by Alex Dolan
Qi Jianyu was born outside of Beijing in 1942, and was discovered by Americans in the early 1970s. Some famous people, notably Andy Warhol, raved about his work, and he moved to New York, where he enjoyed a short burst of fame before moving back to China in 1978. Paire couldn’t find anything about his life after that, nor any record of where in China he might have lived or how his career developed. She found only one photograph of him, probably from the seventies, where he posed with a tall white man in horn-rimmed glasses who seemed to be leaning away as they stood together. The artist dressed in a rumpled black suit, a shorter man with a round face and an ecstatic, wrinkly grin, even though he would have only been thirty or so years old at the time. Other than his smile, there was nothing notable about his features. He seemed plain by all accounts, neither thin nor heavy, handsome nor ugly. She thought about walking through Chinatown, and how many times she might have passed a man with his physical characteristics and not noticed him. She suspected that a man who took on a mononym would have wanted to stand out somehow, and she supposed he had to funnel everything through his work to have any sort of voice at all.
Neither Mayer nor Lucia talked about the empress, even with it hanging on the back wall, unceasingly looking over their shoulders. Neither of them looked at the portrait much. Mayer angled his desk so he sat with his back to the painting. Occasionally, when Paire caught one of them stealing a glimpse, she’d notice them linger for an extra moment. Lucia tended to run her tongue over her lower lip when she stared at it. Mayer shifted in his chair in a way that suggested an uncomfortable bunching around his pelvis. The few times when work shifts overlapped and all three of them were at the gallery together, the painting made Mayer and Lucia forget their discretion. They looked at the painting together and then exchanged devouring stares.
The more she worked at the Fern, the more aware she became of the relationship between Mayer Wolff and Lucia de Moraeas. That Lucia omitted any talk about her husband told Paire a lot about her marriage. No longer entranced by the braces, Paire noticed other things, such as the fingertip bruises on her arms, the ones she’d only see when Lucia came in and before she dabbed on cover-up in the bathroom. Despite her collection of trinkets in the staff restroom, there wasn’t a photograph in the lot of her and her spouse. When Paire searched through her other belongings—just looking, not stealing—she found three stray photos of her family, friends, and what would probably be sorority sisters. Lucia didn’t have braces in these photos, and bore an unusually prominent overbite with large spaces between her teeth when she smiled.
Neither of them ever spoke about their affair. Mayer wasn’t married, but he didn’t talk about his personal life. Lucia seemed more the type who would spill her secrets, yet she talked about anything and everything but Mayer. The lack of gossip worked out well for Paire. She didn’t want to talk about her relationship with Rosewood either, largely because it might open up all sorts of questions about her background, so it seemed best that everyone’s affairs and upbringings were latched in lockboxes.
Her awareness came from watching the two of them interact during the shift overlap. Mayer scheduled two people on the same shift. But in the half-hour overlap time, when Lucia was coming and Paire was leaving, she saw how they stole glances at each other. Lucia would stare at him a few seconds too long, chin down, her lips puckering involuntarily. Mayer might smile slyly at her, easing his mouth into a grin while he exhaled what seemed like a grateful sigh. They had their own code of glances that communicated their emotions when they couldn’t touch, and maybe it was Paire’s imagination, but these seemed more overt as time went on and the empress presided over the room.
Paire tended to avoid looking at the painting when others were around, because she was afraid that if she ever looked she’d end up staring for too long. Even when she avoided it, an irrational sense crept into her, as if the empress noticed when she was being ignored. Being in such close proximity sometimes gave Paire periodic shivers. Even with her eyes closed, she could have sensed the empress in this room. Against the Fern’s white walls, the empress’s crimson robe flew like a battle flag. Noting how it served as an aphrodisiac to Mayer and Lucia, and Rosewood too, she’d come to believe the painting had a pheromonal hold over people. And she worried that if she stared too long she might not be able to control her own behavior. If it made some people horny, if it made Nicola Franconi stab himself, she worried what actions it might provoke from a name-changing kleptomaniac like herself.
