Painter's works return home

In 2001, a show of works by Chinese painter, writer and poet Mu Xin (1927-2011), who was born Sun Pu, was held at the Yale University Art Gallery in the United States, the only one in his lifetime, displaying 33 pieces of landscape paintings－all were donated to the gallery－along with manuscripts produced when he was incarcerated in the 1970s.

The show is now in an art museum named after him in his hometown.

The Mu Xin Art Museum in Wuzhen, East China's Zhejiang province, now owns the bulk of Mu Xin's paintings and manuscripts.

Before Mu Xin's US show, he had already given the paintings and manuscripts a title: Tower Within A Tower.

The first tower refers to the Tower of London－once used as a prison－as a reference to his situation when he was jailed during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), while the latter refers to an "ivory tower" he built for himself.

Mu Xin produced the 33 small-scale landscape paintings from 1976 to 1979, a time when he was sent to labor in a factory in Shanghai. He was also imprisoned for more than a year during the "cultural revolution" cast as a rightist.

"I was by day a slave and by night a prince," he once said of the time when creating the series of landscape paintings.

For three years, Mu Xin drew the curtains of his house and painted secretly everyday after work.

These paintings were applauded as a unique synthesis of traditional Chinese paintings and Western styles when displayed at Yale.

The show also traveled to the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, Honolulu Academy of Arts and Asia Society in New York.

All of them were bought by American collector Robert Rosenkranz in 1995 and donated to Yale in 2001.

Rosenkranz in his preface to the show said: "It is clear that Mu Xin risked his life to produce both The Prison Notes and the landscape paintings. When I asked him why he took this chance, he replied that he would be risking his life to not produce them. And so he would have been, for his life is so much a life of the mind."

Meanwhile, due to logistical reasons, the landscape paintings displayed at the Mu Xin Art Museum are copies authorized by the Yale University Art Gallery, says Xu Bo, who works in the office of the director of the Mu Xin Art Museum.