The Phoenix Years

by Madeleine O'Dea

  The reforms of the late 1970s had given farmers control over their land, but it had not given them ownership. As China urbanised, more and more farmers were finding their land threatened by development. Compensation when land was compulsorily reacquired by the state was often pitiful and all the more so when compared to what the land fetched when the rights were sold on to developers.

  Meanwhile, urban dwellers were discovering their newly acquired homes could be vulnerable, too. If they lived in areas ripe for redevelopment they could find themselves homeless and hopelessly under-compensated. The corruption that attended such land grabs added to the sense of grievance. Property could also be threatened by rampant industrial development or pollution.

  Workers were vulnerable to exploitation in the nation’s booming factories, and those in the floating population found themselves toiling in urban centres without any of the rights of residency that their city-born neighbours enjoyed—notably access to subsidised health services or to education for their children.

  These were the issues the rights lawyers were tackling, and they were teaming up with investigative journalists, a growing number of NGOs, and new associations of workers, residents and other interest groups.

  Few talked about it in so many words, but I was excited to see in their efforts the building blocks of a civil society emerging, something that could serve as a counterweight to the monolithic role of the Communist Party in representing the will of the people. Once again I allowed myself to imagine China as a more vibrant, open and pluralistic society.

  Of course, this vision had appeared before and evaporated in disappointment or worse, but two things gave me hope this time. The first was the weight of history. Most of these new players had been active in the student movement of 1989; now in their mid-to-late thirties they were moving into positions where they could influence society.

  One of the most prominent of the rights lawyers was Pu Zhiqiang, who had never made a secret of his activism in 1989. He rose to prominence as a lawyer in late 2004 when he took up the defence of a pair of investigative journalists who had exposed the brutal exploitation of farmers in Anhui and who had been sued by a local party boss for their pains. Pu had effectively turned the tables in that case, and no conviction was ever recorded against the journalists. This was the first of many freedom-of-speech cases that he would take pro bono over the following years while supporting himself as a commercial lawyer.

  In 2006 he wrote about the need to live in a way that honoured the sacrifices of 1989. ‘If I just slouch along through life, taking the easy route, what do I say to the spirits of those murdered “rioters” of seventeen years ago?’ he asked. ‘Our Tiananmen generation is now in middle age; we are in positions where we can make a difference. Do we not want to?’

  The other powerful new factor was the internet. Liu Xiaobo, a tireless reform advocate who had served nineteen months in prison after 1989 and had been jailed twice more in the 1990s, has written about the excitement of discovering the web on returning home from prison in 1999. At first he didn’t see the point of the new gadget his wife had installed in their apartment. But he soon realised that the computer connected him to the world and to his fellow citizens in a way that hadn’t been possible before, and he became convinced that in China the internet would be a decisive liberating force.

  It suddenly seemed that I’d picked an exciting time to come back to China. And I wasn’t the only one to feel that way.

  In the late 1990s and early 2000s, many in the Chinese diaspora decided to take a chance on China again. Having achieved qualifications and experience in the West, they came back to participate in a country that seemed to be opening up once more. Among them were many of the artists who left China after 1989.

  For Sheng Qi it was an ‘animal instinct’ to return, to see his family, to smell the familiar smells, to hear his native tongue spoken around him. He had served a nine-year apprenticeship in the West and returned confident in himself as an artist.

  He had drifted in his first years away, through three years in Italy and a stint in Paris, before he moved on to London in 1992. Arriving there he determined to learn everything he could about Western art, spending long days in London’s museums studying the work at close quarters. At first he supported himself pushing a yum cha trolley in Chinatown but soon discovered a better way to make a living nearby. For the next six years Sheng Qi created charcoal portraits for tourists in Leicester Square, ‘hanging out with the alcoholics and the homeless, being warned by the police’. After four years he won a place at the prestigious Central Saint Martins art school. By the time he got his Masters degree in 1998 he was developing a reputation as a performance artist, but even though his work was often provocative or extreme he wasn’t yet dealing with his most provocative act of all.

  In the years abroad Sheng Qi got used to hiding his mutilated left hand in his pocket, nervous that people would see what he had done. But on his return to China he was determined not to hide it any more. ‘It was ten years before I finally realised that my left hand with its missing finger had become part of my identity, the severing of my finger my unique act. I began to photograph it. It was then I realised that personal history could also embody the history of a society.’

  Sheng Qi’s My Left Hand, Me (2000) will probably always be his most famous work. It is part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and has been featured many times in books about Chinese contemporary art. It is beautiful, sad and shocking.

  In the photograph his hand stands out strongly against a deep red background, the place where his little finger should be an unsettling void. In the palm of his hand nestles a tiny black and white photo. It shows him as a very young boy, smiling shyly beneath his army cap, innocent of everything that lies ahead of him.

  By creating this work, he was bidding for recognition of the wounds of a time still unacknowledged in China’s official history. Innocence and violence are united in this ‘self-portrait’, as they were at Tiananmen Square.

