As winter turned to early spring, barriers to artistic expression seemed to be melting away, but it was a different story for political dissent. In late March 1979 came a well-sourced rumour that, in a secret speech to the party leadership, Deng Xiaoping had called for a crackdown on Democracy Wall.
In just a few short months the wall had grown into something that to the government looked worryingly like an organised movement. Publishers of unofficial journals appeared to believe it was their right to be part of the reform process, and were encouraging people to discuss political issues and problems themselves.
In pursuit of economic reform, Deng was happy to harness the energies of intellectuals, scientists, officials and even entrepreneurs, all of whom had been sidelined and humiliated during the Cultural Revolution. But political decisions, and even political dialogue itself, were to remain a matter for party control.
Faced with the near-certainty of a government crackdown, the Democracy Wall community split on the question of tactics. Wei Jingsheng wanted to denounce the government’s plans in writing; Liu Qing, co-editor of April Fifth Forum, counselled caution.
Wei Jingsheng decided to go it alone. On March 25 he returned to Democracy Wall to post what would be his final essay, its title an urgent question: ‘Do we want democracy or a new autocracy?’ In it, he warned of the danger that Deng could become another dictator. ‘History tells us,’ he wrote, ‘that there must be a limit to the trust placed in any one person.’
Three days later new regulations appeared, banning any expression of opinion that did not adhere to the Four Cardinal Principles: socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of the Communist Party, and Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.
The next day Wei was arrested.
It was a terrible blow, which stopped most activists in their tracks. But even as the hammer came down on political dissent, China’s painters, writers and poets persisted in probing the artistic limits, and the response of the leadership was more tentative. Into this vacuum, Huang Rui and his friends were only too happy to venture.
On a warm evening in May 1979, dozens of young people arrived at a dilapidated office in eastern Beijing. The space was only one and a half little rooms on the corner of a dusty courtyard behind a deserted Buddhist temple, but it was a symbol of the success of Today.
It was just five months since Huang Rui had ridden out across the snowy city to post the first issue of the magazine. Things had moved fast since then. Today was now being read all over the country. They were publishing 1000 copies an issue, but that was only a fraction of their audience. Every day brought letters from readers recounting how they were sharing their single copy around a dormitory, an office, or a group of friends. Copies were being posted on noticeboards and on other democracy walls, and being read aloud in parks and in homes. Every week brought contributions by young poets, writers and artists from around the country.
The magazine’s office had originally been home to Liu Qing’s mother, who had vacated it so that her newly married younger son would have somewhere to live with his bride. But the son insisted that the Today crowd, whom he idolised, should take the space instead. He moved into his university dormitory while his wife stoically scoured the city for new digs.
Mang Ke slept in the half room, his plank bed converting into a sofa for meetings during the day and into a desk for the mimeograph at printing time. The office quickly became a place of pilgrimage for young poets, artists and dreamers.
Tonight the place was crowded for a strategy meeting for an unprecedented event in the history of the People’s Republic. They were planning an exhibition of work by the outsiders of Beijing’s art world, a little band to whom Huang Rui and Ma Desheng had reached out, who revelled in the official no-go areas of art: the personal, not the political; the realistic, not the rosy; the experimental, not the traditional.
The team that came together in the smoky room may have been untutored, but it was bursting with talent. There was Ma Desheng, who made angry, virile, technically masterful woodcuts; Qu Leilei, whose fine ink portraits were rich with personal imagery; Yan Li, a new friend of Huang Rui’s, who painted brightly coloured takes on cubism; and Wang Keping, whose powerful, politically pointed sculptures in scavenged hunks of wood were the very antithesis of safe official orthodoxy.
As the meeting got down to business, their first decision was the name of their group: they would call themselves ‘the Stars’.
