Hi there:
First, my thoughts go out to any China-based readers who may be in quarantine or lockdown, as the country copes with its latest COVID surge. Hang in there. It also appears that infection control protocols are being scaled back.
In the meantime, perhaps you may draw some inspiration from the subject of our latest story. Meet the indomitable Wang Liuyun, a professional cleaner who, against all odds, charted an unlikely second career in middle age.
When chance led her to a free art studio in coastal Fujian Province, Wang caught the painting bug unexpectedly and proceeded to pursue her new passion relentlessly, despite tight finances.
In her own words, this is what painting means to her:
When I paint, it feels like my soul has found a home. The repression, the sadness and the desperation I feel—they're still there, but there's an outlet for them now. Previously I carried these emotions on my shoulders and they weighed on my facial expression.
Story FM first aired Wang's story in a Chinese podcast on Oct. 17. A technical note: this particular episode makes use of a voiceover to provide background information and improve pacing. These passages are indicated by italics.
Take care and see you soon.
—ML
Balancing Act: A Cleaner/Painter's Blood, Sweat and Tears
Narrator: Wang Liuyun
Transcribed by Nie Liping
1.
I stumbled upon painting by pure serendipity.
By chance I caught a documentary showing on CCTV9 about a studio in the Fujian county of Pingnan that teaches painting for free. It is open to everyone, practising the mantra that everyone is an artist. I was extremely intrigued. The idea of making art seemed to strike my fancy. It seemed to be something I aspired to. That's because painting is such a lofty profession. These painters are so far removed from people like us. They all hang out in tall buildings. And yet here was a vast space where scores of people were painting.
What stuck with me the most was the story of an old lady. She was in her 60s and dressed like a country bumpkin. Her main goal was to paint a gas lamp, which comprises a glass flask and a base. The gas lamp used by the studio didn't even have a glass flask. It just sat there for people to study.
I observed the old lady in earnest on the TV screen. Day One went by, then Day Two and Day Three. Her final product was still dismal. Even she herself was profoundly disappointed. But a week later, the old lady still managed to complete the painting.
I was blown away. Despite her age and lack of education, she still learned how to paint.
I decided I had to check out the studio.
Back then I was still working in our county seat. I worked as a cleaner at a hotel and washed vegetables at restaurants. The sole reason for existence my whole life was survival. I was always trying to make money to support my family and myself. It felt extremely boring, extremely mundane, just like living in prison. What I aspired to was to get a bit of an education or visit places I liked.
So if there's a place that teaches painting for free, I want to give it a try, I thought to myself.
2.
After celebrating Lunar New Year in 2017, I went for it in the spring. I arrived in Pingnan on March 8.
A young studio assistant handed me three canvases and two paint brushes when I showed up at the studio. There was a public supply of paint. The studio was filled with easels, which were also open to all. Whenever someone finished, you could fill the spot.
I demanded to paint the gas lamp immediately. I had watched it being painted on TV repeatedly, so I wanted to use that as a measuring stick.
My excitement was high at the outset. But once I started painting, I was lost. I couldn't put together anything decent. The base of the gas lamp was rusty, which made for a brownish color. All I could manage was a big blob.
At wit's end, I decided to ask for help. I approached the studio assistant again. Yet the assistant refused to offer instruction, saying the most valuable insight was the kind you came up by yourself. There was no point to following a fixed path.
The assistant said I was doing a good job. My work was dog shit—and the assistant still responded with praise.
I had no choice but to force myself to produce something presentable.
I thought back to my childhood. Before we had electricity, my family used gas lamps. The color of the light was a dim yellow. I imagined the lamp I was painting was lit. Based on that vision, I mixed my paint to an orange-reddish tone. In my presentation, the light surrounding the lamp was the brightest, with the color fading as you moved away from the lamp. I focused on depicting each progressive circle of light. When that was done, it provided a nice contrast to the base of the lamp.
The studio assistant then checked on my progress. He said I did great and that my painting had a dream-like quality to it.
