Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  Despite the insatiable appetite of Chinese consumers for Western products, the West, in the eyes of the Chinese, doesn’t really count. I had dinner one night with the wife of an artist. She said, “You know, my husband would be furious if I went out for supper with a Chinese man.”

  “But dinner with me doesn’t matter?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Of course not.”

  I was similarly struck by the availability of the International Herald Tribune, by the fact that many people get the BBC World Service, by the tolerance for Gilbert & George. At first, I supposed that this represented a loosening of ideological barriers; only later did I understand that imported Western ideas cannot really affect anyone, whereas something much slighter in a Chinese forum—a haircut, for instance—could trigger a revolution.

  China officially ended its isolationist policies in 1978, but the isolationist mentality lives on. “We were so cut off for so long,” Zhang Peili said, “it’s as though you are in a dark room and suddenly the curtains are opened. You cannot see the view because your eyes are still adjusting to the light.” The Shanghai artist and critic Xu Hong said, “People speak all the time of mixing Western and Eastern influences, as though it were like mixing red and blue ink to paint pictures in purple. They do not think of what it means to understand these cultures and to try to incorporate their different ways of thought.” Every artist I met explained why his work was really not as Western as it looked. “And how can it be Western?” asked Zhang Wei, a university teacher who lives in the village at Yuanmingyuan. “Of course, we have come of age in the era of the so-called open-door policy, but we all understand that it is at best a door-ajar policy. And we know that that door will never really stand open, that people will never be allowed to pass back and forth through it as they choose.”

  It is difficult for artists to cut themselves off completely from Chinese tradition. The abstract painter Ding Yi lives quietly in Shanghai, where he has produced large, beautifully colored canvases in which simple patterns are arranged over graphic spaces. He has recently started to produce these abstract paintings on bamboo and paper fans. “I needed to tie myself to the Chinese tradition,” he said. “And I wanted simultaneously to make this Western principle less frightening for Chinese people.”

  Other artists, meanwhile, are doing work with Chinese media and Western form. Lu Shengzhong studied folk art at the Central Academy in Beijing, and his specialty is paper cutting. Traditionally, a rural woman should be able to cook, sew, and cut paper; Lu Shengzhong tells of old women who, having lost all other facilities, can do nothing but cut paper and who express themselves with their elaborate narrative paper cuts. He is a master paper cutter and the author of several books on the subject. In his recent work, he has limited himself to the single form of the “universal man,” and he cuts it over and over in different sizes, always from red paper, to create enormous, mystical installations. Lao Li dismisses such work. Many Chinese find this mixing of peasant tradition and modernism almost unclean. They resent the West’s enthusiasm for material that looks so Chinese but is so connected to Western thought. It is as though Lu Shengzhong has prostituted himself and the culture, giving something to the West that they should not have, selling something off too cheap.

  A voice of nationalism emerges in the persistent, strong rejection of the West. The Chinese, competitive always, will take from the West whatever they can put to their own use. “Western culture reigns,” Lao Li said. “In a past era, Chinese culture was the highest. Right now, the West is in a state of decline and China in a state of ascendancy. Soon, we will cross paths.” Gu Wenda said simply, “If China had been the strongest after World War Two, artists of the West would use my language and not I, theirs.”

  The matter of China’s ruling the world is discussed as routinely in China as though it were already settled. The only matter for debate is when it will happen. Some think it will take only twenty years; some think it could take more than a century. Artists expect their international position to be paramount when China has risen above all other nations. “I am the guard of God and the voice of God,” the painter Ding Fang, author of terrifying Wagnerian mythological landscapes, told me. “I create a renaissance of the spirit and spiritual elevation. My work will last forever, as surely as the sun will go on rising; only the blind will not see it. With this work, China will return the spirit to the humans of the world.”

  A Dangerous Idea

  In the artists’ village at Yuanmingyuan, everyone calls Yan Zhengxue the mayor. At forty-nine, he is older than the others and has been in the village longer. Yan does not particularly look like an artist; he has short hair and ordinary clothes. His big ink paintings are decorative and traditional; his manner, unassuming.

