What is referred today as China’s Farmer Painting Movement finds its beginning in the political intervention of Mao when he invited artists, writers and intellectuals to leave academies and relocate in rural communities throughout China.
These works first caught my attention in galleries attached to craft stops where hanging alongside shadow puppets and paper cut-outs of dragons, ancient heroes and blooms, their fresh exuberance of colour and rural activities was a marked contrast.
Painted by the farmers who are predominantly dwelling in the countryside, this naive art speaks for millions of Chinese who live by the rhythm of nature and observe the landscape in every season and their simple pleasures of everyday life, like being chased by hungry geese, observing swimming patterns of fish, pumpkin-laden vines before the harvest, all find expression in their art.
Their inexperienced style follows no rules of perspective and its colour palette is borrowed from nature and embroideries and other crafts around the farmers. The substrate is handmade paper on which gouache pigments are used. The scale and diversity of the available work shows how a social project during the Cultural Revolution has today evolved and won recognition as a separate school of painting.
The intervention that led to the evolution of the farmer’s painting was carried out to diminish the urban and rural disconnect by ending intellectual elitism. Urban thinkers, academics, scholars, poets, writers and artists were integrated with people who till the soil and provide food, giving them an opportunity to develop a relationship of mutual respect. The scholars by experiencing the physical hardship of the farmers’ lives and the farmers through education discovering a world beyond their previously suppressed and illiterate existence played a vital role in liberating China from social apartheid. As the huge population stepped out of the exploitative cycle of unchanged traditions, they began to build a new society devoid of old hierarchies.
The new socialisation process was not without problems as entrenched traditions were not easy to shed and only when the benefits of these social reforms could be seen through widespread education and meritocracy, the Cultural Revolution was successful in reorganising a nation with a majority that had been directionless, lived in abject poverty and had been exploited by a rigidly stratified system over several millennia.
Culture gave agency to the people as their creativity releasing ‘chi’ or energy of life enabled them to explore their talents with freedom. Art gave the rural communities who lived marginal lives at the bottom of the social ladder an opportunity to express their experiences and recognise the value of their contribution, which was an empowering experience.
The depiction of rural life is not new to art but it is done mostly with the outsiders’ gaze. However, one initiative close to home with a curriculum and environment designed to bring artists close to nature and the peasants was Tagore’s Shantiniketan, an art university carved out of a village at a short distance from Calcutta.
In Pakistan many early masters documented rural ethnic groups for the celebration of cultural diversity. Anna Molka Ahmed was among the early art educators who emphasised the need for students to study village life in Punjab for outdoor painting. So it should come as no surprise that her students Ijazul Hasan and A.R.Nagori continued to deeply engage with rural communities.
Hasan took groups of artists and their work to villages for exhibitions where upright string cots were used to improvise display stands. This was an attempt to use art to enhance the interaction between sections of society and connect them through art. Nagori at Sindh University taught the talented young from rural areas and he often talked about their poverty that led to a high dropout rate. He was keen to shorten the academic programme so students could get their degree so essential for employment. In his paintings the ‘Bheel people’, the landless peasant labourers, the poorest of the poor of the desert region of Sindh embodied the rural poverty. He had developed the evocative motif of a Bheel woman with crow’s beak that replaced her face as she looked towards the sky for rain to end the persistent drought that robbed them of both their livelihood and food.
Living in a milieu with such heavy emphasis on the commodification of art has overshadowed its transformative power as a social and personal expression. Farmers’ paintings of China remind us that all art does not have to be academic in nature or theoretical in its reference to give it legitimacy. As a visual language it can be a vehicle of self-realisation and empowerment for ordinary people, who can discover through it a way to talk about their life with pride, giving confidence and strength to believe in themselves as individuals and as people.