The Phoenix Years

by Madeleine O'Dea

  Deng’s blessing was a key moment for Shenzhen. The special economic zone was always a target for attack at times of political upheaval. It had been singled out during the anti-spiritual pollution campaign in 1983, and its citizens had been denounced as ‘gold-diggers’ by hardliners in the government in the months after June 4. Shenzhen’s gratitude to Deng is still on show in the city today. A huge billboard celebrating his blessing of the city stands on a specially dedicated square, depicting a disembodied, god-like Deng looming over a panorama of the city.

  Deng’s endorsement of Guangdong province and later Shanghai in 1992 would prove pivotal. Guangdong’s capital Guangzhou and the port of Shanghai were cities laden with symbolism. They were places that had been built by trade. To elevate them to the centre of economic policy was to leave no doubt that reform and opening up were back in business.

  In the aftermath of June 4 1989, the south of China and specifically Shenzhen held a different kind of symbolism for those who had demonstrated in Beijing. Shenzhen equalled hope. If you could get there, then Hong Kong and the rest of the world were within your reach.

  In the days after June 4 the arrest of students and others who had been active in Tiananmen Square proceeded rapidly but for a few short days local police in Beijing defied the round-up, issuing passes for travel to Shenzhen to any student who applied. ‘I had never seen the police be like that, so good,’ Guo Jian reminisced years later. ‘For a few days after June 4 there was a long queue outside the local police station in the university quarter and the police were going along the line saying, “Are you a student? Who’s a student here? Come in! Come in!” And they were just handing out passes to all the students without question.’

  On June 5 Guo Jian secured his pass to Shenzhen, but he couldn’t bring himself to use it. ‘I kept saying to my foreign friends, “I haven’t done anything wrong,” but they said, “It doesn’t matter! You need to go!”’ Finally he returned to the police station on June 8 for another pass, as his first had already expired. But the police were no longer welcoming students. ‘They shooed us away really fiercely, but even in that they were trying to protect us. They knew if we queued up the soldiers would be able to pick us up easily.’

  In the days, weeks and months that followed, thousands of people were arrested, but there was a groundswell of support for the students that enabled many of those on the most-wanted list to escape. Wu’er Kaixi and Chai Ling both took the ‘underground railway’ to the West via Guangdong, arriving in Hong Kong to be spirited immediately onto planes to France and then later to the United States.

  Student leaders who did not manage to evade arrest were given prison sentences, but worker demonstrators were treated with particular harshness, with many being summarily executed.

  Numerous soldiers were court-martialled, and, it was rumoured, some were even executed for refusing to participate in the massacre on June 4. Major General Xu Qinxian of the 38th Group Army was court-martialled and sentenced to five years in prison for his refusal to enforce martial law. Even today, at the age of 80, he is forbidden from visiting Beijing.

  Guo Jian found a way to drop out of sight in the capital. Taking refuge first with a friend who had found shelter on a construction site near the university, a few weeks later he moved out beyond the fringe of the city to the ruined grounds of the Old Summer Palace. In the previous few years, a group of drop-out poets had formed a community there, renting dilapidated accommodation from the local farmers who raised vegetables, pigs and chickens on land where the Qing emperors had once taken their ease. The farmers were more than happy to take money from the poets and, after Tiananmen, from young would-be artists, too.

  This is how the Old Summer Palace became the site of China’s first artists’ village, and within a couple of years more than 200 aspiring artists were living there, including a roll call of future art millionaires of the next century.

  In the wake of the Tiananmen crackdown many found themselves with demerits on their university records, unable to graduate, or assigned to the worst jobs. Guo Jian had been allowed to graduate because the professor who had talent-spotted him years before had pleaded his case, but his job assignment was a ‘punishment detail’, designing teapots in a remote mountain factory. He turned it down, and chose to hang at the Old Summer Palace, painting his own wry take on the China he saw around him, and selling the occasional painting to foreigners who came calling in search of what remained of the spirit of the ’80s.

