MCLC: Xu Weixin's CR portraits

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Xu Weixin's CR portraits
***********************************************************

Source: The Guardian (2/24/12):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/feb/24/cultural-revolution-port
raits-xu-weixin

China's Cultural Revolution: portraits of accuser and accusedThe Cultural
Revolution was a time when pupil turned on teacher, when friend turned on
friendŠ Now artist Xu Weixin has painted both victim and perpetrator.
Tania Branigan asks him why and hears the personal stories behind the
portraits
By Tania Branigan

No portrait is more important to Xu Weixin
<http://www.china-historical-figures.com/en/?page_id=7> than his first. It
was 1966; the artist was eight; and he had learned, to his shock, that his
kindly young teacher was the daughter of a landlord ­ an enemy of the
people. Outraged, he drew a hideous caricature and pinned it to the
blackboard. When Miss Liu entered the classroom, "She turned pale but
didn't say a word," he said.

She had good reason to be frightened. The Cultural Revolution was at its
height, and across China teachers, former landlords and intellectuals were
being humiliated, beaten and murdered. They were hounded by neighbours,
colleagues and pupils moved by misguided revolutionary fervour, personal
grudges or little more than whim. Friends, children and spouses turned on
them.

By the time the chaos subsided 10 years later, an estimated 36 million had
been persecuted and at least 750,000 were dead in the countryside alone.
Red Guards had smashed up temples, burned books and destroyed historical
treasures. Universities had closed and pupils missed years of schooling.
Even Communist party historians describe it as a disaster, unleashed by
Mao Zedong. But their terse verdict is designed to pre-empt, rather than
encourage, debate. An event that defines China to this day ­ that helps to
explain its fixation with political stability; its dramatic economic
reforms; even, some say, its increased individualism ­ remains largely
taboo.

Xu, now 53, is among the handful daring their country to confront its
past. The faces of the Cultural Revolution are captured in the immense
black-and-white portraits stacked in his Beijing studio. Each standing
2.5m tall, they are both personal and powerful, demanding attention. The
monochrome oils are in stark contrast to the garish colours of 60s
propaganda.

Some of Xu's subjects were victims, some perpetrators. Many were both. Mao
is there, as is his infamous wife Jiang Qing; so are unknown scholars and
Red Guards. It has taken the artist five years to complete this series of
just over 100 paintings. But it is work he has been preparing for all his
life. "I feel they are related to that first portrait," Xu says. "I feel
guilty [about my teacher]; but it also helps me to understandŠ People who
were close to you ­ who were friendly and kind ­ could suddenly turn upon
you."

The theory was that creative destruction would eradicate old habits and
ideas, transforming a struggling country. More urgently, the
disastrousGreat Leap Forward and Khrushchev's fall in the Soviet Union
impelled Mao to see off rivals and critics. His heir apparent Liu Shaoqi
was one of many to die in disgrace.

The violence shook every strata of society and rippled out to the farthest
corners of the country. Teenagers and youths were encouraged to attack
fellow citizens. More than one observer has compared the anarchy to Lord
Of The Flies.

"It's very, very vivid," Xu says. "I remember all the demonstrations and
public denunciations; people breaking pictures and smashing Buddhas. At
the beginning, people were using bricks or wooden rods and metal bars to
hurt people. We could hear gunshots at night and people were beaten to
death." His hometown in Xinjiiang was far from the worst affected. In
Chongqing, rival factions battled with guns and tanks. In Guangxi, there
are accounts of cannibalism. Victims were condemned as "monsters and
freaks"; Xu's response is not to demonise their accusers, but to approach
each subject with the same neutral gaze.

"Even if they are bad people, they are still people. I have to respect
them," he says.

As a child he, too, believed the Cultural Revolution was "a great thing, a
right thing, and something we must do". In retrospect, the movement was
not just horrific but often ludicrous in its paranoia: the most "sinister"
aspect of one supposed conspiracy, notes the book Mao's Last Revolution,
was that even some of its core members appeared unaware of its existence.

