The Phoenix Years

by Madeleine O'Dea

  The signatories saw reform as an urgent matter but the government felt itself under no pressure: events seemed to be running in their favour. At the end of 2008, the global financial crisis (GFC) was tilting the balance of economic power towards China. It was not the Olympics that would further the government’s ambitions for global leadership that year, but raw economic power.

  On September 15 2008 the giant American financial firm Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. There was no longer any doubt that the world’s economy was in crisis.

  The Chinese economy had been slowing for months and by early October the factories of the Pearl River delta were emptying out as millions of workers were laid off. Demand for Chinese manufactured products was drying up as the world slipped into recession.

  In November, China announced a staggering RMB 4 trillion (US$586 billion) stimulus package. Nearly 40 per cent would go towards public infrastructure, and another quarter towards rebuilding the parts of Sichuan hit by the earthquake. This spending would provide employment for the millions displaced from manufacturing jobs. The global knock-on effect helped to keep Australia out of recession, and China’s interventions in Asian currency markets gave support to the economies of Southeast Asia and South Korea.

  China went on a building spree, the biggest the world had ever seen, constructing highways and housing estates, bridges and railway lines. It drove the country to a GDP growth rate of 9 per cent in 2009 while most of the West was in recession. When in 2010 China passed Japan to become the globe’s second-largest economy, talk of an alternative ‘China model’ of development grew ever more respectful. Perhaps, wondered some observers, there was a viable road to prosperity through centralised control of the economy and an iron hand on dissent—an alternative to the democratic route, and one that might point the way for other developing economies.

  It would be a few years before the downside of this success emerged, in ballooning debt and an oversupply of real estate, and in the appearance of ‘ghost cities’, which had been built for populations yet to arrive. Corruption, already rife, was turbocharged and the gap between the free spending rich and the increasingly embattled poor became extreme. But in 2009 the government basked in its successful management of the crisis, which they took to be an endorsement of their muscular style of government.

  The art-world bubble burst immediately after the Olympics were over. Olympic spending had kept it inflated but now the gathering GFC sucked the hot money out of the market.

  The Olympics year had not been a great one for art in Beijing. The success of China’s leading artists had turned contemporary art into a honeypot, so the streets of 798 and the studios of the Songzhuang artists’ village were full of knockoffs going for eye-watering prices. Some of the big-name artists were even prepared to rip themselves off, endlessly reproducing the work that had made them famous.

  Now, with the GFC, the carpetbaggers decamped and along with them hundreds of Songzhuang’s wannabe artists. The commercial galleries thinned out and scores of shows were cancelled. Most of the established artists felt relieved. They were off the treadmill and had time to think. It was 30 years since the Stars had hung their works on the railings outside the National Art Museum of China. What kind of society did they now seek to portray?

  Thirty years after the beginning of reform, China was changed beyond recognition. More than half the population now lived in the cities, in a country with rural traditions stretching back for millennia. More than 10 per cent of the population now had no ties to place, but ‘floated’ in search of work. And a nation which had once been driven by a powerful ideology was now offered nothing more profound to believe in than the drive for material gain.

  When I had returned to China in 2004 I had been struck by how many of my young colleagues at CRI were religious. Some were exploring Buddhism and Daoism, but others told me they were Christians. Among the rights lawyers and civil society workers, too, I discovered, there were many Christians, who would point to their faith as both inspiration and support. The best figures showed Christians at less than 1 per cent of the population in 1978, but by 2007 they were more than 4 per cent with their numbers growing at a rate of 10 per cent a year.

  Religious tolerance had been one of the reforms instituted by Deng Xiaoping, and since 1978 it had been enshrined in the Chinese constitution. Five religions were specifically recognised: Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Protestantism and Catholicism, but their religious leaders were left in no doubt about who was ultimately in charge. The Vatican was allowed no place in Chinese Catholicism and the Dalai Lama was demonised. The Chinese government even arrogated the powers of the Dalai Lama to themselves. When the second holiest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, the Panchen Lama, died in 1995, the Chinese rejected the Dalai Lama’s choice for his reincarnation, naming another child instead and spiriting the Dalai Lama’s nominee away, never to be seen again.

