Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  The performance artist Liu Anping, branded as a leader of the Hangzhou democracy demonstrations, was imprisoned for a year. “No one at Tiananmen understood or was interested in the principle of free elections,” he said. “To be free in how and where we live, what we do—that’s what we really want. We’d like an end to corruption and to be able to make whatever art we like. But China is too big and too difficult to manage for free elections. We are a xenophobic culture. We are nostalgic for the Cultural Revolution because it was so Chinese. We could never accept Western-style democracy—simply because it is Western. We must arrive at a Chinese solution, and the Chinese solution is never as free as free elections. Nor would we want it to be.”

  Zhang Peili, who risked being imprisoned to hang his post-Tiananmen victim painting in Hangzhou, confirmed this view: “Idealism in the hands of an artist is a splendid thing, so we keep it up; it is our right as artists. But idealism in the hands of a leader is terrible.” The rhetoric of democracy is powerful in some circles in China, but not in literal terms. “You can’t run a country on the basis of a billion opinions,” said Zhang. “It would be disastrous, and far more people would be killed than are killed now.”

  At twenty-six, Feng Mengbo is among the youngest of the circle around Lao Li and has an unusually sharp understanding of the relation between Eastern and Western dynamics. Chinese kids in video arcades play Western games in which they take the part of good guys trying to kill off evil. Feng has suggested that this is not far from the behavior of young people in the Cultural Revolution, who similarly took a stance as good, blew up anyone they thought was bad, and got lots of points for doing so. He has done static paintings indicative of a series of video games he would like to produce, based on Mao’s Revolutionary Model Operas. Another series shows a video game featuring Mao in his customary pose, his right hand extended in a wave of benediction. Feng Mengbo has called the game “ ‘Taxi, taxi,’ says Mao Zedong,” playing both with Mao’s pose and with the Chinese habit of quoting every word of Mao’s as though it contained ultimate truth. In the game, Mao stands by the side of the road with his hand held up while taxis speed past. Mao loses every time because none of the taxis ever stops for him. In the eyes of many Chinese, the Cultural Revolution was like a game, and the new interaction with the West is another version of the same game, and perhaps a less interesting one.

  Most of the artists in the Chinese avant-garde are below the age of forty, and so their relationship to the events of the late sixties and early seventies is passive; they were aware of what happened, but insofar as they participated, they did so without understanding these events. Among the older generation, the avant-garde movement was smaller and more dangerous; almost all its artists have emigrated. Yang Yiping, the sole artist in the Stars group still in China, was the son of a well-placed party member, and when the Cultural Revolution came, he got a position in the army, the safest place to be. Yang stayed in Beijing, doing propaganda paintings for the military and discussing ideology with friends until he recognized the disastrous side of the Cultural Revolution and joined the Democracy Wall movement in 1978.

  His current paintings are enormous black-and-white images of young people, their faces suffused with idealism, walking out of the canvas toward the viewer. They are set in Tiananmen Square, and Mao’s portrait at the gate of the Forbidden City is always at the center of the picture. These achingly sad paintings, the color and mood of faded snapshots, bear witness to a youthful clarity of purpose that seems, in retrospect, almost unimaginable. I stood in Yang’s studio and looked for a long time at those shining, almost implausible faces rising above the collars of their Mao suits; then, turning away, I saw a small black-and-white photograph—a young Yang Yiping, wonderfully dashing in his army uniform. I saw in those eyes, too, the unthinking self-assurance of a young person ready to save the world. “I believed in it all so ardently,” he said. “And then there was the Democracy Wall, and the Stars.” We stood looking at his paintings. “That was my youth. I didn’t understand what I was doing. Now I’m sorry that I did it—but how happy I was then! I couldn’t give it up, nor would I.”