  On July 2, Yan took bus line 332 from central Beijing to Yuanmingyuan. He tried to get off just as the conductor closed the door and a minor argument ensued. The conductor was aggressive and Yan was annoyed. At the next stop, the conductor deliberately closed the door just as Yan tried to exit, and so Yan was carried to the last stop, where the conductor accused him of having taken items from his money bag and summoned the police. The area is under the same jurisdiction as the village, so the three policemen who came all recognized Yan Zhengxue as the mayor. He recognized them as the policemen who had closed down an exhibition that artists in the village had tried to mount. Yan said he had never touched the conductor’s bag, but the police pulled him out of the bus, beat him, and threw him on the ground. Some local residents stood watching, too afraid to interfere.

  Then the police dragged him to the station and beat him with electric nightsticks. “I did not fight back,” Yan said, “but only kept asking, ‘Why are you beating me?’ But they didn’t stop.” We were talking in Yan’s small courtyard house in the village, and he produced photographs of himself burned, covered in blood and oozing blisters. “They hit my groin repeatedly.” He held out a particularly grotesque photo. “The electric sticks burn badly. They loosened my teeth, and they bruised my chest, back, bottom, head. They told me to kneel down, but I refused and then they beat me even harder. They said, ‘If you vomit, you will clean the floor with your tongue. We know who you are. Artist, who made you mayor of the village? You have no authority at all.’ ” Then they asked him to sign a confession stating that he had stolen from the bus conductor, and when he refused, they beat him unconscious and dumped him, at midnight, outside the station. At 4:00 a.m., a local resident wrapped him in a blanket and took him to a hospital, where he was treated for bodily injuries and loss of hearing.

  A few days later, one of the village artists recounted this story to Wang Jiaqi, a lawyer who ordinarily works in a Beijing real-estate firm. Wang immediately contacted Yan: “I told him this fierce event violated the law. Our central government does not like such petty police violence. I suggested that we bring a lawsuit.”

  Yan asked artists to sign a petition protesting his treatment. Fang Lijun was among the first of the Yuanmingyuan artists to sign; Lao Li kept a page of the petition at his home, asking those who visited to sign as well. Some Chinese journalists agreed to write about Yan’s lawsuit. As publicity spread, Yan got hundreds of letters from victims of similar violence. “Some asked how to bring a suit; others warned me that I would meet with a ‘sudden accident’ if I didn’t take care.”

  Wang submitted papers including photos, hospital documents, Yan’s statements, and copies of the petition to the courts. “They agreed to hear our case,” Wang told me. “We won’t get any money and the police won’t be punished, but if we can get them to admit that they committed a crime, that will be something. I avoid speaking publicly of human rights and democracy. It’s too dangerous. I work on individual cases in legal terms. The Chinese people have no idea of using law to protect themselves; they imagine that laws exist only to constrain them. We want to stand against that.”

  As I flipped through the snapshots in front of me, showing Yan Zhengxue’s injuries in horrible detail, I said,
“It’s funny that I am in China to write about art and about artists and that I have found myself listening to a story about civil rights and personal freedom. It almost belongs to another project.”

  “This is a story about art and about artists,” Yan said. “The police hate me because I am an artist, disobedient, free in what I do. They resent their lack of control over this village, these unregistered people living here without work units, without schedules, with Westerners wandering through. I was a natural target. In this country, you can seek money, have women, drink, and as long as you are registered in a unit, it’s okay. But to be an artist”—he gestured at his big ink scrolls—“this is a problem.”

  Wang nodded at this. “Mr. Yan is bringing this suit. He is continuing to disobey convention by pursuing the law. Because he is a strong individual, Mr. Yan was beaten badly, and as an individual he is not simply accepting this. Whether we win or lose, I hope we will give this idea to people, that they can protest, that they can find a way to stand up for what they believe, that they can live as human beings.”