When Lucia quizzed her by mentioning, “Qi,” even the name of the artist made Paire flinch.
She pretended that she had to think hard to retrieve the information, when she could have rattled off the biographical data like her social security number. “Born in Beijing, educated at CAFA. Lived in New York for five years and then moved back. Possibly lived in Beijing for the rest of his life, but we don’t know more than that. He was reported dead two years ago.”
Lucia asked, “Anything special about his technique?”
“I thought you didn’t want me to dwell on technique.”
“In this case, it’s part of his story.”
She remembered a smattering of what Mayer had told her. “He painted using tempera, just like they used in Renaissance frescoes. He believes—believed—it lent a timeless quality to the work.”
Lucia played with her ring, which slid loosely on her finger. “Good. What’s so special about this piece here?”
“The Empress Xiao Zhe Yi, Seated, is the only work from Qi currently on display.”
“Where are the others?”
“No one knows.”
“Vanished. You might say, this is the last known Qi in existence.” She asked, “What can you tell me about the subject matter?”
Paire remembered the short description of the piece that the Fern kept on file:
The Empress Xiao Zhe Yi (1854–1875), also known as the Jia Shun Empress, was married to Emperor Tong Zhi, a member of the Qing dynasty of China.
Talented at poetry, literature, music, and painting, she was favored by the Emperor above his other wives. This sparked jealousy in the Dowager Empress Cixi, who ordered the Emperor and the Empress to separate. The Emperor Tong Zhi died of loneliness, and the Jia Shun Empress, hearing of her husband’s death, committed suicide.
When she did a little more digging, some articles contradicted this summary. First, the Empress Xiao Zhe Yi wasn’t the wife of Emperor Tong Zhi of China, but his imperial consort. Similar to a wife back then, but not the same. The Dowager Empress Cixi was Tong Zhi’s mother, a woman who ruled China while her son was too young to take on the responsibility. She controlled his power and his relationships, and did force the emperor and empress to separate. However, contrary to the gallery’s blurb, the emperor didn’t die of loneliness. After the separation, a palace eunuch encouraged him to “cure” his loneliness with trips to brothels outside the Forbidden City. He contracted syphilis from prostitutes. The Dowager Empress Cixi blamed the young empress for his death, and ordered her food supply to be cut off. The young empress either committed suicide or died of starvation. Rosewood might have been right. Freedom and control seemed to be at the heart of everything.
Paire found an image of the Empress Xiao Zhe Yi, an antique portrait in which the empress sat in a similar pose to the Qi portrait. In this painting, the hands and feet were hidden. Other than the face, one couldn’t see a square inch of skin. Her legs weren’t spread as far apart, and the loose imperial robes covered up any feminine curves. The garment featured two embroidered dragons that were ready to fight each other, but lacked the vibrant reds found in Qi’s painting. The young empress’s face was gentle, oval, and pale, too soft for cheekbones, with a wide, flat nose. She was beautiful, but not the same woman as the one hanging in the Fern.
Paire answered Lucia, “She was a real woman, a real empress from China. She was young and beautiful. An artist. She died when her true love died.” She remembered the woman she’d seen during Rosewood’s rec
eption, and tried to recall how closely she resembled the woman in the portrait, or if she simply wished that the Empress Xiao Zhe Yi had a human incarnation.
The next day, when she was on shift with Mayer, she asked him, “Who gave this to us?”
He answered, “I’m not allowed to say, but you might meet them at some point.”
“Did they really insist that it remain hanging during Rosewood’s exhibition?”
Mayer said, “You live with him. You really call him Rosewood?”
“It’s what he likes to be called.”
He returned to her question. “The conditions of this donation were very specific, and the party gave us a lot of money. So it stays on the wall.”
“But the donor doesn’t want to sell it.”
