics who promoted the modernist revolt against socialist realism, their 1985 exhibition pioneered the abstract and expressionistic trends that were followed by many New Wave artists in 1986. Their innovative work was well-received for the same reason that the New Wave experiments of the following year were encouraged by the art establishment—the art world was determined to shake off the Maoist fetters that still constrained it almost a decade after Mao’s death. Zhang Ding recognized their pioneering position when he wrote that their art was to the Chinese art world like the first thunderstorm of the northern spring, which signifies the end of the late winter thaw and is a harbinger of the new life sprouting from the warm earth. Although they left China before the New Wave Movement was fully formulated in the critical literature, and are therefore often not mentioned in its histories by most of critics in China, there is little doubt that they were brave pioneers of the new artistic trend that swept the nation in the mid-1980s and that is known in most Western-language writing as the Chinese Avant-Garde.