In a tiny gallery on Henry Street last week, the young artist Chang Yuchen taught me one of her father’s drawing lessons: “There is no line in the real world.” A subzero wind blew outside as she held up two fingers pressed together. You see a line between them, she explained, but that’s an illusion: It’s really just the place where two forms meet, and that’s what the artist must remember as they draw. We think of drawing as a means of merely depicting the visible world, and the “line” as a neutral tool in that process. But drawing is a technology that has a generative force all its own, and like all technologies it is soaked in ideology.



In Chang’s case, the technology came down from her father, who had been trained in the Chistyakov system at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA). As a child, he had stumbled across a banned book of Tang poetry. “He was so drawn to the imagery of traditional Chinese literature,” Chang told me, “but he couldn’t practice Chinese traditional painting, because it was considered anti-Revolutionary back then.” Instead, he was trained in a strict new pedagogical system, imported from Russia.

Before the Revolution of 1949, fine art in China was dominated by ink painting, particularly in the sensitive literati style (wenrenhua). But the new communist government of the People’s Republic of China condemned ink painting as “feudal,” and instead encouraged a new national art form in the socialist realist style, similar to the kind of painting being produced in the Soviet Union. Mao Zedong named CAFA himself. In 1955, the Russian oil painter Konstantin Maksimov arrived at the prestigious art school, sent as a kind of cultural ambassador by his government. Maksimov, a Stalin Prize winner, immediately found great popularity among the CAFA faculty. He organized a two-year postgraduate course in oil painting, which burgeoned into a wave of influence that effectively institutionalized his style there.

Chang’s work is a radical reconsideration of the pencil drawing. Chang Yuchen / Assembly Room

One of Maksimov’s most enduring legacies was his introduction of the drawing system designed by Pavel Chistyakov. A nineteenth-century educator, Chistyakov emphasized a technique that requires the student to break down what they see into planes, practicing over and over again until the artist is capable of producing a three-dimensional effect on the canvas. Chistyakov’s own paintings had an expressive texture. His figures leap brightly from the canvas, and you can see in them the seeds of socialist realism: the faithfulness to life, the romanticized activity.

But like wenrenhua, Russian influence in Chinese art was formally suppressed following the Sino-Soviet split during the Cold War. The artist Cai Guo-Qiang, who maintains an extensive collection of Maksimov-alia, has spoken about how this erasure occurred in many areas of Chinese life: “Maksimov’s may have been a story in the arts, but stories like this happened in other fields: economics, architecture, military, in everything.” The Soviet influence in Chinese fine art lives on, officially unacknowledged, in the drawings themselves, like an effaced layer in a palimpsest.