It's hard to imagine how doing a still-life painting of something as serene as a peach blossom in a vase can be called an act of counter-revolution, but that's the risk Dr Wang Aihe took every time she painted with her friends in the last years of the Mao Zedong era. Long before Wang joined the School of Chinese, she spent several years at the latter end of the Cultural Revolution as a member of an underground collective of young artists known as the Wuming (No Name) group in Beijing.
The group was formed spontaneously and comprised artists from different social classes, occupations and educational backgrounds. Their clandestine meetings were in direct contravention of the ban on free association and their individualistic work was a challenge to the orthodoxy of the day, which demanded that art represent and serve the state. Many of them sunned the social realist style prevalent at the time in favour of Western styles of painting.
They produced thousands of paintings but apart from a series of secretive exhibitions, little was known or recorded about the artists until 2010, when Wang put together a 13-volume publication and online database of their work. It also includes autobiographical essays by the artists on the historical and social contexts in which the paintings were produced. The 13 bilingual volumes help provide an important insight into the counter-culture of the day, and mark an important step in the research of modern Chinese art history.
(Text reproduced from Faculty of Arts 100: A Century in Words and Images.)
Please click on the following link to access the publisher's page: http://www.hkupress.org/Common/Reader/Products/ShowProduct.jsp?Pid=1&Version=0&Cid=16&Charset=iso-8859-1&page=-1&key=9789888028344
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