“The donor just wants to let people know it exists.” He swiveled in his chair so that he faced it. Losing his willpower, Mayer marveled at the work, his shoulders dropping with a giant toke of air. “You know, you start looking at that thing, you can’t stop. It’s dangerous. Abel Kasson was right about that.”
Now that Mayer was staring at the empress, Paire took the liberty of looking as well. She stepped close to the canvas, breathing on the paint. “So you can’t sell this. But if you were to try and sell this, what would you say?”
Mayer seemed to appreciate her playfulness. He rose from his desk and joined her in front of the gold-leaf frame. “All right. First, it’s unique. This is the chest of gold that you hope to find in a treasure hunt. The history of the artist alone makes it almost priceless—I would say almost only because for the moment, I’m trying to sell it. In truth, it really is priceless. But for me, what makes it special is the work itself, not the provenance. Forget that it pays homage to Chinese tradition. What you should notice is how it deviates from Chinese tradition. Take a look.” Mayer raised a finger, careful not to touch the pigment. “Bare feet. You’d never see those in a royal portrait. And you’d never see the legs so defiantly spread, like she’s straddling the back of a chair. The cheongsam—well, I don’t even want to get into the symbolism of the patterns in there, but you’ve got an eagle and the Statue of Liberty hidden in the embroidery. Let’s just say these are not Chinese images.”
“You mean the kimono?”
“Kimono are Japanese. She’s Chinese, and she’s wearing a cheongsam. You can tell by the way it’s cut up the sides, not folded like a robe.”
Paire looked more studiously at the embroidery in the garment, and the intricate stitching started to reveal shapes and patterns, not just floral vines. The brushwork created the perfect illusion of stitching, white relief atop the flowing red backdrop. She found the Statue of Liberty and the eagle’s spread wings. Then she spotted a peace sign, the dove’s foot inside the circle. She even made out a face with hollowed cheekbones and glasses, similar to the photograph she’d found of the artist standing next to the tall American. She wouldn’t have noticed any of it if she hadn’t stood very close, trying to pick it out of the details within the jungle of simulated needlework.
Mayer continued, “Those symbols would have gotten him into trouble in the People’s Republic. American symbols. The way he renders those images in the embroidered vines in the cheongsam, I’d say he was hinting that the insidious nature of the political ideology works its way into everything, even clothes. Even art. Especially art. It probably would have created a stir in China, especially at the time.”
“Even something this subtle?”
“In Communist China, life as an artist was—and is—a completely different world than it is over here. Especially in Qi’s time, if you were an artist, you worked to serve the values and ideology of the State. In a sense, you would be a propagandist. When Mao spoke at the Yenan Forum in 1942, he cribbed from Lenin and said that art needed to serve the people. There was no exploration of individual expression. That kind of expression in art would have been unheard of. So when Mao was in power, artists adhered to the style favored in China at that time, which was socialist realism, or realism that depicted socialist ideology. Ironically, that style came from Europe—essentially, French nineteenth-century realism, later co-opted by the Russians, who added a little moodiness to it. But I’ve already told you this.”
“Tell me more.”
Mayer shrugged. “An artist in Beijing in Qi’s generation would have been taught Western techniques, such as oil painting, which was a Western invention. So, the use of tempera could be seen as a commentary from an artist who was forced to create using Western techniques. It’s a petulant move. He could have stuck with oils or acrylics, but he used egg-based tempera, almost to throw the obvious adoption of Western techniques in the faces of those who mandated them. Tempera is a relatively delicate paint that ages and cracks, that you can only work in thin coats, with no knifework or thick brushwork. It’s limiting because it’s so hard to work with. You need a solid surface to work on because it cracks easily. As a result, Qi didn’t paint on canvas. He painted on wood. And not just any wood. He used Chinese red birch for his boards, from the western part of the country, towards the Himalayas.” Mayer wound a ringlet of his hair around his finger. “Have you ever seen a red birch tree?”
“I haven’t.”