After a few hours, Wang Liuyun completed her first-ever painting: an old gas lamp. Even though she didn't think much of her work, at least she completed a finished product. She felt settled, to the extent where she felt she could stick around in the studio.
The next day she painted a broken stool and wisterias. Both pieces turned out well. On her third day, when she successfully painted a local peasant's hat, she caught the eye of Lin Zhenglu, the founder of the studio. Lin made a point of taking a picture of the painting.
The teacher in the studio took notice and began to monitor my work on a daily basis.
"Wow, great job! You're a natural," he said.
The teacher Wang Liuyun referred to is Lin Zhenglu, a former art dealer who launched a campaign to teach art to the masses for free under the slogan "Everyone is an artist," establishing studios in villages in Fujian's Pingnan County, including Shuangxi Village. He encouraged students to "naturally gravitate toward subjects they were interested in."
Among his students were farmers, people with disabilities, as well as middle-class workers and young men and women from the city. Lin Zhenglu supplied them with a venue and tools, selling their pieces online at the same time.
One of Wang Liuyun's pieces was posted online, fetching 150 yuan (US$22).
What that 150 yuan meant to me—in all honesty, it wasn't about the money. More importantly, it built my confidence.
It proved that I had ability, that I was gifted. After all, I had never painted before, never taken any lessons anywhere. It wasn't something I had even contemplated.
3.
Wang Liuyun had approached the trip to Fujian in a spirit of curiosity and exploration. When she got to Shuangxi, all she had on her was 300-plus yuan. The plan was to stay for a few days and see if this place was as magical as it seemed on TV. Yet the praise from others instilled a tremendous confidence in her, so she decided to continue her art studies in the studio.
The staff at the studio egged her on by promising to stage an exhibit for her after she completed seven to 10 paintings.
But after a week in Shuangxi, Wang Liuyun was only left with enough cash for a train journey. She decided to make a quick trip home first.
I was full of confidence as I headed home to take out a 5,000-yuan loan from the local credit union.
Why borrow money? Because this has been the state of our family finances all these years—all our money went toward building our own house and raising our child. My husband has always suffered from health problems and has never been able to earn much. I am the only breadwinner. Whatever we earned went toward food and shelter. Not a single penny went unspent.
The thinking behind going back to Shuangxi was: given the fact that I had the talent to paint, I might as well hone my craft. When I ran out of money, I'd head back to my hometown to work.
As far as I was concerned, I had suffered enough in this life. I had no illusions about personal fulfillment. All I wanted to do was make myself happier. Painting is something I enjoy. For example, I may want to check out the scenery somewhere. I may appreciate a particular river. It makes me happy to see the waves created when the water runs through rocks.
I have talent. I can paint. Painting makes me happy. Armed with these simple thoughts, Wang Liuyun returned to Shuangxi with a 5,000-yuan loan.
She stayed at a local hostel that charged 20 yuan a night. Her daughter ordered her a hot plate online. Everyday she found a corner on the first floor of the hotel and prepared meals in a pot. Life was rough but filled with pleasure. She got up just after 5 a.m. and either walked or biked to Shuangxi or neighboring villages, where she made sketches, then headed back to the studio to turn those drawings into full-blown paintings.
She enjoyed a extremely happy block of time.
I started each morning by taking a stroll through town. When I saw a house I liked, I approached the owner to ask for permission to enter. I'd check out the structure of the house, how the eaves were designed and what color the tiles were.
The fourth floor was typically the attic, which was usually covered in dust. But I'd like to explore it anyway, crawling around like a mouse. That's the kind of stuff I liked to study.
I also took in the scenery on the mountains and in surrounding villages. There were waterfalls, small creeks, perfectly perpendicular cliffs and trees on the hills that had been distorted into weird shapes by wind. I loved those trees. They made for great paintings.
I started out without a smartphone to take pictures with, so I'd draw sketches on a notebook and note the colors with a fountain pen. Then I'd construct the paintings from memory. I improved quickly.
