Ten Years of Pent-Up Impulse to Express Finally Broke Free | Memories of the "Stars" Art Exhibition, Part 1

This isn't just a story from the art world — it's a marker of an era.

In 1979, more than twenty amateur painters in Beijing launched a grassroots art exhibition called "The Stars." It began outdoors, then later moved into the official National Art Museum of China. Visitors came from all over the country, and it caused a sensation. People were struck by how the Stars artists expressed themselves — painting ordinary people's portraits and ordinary landscapes in styles that weren't especially realistic. Only a handful of the works carried an overt critical edge.

The Stars exhibition ran twice in total. Opinion on it splits two ways: some art historians argue that the Stars announced the emergence of avant-garde art in China after the Cultural Revolution. Others argue the works weren't contemporary enough — that by the standards of the global art world, the pieces on display were naive, and the Stars artists never went on to build lasting influence.

Still, the Stars exhibition really did become a prelude to China's emerging art market.

Looking back on this exhibition 40 years later, its significance reaches beyond the art world. What matters is how, as the era shifted dramatically, young people found their own way to participate and fight for a chance to express themselves. We interviewed five people who lived through the Stars exhibition — their stories share the common threads of the era, and each is also intensely personal.

Before we get to their individual stories, here's a brief account of how the exhibition unfolded, start to finish. This is the first piece in the series.

The idea for the exhibition came together around April 1979. Huang Rui went to find Ma Desheng. Ma walked with crutches, but according to Zhong Acheng, he was someone who "could do parallel-bar moves on his crutches." Chen Danqing described him as someone "always in a faded green army coat, gaunt to the bone, with bright eyes, his cheeks flushing red when he raged" — like "a Narodnik from a Russian novel, consumptive and locked in furious argument." In short, he was a symbol of passion and action.

Huang Rui, by contrast, came across as strategic, and he liked bringing people together. Like Ma, Huang was a factory worker, 26 years old, living in a courtyard house on Zhaodengyu Road in Beijing's Xicheng District. The house had a big courtyard, and Beijing's painters and poets — established and unknown alike — often gathered there. One day in 1978, under the poplar trees in that courtyard, Huang proposed to Bei Dao that they start a poetry journal. That's how Today was born. By December 23, this literary magazine had already appeared on the streets of Xidan.

Publishing oversight hadn't yet hardened into strict rules back then, and something like "starting a poetry journal" often just came together when a few young people decided to do it. There was no official registration number, the price was a few jiao — not cheap, not free — and the print runs weren't small, yet copies were often snapped up instantly. The address was usually printed on the back cover, and if you followed it, you might find yourself at a gathering spot for these young people. Ask around a little, and you'd likely discover they all knew each other.

Both Huang and Ma had contributed illustrations to Today. Now they were thinking about doing something different. "Let's put on a show that stuns the whole country," Huang said to Ma. "We might actually have the chance now — are you in?"

The two quickly drew up a list of names — between them, they knew plenty of painters. Painters brought in more painters — Acheng, in a memoir essay, compared it to a snowball rolling bigger and bigger.

Wang Keping, who worked in wood carving, was introduced by Qu Leilei. At the time Wang was a proud playwright, frustrated that he'd written several good scripts that no one would stage. He'd been carving sculptures with strong political overtones out of discarded wood, along with some nudes. Wang remembered that when Huang and Ma came to see his work, Huang carried himself like a leader, and at the end said, "Keping, come to our meetings from now on — you're one of the core members too."

The painter Li Yongcun's father was a soldier. Having grown up in a military compound, Li had come to realize early on, through the everyday roughhousing of childhood, that kids of officials like him always wanted to achieve something, unwilling to blend into the crowd unnoticed. When Li joined the group, he hadn't produced a single painting yet — he spent two months working out a distinctive ink-painting technique of his own, and adopted the pen name "Bo Yun" to hedge against risk.

