The art of resistance in a time of war

“You left me less than three hours ago, and already I am enveloped by a sense of emptiness… I would not have the strength to endure such loneliness were it not for your future … I believe you are on the right path,” wrote Celina Deprez, a Belgian woman, on June 21, 1938.

Deprez, who had taken the Chinese name “Li Na”, was writing to her husband Wu Zuoren, who had set out as a front-line artist to record what he would witness in trenches, field hospitals and refugee camps.

Almost a year earlier, on July 7,1937, Imperial Japan — already entrenched in northeastern China — escalated its aggression into a nationwide invasion with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. Within days, China was plunged into the second stage of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45).

Wu was later recognized as a defining figure in twentieth-century Chinese art, and his sketches would endure as records forged in the immediacy of war — of struggle and sacrifice.

Those struggles and sacrifices were not confined to the front. On Dec 21, 1939, Deprez, amid acute wartime shortages and the absence of adequate medical care, died at the age of 28, after giving birth to the couple’s son 20 days earlier. The newborn followed four days later, on Christmas Day.

Wu was devastated, but not undone.

Five months later, he published an article in which he wrote: “Our contemporary artists, myself among them, have been fortunate to be born into this heroic age …” — words that seem to carry the indelible undertone of his late wife.

Their story forms part of the newly-published book Art in Service of the Nation — Artists During China’s War of Survival. Author Qin Jianping wrote the book based on her interviews with the artists and their offspring.

“To retrace their journey — both outward and inward — is to relive an era in which a profound humanity converged with an urgent commitment to social reality, a synthesis often absent from earlier Chinese art,” she said.

“Out of this charged intersection of conflict and personal trial, modern Chinese art — and, by extension, a vital dimension of the nation itself — took shape.”

Enduring tradition

For Qin, to delve into this history is also to trace the origins of her own institution, the Beijing-based Central Academy of Fine Arts, which go back to the National Peking (Beijing) Art School founded in 1918.

Following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the two leading art schools of the time — the Peking Art School and its southern counterpart, the National Hangchow (Hangzhou) Art School — were forced into a prolonged wartime exodus. Over the course of eight years and some 8,000 kilometers, they relocated across the country, merging in January 1938 in Hunan province before continuing together through Yunnan and eventually into Sichuan.

They endured relentless aerial bombardment by Japanese forces. On Feb 4, 1939, Wu Guanzhong — then a student at the merged school — watched enemy planes sweep low, releasing their bombs “like a black blizzard into a raging sea of fire”. In the aftermath, he made his way back through smoke-choked streets, past bodies strewn along the roads. Thighs were caught on wooden poles, flesh burned, and bone laid bare, he would later recall. He and his fellow students survived only because they had been out of town, sketching.

“Given the extremity of the circumstances, the standards of artistic training they maintained were remarkable,” said Qin.

During their 10-month stay in Anjiang village, on the outskirts of Kunming in Yunnan province, the school — consisting of some 250 people — was housed in seven temples, which served as makeshift classrooms.

Qin said discipline did not falter. In an oil painting by faculty member Chang Shuhong local villagers were engaged as nude models — “an extraordinary practice in so conservative a milieu”.

“W h a t these artists — many trained overseas — sought to do was, in the words of Wu Zuoren, to ‘bring inner vision into form through technical command’ in order to ‘create works at once deeply personal and expressive of a nation under strain’,” said Qin.

Between August and November 1937, Chinese forces committed their best troops to meet the Japanese head-on in Shanghai, fighting a brutal street battle that ended in withdrawal at immense cost.

In the immediate aftermath, 18-year-old Zhou Lingzhao painted two large anti-Japanese works, which he and fellow artists carried through the streets of the southern coastal city Guangzhou, Guangdong province, beside a wooden coffin — a stark, galvanizing declaration of a refusal to yield.

In the late summer of 1938, while the Battle of Wuhan in Hubei province was raging, Zhou was in the city, working with a team of artists on a monumental fresco — 45 meters long and 12 meters high — painted on the exterior wall of the city’s landmark Yellow Crane Tower as part of the campaign for national resistance.

“I was the youngest, and was therefore assigned the highest section of the fresco, which I painted from a ladder suspended in midair,” Zhou recalled in 2014, at the age of 95, in an interview with Qin.

“The fresco stood for less than a month. When Wuhan fell on Oct 25, 1938, after more than four months of fighting, it was destroyed with the tower in the battle’s final stages. Yet there was never any doubt: those who had seen it, however briefly, would not forget,” said Qin.

