When Li Keran is mentioned, many people who have lived through Mao’s era will immediately think of his “red landscape painting” work “Ten Thousand Mountains in Red”, which is also his famous work of landscape painting, so it is not too much to say that he is a “red landscape painting” painter.
It is said that the idea for Li Keran’s “Ten Thousand Mountains in Red” came from Mao’s 1925 poem “Qingyuanchun‧Changsha”, which reads, “See the mountains in red and the forests in full color. However, the poem was only published in Poetry Magazine in 1957. Later, from 1962 to 1964, Li Keran painted seven similar paintings of “Ten Thousand Mountains in Red”, which, as the title suggests, emphasizes the word “red” and envelops the entire picture in a sea of red, with the obvious intention of praising Mao and the Chinese Communist Party.
Obviously, this painting is the opposite of traditional Chinese ink and wash landscape painting. Throughout his life, Li Keran did not produce similar works either in the Republic of China or before or after that, and his other landscape paintings were basically traditional. What made him take the trouble to paint seven times?
The painting “Ten Thousand Mountains in Red” became a prophecy
Since the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong’s status has been unmatched within the Party. The aura woven by his lies made his followers and the deceived public see Mao as the “great savior” of the people, and the personal worship of Mao began to heat up. But since the Soviet Union condemned Stalin and his personal cult in 1956, the CCP slowed down its personal cult of Mao and officially criticized it.
However, Mao was not convinced of this. In his 1958 speech, he said that a distinction should be made between correct and incorrect personal worship. If a person has mastered the truth, he should be worshiped. Obviously, Mao believed that he was the one who had mastered the truth. Therefore, he launched one campaign after another to establish his authority, despite the voices of opposition.
In the early 1960s, Lin Biao, who had just succeeded Peng Dehuai as minister of national defense, took the lead in launching a campaign to deify Mao in the army, which spread to the whole country. in May 1964, the army took the lead in publishing “Quotations from Chairman Mao” and started a fervent study of Mao’s writings throughout the army. By 1965, Mao and Mao Thought had been completely deified and reached its peak during the Cultural Revolution.
In 1959, Li Keran held an exhibition of his ink and landscape paintings in major cities across China, but some criticized his paintings as “full”, “distorted”, and “distorted”. However, some people criticized his paintings as “full”, “crooked” and “black”, and even said that they were “so many black mountains”. Such comments have obviously left the realm of artistic creation. You know, in those days, political flaws had a huge impact on individuals.
Li Keran, who was very timid, was probably influenced by Mao’s thought and the trend of using Mao’s poetry as the subject matter of his works, so he painted his first painting, “All the mountains are red”, in 1962 in Conghua, Guangdong, and created six other paintings in the following years. Perhaps Li Keran did not know that in Changsha, where Mao “watched all the mountains red and the forests dyed”, his wife Yang Kaihui died tragically because he did not save her, leaving behind a letter full of tears of accusation against him, and Yang also called him a “double rogue”.
Obviously, the painting “All Mountains Are Red” was designed to match the political situation at the time, and after the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the country was really “all red”. Mao’s statues and photographs were hung everywhere in the streets and rooms, Mao’s “Red Book” was everywhere, and China was in a state of “red terror”. In this respect, “The Redness of All Mountains” is like a prophecy.
The Cultural Revolution was like “an old sparrow with a frightened bow”
According to the book Li Keran, Li Keran was deprived of the right to paint after the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution and was imprisoned as a “reactionary authority” in the “cowshed” of the Academy of Fine Arts. He was imprisoned in the “cowshed” along with the party and government leaders, department heads, professors and individual students of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the Chinese Artists Association.
Li Keran’s home was also raided, and his house was occupied by others, leaving less than half of it. The things in the four occupied houses were all piled up in the kitchen of the Academy, and books were piled up in the aisle, and the house was filled with big-character posters.
What is surprising is that Li Keran was criticized not only for his works such as “The Bitter Song” and “The Wind and Rain in Zhong Shan”, but also “The Redness of Ten Thousand Mountains”, etc. The ability of the Chinese Communist Party to turn its hand into a cloud and its hand into rain is really surprising.
Li Keran, who was just over 60 years old at the time, was slow and reticent. During the first ten days in the “cowshed”, he did not say much, but sometimes smiled faintly, with a generous and benevolent look. In the “cattle shed”, every day, besides memorizing the quotations, requesting instructions in the morning, reporting at night, sweeping the campus, and washing the toilets, all he did was to write confessions.
According to the article “Li Keran and the Redness of All Mountains” in the sixth issue of Yanhuang Chunqiu in 2016, cartoonist Hua Junwu once said that Li Keran was bold in his art, but in those days when “class struggle was the platform”, he had very little guts, so he jokingly called him “an old sparrow with a frightened bow”. Because of such a character, Li Keran suffered more torture during the Cultural Revolution.