Li Shuang came to know the group through Mang Ke and Bei Dao. Her family had been hit hard during the Cultural Revolution, and painting became her way to voice discontent and push back against society — "cool," as young people today might put it. She painted in a style modeled on Matisse. The poet Yan Li, then Li Shuang's boyfriend, had only recently taken up painting, but Huang Rui felt there was "something new" in his work and brought him in too.

"More and more people kept joining — Zhu Jinshi, Zhou Maiyou, Bo Yun, and I brought in Mao Lizi too," Acheng wrote in his memoir. Acheng himself exhibited pen drawings. In the end, 23 artists took part, showing more than 150 works. Some more experienced painters were turned away — Huang Rui once said in an interview that they'd made too many demands, acting a bit like prima donnas.

The exhibition was named "The Stars." At first it may have just been a phrase that sounded right, but the members later gave it a much more elaborate interpretation. "You can't see the stars in daylight" — a line borrowed from Kafka — took on a specific meaning: in the past there could only be one "sun," never stars; only once the sun set could the stars appear. Stars are independent sources of light — they don't need to reflect the sun's.

With an organizer's deliberateness, Huang added another layer: "There are so many different forms of expression in the work, and we're all still exploring. There's no need to be consistent — like stars, we can each keep our distance from the others."

All of these explanations point to the enormous shifts the era was going through. From the Tiananmen Incident of April 1976, mourning Zhou Enlai, to Chairman Mao's death that same year, to the "smashing of the Gang of Four" that ended the Cultural Revolution — one upheaval followed another. "In Beijing, I was constantly hit by these forces from every direction," said Ren Shulin, a member of the April Photo Society who photographed the Stars exhibition. Many people felt that the old ways were clearly no longer viable. But what the new way should be, nobody knew.

"Change was bound to happen... Some people just wait — wait until society changes, then join in. I felt that back then, we should have been the ones joining in," Wang Keping said in an interview.

Reform and opening-up was still taking shape; the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Party Congress was about to convene in 1978. Li Yongcun said that facing this sudden shift, young people still felt somewhat lost. Among the "educated youth" trickling back to Beijing, some found jobs at small factories, others became drifters without work — there was even a term for them at the time: "shehui qingnian," or "unattached youth."

The one clear goal, it seemed, was the college entrance exam, reinstated in 1978. Counting from 1966, the exam had been suspended for 11 years.

Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, Qu Leilei, and Li Shuang had all failed to gain admission to the Central Academy of Fine Arts or the Beijing Film Academy after the exam was reinstated, and so they became grassroots "amateur artists." Anyone into art dreamed of the Central Academy or the Film Academy, but the odds of rejection were high, and there were far too many young people with a bit of a hobby for painting — so the grassroots scene was where they ended up. To the academic establishment and the art world, an exhibition by these amateur artists was nothing more than another "salon of the rejected" — met with mockery, or simply ignored.

But being amateur had its advantages. Over the preceding decade or more, "deifying leaders, cultivating a cult of personality — your art world was at the vanguard of that." Officially sanctioned artists had their own assignments; before graduating, art academy students all had to complete a standard portrait of the leader. For ideological and political reasons, Soviet-style realism was held up as the ideal — "transforming the real scenes of life," projecting a certain "collective political character" onto the work. That's the view of Li Xianting, who at the time was an editor at the official journal Meishu (Fine Arts) and later became a major critic in Chinese contemporary art.

Even so, change was underway in the art world too. In 1978, an exhibition of 19th-century French rural landscape painting was held in Beijing. Huang Rui recalled that almost everything he'd seen before that had been Soviet in style. Nearly every young painter was stunned by it, including Chen Danqing, who would later paint the Tibet series.

