The People of Awa Mountain

In the middle of May in 1980, when I rushed back to the CAFA, my classmates were already at the middle or the late phases of their graduation projects. The graduation exhibition was set to begin in less than 2 months! With so little time remaining, all I wanted to paint and all I could paint was The People of Awa Mountain. I realized that painting the bitter days I spent in Awa Mountain touched my heart more deeply than depicting the joy of the Torch Festival. After all, the scenes and the people were simpler in The People of Awa Mountain.

It was in the morning of that day that I coated the canvas with a blue-gray base. When I returned to the studio in the afternoon, I sat in front of the 5-meter-wide canvas and found that the base coat was not very even. However, as I looked at it, I fell into a trance—it was as though I saw the people I yearned for taking shape on my canvas. The people of Awa Mountain seemed to be walking around on it. During that afternoon—which, in hindsight, was a bit crazy—this vision inspired me to take up a large oil brush and put all my memories of those people down on the canvas in one great spurt of energy!

---Excerpt from a note in Sun Jingbo's letter to his instructors concerning the creation of his painting, The People of Awa Mountain