The Stars? For a group of art school rejects? Actually, this wasn’t a boast; it was a sly political joke with a touch of the poetic. They had all grown up being told that the only heavenly body that mattered was the sun, and the sun was Mao Zedong, whose solar radiance was celebrated in poems, songs and paintings. Now the Great Helmsman was gone. ‘Only when the sun has set,’ said Huang Rui, ‘can you see the stars.’
Their second question was where to exhibit. In Beijing in 1979 there were no private buildings. Even the Today office was unauthorised and technically illegal. You could hold a poetry reading in a park and you could post a magazine on a wall, but an art exhibition needed a space of its own. To use a space you needed a permit, and to get a permit you had to be a member of the Artists Association. But the Stars weren’t members—that was the whole point of being the Stars.
They eventually found a solution, and they would go on to mount their exhibition. But the whipsaw reaction of the authorities would expose divisions in the Chinese leadership over reform strategy. To some, taking the shackles off artistic expression was dangerous. It was all very well to liberalise the economy, but Democracy Wall had shown where free thought could lead. Shouldn’t art be reined in as well? The turbulent way in which that question played out—and is still playing out today—assured the Stars a permanent place in history.
The meeting determined they should seek out the chairman of the Beijing Artists Association, Liu Xun, and ask for his advice. He might not be able to help them, but he would understand the delicacy of their position.
Liu had spent a decade in jail after being trapped by Mao’s infamous ‘Hundred Flowers’ movement in 1956. Mao had called for intellectuals and artists to engage in open discussion of the country’s problems: ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom, and a hundred schools of thought contend!’ Mao believed that the discussions would find a natural centre of gravity: after all, socialism was the only logical solution to human problems and contradictions, and finding new pathways to that conclusion would be a healthy thing. In the event, debates headed in directions that shocked the leadership, with open discussion of the merits of democracy. Mao shut down the movement, but not before taking careful note of who had written what. Liu Xun was singled out in the Anti-rightist campaign in 1957 and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. He was only rehabilitated after the return of Deng Xiaoping to the capital in 1977.
So, in the early summer of 1979, the Stars met with Liu Xun and showed him their work. As an oil painter with a taste for the iconoclastic, he was excited by what he saw and immediately offered to help.
But almost straight away it became clear that, despite Liu’s goodwill, it would not be simple. Each of the 23 artists in the exhibition would need to declare their details, their occupations and their ‘political status’ in advance. And it would not be until the next year that they would be able to secure an official exhibition space, if at all.
The Stars felt they couldn’t afford to wait. There were already too many omens that this exhilarating moment of liberty in their lives might be short-lived. Wei Jingsheng had been in custody for two months and there was no word of his fate. Criticisms of the party had been outlawed, and Democracy Wall was now a gloomier, less edgy place. True, Today continued to thrive, and every day new books, new music and new people were turning up in Beijing. But, despite this, they could feel a chill in the air.
So they decided—secretly—that they should move now and forget about a space: they would exhibit in the open air. The show would be in autumn, the
capital’s most beautiful season, and would coincide with China’s national day—on October 1—when the nation would be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the People’s Republic.
Then came the question of where to exhibit. Democracy Wall was too chaotic. The Old Summer Palace, a melancholy ruin north-west of the city, had atmosphere but was too remote. The forecourt of the China Radio building at the far western end of Chang’an Avenue was perfect, except that it was a bastion of the propaganda ministry and would not tolerate them for a moment.
And then they realised that the solution had been hiding in plain sight. They could show at the National Art Museum in the centre of the capital. Come late September, the museum would have an official exhibition of Chinese art in honour of national day. This would be the establishment’s choice of the works that best represented that moment in history. The Stars would display their counterpoint to this, on the railings of a large garden just to the east of the building. They would open on September 27 and run for one week.
As the day drew close they began to spread the word among their friends. And then on September 26 they rode out to the universities, through the city and to Democracy Wall, posting a notice calling on people to come and see the Stars.
