Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  James C. Y. Watt, a Hong Kong–born Chinese scholar who works under Fong, dislikes confrontation. He had come to Taiwan to oversee the preparation of condition reports and the packing of artwork. Now he found himself in the middle of a scandal. At the public hearing in the Legislative Yuan, he was the first speaker. As he ascended to the podium, the lights of ten television cameras blinded him, and the protesters, who had packed the building, began screaming expletives as he tried to speak. “Shameless! Shameless! You’re crazy!” they heckled. He talked decorously about the Met’s commitment to cultural exchange. No one listened. When Watt stepped into the corridor, a reporter collided with a protester; they ended up in a fistfight from which Watt narrowly escaped. “I felt like I was stuck in an Ionesco play,” he said later.

  By this time, de Montebello said, the museum had “a war room in New York.” He and Fong and Emily K. Rafferty, the Met’s vice president for development, stayed up most nights phoning Taiwan for news. Judith Smith, Fong’s special assistant, consolidated information and wrote up detailed daily reports. The team drafted letters to government officials and protesters—anxious letters, conciliatory ones. Some were sent and some were not. Every day Fong planned and canceled a trip to Taiwan; it was ultimately decided that his presence there would only further inflame the protesters. De Montebello reached Chou Chuan, the New Party whip, “but she had no sympathy for our cause,” he said. “For her it had become a matter of politics, the drama to be magnified for political ends, like [former senator] Jesse Helms on Robert Mapplethorpe, a populist stance that distracted voters from the real issues of the country.”

  On Saturday, January 13, protesters gathered at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei. They had written slogans on strips of gauze and tied them around their foreheads, and they carried huge banners. The politicians present included one independent presidential candidate, who suggested that the leaders of the ruling KMT were exploiting their control of the Palace collection to reflect glory on themselves. Some young people, to whom democracy was new, seemed drunk on the power of protest. A surprising number of angry young men and women burning with Chinese nationalism had shown up. “We won’t grovel before the West,” said one. “We get the work forty days every three years, and you get it for a year? And we pay half the expenses of the show?”

  Aware of the growing anger, Fong declared in an open letter to the Ministry of Education that he would forfeit two of the top three paintings in the show, asking only for Guo Xi’s Early Spring because it was on the cover of the catalogue (which had already been printed). To Fong and Director Chin, all the fuss felt like politicized sentimentalism. “My grandmother or my maiden aunt would also say, to expose this is to destroy it,” Fong would later concede about the Palace collection. “But the time for such mawkishness is past.” The increasingly hostile Taiwanese press quoted him as saying, “quite arrogantly,” that he would cancel the show if more work were withdrawn. “It wasn’t a matter of my canceling,” Fong said, “but of there being no show with the cuts they’d proposed.”

  In the Met’s war room, de Montebello and the others “made lists of what we could not live without,” he said. “We were willing to accept a show that was quantitatively reduced, but not one that was typologically reduced. No single major category of objects could be missing. It was necessary that the show sustain its goal of presenting a transversal history of Chinese art, that we not be forced to eliminate the Tang, Song, or Yuan dynasties from our presentation, that the curatorial vision be left intact. But being too pious in this matter would not have been public spirited. It was important that we not in our disappointment cancel a remarkable show. One day I thought our chances were at sixty percent; the next day it was thirty percent.”

  The Met’s press office, which had been organizing expensive preview trips to Taiwan and printing color brochures, descended into hysteria. Interviews were forbidden and information was given so much spin as to become implausible. Attempts to control journalists could hardly have been more stringent during the Cultural Revolution than they were in January and February at the Met.