  Jiang Wen, thirty, China’s leading young actor, is directing for the first time. He has chosen to adapt Fierce Animals, one of the bestselling novels in China last year, which is set during the Cultural Revolution. I talked to Jiang Wen on location at a school where he had mixed professional actors with enrolled students. To give the students the feeling of the era, he had taken them for “indoctrination programs” in the countryside. It was spooky going from the classroom on the right side of the hall, which has been converted for the film, where everyone wore matching trousers and cloth shoes and the picture of Mao reigned on high, to the classroom on the left side of the hall, where school was in ordinary session, and the kids wore track suits and spoke in or out of turn. Echoing a sentiment that I heard many times, Jiang said, “People in the West forget that that era was a lot of fun. Life was very easy. No one worked; no one studied. If you were a member of the Red Guards, you arrived in villages and everyone came out to greet you and everyone sang revolutionary songs together. The Cultural Revolution was like a big rock-and-roll concert, with Mao as the biggest rocker and every other Chinese person his fan. I want to portray a passion that has been lost.” He was not blind to lives sacrificed at that time, but neither did he think they were the whole story, any more than romantic war poetry and war movies in the West erase the blood lost in other fights.

  I had dinner at the apartment of Wu Wenguang, a filmmaker who recently completed a documentary called My Life as a Red Guard. He found five men who had once been Red Guards, interviewed each of them at great length, then edited the footage to show the curious mix of nostalgia and shame and pride and anger that these men felt about their own history. It was a good dinner, with an interesting assortment of guests, including the Cynical Realist painter Zhao Bandi; a director who had just finished doing the first productions of Sam Shepard in Beijing and would soon open his adaptation of Catch-22; Ni Haifeng; and various others. I asked Wu Wenguang whether he had felt disdain or horror at the role those Red Guards had played in the murderous history of their era. “Look around this table,” he said. “We’re all at the cutting edge of new thought in China. We’re the avant-garde, the ones who are pushing toward the next wave, believers in democracy, helping to build China into a better society.” I nodded. “How can we feel disdain or horror? If we’d been born twenty years earlier, we would have been Red Guards, every one of us.”

  Old-Timers

  In Shanghai, I visited the great scholar Zhu Qizhan, who, at 102, is widely regarded as China’s greatest traditionalist brush-and-ink painter. “In my youth,” he said, “I studied oil painting also, and it touched and influenced my work, especially the strong colors. I would say of the West that Chinese artists can use it, but for Chinese purposes. A Chinese man can ignore Western art, but he cannot ignore Chinese art. And if he sets out to mix up both forms and both kinds of meaning, he will likely be neither fish nor fowl.”

  The Chinese painting tradition is based on the principle of escape, designed to raise the viewer’s soul to new heights. Perhaps the greatest difference between Chinese traditional painting—called guohua—and avant-garde art is that traditional painting takes you away from your problems, while avant-garde work forces you to look at them. Zhu Qizhan’s eloquent and remarkable pictures command the respect of younger artists, but demonstrate how much a departure, both in form and in meaning, the work of the avant-garde represents.

  The vogue for realism began in China in 1919, and it thrives today. The work of the most prominent realist, Chen Yifei, is by Western standards too hackneyed for greeting cards. Chen has emigrated to the United States, but the meticulous craftsmanship of his paintings of young girls in turtleneck sweaters playing the flute still exerts its powerful fascination, primarily on Asians; in Hong Kong, his work can fetch $250,000.

  I went to see Yang Feiyun, a portraitist of Chen’s sc
hool. His women, without flutes, have the photographic sharpness and plastic smoothness to which Chinese academic training aspires. “I was influenced most by Botticelli, Dürer, and Leonardo,” Yang said. “Maybe realism was too good for too long in the West, and artists grew tired of it. I cannot accept the Western way of rejecting the past, or even of rejecting your own past, of starting anew all the time. The pursuit of perfection is more important than choosing many ways. People have said that art has no limit, but this is true only when art stays in its own hemisphere. When West and East meet, art does have limits.”

  Why Gilbert & George?

