The young woman in Beijing artist Qi Zhilong's oil painting 2003 No1 radiates impassioned idealism. Her eyes are bright and clear, she smiles warmly, and - like all of the 1970s-era women the 42-year-old artist paints - she is dressed in a simple Red Army cap and jacket. The impression is of purity and strength. 'I want to look again at the value of the Mao era,' Qi says. 'Then, there was a strong sense of what was good.'
For many people, the Cultural Revolution is the epitome of everything that went wrong on the mainland. The only person safe from attack was Mao Zedong himself. Even Deng Xiaoping, then-party secretary, was reduced to tending pigs in the countryside.
For millions of youth, however, the waning years of the Cultural Revolution were a time for giddy political ideas and freedom. Qi, who has hazel eyes and a tightly cropped goatee, particularly remembers the brigades of 'educated urban youth' who were sent to the countryside to teach and learn from the peasantry.
The teams, Qi wrote in a recent article, 'appeared proud and solemn and seemed to be eagerly anticipating the whole new world ahead of them'.
For Qi, such anticipation was particularly intense. He was born in 1962 in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia - far from the mass demonstrations in Beijing - and came of age in the 1970s, after much of the worst violence had subsided. Both of his parents worked in factories, but his older brother painted propaganda posters and billboards, and Qi often travelled with him.
'Many people think of the [Cultural Revolution] era as a painful one,' he says. 'The older generation and intellectuals suffered. But then we believed that we should live to serve others. Today, people believe they should serve themselves first. It's an absolute change.'
