Changde No. 1 Middle School: From Rejection to the Art Group

After graduating from Lieshi Street Elementary School, Yim Mau-Kun applied to Changde No. 1 Middle School for the first time.

He was not admitted.

Years later, he recalled the experience calmly:

I did not get into Changde No. 1 Middle School after elementary school. I spent a year in a preparatory class, and only passed the exam the second year.

On his second attempt, he was finally admitted and placed in Class 37.

Looking back, that first rejection seems like only a brief pause. What mattered was what happened after he entered Changde No. 1 Middle School. There he met a teacher who had no formal art-school training, yet left a lasting mark on the way Yim later approached drawing:

Zhou Xinzhong.

One sentence Zhou told him stayed with Yim for the rest of his life:

You have to use the eraser skillfully.

To a boy just beginning to draw, it was simply a practical instruction from a teacher.

Only much later did its deeper importance become clear. The remark touched on something that would become central to Yim Mau-Kun's mature approach to drawing:

Drawing is not only about putting dark marks onto the paper.

Erasing can also be a form of drawing.

The First Time He Failed to Get Into Changde No. 1 Middle School

Changde No. 1 Middle School was one of the better schools in the area at the time.

After graduating from Lieshi Street Elementary School, Yim applied once and was not accepted. He spent another year in a preparatory class and took the examination again the following year. This time, he got in.

By then, he already liked to draw. He had taken art classes at Lieshi Street Elementary School. Liu Jiazhen had taught him pencil still life, and he had made Going to Winter School, a childhood picture he still remembered late in life.

But Changde No. 1 Middle School was different.

Art was no longer simply one subject among the ordinary school curriculum.

The school had an actual art group.

The Art Group at Changde No. 1 Middle School

Changde No. 1 Middle School had originally employed two teachers with professional art training. Yim remembered that both were from Anhui. They later returned there.

Without its original professional art teachers, the school asked Zhou Xinzhong to take responsibility for art instruction and the art group.

Zhou had not graduated from an art school. Most of what he knew, he had taught himself.

He painted watercolor.

He carved seals.

He made woodcuts.

Yim remembered that Zhou was quite a good watercolorist.

Earlier in life, Zhou had even set up a stall at rural market fairs in western Hunan, carving seals for customers and earning a little money to support his family.

He did not have an impressive artistic pedigree.

But he could draw.

And he genuinely cared about art.

An Enthusiastic Teacher

After Zhou Xinzhong came to Changde No. 1 Middle School, he threw himself into the existing art group.

He organized activities.

He got the students drawing.

He also hoped to develop talented students who might eventually apply to professional art schools.

For an ordinary middle-school student in 1950s Hunan, this mattered a great deal.

Liking to draw was one thing.

Knowing that art could become a path of study was another.

Where were the art academies?

How did one apply?

What did the entrance examinations require?

Without someone nearby to explain these things, a young student would have had difficulty figuring them out alone.

The art group gave Yim his first small community of people who also liked to draw.

They talked together.

Drew together.

And began to discuss whether they might actually apply to art school one day.

Still-Life Drawing

Yim remembered that Zhou Xinzhong's regular assignments were mainly still-life studies.

This was already a step beyond the simple pencil drawing he had encountered in elementary school.

Objects had to be arranged.

Observed.

Shapes compared.

Proportions judged.

Light and shadow studied.

And then slowly drawn.

Not long after Yim entered the school, one of his watercolor studies was displayed on the first wall newspaper of the new term.

The work received a good deal of praise.

Today, no one knows what the subject was.

The painting itself has not survived.

But decades later, Yim still remembered that one of his watercolors had been put up for the school to see.

For a boy who had just entered a new school, it may have been one of the first moments when he clearly sensed that other people were looking at his work.

“You Have to Use the Eraser Skillfully”

If one asks what Zhou Xinzhong contributed most directly to Yim Mau-Kun's later drawing technique, the answer was not watercolor.

Nor was it any particular work Zhou recommended.

It was one sentence:

You have to use the eraser skillfully.

Yim remembered the sentence for the rest of his life.

Beginning students often think of an eraser only as a tool for correcting mistakes.

A line is wrong, so erase it.

The proportion is off, so erase it.

The drawing is dirty, so clean it up.

As though the eraser is needed only after something has gone wrong.

That was not what Zhou was teaching him.

The eraser itself could be a drawing tool.

Draw.

