Rusticated Youth and the National Exhibitions

Like many artists in China, the Shanghai-born Tang Muli began painting as a child. From the age of six, Tang attended extracurricular art classes at a local children's palace. Children's palaces, established for the supplemental education of elementary school students, were one component of a system intended to broaden China's cultural activities, followed by youth palaces for middle school students, worker's cultural palaces for industrial and other workers, and cultural halls for the masses in general. They were organized by the municipality—in Tang's case, Shanghai—or by the local urban district. Tang studied for a total of six years in these institutions, first at the local children's palace and then at the youth palace. Most of the children represented in local, national, and international exhibitions of children's art were children's palace students. Tang Muli recalls that one of his watercolors was exhibited in Australia when he was in fifth or sixth grade.^[128]

Tang decided during middle school that he wished to become a physicist and began doggedly studying mathematics and English. He dropped his extra-curricular art classes in order to prepare for the difficult college entrance examinations. He sought to enter Qinghua University in Beijing, an appropriate step for a student graduating from Shanghai's most prestigious high school. Unfortunately for his scientific career, the launching of the Cultural Revolution the spring he was scheduled to graduate led to the cancellation of the college entrance examinations.

Tang Muli's father, a prominent film director, was attacked early in the movement. Like many young people, Tang was afraid to return to his family's apartment when his school was closed, for his home had been invaded and ransacked by the Red Guard, who then beat and incarcerated his father. The faculty and staff of his school had largely disbanded, leaving Tang and his classmates unsupervised on campus. They took over the classrooms as living quarters and, for the next year and a half, passed their days in political study,

which included practicing the calligraphy and painting with which they copied the poems of Chairman Mao and rendered pictorial images of his life and work.

In 1968, workers were sent into China's schools to restore order. It was decided that all schools should arrange manual labor in the countryside for their graduates. All over the country, educational institutions, individual administrators, and the students themselves vied to display their loyalty to Chairman Mao by executing the policy as quickly and comprehensively as possible. Tang Muli was sent to work as a laborer on a dairy farm in the Shanghai suburbs, a position that was intended to be permanent.

He worked six days a week shoveling fodder, which had been dumped on the ground by a delivery truck, into a wheel barrow for transport to the barn. At first the aspiring scientist made suggestions for improving the efficiency of the laborious procedure, such as dumping the fodder in more convenient locations. Such ideas, however, were viewed as the product of a lazy and insufficiently Maoist mentality; he soon learned that to be judged a success, he must simply work longer and harder than those old farm hands who were supposed to judge him. The primary goal of his job, namely, was not high productivity, but the reform of his ideology through physical labor. In addition to a full six-day workweek, he, like all farmers, spent four evenings a week in Communist political classes and one Sunday a month on extra labor duty. As political movements came, one after the other, people spent an enormous amount of energy simply trying to understand them in order to avoid being attacked. During this period Tang's only free hours were his three Sundays a month and the two evenings a week when political classes were not held.

Tang's scientific ambitions collapsed with his lifetime assignment as a fodder shoveler, but he began to analyze possible ways to escape the monotony of his daily routine. He ultimately decided that painting would be a good way to enrich his life; moreover, it had some potential as an alternative career. Although he had abandoned his formal art studies some years before, he still retained much of his interest and basic training. Art had two further advantages: it required no state support—pencil and paper was all he needed to begin—and it was relatively unperilous. Tang reasoned that in visual art, unlike literature, it was possible to avoid expression of potentially dangerous personal opinions. And unlike music, which by virtue of its sound was unavoidably public in the communal living standards of the time, art could be practiced with relatively little outside interference.

Every morning and evening Tang worked on his basic technique. He drew still lifes in his dormitory and studied textbooks used at CAFA. He emulated the Russian academic drawings of V.I. Surikov (1848-1916) and analyzed successful contemporary Chinese paintings to extract their technical methods. On Sundays he visited old classmates from the youth palace who had become

professional artists. He heard from them about Cultural Revolution art classes on the correct method of painting portraits of Chairman Mao. From his classmates he learned the new technical requirements: pure red should be used to paint the face, burnt sienna for shading, and yellow ochre for highlights. He was warned that blue and green must never be used on the face and that the paint squeezed on one's palette should be organized in a specific order, with cool colors in the least accessible spot. Mao's face was to be divisible into three equal sections, and his pigmentation to follow the chromatic sequence on a color chart issued for that purpose.

During the next several years, Tang spent most of his spare time making drawings of his own hands and face in order to improve his rendering. In 1971, he submitted his first oil painting, Milk Maid , to be juried for the 1972 national exhibition (fig. 121).^[129] The cultural leadership particularly encouraged the exhibition of works by peasant, worker, or soldier artists that related to their jobs. Tang Muli, now a peasant, depicted a healthy dairy farmer surrounded by cows.

Once Tang's artistic talent had been recognized by the acceptance of Milk Maid in the preliminary local exhibition, the Municipal Art Creation Office, the highest art agency in the city, requested that the dairy farm loan Tang out for other art projects. The farm declined on the grounds that his labor was needed. Soon, though, it asked him to replace the weathered billboard inside the farm's entrance with a new portrait of Chairman Mao. He scraped the billboard down to bare metal, then applied a rust-protective primer, and finally, with several assistants, began snapping powdered strings on the surface to create the grid necessary for enlarging the standard photograph of the Great Helmsman.