  And yet it would be four years before the photograph would be critically recognised. When he showed it to the artists and critics he knew in Beijing they reacted coolly, as if the image meant nothing. Today it’s easier for him to understand the discomfort behind their indifference; but that doesn’t make it less galling to recall how one critic put aside the image with hardly a glance, shoving it to the side of the table they sat at, letting drops of water fall on it as he poured out their tea.

  In 2004 Sheng Qi sent the image to New York to be part of a large exhibition of Chinese contemporary work at the International Center of Photography. There it struck a chord and it was chosen as a cover image for the show. And so it entered contemporary art history, four years after it was pushed out of sight on a crowded table set for tea.

  In 2004 Gonkar Gyatso visited China for the first time since he had taken the road to Dharamsala twelve years earlier. He had spent four years in the Dalai Lama’s ‘capital’, studying Buddhism and the traditional art of thangka painting. He had fallen in love with the city. Everyone—the monks, the citizens, even the Dalai Lama—lived so close together. ‘It was amazing to see a whole society run by Tibetans. When I arrived I was interviewed by the Tibetan Security Bureau; everywhere there were Tibetans, it was very refreshing for me.’ But after a few years he realised he had to move on. He was dedicated to being a contemporary artist and that couldn’t happen in Dharamsala; ‘Understandably, the whole society there is quite conservative, they really want to hold on to their traditions and don’t want to change.’ In 1996 he headed to London where a British artist he had met had helped him to secure a place at the Central Saint Martins art school.

  He had arrived in London just in time to see the explosive ‘Sensation’ exhibition, featuring some of the most outrageous headline grabbers from the art collection of advertising guru Charles Saatchi. Among them was the now-legendary shark in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst, and a tent covered in people’s names and titled Everyon
e I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 by Tracey Emin. The show galvanised Gonkar. ‘I was blown away. Before, in all the training I had done both in China and in Dharamsala, and in all the books about art that I had read, I had understood that there was a boundary between what is art and what is not art, but after I saw the “Sensation” show, that concept was completely smashed. I realised everything can be art. There is no limitation.’

  He began to look for ways to make his ultimate inspiration—the figure of the Buddha—more accessible to Western audiences, liberated by the idea that he need no longer use the conventional means of artistic expression that he had relied on up to then. But before he could move on he knew he must first deal with the question of his own identity as a Tibetan Chinese.

  The year before he visited Beijing in 2004, he had finally completed in London a photographic work called My Identity. Over four panels he depicted the four identities that had defined him during his years as an artist. In the first he presented himself as a traditional Tibetan painter, creating an intricate thangka of the Buddha; in the second he was a good communist, reproducing a standard image of Chairman Mao; in the third he was a refugee, honouring the image of the Dalai Lama; and lastly he appeared as a contemporary ‘Western’ artist, apparently shorn of all ethnicity in a white-walled studio confronting an abstract canvas.

  With this work he believed he had finally laid to rest the search for identity that had obsessed him since he had first left Lhasa to go to university in Beijing. ‘I felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders,’ he told me.

  On the way to Lhasa from London in 2004 he stopped in Beijing and walked the streets, astounded by how the city had changed. He went to visit his alma mater, the Minzu University, but he could not find it. The area around the original site had been transformed, the old rambling gardens in which the university had stood long since sold off for development. Even the entrance to the university had moved to a different street. In the end he gave up the search.

  He wasn’t ready yet to consider returning to China for good. It would be another twelve years before he would be ready to try again to make his home there.

  In 2005 Guo Jian joined the stream of artists returning to China from the West. He had been in Australia for more than ten years making a living as a house painter, brickie’s labourer and gardener, all the time working on his art, which led to a series of exhibitions that established his name. He had developed a strong, almost pop, style, which he used to brilliant effect in a series of works that undercut the propaganda images of military life. His soldiers weren’t ideal specimens of socialist rectitude, their dreams were erotic, not patriotic, and in his paintings their minds were filled not with famous victories but with girls, food and fun.

  He settled in well in Australia; he liked its casualness and what he saw, after living in Beijing, as the tranquillity of its urban spaces. Where most visitors to the inner Sydney suburb of Newtown would see grittiness, he noticed the planter boxes full of flowers and the friendly people on the street. The live music scene was humming in those years and so almost every night after his language class he would go out and see a band. He found it easy to make friends and was amused when the local branch of the Communist Party of Australia tried to bring him into their circle. ‘They were always asking me to sing them a Chinese revolutionary song and, of course, I wasn’t going to do that! So one day I finally said, “Hey listen up, this is a Chinese revolutionary song,” and I sung them Cui Jian’s “Nothing to My Name”.’

  By the time he returned to Beijing his paintings had entered the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art, and he had become an Australian citizen, but for all his success he was attracted by the thought of what he could achieve in China. He wanted to try his hand at sculpture, and Beijing offered the studio spaces and the technical know-how that he needed. And he missed his family, his friends, and the food.

