- On My Illustrations of Eva's Book "The Great Famine
of China"
I have seen Eva only in her photos - so far. In 2012, Eva sent me her
prose collection, "My hometown - countryside village". With strokes of
her pen, her birth place was in a way materialized meandering the earth on the yellow plateau of the
Northwest of China - as if with your hand picking up any piece of dirt at will
you could form a yellow figure standing in front of you. Writing about stories
of those ups and downs of the lives in her hometown village, I was informed later,
especially about the generation of her mother's, after she came back from
America. When I heard of that her mother
was once a homeless in street, I was shocked - because I knew well while I
shoot the news brief "Blazing Star", many women escaped from the west
of Guansu Province to the Shanxi Province in order to survive by marriage in
the later period of " The Movement of Great Leap Forward" - and Eva's
mother was one of them. Due to this event probably, Eva could have touched the
silenced period of 1959-1961, "The Great Famine Of China" , with her
heart. Unlike the rest of us, she did not stop here but bravely following the
trail of her mother's past when her mother was only a girl, and uncovered the
hidden history of that period. Undoubtedly, it is not hard to imagine her sharpened
sensitivity girdled with the basic concept of human rights due to years of
living in America, when once more she re-entered the mythical land of hers in
the past.
By the end of
year 2013, Eva sent me a letter informing me that she would publish a book on
the "Great Famine of China" and asked if I would like to provide some
illustrations? “I will give a try”, I told her. My reply was based on the fact
that I was already familiar with this theme of the "Great Famine in
China". It goes back to the period of 1999 when I shoot the documentary of
"Lin Zhao". In those days of interviewing locals, I realized that
so-called "The Three Years of Natural Disaster" is NO disaster at all
- it is purely out of "humans"
manipulation and it is entirely a tragedy caused by the political movements
then: “The General Line，The People's Commune, The Great Leap Forward". A few
years later, I myself made the same theme by a peasant named "Wu, Yong
Quan" in the Guangshan County, Henan Province, as a documentary, recorded
this event of "The Great Famine of China". Mr. Wu built a memorial
for the 74 peopled starved to death in the year of 1959 - more than half of the
entire population of 130 in the village at that time. Till today, it is still
the ONLY memorial for those thousand of millions of people who died of
"The Great Famine of China" all over China in the 3-year period. Over
the years, in my interviews along the provinces of Anhui, Yunnan, Gansu,
Sichun, Liaoning, etc., emerged in my head, not only by the textual data, by
listening to the narration of interviewers, picture after picture of those
unbearable images looms large in my memory, as a professional painter, while
still making documentaries, I kept constant sketching of those events without
knowing when I can actually use them for the best possible occasions.
Only after Eva sent me the 15 text paragraphs of her book
for illustration did I realize then that the best media to utilize those sketches is in the
form of woodcut, which resulted in the initially current of 15 pieces of them. As
best as I can possibly attempt with those paintings, it is still very hard to
convince even myself whether or not this kind of art form being capable of
thoroughly recalling those memories suffered through actual starvation and the
terrifying periods of excruciating pains endured by the public then, neither
being capable of lessening the writer's psychological torture for herself, due
to the limitation in this form of art. Nonetheless, it is my belief that there
must exist a channel connecting individual sensation with collective memories.
Eva wrote like this:
"My sister in-law passed her night under a neighbor's
roof of their house outside and woke up at daybreak to see her brother finally
coming here to receive her: 'how come you are so late....?" which she
assembled enough strength to utter while ending her last breath. As another case, a little boy under the name
of Wei Fu-lian ran out of home in order to survive from starvation by catching
a train, but not being able to get in. As a result, he put his arm through the
door handle of the car and clenched his thumb finger with his teeth tightly to
prevent himself from falling under the train. More like these appeared in my
interviews, such as babies biting dying mother's breasts searching for milk
etc. Various local dialects spoken from a
multitude of countryside villages echoed the same proofs of those hunger
related events.
More than ten thousand years have passed since drawing which
accompanied humans all the way along has witnessed the visiccitudes of its
modern various schools, what, however, is its inner most aesthetic strength?
How shall we be able to reveal our deeply felt shock of reality? In my
interviews, many so- called "Rightist Intellectuals" became numb when
being violated themselves or ubiquitous violence surrounds them while their
friends were decimated. They were put into such environment for hard-laborers
undergoing brain-washing to implement a "change of outlook" . Anybody
being capable of thinking for himself was terminated from hunger, violence, or
physical hard labor. All words pronounced from them are pieces of paper from
former friend's betrayals, or such "self-criticisms". All their drawings
are either political propaganda for the
"Great Leap Forward" with those masters smiling to their
heart-content, or stack at the back of
their former colleges.
Drawing for what? Once a "Rightist" told me after
experienced such mental agony of "death" but survived eventually: "While
the moment came I knew I was dying, my whole body showed a serene peace without
slightest disturbance of physical hurting. All sensation had left body so the
death of starvation was faced with a smile leaving this world." Drawing
for what? I heard repeatedly such stories in my interviews: when passing a dying
mother, the baby was still sucking milk crawling on the her bosom. How to engrave such kind of psychological
trauma? The editor of "Blazing
Star" expressed his feeling with his heart-felt words and recorded texts,
with dignified speeches seeking justice in court. When Eva's little
far-relative Wei Fu-Lian clenching his thumb with his teeth while hinging
himself outside of that train car to avoid falling off, it reaches the limit of
human capability as an animal seeking survival - how to express this kind of
critical situation in drawing? For those who died of hunger, from children of
countryside to the civil intellectual rightists, what is the base color of
drawing? Starved to death, terrified of starvation and feeling helpless out of
deep depression - what base color is able to describe them? As the old man Wu Yong-kuan concluded:
"There exists, no longer, a human society". Fearing and death have
turned human's value judgment upside down.
Drawing is a sketch of one's heart all of which is the grammatical
future tense of would have done. This
series of woodcuts reflects my exploration of how to reach the bottom of actual
lives with this art form. Incidentally, the historian of art Mr. Li Gong-ming's
selection of this outpost hall in Xiaozhou village of Guangdong Province, as my
exhibition place, is, my take,
particularly meaningful - it is this place in the year of 1959, the leashing out of the political movement of
"Anti Hiding Production Quantity", then initialed from here, Guangdong Province, spreading all over the
rest of China, the so-called "experience", which eventually leads
massive population to the engulfing destiny of starvation of death.