China's current leaders undoubtedly understand the damage; several of
their parents suffered, even died. But a fuller reckoning of events ­ and
Mao's role ­ would risk undermining the party's hold on power.
"In textbooks this long period of history is described with one sentence,
and you can't discuss it," says Xu, who believes it has become harder to
talk about over the last decade.

Several of his portraits were exhibited in Beijing a few years ago, but he
does not expect another show on the mainland. He merely hopes more people
will become aware of his work, and reflect on their own experiences. "Most
people think the Cultural Revolution was the Gang of Four's fault, but
actually everyone should be responsible." That includes the eight-year-old
who scrawled his teacher's picture. That Miss Liu survived the decade
largely unscathed is some comfort, Xu says, but, "Of course, I was
responsible. It's only a question of how great or small my responsibility
was."

Yu Xiangzhen, former Red Guard

Almost half a century on, it floods back: the hope, the zeal, the carefree
autumn days riding the rails with fellow teenagers. And with it comes the
shame, the fear and the blood clotted on a dying man gasping for water.

Yu Xiangzhen was an idealistic 14-year-old when the Cultural Revolution
broke out, and among the first to form a Red Guards group. "We were taught
that Chairman Mao was closer to us than our parents ­ he was like a god to
me," she says. From the first, she had doubts: when she saw fellow
students berating and humiliating teachers, hacking off their hair and
pouring glue over them; when she watched her peers assaulting
"capitalists" and "rightists". It felt wrong, and yet, "I still thought it
was right because everything I was hearing was that we needed to break the
old world to build a new one.

"I didn't think these people deserved to be beaten up....[But in refusing
to take part] I felt I was, indeed, not brave enough. It was a loss of
face."

Then, she says, came "something so horrifying I will never be able to
forget it as long as I live". There is no doubt she is still traumatised,
and her voice rises to a shriek as she describes it. "It was dark ­ I was
standing by the side of a road, waiting for my friends. I heard someone
whispering for water and saw a man crawling towards me from the basketball
court," she says. "He was covered in blood. The blood on his head had
congealed already. I was terrified. Then I saw the court ­ it was almost
covered by dead bodies." All, she believes, beaten to death by Red Guards.

Yet, for these teenagers, it was a heady as well as a frightening time.
Hours after witnessing the atrocity, Yu was on a train to Shanghai. They
were travelling first to spread the cause ­ bearing leaflets titled "Long
live the red terror" ­ but then "it just became travel and leisure".
Trains were free to Red Guards; food and lodgings awaited them. "There
were no plans, no destinationsŠ I was just very happy."

Yu has begun to blog about her past in an attempt to understand it. "I
turn 60 very soon. There isn't much time left to think properly and
write," she says. But she struggles to make sense of the violence, and few
friends want to discuss it. "The Red Guards who were most active had
[political] problems in their family and tried to prove they were
different," she suggests. "Every time we get together, I look for the
people who were most brutal. One told me it was exciting to go to people's
houses and smash things and beat them up. You felt you could do whatever
you wanted ­ that you were in controlŠ And you thought it was the right
thing to do."

Carol Chow

Chow is a modern Chinese success story. She returned six years ago, from
the States, lured back by the country's transformation. Her company sells
cupcakes and confections to Beijing's elite. And yet there is a space in
her life so profound that, "I don't know what it would even mean to have
that gap be filled; I would be another person."

It was left by the handsome young man hanging on the wall of Xu's studio:
the father she knew for a few months before he was taken away. Zhou Ximeng
killed himself in captivity, aged 27. "It's painted like a memory. It's
like he's frozen in that time," she says.