  Despite this supervision of the faiths the ranks of believers swelled. The religions were offering something that the government couldn’t. They offered a moral system and a connection to the transcendental, while the government offered only material comfort. Faced with a society riven by exploitation and inequality, the government preached the need for a ‘harmonious society’ above the right to organise or to protest. The Communist Party, which had once sold itself with the most extravagant and inspirational of slogans, now offered only this widely mocked bromide.

  Where, I wondered, were the artists in all this? By 2009 I was working as the art editor for the Beijinger, a local English-language magazine. The year was the 30th anniversary of the Stars exhibition, and it gave me a reason to take a longer look for a survey article I wrote for the magazine. It was the research for that piece that cemented my friendships with a number of the artists in this book.

  In the spring of 2009 Zhang Xiaogang was working on an exhibition he would title ‘The Records’, a reference to The Records of the Great Historian, the foundation historical work of China. Since he began to paint his ‘Bloodline’ series in the early 1990s, his work had been heavy with history; in the 2000s, he continued to explore how the past weighed on China.

  In the first decade of the new century he had begun a series called ‘Amnesia and Memory’, which concerned both the need to remember and the necessity to forget. In many of the paintings the human subjects looked away from the viewer or their eyes were closed or blindfolded. Simple objects—a bare light bulb hanging from a flex, a rotary dial telephone, a fountain pen—carried the weight of memory.

  Now with ‘The Records’ he had decided to consider, he told me, the ‘contradiction between memory and forgetting’ that underpinned contemporary Chinese life.

  ‘Because our country is developing by destroying things, we are living in a very contradictory situation,’ he explained. ‘Memory is something basic in our nature—you’re born with it—and it is basic to culture, too. It comes to us naturally, but we are living in a situation where memories are constantly being erased. You have to face the changes in your life, but sometimes it is quite cruel to do that, so people get lost and confused.’

  Zhang Xiaogang is deeply thoughtful, widely read and a prolific diarist and letter writer. In ‘The Records’ he wasn’t ashamed to display his own confusion and sense of loss, as he mined his journal for private thoughts which he wrote directly onto the paintings. In one he wrote about his home town of Kunming, in the far southern province of Yunnan, a place traditionally renowned for its temperate climate and graceful beauty: ‘Her purity is long gone, and disintegrated when she was forced to have a face lift. Long ago, her modesty was replaced by “luxury”, her kindness was covered up by “sophistication”, her kind-hearted nature was stolen by various deceits, her uniqueness was remodelled with the excuse of globalisation, her face revised into passages of low-grade advertising, her body turned into one after another false stock market speculation, she became a true guinea pig and selling agent, a beautiful excuse for a small group of people to make profits. That’s just
how it is, our home town has become a legend, a Godot that won’t turn up any more.’

  His whole exhibition was perfectly matched to the atmosphere that pervaded 2009—a year of heavy anniversaries—from the simple objects he portrayed, to his musings on what had been lost in the years that had brought China to this point. He had chosen this time to paint on polished metal, so looking at the works you often had the strange sensation of seeing Zhang Xiaogang’s thoughts projected onto your face, as if his thoughts of loss, of confusion and of hope had somehow become your own.

  My research also gave me a chance to catch up with Huang Rui, whom I had first met some three years earlier.

  In the summer of 2006, I had left CRI and taken a job for a while as the director of a small gallery in the 798 art district. As it happened, it gave me a ringside seat on the struggle—then reaching a climax—to save 798 from developers.

  When the military factories had first been abandoned in the district, the newly constituted Seven Star Huadian Science and Technology Group was given the job of maximising profits from the site. Their plan was to transform 798 into a high technology park, but this would take a while. Meanwhile, when a few scruffy artists and foreign galleries turned up in the early 2000s, Seven Star was happy to take their money until it was time to move them on.