  For it wasn’t just China that had suffered a shock in June 1989, but the West, too. We had fallen a little in love with China in those spring days of 1989 and after the crushing of all that youthful hope, we kept on looking for clues to what remained and what might lie ahead.

  In the spring of 1993, a year after Deng Xiaoping had sent his signal that China was yet again open for business, a very different kind of message was sent out across the world. An exhibition—‘China’s New Art, Post-1989’—opened in Hong Kong, and in a series of iterations went on to tour the world. It would give the West its first glimpse inside the hearts of the Tiananmen generation since June 4. The curators were Li Xianting, one of the organisers of the ‘China/Avant-Garde’ exhibition in Beijing in February 1989, and Johnson Chang, a Hong Kong–born aesthete who had founded the world’s first gallery of Chinese contemporary art in Hong Kong in 1983.

  The two had been intimately involved in the burgeoning of Chinese contemporary art in the 1980s and were finely attuned to its new mood and direction. They saw early what would become obvious over the next decade, that contemporary art could provide a unique map of the emotional landscape of post–June 4 China, and with their new exhibition they set out quite overtly to explore it. They recognised, too, that this was one of those rare moments in history when art captured the spirit of the times with work of extraordinary quality. This was a generation that had experienced the Cultural Revolution in childhood, had grown up to enjoy the privilege of entry to university and the opening up of China to Western culture, had dreamed the wildest dreams during 1989 and experienced the most bitter disappointment, and would now confront the new materialism of a rising China.

  Surveying the scene as they prepared their exhibition, Li Xianting and Johnson Chang identified three major moods among the young artists, and in naming them coined the vocabulary that would guide discussion of Chinese contemporary art into the next century.

  The first movement they dubbed ‘cynical realism’: its exponents used detached irony and satire to capture the psychological alienation of the times. One of the leading cynical realists was Fang Lijun, whose portraits of disaffected youth yawning widely or blowing smoke straight into the face of the viewer would trigger multimillion-dollar bidding duels a decade later. Another was Yue Minjun, known for his grinning, mirthless self-portraits.

  Secondly they identified a form of iconoclasm they called ‘political pop’. This was a style of art that inserted communist icons, such as Chairman Mao, and the three pillars of socialism—workers, peasants and soldiers—into commercial imagery. Most pointed were the works of Wang Guangyi, whose massive triple portrait of Mao had caused such a stir at the ‘China/Avant-Garde’ show in 1989. Now he created a series of paintings based on old Soviet-style woodcut posters, in which square-jawed workers and heroic soldiers were the centrepiece of spoof advertisements for Coca-Cola and Montblanc.

  The last movement was the most subtle and the most poignant, and the curators called it the ‘wounded romantic spirit’. To represent this mood they chose the work of a 35-year-old painter named Zhang Xiaogang.

  The curators had been aware of Zhang Xiaogang’s work since the early eighties and Li Xianting had included one of his paintings, a triptych called Forever Lasting Love, in the 1989 ‘China/Avant-Garde’ exhibition. That painting had a symbolist bent, blending religious and ethnic iconography from East and West in a surreal eclecticism which captured the experimental nature of the 1980s’ art scene. But as Johnson Chang prepared for the London opening
of ‘China’s New Art, Post-1989’, he received a letter from Zhang Xiaogang which brought news of work that was quite different. Looking at the photo that dropped out of the letter, Chang knew at once that he was looking at a real breakthrough. Fang Lijun had captured the cynicism of the age and Wang Guangyi its materialism, but, in his new work, Zhang Xiaogang seemed to have captured its grieving soul.

  The painting was entitled simply Family Portrait. It depicted a man and a woman in drab workers’ uniforms, the kind once worn across Chinese society, their faces shaded in half-light. Between them sat their small son, his features a lurid pink, one eye turned shockingly inward. Wandering across the canvas was a thin, barely perceptible red line, like a cord that bound the group loosely together.