Life used to be miserable, be it working at a factory or washing vegetables in a restaurant kitchen. All I thought about was pay day, household chores and how much money my husband owed.
That was extremely painful. It hurt as much as taking a knife to your own flesh.
But things changed after I started to paint.
I'm in a great mood when I paint. When I paint, my thoughts are trapped in the waterfall I'm drawing. Or I'm crouched next to a rock studying the water current, trying to figure out the color of the stone in the bed of the creek or the color of the moss. I don't think about anything else.
In those moments, I forget about all the people and things that upset me. When I look at someone I'm carefree. You don't have any impact on me. That's how I emerged from the pain.
4.
When she painted, Wang Liuyun felt like an animal freed from its cage. The poverty and disappointment in her real life were tossed aside. Even her physical pain and illness mysteriously vanished. The only thing that occupied her attention was the scenery she was painting and her constant improvement in craft.
But the weight of reality never disappeared. Three months later, Wang Liuyun had spent her loan. She had no choice but to head back to her county seat in Zhejiang and keep working.
I think it was around five days after my return when Teacher Lin sent two if his employees to track me down and tell me to turn around. He gave me just over 10,000 yuan for several dozen of my paintings. He paid me upfront so I would return to the studio.
Then we posted pictures of the paintings online. We sold several dozen quickly.
Naturally that restored my confidence. Maybe I could even support myself with my paintings, I thought. My mindset shifted another gear.
Wang Liuyun appeared to have landed on the path to self-fulfillment. Maybe she was indeed gifted, she thought, and just maybe this talent could help her make a living, on top of freeing her true spirit.
That was indeed the case for some time.
According to media reports, that was the year the terms "female farmer painters" and "painters in paralysis" went viral. Lin Zhenglu's studio drew some 10,000 visitors. Press coverage placed this studio that championed the idea "everyone is a painter" squarely in the spotlight for an extended stretch. And Wang Liuyun was the studio's best-selling artist at the time, netting total sales of just over 40,000 yuan in the span of two or three months.
But the attention didn't last forever. By fall the same year, Wang Liuyun sensed that sales of her paintings had declined. She gradually dropped the notion of staying and becoming a full-time artist. At the end of the day, she was destined to go back to wage labor, she thought.
The biggest problem was that students at the studio were generally self-taught, which became an increasing source of frustration for Wang.
Despite extensive lobbying by Lin Zhenglu, Wang Liuyun decided to leave at the end of the year.
During my later stages at the studio, I didn't have to rent a place. The studio set me up with a two-story space that had electricity and running water. All I had to cover was minimal living expenses. I could have lived in Shuangxi comfortably for many years.
In Lin Zhenglu's eyes, I was a natural artist. He told me that I had to become a professional artist, that if I persisted at his studio, I would hit a breakthrough and reach a certain level. But I decided not to stay there.
Why is that? Without an official teacher, what was there for me to learn? All I could do was learn from myself. I had pretty much painted all the natural scenery in the immediate area. I had hit a dead end. Just like any moving stream, I needed a fresh water source. If I stayed put, I would have become a pool of stagnant water.
5.
So where to next to resolve her bottleneck, to seek a new water source? Wang Liuyun made her next destination Da Fen Village in the outskirts of Shenzhen. It's the largest producer of commercial oil paintings in the country, known for its assembly-line approach that has replicated tens of thousands of world-famous paintings.
Before she left for Da Fen, there were skeptics who said her talent was natural and exposure to mass production would taint her. Yet when she arrived in Da Fen, Wang Liuyun was ecstatic. She felt like a country bumpkin seeing a major metropolis for the first time. There she saw all sorts of styles and a variety of techniques. She met all sorts of people—from renowned masters to craftsmen who painted foundation colors and drew flowers repeatedly on an assembly line.
In her eyes, everyone was a teacher.
What paintings did I copy? Famous ones. The first painting I imitated was Huang Gongwang's Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains.
