Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, the most revolutionary thing in art is not always what proclaims itself as such. When Luo Zhongli exhibited his painting “Father” in 1980, a monumental canvas of 215 x 150 cm depicting the weathered face of an ordinary peasant, he created a seismic shift in the Chinese artistic landscape more powerful than any avant-garde demonstration. It was not just a portrait, it was an existential declaration, an affirmation of the intrinsic value of those millions of anonymous men and women who form the backbone of China.
In this post-revolutionary China, where the propagandist idealization of peasants as collective “heroes” had masked their real living conditions, Luo Zhongli dared to show the raw truth. This life-sized face, scarred by time, sun, and relentless labor, confronted an entire society with what it preferred to ignore. It is precisely this dimension that I wish to explore in relation to two intellectual traditions: Husserlian phenomenology and Kantian aesthetics of the sublime.
Edmund Husserl, in his quest to return to “the things themselves,” invites us to suspend our prejudices to rediscover experience in its original purity [1]. Luo Zhongli performs exactly this phenomenological step in his painting. He sheds the codified representations of the joyful and idealized peasant of official art to confront us with the raw presence, the being-there of this man. The painting does not tell us an ideological story, it places us before a face that truly exists, that sweats, that suffers, that endures. This approach resonates perfectly with Husserl’s will to achieve “apodictic evidence,” the absolute certainty provided by the direct experience of the lived world.
This painting titled “Father” operates a form of pictorial epoché, a bracketing of social and aesthetic presuppositions, to bring us back into pure contact with the humanity of this peasant. Each wrinkle, each pore, each drop of sweat becomes a concrete manifestation of this Husserlian intentionality directed towards the very essence of the Chinese peasant experience. The hyperrealist style is not just a technical choice, but a phenomenological method of access to the existential truth of this man.
As Husserl writes: “Phenomenology proceeds by visually elucidating, determining meaning, and distinguishing meanings. It compares, differentiates, forms connections, relates, divides into parts, or releases inherent moments.” [2] This description could perfectly apply to Luo Zhongli’s creative process, his meticulous visual exploration of the peasant’s face, his methodical excavation of the layers of experience inscribed in this face.
Simultaneously, Luo Zhongli’s work fits within the Kantian tradition of the sublime. For Emmanuel Kant, the sublime manifests when we are confronted with something that exceeds our comprehension, provoking both terror and pleasure [3]. The painting “Father” functions exactly in this manner. The immensity of the suffering inscribed in this face, the magnitude of the labor it evokes, exceed our capacity to fully conceptualize them. The viewer experiences a form of vertigo in the face of this existence that surpasses them.
This sublime dimension is reinforced by the monumental format of the painting. Traditionally, in China, only political leaders or important historical figures benefited from portraits of this size. By granting this scale to a simple peasant, Luo Zhongli creates a sublime tension between the social modesty of the subject and his overwhelming presence, between his political marginality and his existential centrality. The viewer is caught in this dynamic contradiction that characterizes the Kantian experience of the sublime.
The very choice of representing such an ordinary subject on such a monumental scale creates what Kant would call a “negative pleasure,” that mixture of attraction and repulsion that constitutes the essence of the sublime. We are attracted by the expressive power of the face while being repelled by the signs of poverty and suffering it displays. This dialectical tension is precisely what confers the work its sublime power.
The art historian Gao Minglu notes: “The face of this ‘Father’ becomes a microcosm of recent Chinese history, a landscape where each wrinkle tells a chapter of national tribulations.” [4] This comment perfectly underscores how Luo Zhongli manages to transform his subject into what Kant would call a “presented infinity,” the immensity of Chinese history concentrated in this single face.
The temporality inscribed in this portrait is also fascinating from a phenomenological perspective. Husserl attributed considerable importance to the consciousness of lived time, this subjective experience of duration that does not reduce to chronological time. The face of Luo Zhongli’s “Father” is itself a phenomenology of embodied time, each wrinkle, each mark, each scar represents the sedimentation of years of labor under the sun. It is not just an instant, but a temporal compression, a testimony of accumulated experiences.
Jean-François Lyotard, in his analyses of the Kantian sublime, insists on its political dimension: “The sublime is the feeling that something inexpressible wants to be made heard.” [5] In the post-revolutionary Chinese context, this “something inexpressible” was precisely the reality of the peasant condition, systematically obscured by ideological discourse. By giving form to this inexpressible, Luo Zhongli accomplishes a fundamental political act, even if it does not present itself as such.
