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During China's Cultural Revolution, He Qi and Zhang Yimou, the artist who produced the spectacle of the 2008 Olympics opening and closing ceremonies, both found safety as Communist propagandists—He Qi, for Mao; Zhang, for the Bloodshedding Spears, a group of teenage revolutionaries.

Both sought safety and peace. Eventually, Zhang found solace in Confucian and Buddhist history. He Qi's path led to Christ.

He Qi says his art is designed "to give peaceful feelings" and to reveal the kindness and gentleness of God.

But his art can also have an edge. It's not only a counterpoint to the violence of the Cultural Revolution; it's also a response to debates in the Chinese church.

He Qi came to OMSC partly because of what he feels is the corrupting influence of money in China. He Qi advocates "art for the resurrected church"—church design based on Chinese, not European, tradition. He sharply disagrees with the Three-Self church hierarchy, who prefer massive, neo-Gothic churches they think could more easily raise money and enhance their power in China.

At OMSC, he discovered that the American missionaries used traditional Chinese architectural styles to build universities and churches in China. He Qi says, "My time at OMSC has helped strengthen me to keep a Chinese indigenous style for my art works—much like Zhang Yimou insisted on using at the Beijing Olympics."

His stay at OMSC allowed him to reflect and talk with other Christian artists, free from political discord and anger. The result, he says, is that he has a new humility and is more able to imitate Jesus' servanthood in times of conflict.

Last summer, He Qi went back to China to "wash the feet of his critics" in order to achieve peace in the church. Then he returned to the U.S. to raise funds for the Sichuan earthquake victims, bringing together Chinese and American Christians.

In Indonesia, the young artist Wisnu Sasongko grew up in simmering ethnic and religious discord. Muslim terrorists have hacked and bombed their way through the country, so that Christian churches make bomb pits in which suspicious packages can be tossed. Natural disasters, especially the 2005 tsunami, led him to despair. But such terrors ultimately brought him closer to Christ and turned his art into a signpost that pointed the way out of strife.

After he became a believer in 1997, Sasongko discovered something in the pain in his world—a sublime hope appearing even in the blackest spots of life. Consequently, he had a new vision: "God called me to share the spirit of love through art."

He explored Christian art and terror in OMSC's one-bedroom, one-studio apartment in 2004-2005. Sasongko does not paint Bible stories or use bright primary colors, as He Qi does. "I don't want to paint the biblical stories, because I've never seen them," Sasongko says. "I've never touched them. … As an artist, I can only imagine Jesus."

Sasongko's poignant tsunami painting, In Memoriam, is a Christian response to an Indonesian religious tradition where people sing into the sea, hoping to calm the souls of drowned loved ones. Next to it he wrote, "Prayers are the only things" he could offer in the face "of the waves of the souls that have been shattered in bitterness."

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November 2008, Vol. 52, No. 11