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In 1970, Shi Lu (1919–82) created a group of paintings while suffering from a schizophrenic condition; they were the first paintings he worked on after his imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution. These historical and pathological circumstances have formed a blind spot shifting the paintings outside the scope of art-historical analysis. This essay pulls them back into the context of artistic and intellectual discourse of Maoist China by reading the paintings and inscriptions not as notations of ‘madness’, but primarily as artistic statements. The paintings are not only expressions of psychological and political stress, but reflect a cosmopolitan worldview that is informed by the Soviet model and the artist's experience of travelling to India and Egypt, as well as cultural events and debates, and political conflicts. These multi-faceted images thus condense a broad scope of cultural and ideological discourses of Maoist China before and during the Cultural Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]