This print records how during the Cultural Revolution, school graduates followed Mao’s call to ‘receive re-education from poor and lower-middle peasants’ and settled in the countryside to become state farmers. Schematic smiling is a typical symbol of that period. The artist was one of the ‘intellectual youths’ sent from the city to the remote Great Northern Wilderness state farm, where under the direction of Hao Boyi, she began to create woodcuts together with a group of other intellectual youths from different parts of China.
Weimin He, and Shelagh Vainker, Chinese Prints 1950-2006 in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2007), no. 45 on p. 54, illus. p. 54
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