In 1985, KG Subramanyan visited China on an invitation from the China Artists Association. Besides Beijing, he travelled to the Dunhuang caves in the northwestern province of Gansu, then to the neighbouring autonomous region of Xinjiang, and from there, in a big arc, to the province of Shaanxi and all the way down to the southern province of Guangdong. Given the interest in Chinese art that he shared with many Santiniketan artists, including his mentors Nandalal Bose and Benodebehari Mukherjee, he took it as a welcome opportunity to know the diversity of culture, people and landscape of China firsthand and from up close.
In Beijing, Subramanyan visited the art academy – where he noticed the meticulous and laborious pursuit of realism by its students – met with “chosen” artists and visited the Xu Beihong Memorial Museum. Besides being the first president of the China Artists Association, Xu had an old connection with Santiniketan. There were also the customary visits to a friendship shop and a jade factory, where he witnessed handcrafting on an industrial scale.
Despite his movements being curated, Subramanyan noticed that while most Chinese artists survived on a small state salary, there was an emergent and visibly affluent class of youngsters and conspicuous consumption in certain areas. However, what caught his artist’s eyes were not the old monuments or the new gleaming city spaces, but the people he saw in the small towns and villages, especially the bearded old.