Hou Yimin (候一民)
Hou Yimin (1930), Gaoyang, Hebei Province, belongs to the Mongol minority. He enrolled in the National Beiping Arts College in 1946, where he joined the underground Communist Party cell. He graduated from the Oil Painting Research Class of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under the Soviet painter Konstantin Maksimov, in 1957. He is a professor in the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and an expert in oil painting, frescoe, and paper-cuts.
The great proletarian cultural revolution must be waged to the end, 1973
Hou is married with the designer Deng Shu. Together with her and Jin Shangyi and others, he collaborated on the poster shown here.
Aside from painting oils and designing posters, Hou has also been involved in designing the motives for the Chinese currency. He painted the well-known portrait of a steelworker which adorned the 5-yuan note of the set that went into circulation in 1958, and took part in the design work for the currency set that was used from the 1980s onwards.
During the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, Hou was violently attacked by Red Guards because of his 1961 oil painting Liu Shaoqi and the Anyuan coal miners, that showed Liu Shaoqi leading a successfull and important strike in 1922. Claiming leadership of this strike was a crucial element for Mao Zedong in his campaign against Li Shaoqi, and was visualized by the painting 'Chairman Mao goes to Anyuan' by Liu Chunhua, 1968.
Sources:
Important Art of New China 1949-1979 (China Guardian Auction Catalogue 1997, Beijing)
Julia F. Andrews, Painters and Politics in the People's Republic of China 1949-1979 (Berkeley, etc.: University of California Press, 1994)
Chen Lusheng, Xin Zhongguo meishu tushi - 1949-1966 [The Art History of the People's Republic of China - 1949-1966] (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 2000) [in Chinese]
John Pomfret, "Currency Events: A Great Leap Backward?" Washington Post Foreign Service, 20 January 2002
Michael Sullivan, Modern Chinese Artists -- A Biographical Dictionary (Berkeley, etc: University of California Press, 2006)
Zhongguo meishuguan (ed.), 中国美术年鉴 1949-1989 (Guilin: Guangxi meishu chubanshe, 1993)