Then erase.

Reduce an area that has become too dark.

Lift a highlight out of shadow.

Reorganize the values.

Reshape the form.

Let an area that has become too heavy breathe again.

Erasing is not merely correction.

It is part of modeling form.

Drawing Is Not Only About Adding

The idea had an important and lasting influence on Yim Mau-Kun's drawing technique.

A drawing is not built only by adding more lines and more dark tones.

Pencil or charcoal puts material onto the paper.

An eraser can take some of it back.

Between addition and subtraction, form gradually emerges.

A light plane is not always an untouched area. Sometimes tone is laid in first, then light is deliberately lifted back out.

An edge does not always have to be outlined with a dark line. It can appear gradually through shifts in surrounding value.

This understanding of “adding” and “subtracting” later became an important part of Yim's approach to drawing.

He would eventually receive far more complete academic training at professional art school, with more teachers, more methods, and much more rigorous demands.

But Zhou Xinzhong was the first person who made him understand that the eraser was not merely something to reach for after making a mistake. It could actively participate in constructing form.

Years later, when Yim remembered his art education at Changde No. 1 Middle School, that seemingly simple instruction was still there:

You have to use the eraser skillfully.

Sometimes what a teacher leaves behind is only a sentence.

Pushing the Cart

Once he joined the art group, the range of Yim's work began to expand.

He did not draw only still lifes.

He began making landscape studies.

He also tried composing scenes with figures and a story.

He remembered one such picture: two Young Pioneers wearing red scarves helping an elderly man push a cart across a bridge.

He called it Pushing the Cart.

Zhou Xinzhong liked the work very much and enthusiastically recommended it for a Hunan provincial art exhibition.

By the time the work was submitted, however, the exhibition had already reached its quota.

The painting did not get a chance to be selected.

Yim's own manuscript put it simply:

Unfortunately, the quota was already full, so it could not be selected.

Looking back today, whether the work was selected matters less than the fact that Zhou believed a middle-school student's painting was worth sending to a provincial exhibition at all.

From Going to Winter School to Pushing the Cart

It is interesting to place the two early compositions Yim remembered from elementary and middle school side by side.

In elementary school, he made Going to Winter School: an elderly couple in padded winter clothing, carrying a hand warmer as they walked to an adult literacy class.

At Changde No. 1 Middle School, he made Pushing the Cart: two red-scarf youths helping an elderly man push a cart over a bridge.

Neither picture survives today, and there are no complete photographs available for study.

But from Yim's recollections, one thing is clear: from an early age, he was interested in pictures in which people were doing something.

Not simply a person standing alone.

But figures in relation to one another.

An event unfolding within the picture.

Xuan Paper, Line Drawing, and Color Washes

After joining the art group, Yim also began working with materials used in Chinese painting.

He practiced outlining figures on xuan paper and then adding color washes.

Gradually, he began experimenting with figure painting.

In his manuscript, he made a point of writing:

Mother supported me on her meager salary so I could buy brushes, ink, and xuan paper!

He even added an exclamation mark after the sentence.

Today, a brush and some paper may seem like ordinary art supplies. But for a family supported by a single elementary-school teacher's salary, they were not insignificant expenses.

His father was still in Taiwan.

His mother, Huangfu Dao'an, was living in Changde, teaching, and raising children on a limited income.

But her son wanted to draw.

So she let him buy brushes.

Ink.

Xuan paper.

She did not ask, “What use is this?”

This was one of the quieter conditions that made Yim's early artistic path possible.

His mother was not an artist. She could not teach him drawing, and she had no way of knowing whether studying art would ever provide a living.

But she did not stop him.

She did not say, “Stop drawing.” Or, “Save the money.” Or, “Study something practical instead.”

When he needed materials, she supported him as far as she could.

It was not dramatic encouragement. She may never have told him, “You will become a great artist.”

She simply allowed him to keep drawing.

Sometimes the most important condition for a path to begin is not that someone has planned the future for you.

It is simply that no one blocks the road.

Ink Paintings of Ladies

These early experiences of outlining and coloring figures on xuan paper also gave rise to a long-lasting interest.

In the manuscript in which he discussed Pushing the Cart, Yim wrote that these exercises gradually developed his enduring interest in painting women in ink.

The interest continued for many years and only paused later during his Taipei period.

From a Changde middle-school student slowly tracing figure lines with brushes, ink, and xuan paper bought by his mother, to the mature artist he became decades later, there were of course many levels of professional training in between.