  I thought again of Song Shuangsong’s haircut and I understood then why it had generated so much anger, and I saw in what terms it had been a success. I saw why even that trivial event was, in its way, more dangerous than a bomb. So long as art can assert its own danger, it succeeds. For this whole concept of individuality, this humanism of which Lao Li is the epitome, is something almost unknown in the People’s Republic. And if the idea were to penetrate to the vast population of that country, it would shift them toward self-determination. That would be the end of central government, of control, of Communism—it would be the end of China. With luck, this struggle between humanists and absolutists will never stop: for either side to win absolutely would be tragic. Injustice is terrible, but the end of China is also something that no one wants, neither Deng Xiaoping nor Lao Li and his circle.

  * * *

  Acceptance of Chinese contemporary art within the Western art world came more readily than acceptance of Soviet/Russian work. It has coincided with a rethinking of Western cultural history, in which what European and American cultures have exported to Asia is matched by what we have learned from Asia. Asian influence inheres only superficially in a taste for lacquer and porcelain; it resides more profoundly in philosophy. Minimalism and formalism are Asian ideas. Would Fluxus have been possible without Asian traditions celebrating temporality? Having ceased to disparage Asian contemporary art as plagiaristic of modernism, we must now reckon with the idea that modernism was in some ways plagiaristic of Asia. While Western artists learned a bit of technique from calligraphic brushwork, what they mostly took from character-based languages was the metaphoric richness of blurring the line between language and visual representation. Only lately have we acknowledged this debt.

  Contemporary art from China, so marginal to Western consciousness when I first encountered it, has since become pivotal to any conversation about contemporary art, and works by Chinese artists have reached astronomical prices. In 2007, the Cynical Realist Yue Minjun set a record for Chinese contemporary art with the $5.3 million sale of his painting Execution. It was soon surpassed when a picture by Zhang Xiaogang, whose paintings had sold in 2004 for about $45,000, sold in 2008 for $6.1 million. Zhang Xiaogang’s record was exceeded that same year when Zeng Fanzhi’s Mask Series 1996 No. 6 fetched $9.7 million; in 2013, his The Last Supper sold for $23.3 million.

  Lao Li calls much of this work Gaudy Art, a term he made up to characterize the shiny surface and slick appeal of work that demonstrates “the powerlessness of art to shake the pervasiveness of consumerism.” He has referred to it as “a self-ironic response to the spiritual vacuum and folly of modern-day China.” Apolitical cynicism abounds. Cao Fei, a prominent artist from Guangzhou, said, “Criticizing society, that’s the aesthetics of the last generation. When I started making art, I didn’t want to do political things. It’s all been expressed.” The painter Huang Rui said of the new generation, “They grew up during an economic period. They think economics influences their lives. They don’t realize politics can influence their lives even more.”

  The Yuanmingyuan artists’ village was shut down by authorities in 1993. Lao Li, Fang Lijun, and Yue Minjun were among the first to migrate to Songzhuang, a peasant village about twelve miles from central Beijing. Many others soon followed. Town government was pleased to have tax revenue from this influx, but artists soon became embroiled in land disputes with local residents. Other artists set up shop at 798, an abandoned electronic-switching factory in the northeast of Beijing. This became a mandatory stop for art tourists and the cafés and boutiques that follow artistic efflorescence worldwide soon developed. Li Wenzi, a Beijing dealer, said, “The Yuanmingyuan Artists’ Village was a haven for idealists, for troubled souls seeking freedom and peace. From the very beginning, these other villages have been driven by money.” The government was eager to exploit cultural tourism, but its promotion of these areas pushed up rents, and many artists were soon priced out of 798. The problem was less acute in more far-flung areas, and over four thousand artists now work in Songzhuang, which is only one among more than a hundred artist communities on the outskirts of Beijing.