The original is a brush painting, but my copy used oils. No matter how I brainstormed or experimented, I couldn't paint anything decent.
For example, because I didn't know how to handle light and shadows, I started with a tree. So for a big tree that grows in the wild, given its enormous size and its lush growth, it presents in a certain color on top, then in a different color in its mid section. You can't paint it as a uniform green, otherwise the painting is ruined. The color of the tree varies under the light, but I didn't know how to capture the changes.
It pained me immensely to be stuck.
Before I resolved the issue, the pain was holed up inside of me. It felt awful. If felt like I had swallowed a rusty, deformed blade and couldn't regurgitate it or let it pass. I'd wake up in pain in the middle of the night, panting.
This was a painful problem I had to tackle. But how? All you can do is keep learning.
Wang Liuyun's answer at the time was to buy a ton of books on oil paintings. She also sought advice from a veteran painter. Having picked up tips from her master and her landlord, who was also a painter, she'd try out these techniques by studying objects at street level or in the woods. She also watched people paint in Da Fen's Times Square. She started out observing painters from outside their studio windows. Before long she was standing next to the painters trying to pick up a technique or two.
Apart from painting, she also had to work part-time at local hotels to cover her living expenses. She felt a sense of urgency. Carpe diem was her mindset.
The worse off you are financially, the harder you have to study. Lo and behold you may run out of money tomorrow and have to bolt.
Just as Wang Liuyun put it, her days in Shenzhen were subject to ending in a moment's notice. Even though she learned a lot and grew as a painter tremendously, money ultimately was an obstacle. She was forced to give up her stay in Shenzhen.
When I was in Shenzhen, my husband accrued just over 20,000 yuan in debt at home. Panicking like a headless chicken, I went home and started working again immediately.
When I got home, my husband was the same deadbeat. While I scrambled to find a way out, to improve our standard of living, or at least get by, all he did was sit there. It was better when we didn't see each other. Having him in my line of sight was a trip straight to hell every single time.
Plus our town is a tiny place. We all know each other. When I stopped honing my painting skills and sales of my work slowed, I became a local laughing stock. People talked behind my back constantly.
I was struggling again. Home was a sea of flying blades and whirling flames. I was being stabbed through and through.
6.
Refining her painting skills in Fujian and Shenzhen for nearly two years was Wang Liuyun's way of thwarting the cage of reality. But in the end, as she herself put it, after a huge detour, she returned to her starting point of hell.
In order to pay off her husband's debt, Wang Liuyun returned to her county seat hometown for six months of wage labor, but ultimately she found her circumstances unbearable. In the second half of the year, thanks to a referral, Wang Liuyun landed a job as an art teacher in Henan. The pay was minimal, but at least she could teach and paint on the side in peace.
Yet when the coronavirus outbreak erupted nationwide in early 2020, her school suspended classes and she had to find a new out. She also had to grapple with the additional 20,000 yuan in debt her husband had accumulated while she was teaching.
After Lunar New Year, the entire country had come to a standstill. As far as I was concerned, if I fooled around for a month, all I could afford to cook was water. Actually, I couldn't even buy gas.
I was desperate. I asked my husband: "What if the situation persists?" His answer: "Let's just sleep then." He kept singing karaoke while swaying his body. He never cut back on his playtime or loafing around. Even if I died, he would have asked me to dig my own grave and jump in. Like a cold-blooded animal, he didn't feel a thing. He didn't even care about himself.
Out of options, Wang Liuyun decided to find work in Beijing. Even if the entire nation was in lockdown, there were bound to be jobs in Beijing, so her reasoning went.
She remembered a young woman she met in Henan. The young lady told Wang Liuyun she could look her up in Beijing. Wang called her friend, said she had decided to work in Beijing and needed a place to stay for a while. It was quite an imposition, but the young woman still agreed.
In no position to save face, Wang Liuyun went ahead and bought the cheapest train ticket to Beijing. As soon as the lockdown ended, she immediately got a job as a cleaner at an office building.
