I went with the editor Chou Hai-sheng to see Shia Yan, one of the great old men of art in Taiwan, an oil painter whose work looks derivative and banal to the Western eye but whose retrospective at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum last year was a blockbuster. “An artist learning Western art has a plan to improve Chinese art with Western,” Shia Yan said. “This philosophy only damages the tradition and does not reconstruct it at all. Perhaps at best it is possible to bring together Chinese feeling and Western form.”
Another day we went to see Hsia I-fu, who paints landscapes in which only the trained Chinese eye can see corrupting traces of Western perspective and some nontraditional contrasts between wet and dry brushwork. “Western painting you go to when you are feeling quiet and it makes you excited,” he said. “Ink painting you visit when you are excited and it makes you calm. Ink painting is closer to religious experience: like a meditation, it purifies the mind. My work itself is not Chinese, not Taiwanese, but from the heart: for in our hearts here, what most of us really want is to be calm; and what you from the West want, and what these young avant-garde artists and DPP people want, I think, is to be excited.” He paused and looked around the room. “Elections; bombing raids; do we need art to excite us, too?”
* * *
Two years after I wrote this article, in 1998, the Taiwan Domestic Airport was closed down temporarily after missiles were fired by a citizen of mainland China who had arrived in Taipei just days earlier. Estimates range, but the official figure for the number of missiles involved in the incident stands at two hundred. Residents of northern Taipei were surprised but “not unduly alarmed,” according to one local report, by the flashes of intense light and the terrific noise. No injuries were reported. The closing of the airport had been negotiated in advance by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and the missiles had been fired by Cai Guo-Qiang, an artist then based in New York, in a performance for the opening of the Taiwan Biennial. His project, Golden Missile, was one of many radical works in an increasingly politicized approach to art in Taiwan.
TURKEY
* * *
Sailing to Byzantium
Travel + Leisure, July 1997
I was seriously depressed in 1996 and nearly unable to travel. But I had accepted an assignment—my first for Travel + Leisure—so I dragged myself off to the eastern Mediterranean coast. There I discovered a valuable truth: while exercise, medication, and psychotherapy are the most effective treatments for depression, a truly enchanting vacation can help, too. The Turkish coast was gorgeous; my traveling companions were delightful; the weather was impeccable; and I got better. I mentioned the experience in The Noonday Demon.
The ostensible purpose of the trip was to learn painting. On the first day, I said to Susannah that I couldn’t paint. “Nonsense,” she said. “Everyone can paint. You’ve never had proper instruction and I will change all that.” At the end of our first day, she said, “You’re right. You can’t paint. Perhaps you should try photography.”
* * *
Eleven amateur artists had signed up for the sailing adventure, and we were meant to learn painting. Every morning, we were out of our cradles within minutes of waking, endlessly rocking to the mild swell of the wine-dark eastern Mediterranean, the same sea first called “wine-dark” when nobler men dwelt on the earth and sang their warrior songs. Up on deck we would find bread and fresh butter, feta and olives, and cups of good strong Turkish coffee. The youngest of the crew served our meals. His name was Ibrahim, and he called us “sir” or “madam,” and he was always at one’s elbow just when one wanted honey or yogurt or Anatolian cherry preserves. Usually the sun was quite high by then, and the light soaked the air. Some people complained of having had too little sleep and too many of the captain’s special cocktails, but mostly there was only happiness that it was another day on the Arif Kaptan B. None of us minded getting up early, which, had you known us under other circumstances, you would hardly have believed. We hardly believed it.
After we had sated ourselves, the engine would start up or the sails would be hoisted, and we would journey along the contours of the land, following them as if they belonged to a lover’s body whose every curve we needed to know. Tom Johnson, managing director of Westminster Classic Tours, would tell us which of the old men on the piers were café owners in competition with one another, or about how new houses in traditional styles had been built “just there” (he would point) on foundations from the fourth century BC. Meanwhile, Andrew Hobson, an Oxford University classicist dedicated to preserving knowledge of the great early civilizations in a world divorced from its own origins, would tell us about events that were taking place when those foundations were laid. These shores seemed so busy with ancient history that they could hardly contain the present; when you looked at them, you saw their past. We talked about this as we smoked Turkish cigarettes and finished our coffee, reclined on pillows, rubbed sunscreen on one another’s backs, and began to turn the seaworthy color of our captain and crew.
Then came the morning painting lesson. We were amateurs but keen, and the lessons were made for us. Susannah Fiennes is all sensibility delivered in a voice of sense; she sees the world with a precise but passionate eye. Her one-woman show at the National Portrait Gallery in London was praised for both its expressive accuracy and its austere poignancy. Looking herself like a Gainsborough—her face a perfect English pink, her clothes fluttering in the wind, a large straw hat held on with a frayed white satin ribbon—she would teach us the vocabulary of primary colors and their opposites, of suffused and diluted tones, of rich washes and negative space. “Saturated color is freedom from gray,” she would say as she set us up with our palettes and watercolor paper. Her voice would lift as she directed us toward all the forms and tones that are hidden along the coast of Lycia (an ancient region in southwest Turkey) and in its monuments. She could be forceful.