She knows her father from a handful of photographs and from the stories
her mother has told, of a smart, confident, capable man ­ too
accomplished, perhaps. "My mother said he was an overachiever.," Chow
says. "Whatever he did, he excelled at ­ he was always top of his class.
The reason she gave for his suicide was that he had never encountered any
huge obstacles. I think he reached a point where it was all beyond his
control and he didn't feel he could change anything. You had to first
renounce yourself and then renounce your family and friends. I think, when
he got to that point, really, he just closed up."

Zhou came from a long line of landowners and scholars; his father, a
renowned paleontologist, had spent time in America and Taiwan. But in the
Cultural Revolution such a privileged pedigree condemned him. All it took
was "some really small comment" for him to be seized and held, in a
village outside Beijing. His body lies somewhere near the train tracks
where he died.

Xu has painted Zhou's mother, too; another of the casualties: she never
recovered from her son's death and killed herself years later.

Chow and her mother moved to Hong Kong ­ and later the US ­ as soon as
China began to open up after Mao's death. Friends were equally keen to
leave but too frightened to apply thanks to the previous decade's frequent
reversals: "They say one thing, you do it, then they say, 'You guys are
going to jail because you have revealed your true selves.'"

Her father was subsequently forgiven "for his crimes, whatever they were",
she says. "I don't feel bitter or angry ­ I feel sad for him, that he
missed so much," adds Chow, now 42, and who has two daughters.

She wants the next generation to comprehend what happened. "I don't think
they really know about it or understand it or even talk about it. It's
important for them to know what their ancestors went through and what was
lost."

Lin Zhu, widow of Liang Sicheng, the father of modern Chinese architecture

When Liang Sicheng was denounced as a counter-revolutionary, he was scared
to look even his wife in the eye. Lin Zhu, who had been working in the
countryside at the time, rushed home to him on learning the news.

"He said, 'I've been waiting for you and missing you every day, but I'm
afraid to see you,' " the 83-year-old recalls, reaching for a tissue to
wipe away tears. Her husband sensed the horror ahead. Beijing's Tsinghua
University ­ one of the country's top institutions ­ was already covered
in posters attacking professors.

"Back then, I thought this was like a dark cloud that would soon pass. I
didn't realise it would cover the country for the next 10 years," Lin
says. When it lifted, Liang was dead, his health wrecked by the scores of
lengthy "struggle sessions" publicly to humiliate him; by beatings from
Red Guards; and by the cold, damp conditions of the building to which the
family had been moved.

Lin still struggles to understand how hundreds of millions could
participate in such cruelties. Some of Liang's persecutors were forced
into taking part, she says; others were jealous of his success. Most were
young students who did not understand his ideas. To her husband, who had
loved teaching, that was particularly painful.

"He wrote confession letters, one after another, but didn't know what he
had done. The most important claim was that he had received a 'capitalist
education'. No one could tell us what proletarian architectural design was
­ and you were too afraid to ask."

As the movement escalated, Lin considered demands to join it: "I thought
probably I would be beaten to death by the Red Guards. Maybe my children
would desert me and my friends would keep their distance. But I couldn't
understand what Liang Sicheng had done. I couldn't go against my
conscience by leaving him."

Together they endured six years of enforced Maoist study and public
denunciations that often ran for hours. "Because it was all day long, the
brain sort of became numb," Lin recalls. "Normally he was not beaten up at
those sessions, but sometimes they would come and beat us at home."

Liang's ordeal ended when he grew so sick that he could no longer rise
from his bed for the struggle sessions. He died in 1972, aged 70.

In later years, Lin worked with her husband's accusers; some, quietly,
apologised. She does not blame individuals for caving into pressure to
attack others, though she is adamant that she never did so. She even
suggests those years helped her to grow. "Whatever happens, whatever
comes, I'm not afraid any more. It made me stronger and made me think,"
she says.

But she fears that intellectual life in China has never fully recovered ­
and she worries the country could see another such movement. "Many of us
are concerned about whether we can avoid a similar disaster in future.
History doesn't repeat itself exactlyŠ but it's possible."