The overall team there comprised about 50 or 60 cleaners. We were forced to take our meals in a room about a third in size of the room we're in right now. It was like herding chicken and ducks. That's how crowded it was. Everyone reeked of sweat.
Among the cleaners were quite a few old men who liked to talk dirty.
Also, even though it was clearly impossible to work round-the-clock, every time our bosses saw us goofing around, they'd bark at us to do this or that. It was no different than ushering chicken, ducks or dogs. We didn't feel a sense of belonging.
They didn't treat us as humans, but rather tools. We didn't even have the right to think or talk back. It was far worse than the extraction of surplus value that Marx writes about in Capital.
In the face of such cold reality, painting didn't seem like much of a practical skill after all.
Back then, Wang Liuyun lived in a room with three bunk beds housing a total of six people. The cramped quarters was filled with old clothes and jars and bottles containing food necessities. She found it suffocating. It was impossible to paint in these surroundings.
Then I gradually got to know some folks in Beijing. A friend referred me to hourly cleaning jobs in all sorts of locations on Sunday, my day off. I just wanted to earn more money, the hope being that once I had a small nest egg, I could leave Beijing.
In the end, I stopped taking these side jobs. Some employers were downright evil, forcing you to complete three days of work in a day. They'd get on your case, tailing you the entire day while dictating your every single move. You'd die of exhaustion if you worked at that pace for a few days. Employers like that simply don't treat you as human.
Lord, there was this one job near Second Ring Road. When we were getting ready to head back to Zuojiazhuang at the end of the day, when our service vehicle was backing up, I just passed out. I threw up on the floor. It took me a long time to get back on my feet.
That's why I made up my mind never again to take jobs like that even if it meant starving to death.
7.
Wang Liuyun had given up on her side jobs, but it was a matter of time before she left her current company.
There was no way she could keep working like a soulless tool.
About a year later, Wang Liuyun rented a small room in the working-class neighborhood near her company. It was just 6 square meters in size. She cleared a corner in the room, set up an easel and started painting again.
Despite living in a such a tiny room, I still freed up 1 square meter to paint on Sundays or weekdays after work. Progress was extremely slow. I was in a bad mood at the time. But I had to somehow remove myself from hell and shift toward a more normal mindset. It was an exercise in will power.
I have made a point of pursuing spiritual freedom my whole life. I don't want to spend my whole life chained to a job or working at a factory trying to support myself. There's no point to that. Not to mention the mere task of putting food on the table is so painful for me.
When I paint, it feels like my soul has found a home. The repression, the sadness and the desperation I feel—they're still there, but there's an outlet for them now. Previously I carried these emotions on my shoulders and they weighed on my facial expression.
After picking up a paint brush again, Wang Liuyun switched jobs. The pay and working conditions are much better. Her company also set up a rest area for her. It's a tiny space, only about 3 square meters in size, located next to the toilet. But it's a godsend for Wang Liuyun. She paints in the room after work or on her days off.
When she paints, she's no longer confined to the tiny room. She's among mountains, hovering over the sea or standing next to a flowing creek or rolling waves.
Painting hasn't changed the harsh nature of reality, but as Wang put it, even though her life hasn't changed, her spirit has.
Trapped by the demands of daily life and bogged down by her husband—that was the fate Wang Liuyun couldn't escape in the first half of her life. But painting is also her destiny, she believes.
Everyone has their own destiny. For example, supporting my family is one of my fates. For others, playing mahjong non-stop is theirs. As for me, I enjoy painting and my paintings love me too. That's why I'm able to paint. Painting makes me happy.
The bottom line is whenever I have an idea or vision, I paint. I've spent my whole life observing concrete things in the natural world. When I paint, it feels like I'm a tree shedding all its leaves, as a poet once said. My body is brimming with all sorts of ideas. When I pick up my paint brush, it's simply a matter of unleashing butterflies trapped behind a window.