The works in the exhibition were created while Mu Xin was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution (1965–76) and its immediate aftermath. All his works prior to this period were either confiscated or destroyed. Miraculously, the two series – sixty-six sheets of Prison Notes inscribed recto and verso and thirty-three ink-and-gouache landscape paintings – survived.
The Prison Notes are drawn from the artist’s own collection and the paintings are from the collection of The Rosenkranz Foundation. Together they offer the first comprehensive evaluation of Mu Xin’s art and confirm his importance as a leading experimental artist and thinker in the history of twentieth-century Chinese painting and literature.
Born Sun Pu in the village of Wuzhen in Zhejiang province, located north of Shanghai, in 1927, Mu Xin was the only child of a prominent family. He received a classical Chinese education and was simultaneously exposed to the vibrant intellectual and cosmopolitan culture of Shanghai. Mu Xin’s training in Confucian tradition, coupled with his exposure to Western art, literature and philosophy intensified his desire to transcend the traditional confines of Chinese culture and explore a new world of foreign ideas. He was especially influenced by Renaissance masters such as Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, whom he considered to be his “early teacher.” The quest to find a middle ground between Chinese and Western artistic norms constituted the framework for his later literary and artistic accomplishments.
In 1946, he enrolled in the prestigious Shanghai Fine Arts Institute where he studied Western art under the influential painter Liu Haisu. Following this, he pursued informal studies in Hangzhou where he became close to the revered teacher Lin Fengmian whose ideas on the integration of Chinese and Western art had a profound effect on Mu Xin.
During the violence of the Cultural Revolution (1965–76) Mu Xin’s family estate was demolished and all of his family members dispersed, killed or imprisoned. Like millions of other Chinese artists and intellectuals, Mu Xin was repeatedly imprisoned under the Communist regime. Secretly, art became his mode of survival. He privately produced over five hundred paintings and twenty-one book-length manuscripts, including novels and short fiction, criticism and philosophy, anthologies of contemporary and classical-style poetry and a play. Of this corpus, only a handful of works survived destruction at the hands of government authorities, who deemed his work "counterrevolutionary."
In 1982, Mu Xin left his native Shanghai and moved to New York City where he still lives. Today, he is celebrated as a prominent literary figure in Taiwan and among the Chinese diaspora.
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