| While it is well-known that many artists suffered persecution during the Cultural Revolution, a careful study of their response to the catastrophe has been hampered by the inaccessibility of archives and the reluctance of survivors to relinquish details. This study of six famous blacklisted traditional painters, persecuted as counterrevolutionaries and forbidden to paint, reveals a culture of resistance that has not been systematically addressed in scholarship before. Under conditions of duress in which most people would legitimately do nothing but comply with taskmasters, these six artists---Shi Lu (1919--1982), Huang Yongyu (b. 1924), Pan Tianshou (1897--1971), Li Kuchan (1899--1983), Li Keran (1907--89), and Feng Zikai (1898--1975)---found covert ways to register opposition, continue artistic production, and bolster the morale of fellow victims. Despite struggle sessions, incarceration, and hard physical labor, they willed into existence a personal space, in Shi Lu's words, a "spiritual garden," where creativity and authentic emotions could still find expression.; Acknowledging the existence of even these "low-profile" expressions of dissent at a time when most intellectuals are presumed to have been passively compliant has the potential to significantly alter current conceptions of the Cultural Revolution period. This study seeks to reconstruct an inner dimension to the Cultural Revolution experience from the perspective of prominent victims. Their covert continuation of artistic production lies at the heart of what resistance means under these extreme circumstances. At a time when virtually all autonomous thought was forbidden, these painters took considerable risk to assert their prerogative to think and create. Source materials used to research attitudes and behavior by Cultural Revolution victims include confession statements and diaries, Red Guard tabloids, covertly-produced paintings and poetry, and the author's interviews with artists and their families. |
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