“Did Charles ask you for advice when you were painting together?” one of us asked Susannah, who has, at royal invitation, accompanied the Prince of Wales to paint during his state visits.
“No,” she said, “but he got some anyway.”
Sometimes she read aloud from a book about color theory, or from Cézanne’s letters. She would instruct, “Painting must analyze the natural world and still be subjective.” All of us, under her tutelage, learned to see anew. “Look at the beauty of that shape,” she’d say, “where the sky is between those two peaks.” She once exclaimed, “Look at that! It’s not really a nose at all; it’s the most remarkable broken triangle of light!”—which rather alarmed the bashful cook, who until then had been sure it was a nose: his rather comely one.
Then we would go ashore to see some historic place or pull into a bay to swim in water so transparent you could scarcely tell it from the light (but it was a bit more alizarin, Susannah would explain). We breathed in sharply when diving from the height of the deck because we were always overwhelmed at first by the deepness of that sea; but then suddenly we would find that it was not overwhelming at all, and we would swim past one another or tread water holding hands or splash up onto some deserted beach or bit of rock or play at being sea monsters. One of the women had a pink bikini that she had bought in Saint-Tropez, and though the rest of us had nothing of the kind, we all felt equal in the common, salty, clear element. You could swim once around the boat, or you could swim a mile to an inviting rock. It was delicious: so sweet and so cold.
We were usually damp when we sat down to lunch. We noted the color contrasts of the salad and drank the local wine; sometimes the women put flowers in their hair, and we told one another our best stories, our intimacy quick and authentic. Perhaps this can happen only when you are in Lycia and the weather is fine, the youngest of you is only twenty-four and the eldest over eighty, each of the mahogany-paneled cabins has its own shower and bathroom, the boat is eighty-five feet long and has blue sail covers, and a red Turkish flag the size of a carpet flies at the stern. It is most likely to happen when the cost of going hasn’t been
high, and two classicists and a painter are with you at all times. It happens when you have all taken off your watches and do not put them on again for eight days. It happens when most of you have read too much Evelyn Waugh, have pondered but never fully understood both Aeschylus and Matisse, and can identify immediately most episodes of Absolutely Fabulous.
* * *
“Listen! What is that? I think it’s the bird we were talking about yesterday, that rare Anatolian eagle,” said someone.
We were all silent for a moment.
“That’s Venetia’s alarm clock,” someone else said.
And so it was, that time, but overhead birds were flying and crying as though they, too, thought the simple fact of this day and this light warranted celebration.
* * *
After lunch, worn out by the morning’s exertions, we would lie in the sun on big blue mats at the bow of the boat, and usually we would sail on to yet another wonder. Later we would have tea and biscuits and halvah and then disembark for the day’s site. Once it was a Greek theater built into the hillside, and once it was an eerie necropolis of the ancient Lycians, where the wealthy had had themselves placed in rock tombs that would last forever. We examined the inscriptions in the lost language of Lycia, and Andrew Hobson told us about modern efforts to break the code. Tom Johnson puzzled out the Greek epitaphs and translated them for us as we climbed with him to hear what funny things had happened on the way to a polis here, an acropolis there. Near Demre, Tom showed us where Gelasius the nut seller had carved his name into a theater wall, to claim a prime position at the top of the stairs in the main vomitory. Tom led us to the altar in Arykanda where the ancients worshipped Helios in the fifth century BC; and he sat with us beside the tomb of Archemdemos, son of Ermapios, in Üçağız.
Nothing was behind wire. Once or twice we had to pay an entrance fee at a famous site, but mostly the ruins we visited were empty, with wild thyme and clover growing between the stones. As we scrambled around, we felt as if we were the first travelers in these virgin realms of gold. It was the ancient world as it was discovered by the Romantics, and not the Disneyland museology of Pompeii or the scrubbed self-importance of tourist-trodden Delphi. Like the Victorians Sir Charles Fellows and Captain Spratt, we came upon the magnificent Roman theater at Myra and saw the church of St. Nicholas and the spectacular integrity of Arykanda, where Alexander the Great conquered and where Hadrian dallied. At the stadium there, a shepherd stumbled through with his flock; two old women in head scarves moved on to tilled fields below; and we were the only other human beings. Each place we saw was magnificent in its decay, and we felt how the mighty must once have looked on all this and despaired. We regarded it more humbly, carrying on with our watercolors but leaving no further marks on so rich a palimpsest.
The hills we painted were everywhere purple with blossom, and the red-roofed village houses were weighted with bougainvillea. No one had ever been more free from gray than we were as we sat here or there, recording our impressions of the crenellated rocks, while Susannah looked over our shoulders. “I want to see what the form of that pediment makes you feel,” said Susannah. “Think from the edges in.” Our work was quick, sketchy, expressive.