  But they didn’t count on the passion of Huang Rui and his colleagues, who said they were going to secure 798 for art, and meant it. Huang Rui saw the potential of 798 as a permanent ‘safe zone’ for art, and from the moment he and his partners issued their manifesto in 2002 their strategy was to tell such a powerful story about the area that it would become untouchable.

  Together with his partner Berenice Angremy, Huang Rui established an annual international arts festival based around 798 in the spring of 2004. By 2006 the Dashanzi International Arts Festival was attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors over a three-week program of open studios, theatre, music, parties and exhibitions, and played a vital part in establishing 798’s credibility. Meanwhile, the artists lobbied the Beijing government to declare 798 a permanent art zone, highlighting its attractions to the international audience who would soon be arriving for the Olympic Games.

  The year 2006 began with all the tenants of 798 under threat of eviction. Seven Star did what they could to make life difficult, banning new tenants and then outlawing sub-letting by the old ones, too. Rents soared. In the spring a local district cultural inspection team arrived at 798 to censor any works or exhibitions deemed to cross the (invisible) line. The team in turn sent the police to enforce their rulings. No one was surprised when Huang Rui was one of their main targets.

  Much of Huang Rui’s work is subtle, relying on wordplay or performance, but the inspection team had no trouble spotting the satire behind his collage entitled Chairman Mao, 10,000 RMB.

  Chinese people live with Mao Zedong’s image every day. His face is on every large banknote. Every time you visit an ATM or reach into your wallet, there he is. The irony that the great communist should now be so indelibly linked to money was not lost on Huang Rui.

  When Mao was still alive the most popular slogan was the one that called for his long life. ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ was emblazoned everywhere, including on the walls of the factories of 798. In Chinese the slogan is literally ‘10,000 years to Chairman Mao!’ and it was this number that Huang Rui decided to play with. In his work the slogan was rendered in a collage of 100 yuan notes totalling RMB10,000. ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ the bank notes said. The inspection team ordered the work removed immediately from view.

  Despite all their spoiling efforts, by the end of 2006 it was clear that Seven Star had lost. Designated a protected cultural zone, 798 was Beijing’s third biggest tourist attraction when the Olympics rolled around. But Seven Star couldn’t resist one last act of revenge against the person they blamed for their defeat—Huang Rui.

  In late December 2006, Seven Star served him with an eviction notice. The other tenants of 798 quickly mobilised in support and Huang Rui announced a ‘sit-in’ at his studio. He made the protest into a formal exhibition, holding a series of talks and seminars, and conducting a daily public dialogue with a different art world figure over a pot of tea and porcelain cups. For eleven days we joined him, drinking endless cups of tea and debating art and life into the night. Finally, the eviction date well past, Huang Rui had made his point and consented to leave. Seven-Star had won the battle, but Huang Rui had won the war. 798 was safe.

  Huang Rui maintained his café in the heart of 798, and that’s where I went to meet him in 2009, and where he remains today. Nearby is his office, which still overlooks the alley on the corner where his studio once stood. From his eyrie he can keep an eye on the comings and goings of a place of which he is still, despite all Seven Star’s efforts, the unofficial mayor.

  On January 10 2009 Cao Fei declared RMB City officially open. She had built it in Second Life, an online world then some five years old, where hundreds of thousands of role-players lived out alternative existences. Cao Fei had been hanging out there for a couple of years, and, under the guise of her avatar, China Tracy, had found that in Second Life she could act out a truer version of herself.

  For years she had been fascinated by the way fantasy could be used to escape reality. She had found fantasy among the factory workers she had documented in Whose Utopia? and among the cosplayers of Guangzhou, kids who dressed up as their favourite manga characters and played out their stories on the rooftops, construction sites and vacant lots of their increasingly homogenised city. Now she had found the greatest realm for fantasy of all on the internet, a place where you could connect with others around the world, in ways that weren’t possible in real life.

