Uyghur artist turned journalist paints to process painful news of his homeland

In America, artist Mamatjan Juma is free to explore exile from his Uyghur homeland in northwestern China. He paints turmoil and pain in abstract expressionist works that shed the constraints of socialist realism, which, he told The China Project, he considers a rebellion against Communist ideology that led to the oppression of many of his fellow Turkic Muslim people.

Juma, 50, is one of up to 15,000 Turkic Muslims who have made the United States their home. A trickle of earlier emigrés has grown — and would become a flood if the U.S. government allowed it — since the Chinese Communist Party, starting in 2016, began a campaign of clamping down on their culture that has led to the detention of a million or more people, about one-tenth of the indigenous population of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, an area three times the size of France. The repression has included the destruction of mosques, restrictions on Uyghur and other Turkic languages, and round-the-clock digital surveillance.

In 2003, Juma was granted a Ford Foundation scholarship that led to his earning a master’s degree in fine arts from Washington University in St. Louis. Upon graduation, in 2005, the scholarship asked that he put something back into his community, so he briefly returned to teach at the Chinese institution he’d left, the Xinjiang Arts College in Xinjiang’s regional capital, Urumqi.

Soon, Juma felt that his ideas of art had changed too significantly during his U.S. sojourn to make teaching at his alma mater in Urumqi bearable. He applied for a job with the Ford Foundation in the United States, as a coordinator for their leadership training course, and left China. Not long after he arrived in the U.S., a friend warned him that Kashgar police were looking for him.

Juma realized that returning to Xinjiang would be unwise. At the time, Radio Free Asia, the nonprofit news service founded in 1996 with U.S. government funding, was recruiting journalists for its Uyghur service. He applied and got the job in February 2007.

As RFA was set up to promote democratic values and human rights — broadcasting into China in Cantonese, Mandarin, Tibetan, and Uyghur — Juma knew that taking the job meant saying goodbye to his homeland and his family, perhaps for good.

When, in 2016, CCP General Secretary Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 promoted Chén Quánguó 陈全国 — fresh from restoring order in restive, neighboring Tibet — to crack down in Xinjiang, Juma began to spend his days at RFA fielding stories of injustice against his people. At night and on the weekends, he put a paintbrush to canvas to try to make sense of it all.

The father of three children is now the deputy director of RFA’s Uyghur service. He has not seen his family since 2006, when he left, and has been unable to contact them since 2016. Juma paints to come to terms with a range of emotions he said he can’t put into words.

In 2018, Chinese authorities in Xinjiang detained 29 members of Juma’s family as part of a crackdown on the relatives of all RFA Uyghur service journalists. His three brothers were sent to so-called reeducation camps, and later, one of them, Ahmetjan Juma, a literary translator, was jailed for 14 years for being in possession of an “extremist” book.

Soon, the CCP branded Juma the equivalent of a fighter who had joined the Islamic State.

“They called me an international terrorist and issued an arrest warrant,” Juma said. Since he joined RFA, Chinese police have hounded the family Juma left behind, often forcing individual relatives to call him on the telephone to pressure him to return and face punishment by the CCP.

Last year, his father, whom he had not seen since 2006, died of heart failure at 78. Plagued with survivor’s guilt, Juma has recurring nightmares. His eyes often suddenly fill with tears.

A painting from Mamatjan Juma’s “Dream Catcher” series, where he tries to capture his dreams on waking. “Every little dot represents everything you’ve experienced and lived through, good or bad or beyond good or bad, bright or dark. You are who you are because of those moments and your life and yourself is composed of those experiences.” Image courtesy of Mamatjan Juma.

Idyll

Juma was born near the famous southern Silk Road oasis town of Kashgar, in Aydingkol Village, nine miles from Opal Township, the birthplace of Mahmoud Kashgari, the 11th-century Uyghur scholar who compiled the first dictionary of the region’s Turkic languages.

Juma attended primary school in the village and then, for middle school, each day he bicycled to Opal. As winters were hard, during the coldest months, Juma boarded there in a “filthy, cold, and dusty” dormitory.

After middle school, he passed exams to attend the Kashgar Teachers’ School, an hour by bus from Opal, where he was a boarder for his high school years, during which he specialized in art and teaching methodology.

Kashgar is the fertile oasis beloved by traders traveling the ancient Silk Road through southern Xinjiang. The city is sandwiched between the vast Taklamakan — a desert bigger than Florida and New York combined — and the towering Pamir Mountains, which separate China from Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Juma’s progress in art and general academic subjects earned him good grades in the nationwide university entrance exams and a place in Xinjiang’s Arts College, in Urumqi, more than 900 miles from home. There he trained in the techniques of French academicism and the ideology of socialist realism and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree. After graduation, he stayed in Urumqi and became an art teacher.

Juma’s strong bonds with his three brothers and four sisters were forged in the idyllic setting of Aydingkol at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, the period from 1966 to 1976 when the CCP struggled to root out anti-revolutionary thought and sentenced urban intellectuals to learn from China’s majority, the rural farmers.

Juma remembers being surrounded by intellectuals who had been “sent down” to the countryside by Máo Zédōng 毛泽东, the revolutionary founder of the People’s Republic. One had studied traditional medicine for 16 years in India. Juma’s father became his apprentice and eventually set up his own practice and a clinic in the family home.

Juma was raised in a free-thinking household where books were devoured and education prized. In Urumqi, he found it stultifying to study art laced with political dogma.