  At another protest, on January 17 back in Taipei, the rumors flew: the Metropolitan Museum would lock the Chinese treasures in its basement and send back cleverly made copies; President Clinton would give the art back to the mainland; the US Congress’s guarantee of protection for foreign cultural treasures was no more reliable than the diplomatic relationship with Taiwan that it had terminated in 1978. “Neither at the Met nor elsewhere in the West do you know how to treat work on paper or silk,” one protester told me. When a Chinese friend of mine countered that the Met’s studio for the conservation of Asian art operates at a much higher standard than the Palace’s, people screamed insults at him. “This work is much too sophisticated for you,” another protester said. “People in your country couldn’t understand or appreciate it. Sending it is just a waste.”

  The Ministry of Education formed a committee to investigate the whole fiasco. At a big rally on Thursday, January 18, demonstrators wrapped themselves in a petition with twenty thousand signatures that had been gathered in a single day at Kaohsiung University. Particular rage was directed against committee members associated with Fong—though it would have been difficult to form a qualified committee free of Fong-trained scholars. Fong was still being advised to stay in New York. “You can do nothing but wait,” he was told by a friend on the committee. “I hope there will still be a show to save by next week.”

  I was standing in the crowd outside the investigative committee’s first meeting when a television camera suddenly pointed at me. “I’m told you’ve actually met Wen Fong,” a journalist said. “Is he really as we understand him to be: greedy, arrogant, selfish, and mean?”

  By January 20, when I met with Chu Hui-liang, the new New Party legislator, she was expressing regret over the debacle: “I worried about sending Travelers amid Streams and Mountains—I thought they were being irresponsible. People need to know what a ‘restricted list’ actually means. But I didn’t intend that the whole show be destroyed.” Within the high walls of the Palace there was frustrated sadness. “What is wrong with these people?” asked the Palace Museum’s Chang Lin-sheng, who was handling the day-to-day trauma of the protests. I had had to sneak into her office, since she was avoiding interviews; she looked tired. “Don’t they have jobs? Don’t they have anything to do all day besides march up and down out there with inaccurate slogans?” The phone rang. She talked fast for forty-five minutes, her tone conciliatory and irritable. “Wen Fong,” she said when she hung up. “I told him I can’t help him anymore.” She picked up a copy of a popular magazine with Travelers amid Streams and Mountains on its cover. “I suppose it’s something that now everyone in the country has heard of Fan Kuan, when recently this population couldn’t be bothered to see our seventieth-anniversary exhibition. The truth is, we all worried about sending Fan Kuan. Maybe one or two others are best left here, as the Mona Lisa stays at the Louvre. But for the rest—people should see it. How can the people be so suspicious of us? Don’t they understand how much we love that work? We’re all fragile. Should we never leave home again?”

  Fong used a different analogy: “You don’t stop eating because you might choke.”

  The investigative committee and its subcommittees decided to reconsider every object, not just those on the restricted list, and protesters threatened legal action against the Palace Museum. De Montebello’s backdoor approaches and “corridor diplomacy” did not seem to be working. Neither he nor the director of the American Institute in Taiwan, our de facto “ambassador” there, was ever able to reach the minister of education. To those in power in Taiwan, the strong wishes of the Metropolitan Museum were of little interest, and the Met, realizing that posturing would not protect the show, lapsed into relative silence. But Fong remained confident: “The government has to be seen to be responsive to the people. So pieces would be withdrawn. But if the whole show is canceled, the government will appear
to be helpless in the hands of some hysterics. Such a display of weakness would run contrary to their interests.”

  Still, the Met’s situation was getting scary. The packing was already a week behind schedule, and the exhibition cases the museum had commissioned couldn’t be built because no one knew what would go in them. The reserved cargo space on planes had been forfeited. Acer had withdrawn its $1.5 million sponsorship, and now the protesters were trying to halt the Taiwanese government’s financing. The standard greeting in Taipei art circles was “What news from Wen today?” But it had become clear that there was nothing that Wen Fong or anyone else in the United States could do.

