Looking At You Looking At Me

A Digital Walkthrough of Sino-Arabica’s Cairo Launch Event

The following is a digital adaptation of ‘Looking At You Looking At Me,’ Sino-Arabica’s pop-up exhibition of works by Chinese artists Shi Lu (1919-1982) and Zhao Wangyun (1906-1977), held from 4 to 6 March 2025 at Access Art Space in downtown Cairo, Egypt.

Sino-Arabica sourced all of the pieces featured in the exhibition—as in the photographs below—from a first-edition Chinese copy of Selected Sketches of Egypt (Changan Art Press, Xi’an, 1957), a collection of prints reproducing watercolors painted by the two artists to commemorate their late summer 1956 tour of Cairo, Upper Egypt, and other locations across the country.

‘Looking At You Looking At Me’ was organized with support from the Egypt-China Friendship Association, the Cairo branch of the binational organization responsible for editing the 1957 collection from which the prints were sourced.

The essay below, composed by Raphael Angieri, was presented in similar form on a handout distributed at the entrance to the exhibition. Photo captions are by Sama Aziz, with contributions from Isaac Grey.

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Seeing Otherwise:
Shi Lu and Zhao Wangyun’s Egypt

In the late summer of 1956, painters Zhao Wangyun and Shi Lu, respectively the President and Vice-President of the Xi’an Branch of the Chinese Artists’ Union, arrived in Cairo as members of an official delegation from the People’ Republic of China. They had been sent to the newly founded Republic of Egypt to build cultural ties between the two countries, which were both in their first decade of political existence and had established bilateral relations only months earlier.

Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and Mao Zedong’s China had no shortage of commonalities. Both sought to define themselves anew in the post-colonial era, guided by internationalist, socialist ideologies that were infused, if somewhat paradoxically, with exhortative discourses of national renewal—Arab on the one hand, Chinese on the other. Politically, the affinity felt between the two countries manifested in strategic cooperation and high-level meetings such as the Bandung Conference of 1955. Culturally, artists and writers worked to spark mutual inspiration and find common cause through initiatives like the 1956 Asia-Africa Art Exhibition in Cairo, at which Zhao Wangyun and Shi Lu delivered remarks on the question of national-artistic form.

Zhao and Shi, as leading artists in China’s early communist era, sought to follow and elaborate upon Chairman Mao’s directives, articulated in speeches at the 1942 Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, that cultural production ought to emanate from, be focused on, and appeal to a proletarian subject-object-audience, and moreover be aimed at making sense of the world in a manner favorable to advancing socialist revolution—whether by glorifying the proletariat or castigating its opponents. At the same time, the artists were concerned with maintaining and, if possible, elevating China’s particular national-aesthetic forms honed over millennia. At the Asia-Africa Art Exhibition in Cairo, the two painters expressed their dual aesthetic-political purpose in the following manner:

“We believe that artistic form is inseparable from expression of artistic content. But [artistic form] must also respect certain principles of beauty. […] Chinese art, while representing real life, must also constantly pursue the refinement of artistic form. Moreover, the meaning of artistic beauty varies according to different ethnic groups and historical periods, each with its own aesthetic concepts and characteristics. Therefore, artistic forms must be rich in both national and popular characteristics. That is, the artistic forms of any given ethnic group must manifest their unique national style as determined by long-term shared experiences of life, common psychological traits, and the totality of their culture.”

The sketches which Shi and Zhao produced to commemorate their tour of Egypt exemplify this political-artistic ambition. According to scholar Juliane Noth, the paintings are “typical examples of what was called caimohua, ‘colour-and-ink painting’, in the official terminology of the early to mid-1950s, […] executed in the traditional media, namely ink and colours that were applied on paper (or, less frequently, on silk) with a soft, pointed brush, but incorporated realist painting techniques such as chiaroscuro, single-point perspective, and anatomical drawing”. ‘Sketching from life’ (xiesheng 写生), itself a recent adoption in Chinese painting, which historically relied instead on immersive observation and an artist’s memory, was critical to Shi and Zhao’s attempt to vividly portray the idealized ‘real life’ of Egyptian subjects engaged in acts of work, rest, and play.

