"I am no master. I am only a soldier stationed in the front lines of the arts and culture of our motherland," said Xiao Feng.
These words, which may seem a bit melodramatic to both young Chinese and foreigners, came from the deepest corner of the 72-year-old artist's heart in his address on Sunday (June 20) at the opening ceremony of an exhibition of works of art by Xiao himself and his wife Song Ren.
An exhibition of the work of Xiao Feng, one of the best artists of New China and retired president of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, and of his wife Song Ren, also an artist and a retired professor of the academy, is now running at the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) until (June 26) Saturday.
Just as military metaphors like Xiao's are seldom heard today, exhibitions like this are rarely seen in China today.
Entitled "Traces of Time," the retrospective show features more than 200 of the couple's oil paintings and traditional Chinese ink paintings.
They are mostly "paintings of Chinese revolutionary history," which are a unique feature of art in this country.
Paintings using this theme dominated the art scene in China in the 1950s. They depict mainly scenes from the revolutionary war that culminated in the liberation of China in 1949.
"As representative artists of the time, Xiao and Song are sure to leave their mark in Chinese art history," remarked Wang Chaowen, one of the country's most renowned art historians.
Their works have been collected by museums around the world.
The exhibition, which includes examples of their finest work collected by the National Museum of China and NAMOC, arouses feelings of nostalgia among many of the viewers.
"I have seen several of their works hung here in many galleries around the country in the late '50s and early '60s," said Liu Lie, a retired government official in his 60s.
Liu said many people of his age remember the 1950s as a time filled with "revolutionary enthusiasm," when everyone was looking forward to a glorious future.
One of the oils in the show, titled "The Dawn" (Fuxiao) painted by Xiao and Song, was very famous at that time.
With a variety of greys, they recapture in the 1959 work, the night when the People's Liberation Army (PLA) first entered Shanghai in 1949.
Under neon lights, soldiers slept along the streets as they didn't want to bother the local residents. Chen Yi (1901-72) and Su Yu (1907-84), commanders of the East China Field Army of the PLA, walked along the street, looking affectionately at the soldiers.
At the center of the painting a sleeping soldier in his 50s is propped in a sitting position against the base of a statue with a teenage soldier sleeping with his head on the older comrade's knees.
People said that the teenager was, in fact, Xiao himself.
The couple, both of whom became orphans during the Second World War (1937-45), were little singers, dancers and later painters in the New Fourth Route Army, also a resistance force led by the Communist Party of China in the war against the Japanese invaders.
After 1949 Xiao studied art at the National Art College in Hangzhou (today's China Academy of Art), and Song at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.
In 1956, Xiao was sent to the former Soviet Union by the central government , where he studied oil painting at the prestigious Repin Academy of Fine Arts for six years.
His work is strongly influenced by Russian oil painting, which was also imbued with the revolutionary zeal of the time.
The Russian influence was quite pervasive in China's art circles in the 1950s and early 1960s. In Xiao and Song's work, as in that of generations of artists, the blend of foreign art with traditional Chinese art can be observed.
(Xinhua News Agency June 23, 2004)