  And so she had built RMB City, a fantasy Chinese urban realm where Tiananmen Square had been turned into a swimming pool and a panda’s portrait had replaced Mao’s on Tiananmen Gate. Situated on an island, her city had a Hong Kong–like cluster of skyscrapers and other spaces into which she invited other artists and arts institutions to adopt avatars and move right in. In her city, she said, everyone could live out their virtual dreams.

  ‘I want to build a utopian city in Second Life,’ she told me as she prepared for the city’s grand online opening, ‘because you can’t do it in real life.’

  The same month, I found Jia Aili living inside a gallery in Beijing. He had moved in in November and planned to stay till spring. He would paint all night and sleep all day. He called it his ‘hibernation’.

  His project was under wraps when I dropped in, but I could see it was a gigantic canvas—6 metres high and 12 metres long. He was hoping his winter exile in the gallery would ensure he finished it. He had already given it a title—We Are from the Century.

  He had moved to Beijing in 2007. He’d come for an exhibition of his paintings but once he had seen the gigantic studio spaces in the capital he knew he had to stay. He threw in his job as a lecturer at the prestigious Lu Xun Academy in Shenyang, to the horror of his parents. He could be a teacher, and instead he wanted to be a painter? What on earth was he doing?

  Luckily he found success quickly. His poetic, beautifully painted canvases evoked the tragedy of China’s rust belt and the destruction of the old communist system, in a wasteland of fallen idols and tangled wire. In many of the paintings he appeared as a pale figure wandering naked, clad only in a gas mask. He had bought the mask in a shop in Shenyang and adopted it as a kind of talisman. The mask was of the kind the Soviets had designed during World War II and then exported to East Germany and into China. It seemed a suitable symbol for the destruction that surrounded him in his home province, where the very air seemed filled with dust and despair.

  He didn’t manage to finish We Are from the Century during his time in the gallery and he was still working on it when I came to visit him for the first time in his studio in spring. He had taken over an abandoned factory on the outskirts of the city and I wondered whether its monumental size conjured up for him the deserted
spaces he had wandered as a teenager. The painting was incredible, a sprawling panorama of a fallen world. Dominating the foreground was a crashed plane and a giant hammer and sickle lying among the wreckage. Children wandered through the blasted landscape, while in the distance a statue of Lenin lay broken on its side. Towards the back of the composition wandered a figure in a spacesuit.

  Jia Aili spoke matter-of-factly of the monumental changes that had taken place in his lifetime, and which lay behind this painting. He told me he was interested in exploring the secrets behind modern history and its endless implications, a history whose objective reality was often hard to grasp. ‘Everyone knows what’s happened in China and the whole world in the 30 years since I was born. I’m simply a northerner. I’ve experienced the four seasons, the germinating of my body and my mind, and the loss of faith.’

  Elsewhere in Beijing in the spring of 2009, Aniwar was reconnecting with an experience that years before had changed his life, an experience which had intensified his sense of the immensity of nature, something that made him determined to create work that embodied its force.

  In 1987 he had spent 100 days exploring the Taklimakan Desert, which lies at the heart of Xinjiang. The Taklimakan is studded with ancient cities lost beneath its dunes, and its shifting sands have a well-earned reputation for treachery. But it exercised a powerful attraction to Aniwar, who had been born on its fringes. In the summer holidays that year his fellow students had been encouraged to go out and explore their country in preparation for their final year at college. Most of them had headed for the special economic zones, but Aniwar had decided to return to his homeland.

  Over a number of weeks, armed with sketchpad, compass, dried food and three canteens of water, he made two- or three-day sorties into the Taklimakan and out again. His idea was simple: to feel the desert, to walk alone. But then on a journey to a place called Black Sand Mountain, he lost his way.