  Toward the end of January, reports of new Chinese threats to Taiwan pushed the art controversy off the front pages. On January 23, the committee announced a compromise that left all sides frustrated: twenty-three items, including several landmark pieces, were withdrawn, and nineteen other important works were restricted to forty days of display. Then the Met bravely decided to start packing without financial guarantees for one of the most expensive exhibitions in its history (although insurance and transportation costs were somewhat reduced by the exclusion of key priceless works). “We told the board of trustees we would be picking up the gap of $1.5 million left by the withdrawal of corporate sponsors,” said Rafferty. “We also said there was a possibility that the $3.1 million from Taiwan would not come through. It was a gamble—$4.6 million from our operating budget wouldn’t have closed down the museum, but it would have been devastating.” De Montebello asked wryly, “Whom should it make anxious to have the work here and the money not?” In the end, Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry came through.

  So Splendors of Imperial China will open at the Met after all, but without thirty-six of its crowning splendors. Sadder even than the absence of Early Spring or Travelers amid Streams and Mountains is that the elegant narrative coherence and balance of the planned exhibit has been substantially undermined. It is still, however, in many ways the greatest exhibition of Chinese art ever staged in the West, and the work will be displayed and lighted a thousand times better than it has ever been at the Palace. It may also be the last show of its kind: given the frenzied protectionist sentiment during January’s fracas, much of this work is unlikely to leave Taiwan ever again.

  * * *

  The unrest in Taiwan was strange for two reasons. First, Taiwan is hardly anti-American. An enormous number of Taiwanese travel to, and study in, the United States. Much of the population speaks English, and the occasional bar fight about Fan Kuan notwithstanding, as an American you tend to feel at home in Taiwan more easily than in almost any other East Asian country. Seven of Taiwan’s seventeen cabinet members hold PhDs from American universities. Taiwan is the world’s third-largest purchaser of American armaments, our eighth most important trading partner. “The educated population here is as much American as anything else,” a young artist told me.

  The second reason the protests were so surprising is more subtle and important. Taiwan has been in turmoil for a long time, and particularly in the past five years, about whether or not it is China. The “one China” policy is the most pressing political issue of the day: Will Taiwan at some point be reunited with the mainland—by force or otherwise—or will it eventually declare independence? The official stance of mainland Communists and Taiwan’s KMT is that Taiwan is a province of China; both Taipei and Beijing claim to be valid rulers of China. To the casual Western observer, the situation seems ludicrous. Taiwan has a separate economy, political system, and educational system; citizens carry Taiwanese passports. But Chinese nationalism is deep-seated. Some Taiwanese like to feel that they are part of a great nation and not, as one essayist wrote, “citizens of another piddling Southeast Asian provincial hole-in-the-wall country.” To many Taiwanese with close ties to the mainland, declaring independence would be like cutting off their own arms.

  Not that the mainland will countenance independence. Since President Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan visited the United States in June to deliver a speech at Cornell, China has conducted ever-grander “standard military exercises” on the shores opposite Taiwan and in the sea off the island’s northern coast. So Taiwan, under constant threat from the mainland, must toady both across the strait and to the West. That the United States withdrew its ambassador in 1978 still provokes rage. There’s Taiwan—a peaceful democracy that the United States doesn’t recognize because we do recognize another country with a terrible human rights record, with which we do less than half as much trade, and which snubs us in its foreign and domestic policies.

  Taiwan’s identity struggle fed the Palace protests. During the seventieth-anniversary celebrations, I encountered more people in Taipei art circles who wanted to disavow the Palace than who praised it. Though the Palace has always attracted tourists, most locals have avoided it—because of its forbidding air, because Taiwan has long been indifferent to art, and because the museum is, according to many Taiwan intellectuals, “alienatingly Chinese.”

  A powerful ethnic tension exists within Taiwan today between the “mainlanders” (also called the “1949ers”), who came over with Chiang and their progeny, about 20 percent of the population, and the “Taiwanese,” whose forebears settled there earlier. This ethnic tension is perplexing inasmuch as both groups are Han Chinese, all tracing their roots back to the mainland; the indigenous aboriginal population is tiny. But Chiang’s forces arrived with the air of conquerors, and from 1949 until the end of the brutal “Chiang dynasty” in 1987, the mainlanders of the KMT ruled, and the ethnically Taiwanese, despite controlling much land and wealth, were treated as an underclass.

