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Art by Jai Lu

Posted By: Alexpal
Art by Jai Lu

Art by Jai Lu
51 JPG | up to 1000x800 | 8,3 Mb

Jia Lu was born into a Beijing that stood relatively unchanged by the ravages of the Chinese Communist Revolution. Land reforms and a fundamental reorganization of government and civil life had transformed relations between individuals during the five years of Communist rule preceding the artist’s birth. But the Beijing landscape, with its narrow, winding alleys and compounds enclosed by gray walls, the palaces of the Qing emperors and aristocracy weighted under their yellow and kingfisher roof tiles, the lakes and parks where one could swim during the summer and skate in winter, the songs of vendors falling through the dawn air like the swallows appearing at first light—these were the permanent aspects of a Beijing that filled the artist’s memories and provided the earliest inspiration for a lifetime of work.
The people of Beijing still maintained a dignified politeness among themselves, their language touched with the dialect of the Manchurian elite and the terms of respect that had been used in the capital for the last three hundred years.
Jia’s parents were members of the new Beijing society. Her father, Enyi Lu, the youngest son of a landowner in Jiangsu province, had joined the New Fourth Route Army at the age of fourteen and had served as war artist for much of the struggle with the Nationalists and Japanese. Later assigned to the cultural department of the Navy, he rose in rank in part for recognition gained painting revolutionary scenes featuring the new leaders and depictions of navy life. Jia’s mother, the daughter of a landscape painter and calligrapher, was herself a graduate of the new Central Academy of Fine Arts and worked in the Forbidden City as a museum exhibit designer.
In 1958 Jia’s father called on the Communist party to attach greater importance to the work and livelihood of artists, and was accused of being a Rightist. Reduced in rank and stripped of Party membership, he was ordered to repair reservoirs north of Beijing as labor reform. Investigations of the family revealed that grandparents on both sides had been important administrators in pre-communist society, and several of Jia’s uncles and aunts had accompanied the Nationalists’ flight from China and now lived in Taiwan. Jia’s family was suspect and accused of anti-revolutionary tendencies.


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