Traditional Painting in New China: Guohua and the Anti-Rightist Campaign

The anti-rightist campaign of 1957 and 1958 had dire consequences for many of China's artists, just as it did for hundreds of thousands of China's intellectuals (Link 1984:11–14). A sculpture instructor and Communist Party member at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, for example, refused to testify against the artist Jiang Feng, the academy's director and a man to whom he felt personal loyalty. The sculptor was declared an “extreme rightist” and sent to a labor camp at Xingkai Lake in Heilongjiang on the Soviet border. His entire sculptural output for the following years, 1958 to 1979, was a small box filled with crudely carved tree roots, work conducted in secret without professional tools or materials (interview with A 1986).