  Chiang’s government, still claiming to rule mainland China, and filling its legislature with representatives from every mainland district, was corrupt. But over the past nine years, the country has transformed itself with remarkable fluidity into a functional democracy with a highly educated population (the literacy rate is more than 90 percent, which in a character-written language is astonishing), enormous national wealth (including one of the largest per capita cash reserves in the world), and open elections. The legislature no longer professes to represent all of China.

  “The Palace Museum is a nice place, but it’s too Chinese and insufficiently Taiwanese,” said Chen Shih-meng, deputy mayor of Taipei and former secretary general of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The DPP, one of two major opposition parties, stands overtly for independence. “Whether Chiang Kai-shek took that material rightfully or wrongfully, I don’t know, but we need a Taiwanese place to complement the Palace Museum. We deserve to understand ourselves as Taiwanese. I was taught that I was a part of a Chinese culture to which I never truly belonged. We must raise the consciousness of our next generation. We must help them toward cultural freedom from the mainland.” Then, as is typical given the tense politics of Taiwan, Chen fused the topic at hand with the more essential matter of independence: “The leadership here says that to avoid irritating the mainland, they must speak with creative vagueness. This vagueness, meant to confuse Beijing, confuses the people of Taiwan more than it does the enemy. If China uses military force, we will counterattack. We could destroy their economic zones incredibly fast. We will not win by pitching threats against Chinese military experts, but if we use our military capacities to sow fear among the economists, we can divide that leadership to triumph. We must make our plans clear to the mainland. Developing a native cultural awareness is a part of this policy. The Palace Museum does not enable such objectives.”

  Chang Lin-sheng of the Palace Museum said of those who would advocate an autonomous Taiwanese art, “These are rootless people. Did you know that the aboriginal tribes the localists love so much have no word in their language for art?” She paused dramatically. “Democracy is not good for art.” She wrung her hands and laughed. “Communism is worse. Capitalism is a good approximation of an imperial system and is very good for art. There is no Taiwanese culture. It’s not like the racial problem in the US—we are all Han people, a
nd our culture was at its greatest in imperial courts.” The Palace Museum, she insisted, was the best answer to the Taiwanese search for dignity.

  * * *

  The greatest landscapes of the Song dynasty will not be on view in Splendors of Imperial China, but masterpieces of calligraphy and later painting will be. It is fashionable to note the failure of Western medicine to reconcile the mind-body split, and to look to the East for holistic cures. The Western division of word and image, sundering literary and artistic history, is no less troubling a split. It does not exist in China, where the character is at once a verbal representation and a visual language, and where the components of a painting are almost as iconic as literary vocabulary. Calligraphy is still the hardest of the Chinese arts for most Westerners to grasp: language is not metaphor but object, and what is signified is to some extent the process of signification. The writing and the content are harder to dissever than the dancer from the dance. It can be epistolary and spontaneous, with an ink trace that is entirely expressive, or it can be formal and ritualistic.

  Visitors to the Met will see Huaisu’s Autobiographical Essay, a self-congratulatory drunken celebration of cursive forms, dated 777. In it, Huaisu explains that he writes best when inebriated. As he grows drunker, the text becomes less literary, but the quality of the calligraphy is exalted. The characters flow into one another as the brush charges forward, making fluid patterns of line—rhythmic, pulsing, almost erotic. Zhao Mengjian, writing in the thirteenth century, said that Huaisu “grasps his pen grandly like a frightened snake, rings it about roundly, and yet is very strangely spare.” Huaisu himself wrote, “Good calligraphy resembles a flock of birds darting out of the trees, or startled snakes scurrying into the grass, or cracks bursting in a shattered wall.”