September 27 was a perfect Beijing autumn day, which meant the weather was as beautiful as you could find anywhere in the world. The 23 artists gathered early, bringing their works on pedal carts and on the backs of bicycles and then tying them to the garden railings with twine. Altogether 150 works were hung that day. Huang Rui’s secret painting of the year before was on display for the first time, dappled by sunlight shining through the trees.
Beijing was a small place then. Most people lived within what is now called the Second Ring Road, which follows the course of the old city walls that were torn down in the 1950s. Within that perimeter news spread fast. Office workers arrived with their shopping and their children in their arms, students rushed there after school. People worked their way quietly, intently along the railings, examining each work in turn, and stopping to read the Stars’ manifesto:
We, 23 art explorers, place some fruits of our labour here . . . The shadows of the past and the light of the future overlap to form our multi-layered lives today. We live on with determination and remember every lesson we have been taught. This is our responsibility.
A group of students gathered, laughing with shock at Wang Keping’s sculptures. One piece, carved from the rung of a broken chair, showed a shrunken, distorted figure, its outsized arm and hand thrust towards the sky, brandishing a little book. Titled Long Live the Emperor, the work’s target was unmistakable, as was the artist’s contempt for the era it depicted. More visceral still was a work he called Silence. A carved face stared out, one eye blacked out and a large wooden stopper in its mouth.
Nearby hung a Ma Desheng woodcut of a farmer and his oxen plowing a darkening field. The figures were tiny and exposed in a shaft of light under the gaze of a gigantic figure. It was titled Rest, and the irony was obvious—there would be no rest for the farmer this side of the grave. In interviews, Ma Desheng later made no secret of his anger at the party’s hypocrisy over China’s peasants. He had seen enough of rural life during the Cultural Revolution to know its grinding poverty, and to see through the cant of urban cadres who glorified the peasantry but whose own lives were paradises by comparison.
The political edge to Huang Rui’s work was gentler. Apart from his commemoration of the April 1976 Qing Ming demonstration, he had hung two paintings of the ruins of the Old Summer Palace. Known as the Garden of Perfect Brightness (Yuanmingyuan), the palace complex, stretching for 857 acres beneath Beijing’s Fragrant Hills, had been the favoured home of the Qing imperial family for 150 years. It was a place of legendary beauty, its Chinese style pavilions and gardens interspersed with Italianate follies designed by the emperor’s Jesuit advisers, complete with whimsical musical clocks and curlicued marble archways.
In 1860 French and English troops razed the entire complex at the height of the Second Opium War. The palaces were never rebuilt and in 1979 the lonely ruins were an ambiguous witness to whatever version of history it seemed correct to subscribe to.
Huang Rui painted the ruins repeatedly in 1979, each time investing the stones with something new. In the first Stars exhibition he hung two paintings of the same stand of ruined columns, stark against the sky. In the first, which he called Last Will and Testament, the sky was a smouldering coal black, the sun blood-red. In a second painting the columns stood against a blue sky filled with clouds amid green pastures, and the shape of the columns had shifted slightly so they seemed like couples embracing in the sun. This painting he called New Life.
Today the Communist Party has preserved the ruin of the Old Summer Palace as a reminder of the humiliation heaped on pre-revolutionary China by foreign powers. But in 1979 Huang Rui claimed it for his generation. The ruins seemed to show that you could survive utter destruction and in the aftermath find new hope. For a generation that had come through the Cultural Revolution, the meaning was clear.
In a tree by the railings of the museum Huang Rui had hung an old exercise book on a string with a pencil attached as a visitors’ book in which the artists encouraged people to write their impressions of the works. That day a person who called himself ‘an elder’ wrote that in the paintings he found ‘fresh and robust strength emerging from ruins amidst rotten grass. Young blood, bright colours, vibrant brushwork. Ah!’ he exclaimed, ‘your art enlivens this old man’s heart.’
When Liu Xun arrived, he was unperturbed by the Stars’ impatience and their cheek at exhibiting without permission. Surrounded by a crowd he toured the exhibition smiling at what he saw.