The small detail of the ballpoint pen behind the peasant’s ear adds an additional layer of complexity to this work. Added at the request of the authorities to signify that he was a “modern peasant,” this pen paradoxically becomes the marker of a historical tension. As the artist himself explains: “This pen objectively testifies to the system of artistic censorship of that era, it records this relationship between politics and art at this precise moment.” [6] This seemingly anecdotal detail crystallizes the contradictions of the era and becomes, unwittingly, a major semiotic element.
Luo Zhongli’s great strength is having been able, through this singular work, to reconcile seemingly contradictory dimensions: social realism and existential transcendence, political engagement and human universality, documentary and visual poetry. In doing so, he created a work that far exceeds its immediate historical context to achieve a universal scope.
If Husserlian phenomenology allows us to understand Luo Zhongli’s methodological approach, his return to “the things themselves,” his will to seize the lived essence of the peasant experience, Kantian aesthetics of the sublime helps us grasp the effect produced by his work on the viewer. Together, these two philosophical traditions offer a particularly fertile framework for understanding the complexity and power of this painting “Father” (1980).
It is striking to note that this work, created in the early years of China’s opening, already anticipated contemporary challenges of the peasant condition. Today, as China has become a global economic power, the disparities between urban and rural areas have only increased. Millions of migrant workers, coming from the countryside, constitute a precarious workforce in large coastal metropolises, often without legal protection or economic stability.
In this context, Luo Zhongli’s “Father” continues to resonate with particular acuity. It is no longer just a historical testimony, but a persistent ethical interpellation. As the critic Wang Ping writes: “The value of this work resides in its ability to make us see the smile that emerges after wiping away the tears, the impregnated embrace of humanity, the kerosene lamp that illuminates life.” [7]
After “Father,” Luo Zhongli continued to explore rural life, but with a notable stylistic evolution. Gradually moving away from the photo-realism of his beginnings, he developed a more expressionist pictorial language, integrating elements of Chinese folk art and traditional painting techniques. This evolution testifies to his constant quest to find an authentically Chinese artistic language, capable of expressing contemporaneity while remaining rooted in the national cultural tradition.
This quest echoes the preoccupations of Husserlian phenomenology concerning the relationship between tradition and innovation. Husserl emphasized that any authentic renewal implies a return to the origins, a reactivation of the founding meaning. Similarly, Luo Zhongli seeks to revitalize the Chinese pictorial tradition by confronting it with contemporary challenges, by reactivating its expressive potential in the face of current realities.
In recent years, in his series “Rereading Art History,” the artist has engaged in an even more explicit dialogue with the artistic tradition, reinterpreting canonical Western and Chinese works through the prism of his personal sensibility. In doing so, he continues his reflection on cultural identity and the possibility of a truly transcultural art.
Luo Zhongli’s work, and particularly “Father,” offers us much more than a striking representation of the Chinese peasant condition. It constitutes a profound meditation on human dignity, on the intrinsic value of each existence, however humble it may be. Through the frameworks of Husserlian phenomenology and Kantian aesthetics of the sublime, we can appreciate all the philosophical richness of this artistic approach.
In a globalized world where economic inequalities continue to widen, where rural populations are often the first victims of social and environmental upheavals, Luo Zhongli’s work remains strikingly relevant. It reminds us that behind the statistics and economic abstractions hide real faces, concrete lives, existences worthy of our attention and respect.
As the artist himself says: “Our country is a country of peasants. But those who speak for them are few, and those who tell the truth even fewer. They are our father and mother who provide us with clothing and food, they are the true masters of our country.” [8] This statement, far from being a simple political posture, expresses the very essence of his artistic approach: to give back a voice and a face to those that official history tends to erase.
- Husserl, Edmund, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, translated by W. R. Boyce Gibson, Routledge, London, 2012.
- Husserl, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, translated by Dorion Cairns, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1999.
- Kant, Emmanuel, Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by Paul Guyer, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000.
- Gao, Minglu, “Academicism and the Amateur Avant-Garde in the Post-Cultural Revolution Period (1979, 1984)”, in Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art, edited by Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, University of California Press, 2006.
- Lyotard, Jean-François, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1991.
- Interview with Luo Zhongli by The Paper, Shanghai, 2019.
- Wang, Ping, “Luo Zhongli hao zai nali?”, Zhongyi Journal, 2012.
- Quote from Luo Zhongli in Xia Hang, “Sichuan qingnian huajia tan chuangzuo”, Meishu, 1981, translation by Martina Köppel-Yang, Semiotic Warfare: A Semiotic Analysis, The Chinese Avant-Garde, 1979, 1989, p. 96.