“They’re elegant. When you see them in nature, they have peeling brown bark that comes off the trunks like paper. The grain is light and mild, and a perfect stand-in for canvas. What Qi is saying—or what he might be saying, which I’m fabricating for the purpose of selling this piece of work to you—is that, despite being forced into an artistic style based on Western tradition, under that veneer is something distinctly Chinese.” He pointed to the bottom corner. “See the chop?”
“Come again?”
“The way he signs his work. Round about this time, artists would still use a chop, or a wax seal, to stamp their work instead of a signature. He’s using that here, the red stamp right in the corner. But you can see he’s also painted a signature, like a Western artist, right below it. He’s mashed up East and West as much as he can. And maybe that was the sort of commentary that the State might forgive.” He gestured again across the canvas. “But the American symbols, the way she’s posed, the overt sensuality—that wouldn’t fly in China. And that makes the piece even more fascinating for me.”
“What does it tell you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe this was painted for a private collection, but I can’t imagine that this would ever have been displayed in China. Not in public. Not in 1980.” He rubbed his beard. “And then there’s the possibility that Kasson’s right, and this is just an exquisite forgery.”
He stared at Paire, possibly interested in how close she stood to the piece. At a museum, a guard might instruct her to step back, but here at the Fern, colleague to colleague, he’d allowed her the proximity. Mayer warned, “You could lose yourself in the embroidery patterns alone. And the way she looks at you, she’s almost daring you to.”
Paire wondered if any of the story was true. She found it hard to believe in history, because like any story, it always changed depending on who was writing it. But she wanted to believe it. She knew the model in the painting wasn’t the actual Jia Shun Empress, but in her imagination they were the same person, as if Qi finally gave the woman the proper rendering in 1980, and anything before that had been cartoon illustrations based on hearsay descriptions.
In the story she chose to accept, the young woman was kept apart from a man she loved. When her man died, she had added her death to his to spite the person who had separated them. In the portrait, the empress’s expression evoked a sense of loneliness, certainly. But more than that, she possessed a defiance that came from having lost what she cherished. Once the thing she dreaded most had befallen her, nothing else could frighten her.
Paire remembered how hopeless Nicola Franconi had looked when he plunged the letter opener through his ribs. She imagined that he had been so consumed with the Chinese bride that he had volunteered to die if he could not possess Her. That he would be attracte
d to Her was the most natural thing. The woman in the painting was a beacon for lost souls.
When no one else was in the gallery, Paire patrolled the perimeter, trying to minimize the clack of her heels on the floor. She scrutinized each Rosewood to find something new she might appreciate. She lingered whenever she got to the hyena people in the LAUGHTER series, staring at the different ways the lips parted, how much teeth each of them showed.
She took advantage of her window time to watch stray people, some of them likely classmates, walk past the Fern. When she made eye contact and smiled, occasionally they’d come in and she’d chat them up. When the street was empty, she studied the quiet brownstones across the way, looking into the black windows for traces of movement, occasionally seeing a figure drift behind the glass. Sometimes she looked down to the pavement just outside the Fern, where a slight discoloration in the concrete was the only indication that blood had been spilled there.
At the window, she also appreciated whatever limited sunlight filtered down between the high-rises. Manhattanites didn’t see much direct sun on either side of noon. The high-rises diffused sunlight like the canopy of a redwood forest, so the street-level pedestrian was treated to a hint of sun through reflections and a general brightening of the sky. When she looked up from the front door, she craned her neck for a hint of blue. The odd thing was how the reflected sunlight managed to enter the Fern gallery.
In her first-year art history classes at MSAD, Paire had learned that the temple of Abu Simbel in Egypt had been engineered so that twice a year, on his birthday and his coronation day, the sun would shine in through the shadowy chambers and illuminate the face of Ramses’s statue. In a similar fashion, sunlight bounced around the tight glass-and-steel labyrinth of New York and found a way to glint off the empress’s eyes.