“Everything was about ideology,” Juma said. “We were criticized if our work didn’t make a political point.”

One painting he did in vivid orange and bronze depicted farmers returning home through the desert after a punishing day doing dirty, unpaid work, turning the soil for a government farm.

Mamatjan Juma’s painting of Uyghur farmers after a day of “voluntary” labor on a government farm was rejected as too gloomy by the Party Secretary at his college, who wanted smiles and green trees to mitigate the fiery dust and weariness of the workers. Image courtesy of Mamatjan Juma.

“I wanted to show the exhaustion of the men and the oxen; the dust and the heat,” Juma said. But the powerful Party Secretary of the Arts College admonished him. “He said I should only give a positive image of farmers’ lives. He told me to add some green; to make it brighter and put in some trees. I said, ‘Yes, yes,’ but went away and didn’t change anything.”

Art as therapy

For four years after graduation from the Xinjiang Arts College, Juma taught the tightly controlled socialist realist techniques and artistic styles in which he’d been instructed. When the Ford Foundation offered him a scholarship in the United States in 2006, Juma jumped at the chance and moved to Missouri, as far away from Xinjiang as could be imagined.

“I started to spread my wings, to abandon my realistic, heavy ideological training, and to experiment,” Juma said. “Gerhard Richter, the German abstract artist, became my inspiration.”

Juma described the smothering pressure and restraints of communist ideology and the constant criticism of anything that veered off the path of “correct thinking.”

“There was absolutely no room for individual thought or imagination,” he said.

Following Richter’s lead, Juma began to feel the potential and scope of abstract styles.

“Coming to America, I could explore the limitlessness of art, and step out of the boundaries I had been forced into at home,” he said.

Bad news from home

Every day at work at RFA, Juma is deluged with bad news emanating from the Uyghur homeland.

“I don’t always set out to paint my trauma, because life is full of happiness and beauty, too,” he said. “But it usually comes out in my pieces somewhere. It is always there in my subconscious.”

Art helps him manage the emotions that are rarely far beneath the surface.

“It’s a way to forget, even for a short time, the tragedies in my homeland. It’s a way to get the feelings out and take some kind of form rather than just being bottled up inside me.”

Although there are still hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in prison or disappeared, art helps Juma to defuse the triggers he faces in his daily work at RFA.

“Suddenly, I might see a photo or a picture, something might remind me of conversations I used to have with my family,” he said. Juma described his work with RFA as being “on the front line of trauma.”

“Every day we hear of arrests, killings, long jail sentences, and injustices against my people,” he said. Art is a way of striving for balance in his life.

“Just as when the human body is out of balance, we get sick; so the world, when it is out of balance, erupts into war and suffering,” Juma said.

Through art, Juma said, he can achieve some peace of mind.

“As I meditate on the piece, I feel myself relax and achieve some measure of healing,” he said. “Art is a sanctuary enabling me to transcend unhappy events and find solace amidst my most distressing thoughts.”

Though Juma has lived in Virginia for 17 years, his art often is inspired by memories of the Uyghur homeland he fears he will never see again. He dreams of cave paintings in ancient Buddhist grottoes and sometimes searches Google Earth for satellite images of his village and Opal Township on the edge of the vast Taklamakan.

Part of Mamatjan Juma’s “Land of No Return” series, this painting was inspired by aerial photographs of the vast Taklamakan Desert, which occupies the southern half of his seemingly limitless homeland, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Image courtesy of Mamatjan Juma.

Pondering questions of existence and being, Juma pores over images of the planets and the stars that he then tries to capture on canvas, in collages, using oils, acrylics, and ink.

“The universe is vast and limitless, we are smaller than a particle of dust,” Juma said. “With that I can imagine somewhere untouched by human errors and ruined by human greed. It frees me from the shackles of hatred. I explore the essence of these places as a way to capture my memories, dreams, and layers of experience in two-dimensional form.”

Juma said art helps him persevere through the grim reality of his work at RFA to expose the CCP’s oppression of his people.

“If I stop, or we give up doing this work, then the CCP will have won,” he said. “We must not stop telling the truth of what is happening in my homeland. Exposing the Chinese government’s atrocities makes our lives worth living.”

“One day, we’ll look back and people will see that at least we tried. I don’t want to have done nothing and then feel defeated and guilty at the end,” he said. “It is a good feeling to be a voice for the voiceless.”

Letting go

Still in the process of shedding the ideological teaching that weighed his art down at the start, Juma now enjoys painting for the sake of it, “With no pre-thinking, without ideology; just something beautiful.”

Nonetheless, Juma would like to feel that one day his art, not just his reporting, will give voice to what is happening in Xinjiang.

“Each painting speaks to me in its own language, guiding my choice of color, stroke, and composition. Sometimes a painting comes together as a vision of beauty almost on its own, and my job is to complete it with a simple dot or line,” he said. “Other times, I must search for the story’s conclusion myself.”

“As human beings we are capable of creating beauty and love, not simply atrocities and killing each other,” he said.

This painting of Juma’s, called “Random,” was inspired by his 12-year-old daughter, Sherin. Image courtesy of Mamatjan Juma.

He is inspired by his 12-year-old daughter Sherin’s direct approach to art.

“Without thinking, she just covers the whole surface immediately,” he said. “I sometimes just stare at a canvas and have no idea where to start, but recently have started following her example. I’ve started trying to do something without even thinking. Without any ideology. Just doing the art.”