  Family Portrait (1993) was the first in a series of works—104 in all—that Zhang Xiaogang would paint over the next decade, and which became known as the ‘Bloodline’ series.

  All were portraits, mostly of two or three figures posed solemnly in the style of family photographs taken during the Cultural Revolution. A muted palette heightened the unsettling effect of the other elements: a translucent ‘birthmark’ hovering over some of the faces; the overlarge jet-black eyes against soft-toned skin; the blank, haunted expressions; and the wayward red thread that joined the groups together.

  The images are full of ambiguity and dissonance: between reality and unreality, between peace and sadness, and between the conformity of the drab Maoist clothing and the individuality conferred by a turned eye or crooked teeth.

  Zhang Xiaogang himself wrote that the figures in his paintings represent ‘souls struggling one by one under the forces of public standardisation’, their faces ‘bearing emotions smooth as water but full of internal tension’. To a Western eye the portraits immediately conjured a sense of sadness, a glimpse into the heart of a traumatised nation.

  Johnson Chang told me years later that in the ‘Bloodline’ imagery he recognised a genuine ‘breakthrough in the language of art. It was Western figuration that nonetheless felt Chinese.’ With this new language, Zhang Xiaogang created works that speak equally as strongly to his own country as to the West. Indelibly associated with the time after Tiananmen, the ‘Bloodline’ series reflects a period of loss which in a real sense has never ended.

  Today, ‘Bloodline’ is one of the most recognisable series in Chinese contemporary art, and one of its most prized. In 2014 a work from the series, Bloodline: Big Family No. 3, sold at auction in Hong Kong for $US12.1 million.

  Zhang Xiaogang’s childhood was marked by trauma. When young he had been terrified by the behaviour of his mother, who was only diagnosed as schizophrenic after he had grown up. His father tried to keep the family of four boys together but had little time for his youngest son. When Zhang Xiaogang was just eight years old the Cultural Revolution broke out and, in the ensuing chaos, his mother’s behaviour came to seem almost normal for the first time in his life. In 1979 at the age of 21 he entered university, one of the many young people given the chance by the reopening of the universities to competitive examination. Despite his father’s resistance he enrolled in art and it was at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in Chongqing that Zhang Xiaogang first found a place where he felt at home. Not in the academy itself, which he found stultifying, but with the friends he made, and the private world of inspiration they created for themselves out of the works they made and the books and music pouring in from the West.

  ‘When I was at university,’ he told me, ‘it was very academic, and conservative. I thought I needed to protect myself and my ideas from that, and I wanted to enhance my creativity and my feelings. So I inoculated myself against the conservatism with Western books and music. The music, the books and the art we made built up an atmosphere in which we could grow.’

  From the moment he arrived at the academy he knew he wanted to be an artist and he persisted against all the odds and in the face of parental disapproval. At times he lived a hand-to-mouth existence but like all those who came of age in the 1980s he would look back later on that time with nostalgia.

  Talking in his grand Beijing studio one day in 2014, he told me he still turned to Western music to create the atmosphere he needed to work. Inspiration still came from his first loves—Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Pink Floyd.

  Looking around his studio together we stopped for a while by a print hanging in a quiet corner, one of a group of small works he had created about the same time as the triptych Forever Lasting Love in 1988. It was hard to equate the artist he had become with the person who had created these whimsical and romantic works in the 1980s.

  ‘After 1989, after June 4, everything changed,’ he told me. ‘I just didn’t want to paint romantic things.’

  ‘You couldn’t?’ I asked.

  ‘I didn’t have that feeling any more,’ he replied quietly.

  In the 1990s Zhang Xiaogang had the opportunity to leave China for the West but he decided to stay. To stay or to go was the great decision for many people in that decade. After June 4 Western countries threw open their doors to young and talented people from China. Many would follow the lead of artists of an earlier generation, like Huang Rui, Wang Keping and Ma Desheng, and leave China, believing that only abroad would they have the freedom to develop. Others, despite having ample chance to leave, would stay. Among the stayers were Fang Lijun, the original cynical realist, and Wang Guangyi, the pioneer of political pop.

