How Mai Cheng became an artist during the Cultural Revolution
Even though the Cultural Revolution had little to do with culture, it turned Mai Cheng into an artist. This is partly what The Art of Survival is about. The story of her childhood in China in the sixties and the seventies, in times of great upheaval and chaos, makes up about a third of this book. We also learn how Feng-shui, Chinese history and the cultural heritage of Europe have influenced and formed Mai Cheng's artistic expression.
Only fourteen years old, she lives all by herself in a large apartment in Beijing. The Cultural Revolution is advancing, and her "reactionary" mother has been arrested and put in prison. The rest of her family has been sent down to the countryside for "re-education". Belonging to a counter-revolutionary family, she dares not go to school, but spends her days drawing and painting. She studies the calligraphic masterpieces that her father had introduced her to. While her classmates - the Red Guards - are busy tearing down the most valuable parts of China's history, she is holding on to the old culture. In this moving book we get to know how Art saved her life.
When the Central Academy of Fine Arts is reopening after the Cultural Revolution, Mai Cheng is among the first to be admitted. Later, she starts a promising career as an artist in China, but then she gets to see an exhibition with the pictures of Edvard Munch. She decides she wants to travel to Norway.
Today, her studio is in France, and if there are international artists, she must be one of them. The book is illustrated with 36 paintings, and together they show how she has created a synthesis between East and West, between what is new and what is old, and not least between what is written and what is drawn. Through the use of pictograms, symbols and archetypes from many parts of the world and from different periods of history, she makes Feng-shui Art. It is not Chinese, not Norwegian, and not French either. The teachings of Feng-shui had its starting point in China about 4000 years ago, but it doesn't belong to a certain place or a specific period of time. It is just as global as the Wind and the Water.
The Art of Survival was supposed to be translated into English by Anne Born, the winner of the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. However, it has not been finished because the translator took ill.