Yanping Yang. One of the most distinguished of modern Chinese women artists, has recorded how, one day in the autumn of 1978, released at last from the ‘brain washing education” to which she had become subjected after the Cultural Revolution, she came upon a farm with a long neglected lotus pond in which the plants were broken down, tattered, yet still surviving. With her Atom Brand pen she drew them on a sheet of course yellow paper.

Ever since, the lotus has given her the subject matter, the symbolism, and the pictorial language into which she has poured her thoughts, feelings and memories. “The twists and turns of every stem”, she later wrote, “were testimony of a stubborn fight against the passage of nature. This pathetic sight, set in the glowing light of an autumn sun, seemed to reveal the lotus as the representative of all living things…. Does not this image share a striking similarity with human life…?”

Michael Sullivan