This article seeks the origin of the red sun (hong taiyang in Chinese), a motif that Chinese painter Fu Baoshi used in his works during the 1950s and 1960s. A similar motif can be found in some works made by Japanese painters during the 1920s and 1930s, though there is no definitive evidence that Fu learned directly from them. Rather, I argue that Fu and his Japanese counterparts drew from an East Asian tradition for depicting national idols that was exemplified in Tianbao jiuru, a theme which had been shared between China and Japan for a long time.
Yijie Chen (Wed,) studied this question.