Another exhibition, called the "Spring Oil Painting Exhibition," followed in early spring 1979. The works on view look unremarkable by today's standards — mostly still lifes and landscapes. But during the Cultural Revolution, works that couldn't serve an ideological purpose had been barred from exhibition. Jiang Feng, chairman of the China Artists Association, wrote the preface for the Spring Oil Painting Exhibition: "For this show, put together voluntarily by these painters, we agreed together not to impose any censorship system." That April, a "Declaration on Open Painting Societies" was issued, allowing art groups to organize freely. In Beijing at the time, Huang Rui recalled, there were over a dozen such painting societies.

After several gatherings, the Stars exhibition was set for September 27 to October 7, 1979 — 12 days — in the outdoor garden outside the National Art Museum of China. Inside the museum, the "National Art Exhibition for the 30th Anniversary of the Founding of the PRC" was on view at the same time, which was expected to bring in some foot traffic.

Setting up in the garden wasn't easy. Most of the paintings were hung on the iron railings, some were hung from trees, and the larger wood sculptures were simply placed on the ground. The exhibition issued its own manifesto, and Huang Rui designed a "Stars" emblem in red, white, and blue, built from a circle, a square, and a triangle. Admission worked like at foreign museums — visitors gave whatever they wished. Acheng took charge of photographing and printing the works so they could be sold to help cover the cost of putting on the show. Photographers from the April Photo Society — an influential photography group at the time — were enlisted to document the exhibition.

After the exhibition ended, Li Xianting joined in too, writing a piece in Meishu urging readers to take notice of the Stars.

It turned out to be nothing like a "salon of the rejected." This 1979 exhibition ended up playing something like the role the Fauvists — whom these amateur painters admired and imitated — had played at the 1905 Paris Salon d'Automne. People remembered "The Stars."

Members of the group clearly remember that a number of already-famous older painters loved their work and proposed trading pieces of their own for it. From October 1979 to early January 1981, several Stars members were invited to travel and were hosted in 26 different cities. In December 1979, the student union at the Central Academy of Fine Arts invited four Stars members for a discussion. Chen Danqing sat in the audience — he had already decided to make his graduation project a set of sketches of the Stars members. Wang Keping remembered Chen telling him, "We've all been doing exercises — you went straight to real creation." Wang's two most talked-about pieces were Idol (not shown at first) and Silence.

Still, some critics point out that, viewed from the broader vantage of the global art world, the works shown at the Stars exhibition were naive. Li Xianting later expressed a similar view in an interview about the Stars and China's early modern art. Looking back now, that's clearly the case. At Art Basel Hong Kong this past March, a Hong Kong gallery represented works by Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, and Wang Keping. Their paintings and sculptures from the Stars period looked out of place at the fair — traditional in technique, conservative in color, and the prints so small in scale that visitors found them puzzling.

At first, simply "painting realistically" was a genuine struggle for most of the Stars painters. Realism had long stopped being the necessary standard for judging good art, but these amateurs had seen so few paintings that it was hard for them to develop their own sense of what counted as "good."

For the decades before the Stars exhibition, the whole country had been sealed off, and getting hold of Western art books was nearly impossible. On the rare occasion someone got one, a crowd would gather to flip through it — usually a surviving relic from a parent's collection that had somehow made it through the political campaigns. Wang Keping didn't even know who Matisse was, and got mocked for it by the others. But the others weren't much better off. The names they knew were Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin — all painters from the early 20th century. Yet this was already the 1970s, and the most fashionable artists in the world by then were probably Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol.

Some, including Wu Hung — a professor of art history, curator, and critic at the University of Chicago — argue that the Stars announced the emergence of Chinese avant-garde art after the Cultural Revolution. But not every critic accepts that framing. After all, the works first shown didn't include a single abstract piece, and carried a strong Expressionist flavor instead.

In interviews, the Stars members themselves take a complicated view of the question. "Looking back now, it's kid stuff... but that's just how that era was," or "you have to see it in the social context of the time," or "I'd only say these paintings are very 'personal,' not very contemporary." But almost without exception, they all feel their work has been undervalued.