  Lao Li is director of the Songzhuang Art Museum and the Li Xianting Film Fund, which for ten years organized the Beijing Independent Film Festival. In a 2010 interview, Fang Lijun stated, “Lao Li was like the sun in the sky, shining down on all of us.” In August 2014, authorities closed the festival the day before it was to open. More than a dozen police arrived to confiscate documents from the festival office; officers detained Lao Li and two collaborators, forcing them to sign papers assenting to the cancellation, then turned off the electricity at the festival venue. They later blockaded the space where the Li Xianting Film Fund had for many years offered a workshop for aspiring filmmakers, which now moved to a secret countryside location. The organizers were bewildered. “Our main goal is to open our students’ minds—to teach them new ways to think about life and cinema,” said Fan Rong, the festival’s executive director. “Nothing we want to do is against the party or the government.”

  After bringing his 1993 lawsuit over abuse at the hands of the police, Yan Zhengxue, the “mayor” of Yuanmingyuan, was sent to a reeducation labor camp for two years. He produced some hundred paintings of dark landscapes oozing blood under black suns, each divided by a central vertical line—the result of his attempt to conceal the true themes of his pictures by painting only half at a time. To get them out, he would stuff them into plastic bags, conceal them in his underwear, and then drop them into the vats of excrement that passed for camp lavatories; his children and friends would go there to retrieve them. He has been brought into police custody more than a dozen times since his release. In 2007, he was imprisoned for “subversion of state power.” He made no art during this two-year sentence. “I was tired of fighting,” he said. He attempted to hang himself.

  Transgender performance artist Ma Liuming was jailed in 1994 on charges of pornography. All performance art became illegal after Zhu Yu displayed a video of his performance allegedly eating a fetus in the 2000 Fuck Off show in Shanghai organized by Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi. Wang Peng, who grew up in a rural village but works in Beijing, knew nothing of the Tiananmen massacre until 2002, when he gained access to software that broke China’s Internet firewall. He abandoned abstract painting to work with bloodied surgical gloves retrieved from clinics where forced abortions take place. He said that learning of the massacre “made me want to rip open the most shocking and ugly side of society. It made me realize beauty is not what’s important, reality is.” Chen Guang was one of the soldiers at Tiananmen, and the memory of that horror informs his blood-soaked imagery. After he staged a private show at home in 2014, he was taken away by the police, who came to his humble apartment with four armed vehicles. In 2015, Shanghai artist Dai Jianyong was arrested for “creating a disturbance” after he sent friends a Photoshopped image that showed President Xi Jinping with a mus
tache and crinkled eyes; he faces five years in prison.

  Shipping crates of Zhao Zhao’s work were seized by authorities in 2012. After they were taken, he was told that he had to pay a fine of about $48,000, though he was charged with no crime. He would not get his work back in any case, but after he paid, he would be allowed to see it once before it was destroyed. He had no means to raise such a sum. Asked if he was afraid following this incident, he replied, “I don’t want to become cautious.”

  Wu Yuren was arrested in 2010 for protesting in Tiananmen Square against the government’s seizure of his studio and the studios of several other artists. Many important artists came to his trial, including Ai Weiwei. Wu was released in 2012. Shortly before the 2014 Chinese New Year, Wu Yuren was sent a leaked document. An official notification from the Beijing Domestic Security Department, it instructed officers to act against “the unsafe, suspect population throughout the city.” They were to keep such people away from central areas. The memo ended, “Stop the harmful influence caused by people gathering.” The anonymous sender added a note to Wu Yuren, almost a dare, saying, “If you post this, the government will come and grab you.” Wu Yuren posted the document on his WeChat channel and four hours later, after his post had been shared by many people on WeChat, he received a police invitation to “a cup of tea.” It was the middle of the night, but he headed out. On the way to the teahouse, Wu was confronted by four police officers and some additional heavies. At the police station, one of the officers said, “The New Year is coming up, and you’re going to be here. We’re not going to let you go home.” Wu replied evenly, “Actually, I’m cool with that. I haven’t prepared at all for the New Year’s celebration. I’m really behind schedule. This is a great excuse.” This time, insolence worked; he was released a half hour later. “My parents of course want me to leave the country or to stop criticizing the government,” he said. “It’s something all parents would want. I don’t want my own child to live in China, especially under the current circumstances. People of their generation all say that there’s nothing you as an individual can do, so stop trying, it’s not worth it.”