  In recent years, China has been increasingly open to exhibitions from the West, which are accepted so long as the West pays for them. For about $25,000, you can take the upstairs rooms in the National Art Gallery for a month and, subject to certain approvals, you can hang whatever you like. Since Robert Rauschenberg broke the ice in 1985, several one-man shows have been sent by obscure artists with sponsorship from their own governments, along with a few international student projects and a big Rodin exhibition, which opened in June.

  Gilbert & George, British avant-garde artists, have made a point of exhibiting their enormous, brightly colored, highly politicized photomontages internationally. Their Moscow show from 1990 is still discussed in Russian artistic circles. That exhibition was organized by a savvy and enterprising Englishman named James Birch; when he said to Gilbert & George, “Where next?”—they said, “China!”

  By the time of the Moscow show, Russia was in the throes of glasnost, and the decision to show art that, even in the West, has provoked hostile comment for its cultural, political, and sexual radicalism—some of it highly homoerotic—fit with a general agenda of “nothing’s too extreme for us.” In China, many things are considered too extreme, and the decision of the Chinese government to host an exhibition of Gilbert & George seems at first glance to be startling. Gilbert & George’s last major exhibition was called New Democratic Pictures, and though this title was not used in China, the meaning of the work was quite clear to anyone literate in the language of contemporary Western art.

  Though Chinese officials were won over in part by Birch’s enthusiasm, economics carried the day. Not only did Gilbert & George and their London dealer, Anthony d’Offay, rent the gallery, but they also promised to bring Westerners for the opening, to stage banquets and television presentations, and to pump money into the local economy. According to one participant in the exhibition, the total bill ran close to ₤1 million. Further, the government was naïve about these images. “You don’t imagine,” said Lao Li in an amused voice, “that these officials understand what this work is about? It’s famous from the West, and that’s as much as they know.” Then, the Chinese needed to appear open before the Olympic Games site was chosen. Additionally, with a “what the West says doesn’t affect us” mentality, the Chinese knew that by controlling what happened at the opening they could control the media image of Gilbert & George.

  The exhibition was opened with high pomp on September 3 by the British ambassador and the Chinese minister of culture. About 150 people had come from the West; myriad high Chinese officials flocked to the event. Gilbert & George felt that the flowers arranged for the opening were insufficiently opulent, and they went out themselves and bought gorgeous arrangements that bedecked the exhibition hall—to the immense amusement of the Chinese, who knew, as Gilbert & George did not, that these were funerary bouquets. Gilbert & George made a point not only of hanging the exhibition but also of speaking at the opening and at the seven or eight banquets associated with it. They gave interviews to the press and to television. It should be noted that very little of what they said to the press was printed; that the show had, within China, relatively modest publicity; and that the speeches they made were substantially altered and toned down even in simultaneous translation at the events.

  The British got in touch with Lao Li, who was given invitations to distribute to artists, but the Chinese avant-garde found the jet-set glamour of the opening obnoxious, imperialist, and self-aggrandizing. They deplored the tolerant enthusiasm with which Gilbert & George basked in the attention of officials. At the opening banquet, someone looked at them at the head table and described them as “a pair of blockheads among the rotten eggs.” In the eyes of the Chinese, the opening almost defeated the meaning of the work. It had the same aura of hypocrisy that might be noted if Mother Teresa came on a goodwill mission and spent her whole visit with Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley. The Chinese officials knew that by arranging the opening as they did, they could castrate the work in the eyes of the radical element in their own society.

  Most Chinese artists have seen Western contemporary work primarily in books. In the painter Ding Yi’s studio, I leafed through a volume called Western Modern Art, which included one of Gilbert & George’s monumental color photomontages, which are often twenty feet long or high, reproduced as a scratchy black-and-white plate two inches square. During their tour, Gilbert & George said repeatedly, “Our art fights for love and tolerance and the universal elaboration of the individual. Each of our pictures is a visual love letter from ourselves to the viewer.” What higher message could there now be for Western art in China? “I think,” Lao Li said, “that what is important in this work will get through to the people who are interested in understanding it.” The opening was only like bad static.

