Qiu Deshu, born in Shanghai in 1948, was one of the earliest artists on the mainland to receive international recognition in the post Mao era. As a child he studied traditional ink painting and seal carving, but his interest in the traditional arts was interrupted by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, during which he was sent to work at the Number Eighteen Shanghai Plastics Factory.

At the close of that tumultuous period, he rededicated himself to art and co-founded the Grass Painting Society (Cao cao hua she ????), one of the first experimental art groups in the late 70s. However, his interest in abstraction was deemed too 'bourgeois' and he was ordered to cease painting during the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign of 1983....