Protective Masks in 1979 Beijing: An Oil Painting

When protective masks became part of everyday life during the pandemic in 2020, I remembered this oil painting I had made in Beijing in 1979. The masks were already there, more than forty years earlier, among the people gathered at the Democracy Wall.

A crowd at the Democracy Wall

The figures fill almost the whole picture. Blue and green coats press against one another; we see caps, shoulders and the backs of heads. Two faces turn towards us, their white masks standing out against the darker clothing.

The painting recalls the crowds who came to read the wall newspapers. The texts themselves are largely hidden by the people in front of them. What remains visible is the gathering: people standing close together, looking, reading.

Beijing in 1979

At the Xidan Democracy Wall, near Chang’an Avenue (长安街), people posted handwritten texts known as dazibao (大字报). In 1978–79, these included grievances, political criticism and calls for reform. Readers gathered to discuss them, and independent journals also circulated there. It was a brief opening for public expression; the authorities closed the Xidan poster site in December 1979.^[1]

I painted this scene during my years of study in Beijing. Looking at it again in 2020, it was the masks that first brought it back to mind. Behind them, the crowd still belongs to that particular moment in the city’s history.

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Footnotes

[1] For the wall newspapers, gatherings at Xidan and the closure of the site in December 1979, see Helmut Opletal’s account of the Democracy Wall in the University of Vienna’s project on the Chinese democracy movement of 1978–1981, including contemporary photographs and film. ↩

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