  East Meets West

  “The West tends to equate civilization, modernization, and westernization,” Zhang Peili said. “But it is only in this modern period that the West has arrived at new ways before China has. In past eras, we were the more advanced civilization.” The Chinese hate the Western habit of taking credit for industrialization. “You look at a factory and you say that it’s Western,” Bo Xiaobo, a Shanghai journalist, said to me. “But we’ve had factories here for a hundred years. Westerners started using gunpowder immediately after they found it in this country, but no one speaks of the American Revolution or the First World War as Chinese. If someone gets in a car and drives or goes to a factory and works, that’s not Western life; it’s just modern life.”

  The West also tends to take credit for all art that is not brush painting. Today, the Chinese employ visual language that was developed in the West. But paper originally came from Asia, and all works on paper are not deemed Asian. Why should every oil painting be called Western? Why is it that the West feels it owns conceptualism, installation, modernism, and abstraction? The Hong Kong dealer Alice King, who shows work that uses guohua styles in modern ways, asks, “What is a Chinese painting? Is it any painting made by someone from China? Any painting made by someone who is ethnically Chinese? Or is it a stylistic question? Can a Westerner make a Chinese painting if he uses rice paper and a brush?” Westerners sometimes dismiss Chinese work as derivative. “We must as artists solve the problems of China, even if they’re boring for the West,” said the painter Wang Yin, one of the artists of the Yuanmingyuan village.

  Li Xianting pointed out that until Western literature reached China during the Qing dynasty, a great gap existed between Chinese written and spoken language: “Classical Chinese is a very vague, open-ended language in which much of the content is left to the reader to determine. Only when Chinese scholars read foreign books did they imagine that there could be a direct correlation between the written and the spoken word. After that, our written language took on this Western precision. But it was still the Chinese language; the subjects were still Chinese. If I hand you a recent Chinese novel, you will not say, ‘But this is in English!’ No more should you say that of our art.” One could say much the same thing of Chinese economic and social reform, for which the West, to the intense irritation of the Chinese, seems far too often to claim responsibility. “Now it’s a one-way situation,” the Shanghai New Revolutionaries said, “with every Western thing and idea in China, and no Chinese ideas or things in the West. It must balance.”

  The extent of Western freedom—that natural corollary
of democracy—is a subject of constant discussion among the Chinese. Gu Wenda, who now lives in New York and, with Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing, is a leader of Chinese art abroad, told me that while his exhibitions in China had been closed down for “inappropriate political meaning, something about a code for political secrets,” he had found in New York that when he showed work made with traditional Chinese medicines, including a powder made from human placenta, the authorities once more closed down his work, saying something about abortion. For him as an artist, there wasn’t so much difference.

  Last year, Ni Haifeng won a German arts prize and lived for three months in Bonn, where he befriended local artists. One of them invited him to a potluck dinner and said, “We were hoping you’d make something Chinese.” So Ni Haifeng made a soup of which he was particularly fond. “I served it to everyone,” he told me, “and they all said they loved it. I tasted it last and realized at once that I had done something very wrong. The soup was terrible. At first, I thought everyone was just being nice to me, but people ate many bowls, and I finally understood that they all really liked it. But I felt guilty about having served them bad soup, and so a few weeks later I had everyone to my house, and I made the soup again. This time the soup was perfect. ‘Well,’ they said to me, ‘this is okay, but not nearly as good as last time.’ And they took very little of it.”

  The Chinese are amused by Westerners’ inability to understand their cultural standards. One evening in Hangzhou with Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, and other friends, we got onto the subject of two women from their school who were “like unsellable goods from an old department store.” Both had found happiness with Western boyfriends. Zhang and Geng described having dinner with the family of one of the boyfriends, whose mother kept whispering that she’d never met a girl “so beautiful.” “Our next big export,” they said, “will be the ugliest women in China. They can all marry attractive rich Americans.” Then they put me through a sort of quiz. “Look there,” they’d say. “One of those women is pretty and the other plain. Can you tell which is which?”