  Within months of arriving in Beijing he had teamed up with two other artist friends from his native Guizhou province to launch a restaurant, Three Guizhou Men, which quickly became a favoured canteen for the art world in the capital. The restaurant business was a popular second string for artists at the time. Huang Rui had pioneered this with his café in 798, and ‘cynical realist’ Fang Lijun had followed, opening a chain of restaurants specialising in food from Yunnan province. In the new century, contemporary art was safer than it used to be, but it didn’t hurt to be in business, too.

  At Three Guizhou Men the partners naturally hung their work on the walls, but Guo Jian soon found his own work made his fellow owners uncomfortable.

  His painting seemed innocent enough—it shows a group of ordinary soldiers, grinning broadly as they are serenaded by an army entertainer. One of the soldiers holds a pig ecstatically to his chest, as the chanteuse, resplendent in her dress uniform, looks the viewer straight in the eye, hair shining, teeth sparkling, her glossy red lips and nails glittering in an unseen spotlight.

  The singer commanding all the attention in Guo Jian’s painting bore a striking resemblance to Song Zuying, who for more than a decade had been a star of the Spring Festival Gala, the variety show broadcast each Chinese New Year on the national television network. The gala is the pinnacle of officially sanctioned popular culture in China and there’d long been speculation about how Song Zuying came to secure this plum gig year after year. Some said she had been talent-spotted by President Jiang Zemin himself when he was in power, and she was also rumoured to be his mistress. Whatever the truth, her run on the gala went on for more than twenty years.

  Hanging in a prominent position by the restaurant entrance, the painting began to attract attention from customers, who swapped knowing remarks about what the soldiers might really be smiling about. One day a friend of Guo Jian’s turned up to dinner with the head of the China Artists Association in tow. ‘You know that painting could get you closed down?’ the official remarked, and laughed at his own joke. Guo Jian knew a warning when he heard one. The painting went back to his studio.

  The young journalists I worked with at CRI were bright and well informed about Chinese affairs. They were also keen to improve their craft and wonderfully responsive to advice.

  Part of my job was to read the English-language news, using material prepared by my colleagues. I decided to use these slightly wooden scripts as an opening to talk about the elements of good writing. Try to keep the language fresh, I urged them; don’t get trapped in a formula. One night, half an hour before airtime, I handed back a report from the weather bureau about how temperatures around the country were falling at the end of summer. ‘See if you can brighten this up,’ I said to the young woman who was on duty with me. She returned a few minutes later and put a new script into my hand.

  ‘Coolness is creeping over China,’ it began. ‘There’s a feel of fall in the air.’

  This gem of accidental poetry quickly became my mantra, because in those early years of the century, China was becoming very cool, as thousands of foreigners were discovering. There was a crackle of excitement not just in the alleys of 798 and on the banks of Houhai, the once sleepy back lake to the Forbidden City in Beijing, but in the rooftop bars of Shanghai’s Bund and the tree-lined streets of the city’s old French Concession. A new breed of Chinese urbanites were colonising the old spaces of their cities, opening cafés and bars, clubs and small shops, creating a new infrastructure for a city life that was open and colourful and cool.

  At Houhai you could look out across a lotus-filled lake where at the turn of the previous century Chinese poets had floated their wine cups on the water, and listen to poets of the coming age—punk rockers from the capital, or folkies from the loess plains of Shaanxi—while chatting to a bar owner who slept in a loft he’d constructed in the rafters and who shared his life with a dozen street cats he’d adopted as pets.

  Around Beijing small clubs were opening up, providing entry to the alternative music scene every night of the week. Yo
u could see the all-female punk band Hang on the Box, whose lead singer looked like Debbie Harry and sang like Sid Vicious, or the crazed folk rockers Glorious Pharmacy, or the wild-haired Askar whose Xinjiang band Grey Wolf summoned up the spirit of the Silk Road and of the eagles that soared above the Karakorum. Independent recording labels were starting up, too, or you could buy music downloaded direct to a CD by a local enthusiast in a hole-in-the-wall shop in a hutong off Houhai.

  For much of the 2000s the visas that allowed young foreigners to keep hanging on in China were quite simple to get. People would arrive on holiday and wangle work or business visas through a grey market of intermediaries. Then they would stay on, banding together with locals to launch pizza parlours or clubs, play bass in bands or pick up bit parts in TV dramas, launch listing magazines or small fashion labels, front real-estate companies or foreign galleries, and use sheer chutzpah to score jobs or business opportunities that would be out of reach at home. The authorities knew the visa system was loose, but they seemed to be making the correct calculation that these freewheeling foreigners were putting a lot more into Chinese urban life than they were taking out.

  I felt the winds of change at CRI, too.

  The station was still firmly part of the propaganda system, but there was a group of young managers who were quietly pushing to make it a bit more than that.

  There was the one who headed up CRI English Online, who always came in early so that he could get in ahead of the official directives and make his own decisions about what stories to highlight on the website. There was another who took me aside when I first arrived to chat about stories I’d produced at the ABC. He was the one who told me that the CRI leadership had certainly seen my police file before hiring me. It hadn’t put them off, he told me, because they were looking for real journalists now, people who could bolster their own efforts to train their staff to be more professional.