Brave performers

Around this time, theater troupes were formed under the direction of Zhou Enlai, who would become premier in 1949 with the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Taking along his eight younger siblings and cousins, Zhou Lingzhao joined the theater troupes and followed them across the wartime front — from Wuhan to Yunnan province on the southwestern Chinese border and on to Burma, where, following the United States’ entry into the war after Pearl Harbor, the China-Burma-India Theater was established in early 1942.

Zhou recalled to Qin one harrowing incident in Yunnan.

“On one occasion, I needed to reach the mountaintop trenches. The soldiers led me along a winding path, but I chose a direct route up the steep slope. Climbing on all fours, I grasped what I thought were tufts of grass — only to realize they were the hair of fallen soldiers,” he said.

Many of the fallen were no older than Zhou, with some younger. In western Yunnan, where the fiercest fighting of the Allied counteroffensive unfolded in 1944, a memorial now marks the presence of underage soldiers, many in their mid-teens, who volunteered for a victory they believed in but would never see.

Traveling with Zhou was Feng Fasi, a member of the theater troupes attached to the Chinese Expeditionary Force in the China–Burma–India Theater. Like Zhou, he served as an actor, set designer, and poster painter, while also recording the front-line fighting and the troupes’ routines and rehearsals with charcoal sticks and brushes.

On one march, Feng came upon a fleeting scene deep in a forest — smoke rising from cooking fires, figures at the water’s edge — that was so arresting that he longed to stop and draw. He waited until the troupe made camp more than 20 km away, then secured a horse and rode back alone, a drawing board strapped to his back. Reaching the spot, he set to work at once, and continued until the piece was complete some six hours later. The charcoal drawing, titled Cooking and Washing in the Forest, is suffused with an idyllic calm that seems to deny the war beyond it.

“A sense of beauty endured in these men — and from it came their strength to answer the call of their time, and stay hopeful,” Qin said.

Safeguarding heritage

In April 1945, four months before Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender in a radio broadcast on Aug 15, LIFE magazine published an article titled “Woodcuts Help Fight China’s Battles”.

The article introduced US readers to Chinese artists who used woodcuts to disseminate wartime messages among the masses, lifting morale, and mobilizing resistance across the vast nation.

“It is an enlightenment, in the sense that art became a decisive force in shaping modern China and in the emergence of a new artistic language,” said Qin.

“The turn to realism in Chinese art carried a sense of inevitability — born of a historical moment defined by destruction and national crisis, in which art was called upon to bear witness and to sustain the nation.”

When news of Japan’s surrender reached Chang Shuhong, he had already spent nearly two and a half years at the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes in the forbidding hinterland of northwestern China. It was a commitment forged in Paris in the late 1920s, where he first encountered reproductions of Dunhuang murals and manuscripts — treasures removed from China and preserved in European collections. Confronted with his own heritage in exile, he grasped both its artistic significance and its fragility; what began as an aesthetic awakening became a moral imperative. In early 1942, he carried that conviction to Dunhuang, devoting himself to the preservation and study of the Mogao Grottoes — working in relative isolation even as much of the nation remained at war.

“It was his way of safeguarding his country — not by carrying his work to the front, but behind the lines,” said Qin. Upon hearing of China’s triumph, Chang climbed to the top of a nine-story wooden structure, its tiers set into the mountainside to house a colossal Buddha, and rang its bell in a burst of elation.

With the war’s end, the National Peking Art School and the National Hangchow Art School were reestablished in their original homes.

In 1946, Xu Beihong, a towering figure in modern Chinese art education and mentor to both Wu Zuoren and Feng Fasi, became president of the Beijing school, which would be renamed the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1950. During the war, Xu vowed to “build a temple of art” — but “not before the war’s won”.

In 1939, after the death of Wu’s wife, Xu wrote to the artist with a quiet injunction. Xu told him to go on “in the spirit of the boat tracker”, a reference to Wu’s 1933 oil painting, The Boat Tracker, painted as a metaphor for national endurance.

Wu, who painted his wife in the hours after her passing, did as his mentor had urged, and carried on for the next half century. During the war, he sketched, painted, and exhibited without pause, devoting himself to the creation of what he called “the art of our tempestuous time”.

In 1958, he would assume the presidency of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, stepping into the path first laid by his mentor. In 1988, King Baudouin I of Belgium conferred upon Wu the Order of the Crown in recognition of his artistic achievements.

In that letter she penned in 1938, hours after her husband had left home, for the front line Deprez told Wu: “Fulfillment and happiness are yours no less than mine, nor less than those of your mother, your siblings, and all your loving family. And even as you do so, you devote yourself to your country at a moment of grave urgency, when she calls upon the dedication and labor of her sons more than ever.”

zhaoxu@chinadaily.com.cn