The China Project

85 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection HUANG Yongyu By the time of the Cultural Revolution, Huang Yongyu was one of China’s leading artists in printmaking and ink-and-wash painting. Yet, during the Cultural Revolution, he was persecuted for the perceived subversive allegorical content of his paintings and for his witty parodies of communist party jargon in A Can of Worms , an unofficial compilation of some 80 animal character ink drawings. Huang began writing and illustrating these vignettes in 1964 — they proved extremely popular, and he intended to publish them — but in 1966, he was denounced and severely beaten, his manuscript seized and declared counter-revolutionary. His art works would suffer a similar fate. In March 1974, Huang’s painting Owl 1973 was included in a ‘black art’ or ‘black painting’ exhibition 1 organised by Jiang Qing, Mao’s third and last wife, and he was charged by the Ministry of Culture with blasphemy against ‘the Socialist system’. 2 Historian Eugene Y Wang has given an account of these events: The organizers’ captions constituted a de facto indictment of the artists’ subversive political intent. Among the paintings showcased, the centerpiece was Huang Yongyu’s Owl , which shows a squat owl perched on a sparsely budded tree branch, facing the viewer head on, with an enigmatic expression that can be seen either as a wink or as a one-eye- open stare. Its exhibition caption read: ‘Huang Yongyu produced this Owl in 1973. The owl, with its one eye open and the other closed, is a self-portrait of the likes of Huang. It reveals their attitude: an animosity toward the Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the Socialist system’. A grueling chastisement followed the Ministry of Culture’s categorical pronouncement. Reprimand sessions ran for months in the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, where Huang was a professor of woodblock printing, to coerce the painter into confessing his antisocialist stance. 3 After Mao’s death in 1976, when the political and cultural situation changed, Huang was exonerated, and in 1978 he was commissioned to design the landscape tapestry in the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall. Huang has become a highly prolific artist specialising in the rural subjects he favoured for his woodcuts and ink drawings. Lotus with birds 1984 is typical of the subject matter and technique of his paintings, with its focus on the natural world and his use of bold lines and broad strokes. It was painted as a gift to Hugh Dunn, Australia’s second ambassador to China, and his wife Marney Dunn, both of whom developed a close friendship with Huang. The lotus is a Buddhist symbol of regrowth and peace, and the painting shows three graceful birds hiding beneath the vigorous black outgrowths of the lotus leaves. Significantly, it contains a sly reference to Huang’s experiences with his owl painting. On the left, the small bird closes it eye in a perceptible wink. endnotes 1 The term ‘black art’ or ‘black painting’ refers to art considered by the Communist Party of China as counter-revolutionary or pro-capitalist, rather than the use of black in the work. Jiang Qing organised these exhibitions in Shanghai and Beijing between 1973 and 1974 to fuel anti-capitalist sentiment. See Julia E Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979 , University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994. 2 Fang Dan, ‘Pi heihua yuanshi cailiao’ (The original document of the Castigation of the Black Paintings), Nanbeiji , 105, February 1979, p.27, quoted in Eugene Y Wang, ‘The winking owl: Visual effect and its art historical thick description’, Critical Inquir y, vol.26, no.3, spring 2000, p.435. 3 Wang, Critical Inquiry , pp.435–6. opposite Lotus with birds 1984 Synthetic polymer paint and ink on laid paper / 153 x 115cm /Gift of (Mrs) Marney Dunn and Hugh Alexander Dunn, ao , through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2008 above Winking Owl (detail) 1978 (after the 1973 version) Ink and colour on paper / 60 x 92 cm / Image: Zheng Xiaojuan and Xiao Shiling. Huang Yongyu and His Paintings , Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1988