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In 2001, a show of works by Chinese painter, writer and poet Mu Xin (1927-2011), who was born Sun Pu, was held at the Yale University Art Gallery in the United States, the only one in his lifetime, displaying 33 pieces of landscape paintings — all were donated to the gallery — along with manuscripts produced when he was incarcerated in the 1970s.

The show is now in an art museum named after him in his hometown.

The Mu Xin Art Museum in Wuzhen, East China’s Zhejiang province, now owns the bulk of Mu Xin’s paintings and manuscripts.

Before Mu Xin’s US show, he had already given the paintings and manuscripts a title: Tower Within A Tower.

The first tower refers to the Tower of London — once used as a prison — as a reference to his situation when he was jailed during the “cultural revolution” (1966-76), while the latter refers to an “ivory tower” he built for himself.

Mu Xin produced the 33 small-scale landscape paintings from 1976 to 1979, a time when he was sent to labor in a factory in Shanghai. He was also imprisoned for more than a year during the “cultural revolution” cast as a rightist.

“I was by day a slave and by night a prince,” he once said of the time when creating the series of landscape paintings.

For three years, Mu Xin drew the curtains of his house and painted secretly everyday after work.

These paintings were applauded as a unique synthesis of traditional Chinese paintings and Western styles when displayed at Yale.

The show also traveled to the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, Honolulu Academy of Arts and Asia Society in New York.

All of them were bought by American collector Robert Rosenkranz in 1995 and donated to Yale in 2001.

Rosenkranz in his preface to the show said: “It is clear that Mu Xin risked his life to produce both The Prison Notes and the landscape paintings. When I asked him why he took this chance, he replied that he would be risking his life to not produce them. And so he would have been, for his life is so much a life of the mind.”

Meanwhile, due to logistical reasons, the landscape paintings displayed at the Mu Xin Art Museum are copies authorized by the Yale University Art Gallery, says Xu Bo, who works in the office of the director of the Mu Xin Art Museum.

However, all the notes from his time in prison on display are originals.

The 66 pages of paper were intended to be used by prisoners to write “self-criticism’’.

In the notes, Mu Xin “converses” with Western masters like William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy and Frederic Chopin.

Speaking about the notes, Xu says: “He didn’t feel lonely in prison. He felt he was with those masters. The words he wrote were a way for him to express his own emotions.”

When the manuscripts were first revealed to the public in the US, Mu Xin told Tong Ming, a professor from California State University, that he could not recognize them.

The writings were on both sides of the paper, and there were more than 10,000 characters on each A4-size paper.

Mu Xin also said that he did not want the notes to be interpreted since it was a way of surviving.

So, Xu says: “We respect the artist’s wish not to interpret it or publish it. In history, many intellectuals wrote in prison as a way of ‘spiritual salvation’.”

Mu Xin moved to the US in 1982. And though he struggled to live by working at antique stores, he never stopped writing and painting, says Chen Danqing, who met Mu Xin in New York.

It was only from 1984 when his articles were published in Taiwan that Mu Xin could make a decent living, and after that he wrote diligently, up to more than 10,000 words per day.

Zhan Hongzhi, an editor in Taiwan who published Mu Xin’s articles, recalled that when he first met Mu Xin in New York in the 1980s, he was impressed by the artist’s poise and humor, though he was in dire straits.

“I found no trace of suffering on his face,” says Zhan, adding that Mu Xin never spoke of the hard times.

Mu Xin kept a very low profile. And according to Chen, he did not show up at the opening ceremony of his solo show in the US.

He told Chen that it’s the art that matters, not the artist.

Art, literature and music were Mu Xin’s spiritual shelter, says Chen.

PHOTOS PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY Mu Xin’s landscape painting Dawn Mood in Bohai (left) is exhibited at a museum named after him in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province.