As Tang Muli grew more comfortable with the scale of such work, he began looking for ways to improve his efficiency. He learned that he could dispense with the time-consuming step of applying the grid if he attached his brush to a long pole and painted freehand. With this innovation he no longer needed to rely on assistants for this basic preparatory step and could begin work more quickly. His unorthodox method was fascinating to the peasants, and he soon began attracting crowds of spectators. The factory next door requested that he paint a new portrait for their billboard; soon other work units in the neighborhood followed their lead. Tang prided himself on painting quickly, normally completing a billboard within a week. He was not paid for his work, but was freed from farm labor and received three free meals a day for the duration of a project. His speed and reliability were appreciated by the meal-providing units. As his reputation spread, he was "borrowed" by all twelve dairy farms in the system, and then by chicken farms and other agricultural units in the same administration. He ultimately spent an entire year painting huge portraits of Chairman Mao, with occasional variations, such as

Image not available

Figure 121
Tang Muli, Milk Maid, 1971, oil on
canvas.

Image not available

Figure 122.
Tang Muli, Acupuncture Anesthesia,
1972, oil on canvas, 165 cm × 229 cm

enlargements of Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan and other officially recognized model pictures. Tang Muli's chief reward for his painting was respite from backbreaking physical labor and better meals than his small monthly salary allowed him to purchase.

In 1972, Tang was commissioned by the health service to prepare a picture about acupuncture's usefulness as an anesthetic in surgery. The preceding year, a health worker had submitted a painting on this topic for exhibition in the same show Tang Muli had entered with Milk Maid . Although art officials were pleased with acupuncture as a subject, they found the picture to be technically inept. When the hospital was unable to find anyone on its own staff who could do better, guidelines were waived to allow Tang Muli, the dairy farmer, to paint a picture of health workers. The dairy farm objected, again on the grounds that Tang was needed to load fodder. Tang ultimately agreed to paint at the hospital in the evenings, after completing his daily farm work. He usually slept at the hospital and went to the farm early every morning.

The final version, Acupuncture Anesthesia (fig. 122), was a relatively successful product of the "unity of the three." In such collaboration, a worker was

expected to evaluate the correctness of the revolutionary statement, a cadre would speak for the bureaucracy, and a doctor would guarantee professional accuracy. Tang's picture involved at least five decision makers, for the hospital worker who made the first version and Tang Muli himself participated in the discussions as well. Every aspect of the composition was thus approved by the entire group, with Tang, as the artist, simply the mechanism by which the collaborative work came to fruition.

Some issues were very straightforward. The model for the main figure, the nurse, was expected to be the most politically correct worker on the staff rather than the most aesthetically pleasing, and was chosen by the hospital administration. It was decided that the theme would be lung surgery and that the patient would smile to indicate the efficacy of acupuncture as an anesthetic.

Surgical regulations contradicted the standards expected in Cultural Revolution art and made other decisions more difficult. One problem was how to depict the carefully selected model nurse. Artistic conventions required that she smile to show her enjoyment of her work, but hospital regulations decreed that she must wear a surgical mask. It was decided to omit the mask—thus weighting political concerns more heavily than professional ones. Professional regulations presented practical problems as well, for they prohibited the use of sketchpads in the operating room. Tang was given permission to work from photographs, which was normally frowned upon by arts leaders. A similar problem arose over the questions of Mao buttons and political posters, all of which were prohibited as unhygienic in the operating room. Normally, one would not venture out in public without a Mao button pinned to one's jacket and Mao's little red book visible in one's breast pocket. It was suggested that Mao buttons be added to the surgical scrub suits in Tang's painting, for even though scrub suits were not worn in public, the artwork was intended for public display. In the end, however, the group decided to omit the Mao buttons and political slogans from the painting. This victory for professionalism over politics yielded a relatively uncluttered, cool, and precise composition. It was considered very daring by the art world of the time.^[130]

Acupuncture Anesthesia was well received when exhibited in Shanghai in the spring of 1972. At this point, the higher authorities succeeded in borrowing Tang from the dairy farm so that he could work full time on a final version to be shown in the national exhibition in the fall of 1972. The process by which this painting came into being was standard for the period. Many works eventually exhibited in the national exhibition involved collaboration not only in applying the paint but also in developing the ideas. The most scrupulous local officials attached the name of a work unit rather than an individual to the painting. The pseudonym Qin Wenmei, for example, was used for many collaborative works produced by artists in Xi'an, Shaanxi.^[131]

In 1973, Tang's artistic success led to his transfer from the dairy farm to

another work unit in the agricultural system, the Shanghai Agricultural Exhibition Hall. Although this move allowed him to leave the farm and to assume duties parallel to those of a commercial artist in the West, he was still technically classified as a worker rather than as a cadre, the higher status granted to most professional artists. In this new position he was responsible for making political posters, illustrations, leaflets, and portraits of Chairman Mao. He worked at this job until 1978, when he sat successfully for the graduate oil painting examination at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and became a professional artist.