Then we would leave, perhaps to see another tomb with a view; or perhaps if we were near a village, we would sit in a bar and drink aniseed-perfumed raki. We might buy kilims and postcards and old Armenian silver belts, or we might run into some local who was a friend of Tom’s or of a crew member’s and climb with him into hidden streets where women with a few gold teeth were doing laundry and cooking, and where men, fat with success, sat smoking and playing backgammon. “A man without a belly,” our captain, Hasan, told us, “is like a house without a balcony.” Sometimes the chaps in our party went to see the village barber, who would shave us with a straight razor, massage our faces and shoulders, and comb and oil our hair. Consuming plates of Turkish delight back on the boat, we balconied ourselves like some sultan’s palace, then went swimming in the lingering twilight, our paintings strewn about the deck.
Usually around nine, we sat outside again. The sun would at last be setting, and Ibrahim would bring us more wonders from the kitchen below: roasted meats and spiced chicken and stuffed eggplant. When the moon was up, we played charades or told stories, and we drank more raki, and talked more about art or lapsed into epigrams and aphorisms, everyone’s wits sharpened by our intense pleasure. On the night of the full moon, we turned off all the electricity; the crew put orange peel on the candles to scent the air, and Andrew Hobson picked up The Iliad and read us the narration of Hera’s seduction of Zeus. Then we went for a midnight swim, splashing one another with luminescent water. Even the crew joined in the fun: the captain did a belly dance that put us all to shame.
* * *
“Listen,” someone said in the small hours. “You can hear the bells the goats are wearing. They’re awake, too.”
We were all silent for a moment.
“That’s the ice jingling in Jasper’s glass,” someone else said.
So it was, that time. But in the light of the moon we did see the goats, wild goats without bells, climbing up and down the hills. That night, most of us slept side by side on the foredeck, waking up suddenly when rosy-fingered dawn touched us and turned the stones all around an unsaturated pink. We drifted back in and then out of sleep until Ibrahim brought our coffee.
* * *
Always, there was the dancing; it seemed that we were perpetually dancing, old and young alike. Some evenings we would go out to the small bars of the port villages and dance with the swashbuckling locals to music as old as the hills, our shoulders thrown back and our arms raised as we went in a ring. Tom was a champion Bodrum efe dancer, and he taught the men of our group these local traditional steps (“You have to make it look very high testosterone,” he explained encouragingly). In Kaş, some of us ventured to a provincial disco, where Turkish windsurfers and scuba divers were rocking to Rod Stewart while their women gyrated like latter-day Salomes high on Olivia Newton-John.
But most of all, there was the dancing on board. After breakfast, and again after lunch, some of us would nap while others, listening to music on a cassette player or imagining it in the sounds the wind made as it touched the cliffs, would twirl along the main deck. Susannah, wearing one of her trailing dresses, would laugh as someone dipped her over the bow so that her hair hung down toward the sea, and the crew would peek out from the main saloon. In this world of teak and sailcloth, we fancied ourselves bacchants.
During a sudden rainstorm one hot day, we all rushed out and stood with the water streaming down our faces, halfway between dancing and swimming, sliding on the deck while, on one of Tom’s tapes, a Turkish man sang in a throaty voice about his burning, burning love. It seemed that, though we had a concentration of that respect for irony that is the essence of English humor, we had somehow left ashore ironic distance from our immediate circumstances. This was the first and only odyssey, and everything we did on that boat seemed more real than our real lives, at least for the moment. And if we thought of the long trip back, we no more imagined that we might have stayed at home and contemplated Lycia than did Alexander the Great, who first touched these still-unspoiled shores in 333 BC.
ZAMBIA
* * *
Enchanting Zambia
Travel + Leisure, February 1998
I had first visited Zambia in 1992, and I returned in 1997. Zambia has since become a popular destination, but it was well off the beaten track in the 1990s, and though this safari was at the rough end of the spectrum, it allowed the photographer, two friends of mine, and me to see the fierce beauty that can inhere in feral wilderness.
* * *
A few years ago, I spent a month driving with a friend through southern Africa. Our plans were vague and our knowledge thin until one night in Botswana, when we eavesdropped on a bearded man with an air of sublime safari competence, solicited his advice, and rewrote our itinerary. But we had little opportuni
ty to apply our new certainties. Two days later we overturned our car on a rough road in Zimbabwe, bringing our trip to an abrupt and ignominious end. For five years I fantasized about returning to southern Africa, and last July I finally set off to explore Zambia with two good friends, a photographer, and the bearded man himself, Gavin Blair.
We wanted a country that was challenging, obscure, and fresh; interesting, beautiful, and not dangerous. We wanted a place with good game viewing, as well as access to local culture. In Zambia, the former Northern Rhodesia, Gavin said we would feel as though we were discovering an Africa still unknown to the masses who have inundated the parks in Kenya, northern Tanzania, and South Africa. During two weeks there—aside from three days on what passes for a highway—we saw a total of eleven other vehicles.
A white Zimbabwean, Gavin Blair is licensed as a guide in three countries and is familiar with back roads and rare species in several others as well. He knows the Latin names for most plants you may see, the mating seasons of insects, and the spoor of every animal. He can fix a car, your binoculars, the broken wing of a bird, and the injured feelings of people bickering around the fire.
Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change Page 25