Art marches straight to the heart

In 1975, Shen Yaoyi set out on a journey that would shape the rest of his career. Carrying paints and a sketchbook, he traveled along the Long March route, the strategic transfer undertaken by the Communist Party of China between 1934 and 1936.

Shen crossed mountains, rivers and grasslands spanning from Jiangxi and Hunan provinces to Shaanxi province. Over three months, he produced more than 200 gouache paintings and a sketchbook, recording the landscapes and people he encountered along the way. He returned to the route many times over the next five decades.

"I am an artist who was trained in the 1950s, in the early years after the founding of New China," says Shen, 83. "It was only after spending 50 years traveling along the Long March route, which was constantly changing, that I came to understand the spirit of this epic event in Chinese history."

Now, 90 years after the end of the Long March, Journey Along the Red Ribbon, an exhibition held at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, brings together 183 of Shen's works from his decades-long engagement with the subject, including gouache, oil paintings, acrylics, and sketches.

Among them are original paintings and sketches made during his journey between 1975 and 1977, making their public debut in Beijing.

For Shen, however, these works are more than records of places he visited.

"History is too far away from us," he says. "Because the Long March took place 90 years ago and left behind very few visual records, it has become an invisible history. That is something I cannot accept. I have made it my life's work to fill that visual void."

His first journey began almost by chance.

In early 1975, Shen met Guo Jun, then head of Tianjin People's Fine Arts Publication House and a veteran of the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Yan'an, the cradle of the Chinese revolution in Shaanxi province. Shen told him that he wanted to create a color comic book based on a memoir about the Long March. Guo encouraged the idea and helped arrange an introduction that enabled Shen to travel along the historic route and sketch from life.

From May to August that year, Shen traveled from Nanchang to Ruijin, Ningdu, and Yudu, then to Jinggangshan in Jiangxi province, and Zunyi in Guizhou province. He crossed the Jinsha River, continued through western Sichuan province, and eventually reached Yan'an, Shaanxi province.

He returned to Tianjin with hundreds of sketches and paintings, which later became the basis for a color comic book. He also began work on two major oil paintings inspired by that journey.

But Shen soon realized that one journey was not enough.

In 1977, he returned to the route, traveling for more than a month from Gansu province's Minxian county to Luding county in the Garze Tibetan autonomous prefecture in Sichuan, then to Mianning county in the Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture, also in Sichuan.