Lea Li, a French curator who later married Huang Rui, once asked him: "Setting aside how people judge 'The Stars' as a whole, how do people see the works themselves?" Huang answered: "These paintings have existed for 30 years now, from that time to today. In all that time, there hasn't been much of a positive response."

After the two exhibitions, the Stars' influence didn't last long. "No one, on any side, wanted to keep bringing up 'The Stars.' The authorities certainly didn't like it," Wang Keping said. It never featured prominently in official history, precisely because of its grassroots nature.

From the very start, this grassroots exhibition ran into trouble.

Huang Rui and Ma Desheng had originally hoped to hold the show inside the National Art Museum itself. The two began applying for exhibition space in the summer of 1979, but approval dragged on and went nowhere for months. Holding the show in the museum's outdoor garden was a fallback. The outdoor exhibition drew some attention and discussion, but nowhere near the scale Huang had imagined when he talked about "stunning the whole country."

On the third day, the exhibition was shut down and the works confiscated. Members of the Stars and of unofficial literary journals gathered to figure out what to do, and decided to organize a march. Huang Rui was one of the few who explicitly opposed it, but he was outvoted. In the end, the march went off "without incident," with its route and timing "following the police's guidance." Ma Desheng and Wang Keping marched at the front of the line, with Wang holding up a sign reading "We want artistic freedom." Liu Heung Shing, then a photographer for the Associated Press, captured the moment on film. Liu later called that period China's second New Culture Movement, after the one in 1919.

Before long, the confiscated works were returned. The Artists Association agreed to let the Stars re-stage its exhibition at the Painted Boat Studio inside the National Art Museum, from November 23 to December 2. People's Daily ran the news, and visitors poured in from across the country — on the busiest day, more than 9,000 tickets were sold. Not all of them were art lovers. In 1980, the second Stars exhibition drew a total of 160,000 visitors. The members were naturally thrilled. That summer, the Stars Painting Society was formally established and registered with the Artists Association. Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, and Wang Keping became Association members.

There would only ever be these two Stars exhibitions.

What happened afterward made clear that 1979 had only been a brief moment of glory for the art world.

Before long, the "Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign," targeting literature, art, and intellectual life, got underway. "The Stars went from being the biggest sensation in the art world to a scandal within it." Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, and Wang Keping were expelled from the Artists Association. Jiang Feng, the Association chairman who had supported the Stars, came under attack and died in 1982. In 1983, Li Xianting was removed from his post at Meishu for publishing abstract paintings in the magazine. Even earlier, Today had already ceased publication in December 1980 for lacking complete registration paperwork. The nude murals at Beijing Capital Airport were covered up.

Around 1984, Stars participants Li Shuang, Wang Keping, Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, and Qu Leilei left China one after another. Before leaving, Li Shuang had been arrested and imprisoned for two years on a charge of "hooliganism and incitement."

Even so, the Stars exhibition became a prelude to China's emerging art market.

Before it, there were no galleries, no art market, and not even many painters to speak of.

Afterward, a saying made the rounds among Beijing's foreign community: "In the morning, go to the Great Wall at Badaling; in the afternoon, go to Ma Desheng's place." The Stars painters found their first collectors among foreigners living in Beijing, the French especially. Ma Desheng became the first painter among them to earn 10,000 yuan. Li Yongcun and Mao Lizi both bought cars in 1986.

By the time of the 1989 China/Avant-Garde exhibition in Beijing, artists could talk fluently about Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, de Kooning, and Yves Klein, and they quickly seized the moment as Dadaism swept the globe. Huang Yongping put A Concise History of Chinese Painting and A Concise History of Modern Painting in the West into a washing machine and ran it for two minutes; Xiao Lu fired a gunshot inside the National Art Museum of China.

That's another legend altogether.

In the next piece, we'll introduce Huang Rui, one of the main organizers of the Stars exhibition. In 1979, factory worker Huang Rui was a typical young painter — and also a relatively low-key organizer.