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Jin Shangyi was born in 1937 in Jiaozuo, Henan, then ocuppied by the Japanese. He was not good at studies, but liked coping drawings from picture-story books such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants and Investiture of the Gods. In 1949, the communists took control of Beijing, Jin took the exam to enter National Peking Art School, predecessor of today's China Central Academy of Fine Arts, although he never had formal training for drawings. At that year he met Xu Beihong, then the president of the art school, the only time in his life. But Xu was not satisfied with Jin's drawings.

In 1950, a student at CAFA should draw 40 sketches one year. The school proposed that art should serve the workers, peasants and soldiers, so a "Red May" movement started. Jin drawed a flag rising scene from the Founding Ceremony, a drawing he later considered as confusing. In grade two they learned Lianhuanhua, Jin drawed a series of strip pictures about Three-anti and Five-anti Campaigns. During that summer he laboured at a cocomotive works factory, where he made his first oil painting, a portrait of Mao Zedong. In the summer of 1951, he went to Tianjin, participating in arrangement for a material communication exhibition. There he learned about traditional Chinese medicines, and watched a Peking opera for the first time.