Painter Huang Yongyu wrote in “Requiem Sacrifice at No. A-2, Dayabao Hutong” that “Mr. Kechen could not, he had never experienced such a great upheaval, such vicious persecution” and that “it was this class of Zhongshan wolves (Red Guard juniors) that demoralized Mr. Kechen, who had not experienced fear and fraud. He had been suffering from high blood pressure for many years. When he was ordered to stand up and say something, even his arms and the skin of his mouth were trembling, not to mention the words he was asked to say.”
People who had been imprisoned with Li Keran also mentioned in their reminiscences that he had been reprimanded in the “study class” for not being able to recite the “Old Three Pieces”. When he was on duty at the beginning of the meal, he did not share the buns evenly and was badly spoken to by the student guards. He had to endure the unwarranted bullying and insults.
In April and May 1970, Li Keran and a group of other old professors from the Central Academy of Fine Arts were sent to the “May 7” cadre school of the Ministry of Culture in Danjiangkou, Hubei Province, where they started to pull weeds in the fields and were later assigned to watch bicycles and answer and pass telephone calls in the communication room.
Six months before President Nixon’s visit to China, Li Keran was transferred back to Beijing to decorate the facade of the hotel where the Americans were staying, as Mao’s portrait and quotations from the “Supreme Instruction” were hung everywhere in hotels and restaurants at that time. The painters were asked to paint “revolutionary paintings” with fear and trepidation, but revolutionary paintings such as Li Keran’s “All Mountains Red” were criticized, so what should they paint?
In 1973, he created a large painting of the Li River for the National Hotel, and in the following year, he made a huge 6-meter painting of the Li River for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which took three months to complete. In addition to this, he also repeatedly created “Shaoshan”, Mao’s former residence, as the subject matter. This painting, which has no artistic value, has a far-fetched composition and is painted in green and blue instead of ink, so it is clear at first glance that the artist was reluctant to paint. There is no doubt that this is not a true reflection of Li Keran’s art, but it seems that Li Keran, who was already scared by the Chinese Communist Party, did not have much choice.
In December 1973, with the consent of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Li Keran and Wu Zuoren were interviewed by Zhao Haosheng, a scholar who had traveled to the United States, who asked Li Keran why he had chosen Qi Baishi as his teacher. Li Keran said that Qi Baishi was the bearer of traditional culture and if he did not learn from Qi Baishi, he would have made a historical mistake. During the conversation, Wu Zuoren and Li Keran also commented that Qi Baishi was “clear about right and wrong”, “very strong-willed”, and “very deep in artistic cultivation”, but these big truths made him hostile and cursed However, these big truths made Jiang Qing, who was hostile to Qi Baishi, very angry.
The following year, Li Keran was criticized at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and in the art world for “a right-leaning, reversalist wind, trying to negate the Cultural Revolution, and even openly carrying out a counter-attack”. At the “Black Painting Exhibition” from February to April of the same year, Li Keran’s works and those of his students Huang Runhua and Zhang Ping were criticized, along with Huang Yongyu, Zong Qixiang, Li Bitchan, Li Dui and Huang Zuo, a total of 18 painters. The paintings they created for the Beijing Hotel and the International Club were described as “black paintings with a very blatant reactionary tendency” and “a return to the black line of literature and art in the field of art”, and were therefore withdrawn.
As a result of this blow, Li Keran became seriously ill and lost his language, and could only talk to his family by writing. Fortunately, an old friend, Wei Longchao, a traditional Chinese medicine doctor, helped him recover his illness and restored his ability to speak within six months.
In addition, the family was divided by Li Keran’s influence. His son Li Xiaoke was demobilized from the army and returned to Beijing, where he worked as a forger in the General Factory of Internal Combustion Engines for 10 years. Li Geng went to the mountains and the countryside to the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Later, both of them became painters. Daughter Li Zhu went to Gu Yuan in Ningxia during the Cultural Revolution and worked in the Production and Construction Corps under the Liupan Mountain, where she almost sawed off her leg due to vasculitis.
Conclusion
Sadly, Li Keran escaped the Cultural Revolution, but not the June Fourth Incident, and supported the students during the 1989 student movement. After the Chinese Communist Party suppressed the student movement, Li Keran was supposed to be “liquidated”, but because he was old and his paintings were admired by the Japanese, he was sent to inform him that “the government would not pursue the matter anymore”. When the visitor knocked on Li Keran’s door, Li Keran thought he was being arrested and was so angry that he had a heart attack and died suddenly. Li Keran’s tragedy was a typical epitome of artists of that era.
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