Shi Lu, with his affectionate, expressive close-ups of Egyptian women, men, and children, and Zhao Wangyun, with his sweeping—but always populated—portrayals of iconic monuments or unassuming village streets, can each be seen to insist in his own way upon the capacity of a Chinese aesthetic to capture the shared humanity and lived experience of working people across massive geographic and cultural distances. All while presenting their subjects in a manner which may indeed be described as ‘exoticizing’, in the sense of acknowledging and perhaps amplifying or romanticizing elements of foreignness in aspect, dress, or setting, Shi and Zhao call upon the viewer in turn to recognize and admire experiences which transcend culture: an elderly cartman’s stoic poise; the mid-day drowsiness of a shepherd girl; the boisterous play of children on picnic; the gentleness of a mother toward her curious child.

The inherent tension of accentuating the exotic while simultaneously insisting upon the universal can be found in a 1956 essay written by Shi Lu regarding his tour of India the year before traveling to Egypt. In this text, entitled “Dauntless Women—Tall as the Sky, Rooted in the Earth,” Shi describes with reverence the figures of Indian women laboring unbowed under the weight of water jars, firewood, and bricks, their work rendered not as simple toil but rather something monumental, eternal, sacred—likened in his words to the Taj Mahal.

There is in Shi’s writing, as in the paintings of both Shi and Zhao, an evident tendency toward the sensational, an impulse to monumentalize, to extract from the rhythms of labor and rest a kind of heroic permanence, to find nobility in the faces of the poor. If this idealization verges on exoticism, it nevertheless appears to arise from a sincere admiration, and from a desire ultimately to collapse cultural differences by situating the Egyptian peasant within the political-aesthetic vision that defined socialist-realist art of New China in the 1950s.

Zhao Wangyun and Shi Lu’s sketches of Egypt speak not only to cross-cultural recognition, but to mid-century Chinese artists’ attempt through this type of encounter to reconcile their country’s indigenous national-artistic tradition with its new political regime’s transnational mission of revolutionary solidarity. These paintings, today divided between various private estates and the National Art Museum of China, testify to Egypt’s unexpected place within a pivotal episode of Chinese self-exploration, and offer uncanny glimpses of a newly emergent Arab Republic as filtered through a resolutely Chinese subjectivity.

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Credits

Production design: Raphael Angieri
Artistic direction: Sama Aziz
Logistics support: Atef Elwan, Hany Goda, Mateja Lazarević
Research support: Hongda Zhang, Isaac Grey
Arabic translations: Fourat El Khoury
Photography: Matilde Ferreri

Special thanks to Mina Noshy, Mohamed Ibrahim, and Farida Hegazi of Access Art Space for hosting and facilitating the exhibition; to Ambassador Ali El Hefny and Nesma Mohamed of the Egypt-China Friendship Association for endorsing our showcase of the Selected Sketches; and to Youssef Mansour and Lina Khedr of Mazra’a Network For Arts & Culture for consulting on event production.

Works referenced

Mao Zedong. “Zai Yan’an wenyi zuotanhui shang de jianghua” [Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art]. In Mao Zedong xuanji [Selected Works of Mao Zedong], Vol. 3, 73–104. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1953.

Noth, Juliane. “Confucius and Tolstoy in India: Shi Lu’s Paintings of 1970 and the Socialist Culture of Maoist-Period China.” Art History 39, no. 5 (2016): 952–983.

Shi Lu. “Ding tian li di de nüren – Yindu xiesheng suigan zhi yi” [Women Who Stand Tall – One of Several Impressions from Sketching in India]. Xin Guancha, no. 7 (1956). Reprinted in Shi Dan and Ye Jian, eds., Shi Lu yishu wenji [Collected Artistic Writings of Shi Lu], 35–36. Xi’an: Shaanxi People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 2003.

———. “Guanyu yishu xingshi wenti” [On the Question of Artistic Form]. In Shi Dan and Ye Jian, eds., Shi Lu yishu wenji [Collected Artistic Writings of Shi Lu], 32–34. Xi’an: Shaanxi People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 2003.