On the same day, the show was visited by Jiang Feng, chairman of the China Artists Association and dean of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He was a veteran of the political struggles of the 1930s and ’40s, and had been repeatedly imprisoned for his fealty to the Communist Party. After the founding of the People’s Republic he had pioneered the teaching of oil painting and the expansion of art education beyond the universities into high schools. But after the Hundred Flowers campaign he was labelled a ‘rightist’, stripped of his posts and sent into exile. Like Liu Xun, he had only just returned to Beijing.
When he stood among the young artists and their works that day he only had three more years to live and he acted like he knew it. He was excited and had no intention of discouraging the Stars. ‘Art exhibitions in the open air are a fine thing,’ he declared. ‘One can exhibit inside an art gallery, and one can also exhibit outside the gallery. Artists rise from within the art academy, as well as from outside it.’ He then briskly instructed the museum curators to accommodate the Stars’ works within the official grounds where they would be safer.
That night the Stars partied on Beijing Beer and Erguotou, and pooled their funds to buy bowls of cabbage noodles. Their friends from
Today toasted their success. The second day of the exhibition went as well as the first. Hundreds of people were stopping by to see the Stars’ works, and others arriving for the official exhibition at the museum also came over to loiter in the sun and pore over the works. It was like a dream.
Then they woke up.
On the morning of September 29, Huang Rui arrived at the exhibition to find all the billboards for their show torn down. In the park was a group of provocateurs who taunted the artists and the others who had gathered to see the show. Earlier that morning the local Public Security Bureau (China’s police force) had sent 100 officers to the National Art Museum to seize the works and post a notice that the exhibition had been banned. The edict was backdated to the opening day, September 27, to make the show look doubly illegal.
Liu Xun was appalled. He invited the Stars to meet with him at the Huafang Zhai, a beautiful pavilion in Beihai Park to the north-west of the Forbidden City. Beihai had once been part of the imperial pleasure gardens built around the capital’s Northern Lake, but had been opened to the p
ublic after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911. The pavilion where the Stars went to meet Liu Xun was beautifully decorated and built around a lily pond. Wang Keping remembered later that the lilies were beginning to shrivel as autumn was drawing in but the water was still sparkling. It was here that the Beijing Artists Association had their official exhibition space, in four separate halls built around the courtyard.
Liu Xun took the artists through the calendar for Huafang Zhai and offered them a date later in the year. They accepted, and tried to see it as a victory. After all, a few weeks earlier there had been no place for them in the official schedule and now they had a chance to hang their work in one of the loveliest spaces in the capital. It was a big step up from park railings in the open air. Yet, as they left they couldn’t help feeling it was the wrong call.
They met that night with their friends from Today and the editors of other unofficial journals like April Fifth Forum, run by their friend Liu Qing. The editors had been excited by the Stars’ success, especially because the arrest of Wei Jingsheng and the muzzling of Democracy Wall had cast a pall over the reform movement. Somehow the compromise of the Huafang Zhai show didn’t seem enough. After all, Liu Qing argued, the Stars had done nothing illegal in the first place. Didn’t the constitution protect freedom of speech, publication, association, assembly and demonstration? In the Stars’ case, Liu Qing saw a chance to make a stand. He and his co-editor Xu Wenli suggested they hold a demonstration on national day, October 1.
Huang Rui argued against it. He wasn’t scared, he said later, it was just that he hated politics, and preferred the quicksilver path they had taken to date. In his view ‘artists should use art to win’. But the others disagreed. Wang Keping felt they had a responsibility to speak up for others. They had made a stand for artistic freedom with their exhibition, and they could not just roll over now. Ma Desheng also argued strongly for a public protest. Outnumbered, Huang Rui agreed. And so they began to plan the first demonstration for freedom of speech ever held in the People’s Republic of China.
The Phoenix Years Page 6