As a teenager, he became involved in left-wing politics, mainly because he worked as a bookkeeper for a railroad company and participated in labor strike activities.
[1] At the age of nineteen, Jiang began taking classes at the White Swan Western Painting Club in Shanghai.
In 1931, Jiang joined a group of protesting students and launched the Shanghai Eighteen Art Society Research Center.
He put Jiang and the members of the "Eighteen Art Society in charge of selecting students for the workshop on woodcut technique in 1931 that Lu Xun organized in Shanghai.
Shortly after Jiang joined the Communist Party, he was arrested along with eleven other members of the Eighteen Art Society by the Nationalist Government.
[1] When the Japanese attacked Shanghai in 1937, Jiang fled to the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army in Yan'an.
In this particular position, he was in charge of the art factory responsible for producing nianhua prints for Red Army propaganda.
The Yan'an conception of art education required students to learn Marxist and Mao Zedong thought.
The Russian system of art education emphasized drawing from life and from plaster casts of sculpture, and acquiring the skills needed to paint with oils and watercolors.
The painting depicts a group of flag-warning demonstrators fleeing from the gunfire of armed Nationalist troops.
It conveyed two children holding up a writing brush and abacus, while squash and grain are growing at their feet.