Climbing Over the Great Snow Mountain

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the government promoted a new style of painting called Socialist Realism. Originating in the Soviet Union, Socialist Realism was a bold, bombastic style that typically portrayed the heroic achievements of the Communist Party and celebrated the lives of ordinary people. The government often used such images in its propaganda campaigns and made it the dominant style of Chinese art during the Cultural Revolution period of the 1960s and '70s.

This painting from 1977 of Communist soldiers bravely battling a snowstorm in the mountains of western China is an excellent example of Chinese Socialist Realist painting. It depicts a famous episode from Chinese Communist Party history. In 1934, the Chinese Republican army led by General Chiang Kai-shek began a vigorous campaign to exterminate the Chinese Communist Red Army led by Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Outnumbered and nearly surrounded, the Red Army made a daring escape by marching nearly eight thousand miles from Jiangxi province to Shaanxi province through some of the most difficult terrain in China. The Long March, as it came to be known, took more than a year to complete and cost the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers. However, it allowed the Chinese Communists to survive, regroup, and eventually emerge victorious in their struggle to control China. The memory of the Long March was often invoked by the Communist government during the tumultuous 1960s and '70s to remind people of the Party's earlier sacrifices and to encourage an ongoing spirit of endurance and loyalty to the state.

Shen Jiawei was born to a working-class family in Shanghai a year before the People's Republic of China was founded. He taught himself how to paint and was assigned to make political propaganda images by his work unit during the Cultural Revolution. His 1974 painting Standing Guard for our Great Motherland won praise from Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong's wife, and was reproduced in thousands of posters. In the early 1980s, Shen finally received formal artistic training at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. He left China in 1989 and emigrated to Australia, where he continues to work today. The AMAM was fortunate to acquire this important painting from early in Shen's artistic career thanks to a grant from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. The acquisition also included a group of seventeen charcoal, ink, and oil sketches that illustrate the artist's creative process and make the painting even more valuable as a teaching tool for Oberlin College students.