  But for others after 1989 it proved impossible to settle down again; among these was Sheng Qi.

  His mother came to find him in the hospital in Beijing. For twenty days after he had severed his finger, Sheng Qi lay in a fever, an infection raging in his blood. He asked his mother not to cry when she saw what he had done, but she did so all the same. She took him home with her to Hefei to nurse him back to health. In the weeks that followed he sought out a Tai Chi teacher, hoping to find peace and regain his strength.

  For two months he got up at 6 a.m. every day and practised Tai Chi with the old man. ‘It was a kind of meditation, I guess,’ he said. It was also a release. After two months he felt physically and mentally strong again. He also felt resolved. He could not stay in China. A friend in the Italian Embassy helped him with a visa application, and by the spring of 1990 he was on his way to Rome. It would be a decade before he returned.

  In 1992 Gonkar Gyatso would also leave China, but he was not heading for the West. Instead he would travel to India, to the seat of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile, Dharamsala.

  When he returned to Lhasa from Beijing in 1984 he found his home town transformed. It was full of colours, scents and sights that were new to him. The new policy of religious tolerance had brought Buddhist practice back into the open, while members of Tibet’s ‘old society’ who had been persecuted and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution—members of the religious orders and the old aristocratic class—had been rehabilitated. With the monasteries reopened he saw for the first time the true riches of Buddhist art. It was ‘visually overwhelming’, he told me.

  Every day he would meet with friends in one of the city’s teahouses, spending hours debating how they could make art that was about the real Tibet. The change in the city was both exhilarating and confusing.

  ‘I saw so many contradictory things, things that contradicted what we’d been taught before. We’d been educated since kindergarten that the landlords, the aristocrats, the monks, the Dalai Lama—they are all bad guys, “bad elements”. Then suddenly all those people are back. And they have become popular figures. Like suddenly you can see the Dalai Lama’s photo everywhere, and you can actually buy his photo on the streets! You can see the monks in their robes, and the aristocrats, too, and the government is giving them back their land and their houses. It was just such a reversal.’

  All the things he now saw around him made him wonder what Tibetan society was really like before 1959 when the Dalai Lama went into exile.

  ‘I had this hunger to know more about my own history, but the
re was a kind of big blank. Nobody told us what things were really like before ’59. The government version was that, before ’59, Tibet was a very dark and very cruel society, but then suddenly when everything was opened up in the eighties and was aired it seemed like all those dark things were actually positive. I realised there was no way to actually find out what was the real story and what was not. I had already realised when I went to Beijing that I was Tibetan not Chinese, and so now I thought, So, if I am Tibetan, what do I really know about my tradition?’

  One day he came across some speeches by the Dalai Lama which had been smuggled on cassette tapes into China. ‘When I listened, I thought, if I can go and see him maybe he can give me some guidance.’

  In 1992 he flew out for Nepal. He had waited almost five years for a passport and permission to leave. His father had relations in Nepal, and the Chinese authorities finally granted Gonkar an exit visa for a family visit.

  In Nepal his relations advised him how to get to Dharamsala. He must discard his Chinese passport, they told him, and take a bus to the Indian border with a group of other Tibetans. There he should approach the border guards, and when challenged he should just say ‘Dalai Lama! Dalai Lama!’ and that would get him into India. Gonkar threw away his hard-won passport and set off.

  At the border it happened just the way his relations said it would. At the sound of the Dalai Lama’s name, the guards waved him through.

  And so it was that, in search of his identity, Gonkar became a refugee.

  I returned to China in the autumn of 1993. I had begun working with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) the year before, on a new television program called Foreign Correspondent. Over the next few years I would visit China numerous times to produce stories for the ABC, allowing me once again to track the changes in the country at first hand.