“History is not meant to be forgotten, but to teach people kindness.” With this conviction, Russian concept artist Marina Nechaeva is transforming family memories and collective trauma into vibrant works of art.
Nechaeva features in the second episode of CGTN’s docuseries “World War II: Remembered, Reimagined, Retold,” part of the Kenya-China partnership to commemorate World War II.
She shared her family’s story with host Huang Jiyuan, a story of survival against impossible odds.
Her great-great-grandmother lived through the Siege of Leningrad, enduring hunger, freezing winters, and bombardment. At times, survival meant scraping melted sugar from bomb-scorched ground. That resilience, coupled with luck, shaped the stories passed down to Nechaeva and now flow through her brush.
Now based in Guangzhou, China, Nechaeva sees concept art as more than creating characters.
“It is world-making,” she says, reflecting her yearning for peace while confronting history. The episode draws a connection between St. Petersburg and Guangzhou, cities scarred by WWII, underscoring how trauma transcends borders.
Leningrad suffered nearly 900 days of siege, where starvation and cold claimed more lives than bombs, while Guangzhou, from 1937 to 1938, endured relentless Japanese bombardment that killed thousands of civilians and left streets littered with devastation.
By weaving these histories together, the episode underscores how war trauma transcends borders, binding people in a shared legacy of suffering and resilience.
Marina’s relatives, like many survivors, seldom spoke about the horrors they endured. Silence became its own form of survival, an attempt to bury memories too painful to confront. Yet Marina insists on the importance of remembering.
Forgetting, she warns, risks distortion or erasure of the truth. To her, transmitting these stories is an act of kindness, a way of teaching future generations empathy and respect for other cultures.
Ultimately, it is less about war than about what comes after: The pursuit of peace, the responsibility of memory, and the hope that history’s darkest chapters can guide us toward compassion.
From St. Petersburg to Guangzhou, from blood-soaked streets to quiet studios, Marina’s journey illustrates how art can transform inherited trauma into a universal call for kindness. It reminds us that history is not distant. It lives within us, in our choices, and in the world we dare to imagine.