But the earliest beginnings of that interest were already present in this small school art group.

Older Students Had Already Gone Ahead

The art environment at Changde No. 1 Middle School gave Yim something else that mattered greatly:

Examples to follow.

Before him, other students from the school had already entered professional art education.

Two names remained in his memory late in life:

Yang Yao.

Gui Tikan.

Gui Tikan was also from Changde and had lived near Changxiangzi. He had earlier been admitted to the Central South School of Fine Arts. The school later moved to Guangzhou and, through institutional restructuring, became part of the system that developed into the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.

Yang Yao studied at the affiliated secondary school of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and later entered its oil painting department.

These older students had a very direct significance for young artists at Changde No. 1 Middle School:

They had already taken the path of applying to art school.

They were not distant legends.

Not people in books.

They were students from the same school.

So It Really Was Possible to Study Art

Today, students can easily find information about applying to an art academy.

At the time, however, a boy in Changde, Hunan, might not naturally know where someone who loved drawing was supposed to go next.

The art group at Changde No. 1 Middle School, together with older students who had already gone to Guangzhou, gradually made that path visible.

Even the application forms were sent back from Guangzhou by older students.

It was something very concrete.

An application form traveled from Guangzhou to Changde.

A student who loved to draw held it in his hands.

And for the first time could seriously wonder:

Could I try too?

He Shengshan

One of Yim's classmates in Class 37 was He Shengshan.

Both boys belonged to the art group.

Both loved to draw.

So they became close.

When they finished middle school, the affiliated secondary school of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts established entrance-exam sites across several provinces in central and southern China.

The Hunan examination site was in Changsha.

Yim Mau-Kun and He Shengshan decided to apply together.

Two boys from Changde No. 1 Middle School would leave the city they knew and travel to Changsha for an examination that might change their lives.

They did not yet know what the result would be.

Only that they could try.

A Year of Rejection Led to Another Examination

Looking back, it would be easy to turn Yim Mau-Kun's development into a smooth, straight line.

He liked drawing as a child.

Entered Changde No. 1 Middle School.

Joined the art group.

Got into art school.

Became an artist.

But the beginning was not that smooth.

He had failed even to get into Changde No. 1 Middle School on his first attempt.

He spent a year preparing and entered only on his second try.

Then he met Zhou Xinzhong.

He drew still lifes.

Painted watercolors.

Had a work displayed on the school wall newspaper.

Made Pushing the Cart.

Learned line drawing and color washes on xuan paper.

His mother used her modest salary to buy him brushes, ink, and paper.

Older students showed him that professional art education was possible.

Only then did he and He Shengshan take their application forms to Changsha and sit for the entrance examination to the affiliated secondary school of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.

One Sentence Remained

If, decades later, one asks what from those years at Changde No. 1 Middle School truly remained in Yim Mau-Kun's mature art, one of the clearest answers was not an early painting at all.

It was a sentence from Zhou Xinzhong:

You have to use the eraser skillfully.

Pushing the Cart did not survive.

No one knows what became of the watercolor study that had been praised on the school wall newspaper.

Many other exercises from his youth disappeared long ago.

But a teacher's sentence could remain in a student's hand for decades.

As Yim's drawing technique matured, he no longer used the eraser simply to “fix mistakes.”

In his drawings, the eraser could recover light.

Organize halftones.

Reduce passages that had become too heavy.

Model volume.

Work together with pencil and charcoal.

Drawing and erasing were no longer opposites of “right” and “wrong.”

They were two directions within the same process of building form.

One adds.

One subtracts.

One builds the form into the page.

The other brings the light back.

The earliest seed of that idea came from a Changde No. 1 Middle School art teacher who had never received formal professional training.

Years later, people might naturally look to Yim Mau-Kun's professional training at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts when studying his drawing technique. That training was, of course, far more complete and systematic.

But before those formal academy courses, the art group at Changde No. 1 Middle School had already left him with certain things:

The xuan paper his mother bought.

The still lifes Zhou assigned.

A watercolor on the school wall newspaper.

Pushing the Cart, which never made it into the Hunan provincial exhibition.

And one ordinary sentence that stayed with his drawing practice for decades:

You have to use the eraser skillfully.

Some teachers teach a lesson.

Some leave behind a method.

And a truly useful method can stay with a student for a lifetime.