Artistic Family in Mao’s China

Xu Fangfang

When I was 18, in 1966, Red Guards tore apart our family’s house, whipped my mother with a belt, and defaced artworks by my father, Xu Beihong. They even threatened the collection in the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum, home to more than 2200 artworks donated by his widow, my mother Liao Jingwen. The Cultural Revolution caused the most severe threats to Xu Beihong’s artworks during the Mao era. My mother, my brother, and I struggled to preserve Xu Beihong’s legacy from the 1950s through the devastating ten-year Cultural Revolution.

My father, Xu Beihong, is widely known as the father of modern Chinese painting. Born into a poor family in 1895 in Yixing, Jiangsu Province, he learned Chinese classics and traditional Chinese painting from his father, a self-taught artist. One of the first Chinese art students in Europe, Xu Beihong in the 1920s studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, returning to China with methods and techniques that modernized Chinese painting. The Western practice of sketching from life was then rarely heard of, but he believed it was the foundation, and he taught generations of students to paint with oils. Prior to this, few Chinese artists could paint human figures effectively. In his efforts to improve Chinese painting, Xu Beihong incorporated Western sketching techniques to create powerful figure paintings in ink brush. His animal and figure paintings capture the essence of the subjects, expressing strong feelings that have moved the hearts of many viewers throughout the world. He is best known for vigorous ink brush paintings of galloping horses.

In the new China established in 1949, the Communist Party controlled all art institutions. They urged artists to serve workers, peasants, and soldiers and make their artworks serve the Party’s policies. Xu Beihong held the highest honorary positions in visual arts with access to top leaders such as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. But he had no administrative power to determine the teaching program’s content at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Eager to adjust his thoughts to serve the new China, he traveled to Shandong Province to sketch construction workers for a monumental oil painting never completed. I remember as a child overhearing my parents’ conversations hinting at conflict at the Central Academy of Fine Arts where Father was president. His established art courses might overnight be jettisoned and then reinstated as Chinese heritage. Unpredictable politics ruled art. Father was told his major oil painting of Mao showed intellectuals instead of a required proletarian crowd. That was his first encounter with Communist control over art, a precursor to events that changed his teaching program in the 1950s and 1960s.

When the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966, most famous professors, musicians, and artists, my deceased father included, were considered bourgeois academic authorities to be struck down. Although many of Xu Beihong’s works expressed his patriotism during the War of Resistance, they did not explicitly serve Mao’s political position in 1966, which was one of the strict ideological standards that all works of music, art, and drama had to meet. In 1966, the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum was closed and later demolished to make way for subway construction.

My mother was married to my father for only seven years before his death in 1953. But she cherished their love after his passing and devoted her life to his artistic cause for sixty years. In my childhood we lived next door to the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum, where my mother kept Father’s spirit alive. As director of the museum, Mom gave museum tours to visiting Chinese and foreign art lovers. While she lovingly spoke about Father’s works, I followed her and listened. These formative years influenced my desire to share her mission later in my life.

During the Red Guards’ raid in 1966, Mom was determined to save Beihong’s works in spite of the abuse and humiliation she was suffering. She wrote a letter to Premier Zhou Enlai, Father’s long-time friend and a supporter of the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum. My brother, Xu Qingping, a nineteen-year-old college student, delivered the letter to the west gate of Zhongnanhai (“Central South Sea”), the CCP headquarters. Premier Zhou responded quickly by sending government workers to pack and remove from the museum all the works, including those by Xu Beihong and those in his collection, all in one day without saying where they would be stored. This was how Xu Beihong’s artworks and those in his personal collection had escaped the Red Guard raids.

In mid-1973, seeing the relatively favorable political situation following Lin Biao’s disappearance, my mother wrote a letter to Chairman Mao, asking that the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum be reinstated. A little more than a month after she sent the letter, Chairman Mao approved the reinstatement of the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum.

My mother worked through the bureaucratic process for ten years to complete the new Xu Beihong Memorial Museum building. It was
not opened until 1983.

It took me years to explore how best to contribute to my father’s legacy. I had passionately studied Western classical piano performance for nine years. In 1966 I was one year short of graduating into a concert career when Western classical music was banned and China’s colleges and universities closed, and remained so for ten years.

I was among the many student artists Mao sent to be “re-educated,” assigned to the 4701 Army Farm. Intellectuals and artists were removed from their fields to eliminate their influence. It became a crime to seek any knowledge besides that found in Mao Zedong’s works. I and my classmates grew rice in brackish marshes and drank water hauled in from a nearby town by an ox-drawn wagon. We dug irrigation trenches in temperatures well below freezing. Our fingers lost dexterity. This harsh life was to purge our bourgeois thinking.

Although our stay on the farm was indefinite, I chose to quietly study English with a dream to go abroad to continue my Western classical music education. Perhaps I could bring Father’s works to the United States.

In 2011, my dream came true. Xu Beihong: Pioneer of Modern Chinese Painting exhibition was held at the Denver Art Museum. This first comprehensive solo U.S. exhibition of my father’s work displayed sixty-one of his best works from the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum.

The exhibition drew international attention. I was elated to have been able to help initiate and bring this exhibition to the U.S., a dream that my father was not able to bring to fruition in 1941, seventy years before.

My mother in her late eighties ensured full collaboration of the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum to make the U.S. exhibition successful. She died in 2015 at age 92.

Today problems with continuing my father’s legacy of educating the public on Chinese artistic heritage remain. Many of China’s secondary schools are experiencing art teacher shortages. Among younger generations in China, there is a lack of emphasis on developing a love of art and learning about the best traditions of Chinese painting. I am hoping that more people will be as passionate as my mother about preserving Xu Beihong’s legacy so future generations around the world will be able to understand and appreciate Xu Beihong’s art.