Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  “This is my exhibition,” Song said, “and I take full responsibility.”

  After a brief exchange of hostilities, the director of gallery security stormed out, only to return with threatening-looking minions. You would have thought, to witness the scene, that Song Shuangsong had been caught holding a bomb rather than succumbing to a haircut and shave. Everyone was thrown out of the room. The doors were secured with heavy chains and padlocks. The exhibition was closed down immediately and permanently. Song was led out roughly between two guards.

  One Westerner who strayed into the performance turned to me with a shrug and commented on how sad it was that these attempts to fight openly for democracy in China always failed. He had arrived at the popular Western conclusion that an artist who runs up against the state must be working directly or indirectly toward free elections and a constitution. This logic is grounded in a misreading of China and the Chinese. In this case, it missed the point: the haircut had in fact been entirely successful. The Chinese intelligentsia—including the vanguard “underground” artists, many of whom are or have been active pro-democracy demonstrators—are united in their firm belief that Western democracy in China would be not only a mistake, but also impossible. The Chinese like China. Though they want Western money, information, and power, they do not want Western solutions to Chinese problems, and when they protest for democracy, this is a covert way of pushing toward Chinese solutions. In the East, more than one artist emphasized to me, it is customary to ask for what you do not want in order to get what you do.

  The very decision in China to act as an individual is radical. It runs against a five-thousand-year history of which the Chinese are intently aware and immensely proud, a history they frequently revise (sometimes violently) but never abandon. The members of the Chinese artistic avant-garde are individuals every one, but individualism carried too far is in Chinese terms ridiculous; artistry lies not in what the Chinese would deem coarse Western-style self-interest, but in balance. What seems to us to be a disowning of the Chinese tradition of uniformity is really more a means of stepping outside of it so as to prod it to evolve. China, despite its problems and cruelties, is highly functional, and that is much more important to the Chinese, even the Chinese intelligentsia, than any Western notion of democracy. Even iconoclastic artists, horrified by Deng Xiaoping’s government though they may be, are by and large surprisingly content with how their system works. The acts of defiance of the Chinese avant-garde function legitimately within their system; they are not designed to be interpreted within ours.

  What looks radical often is radical, but not always in the ways you think. In Nanjing dialect, the sounds i luv yoo mean “Would you care for some spiced oil?” “What the West does, encountering our art,” the artist Ni Haifeng said, “is to think we’re saying we love you, when we’re only having a private conversation about cooking.”

  Soul of the Avant-Garde

  Chinese society is always hierarchical; even the most informal group has a pyramid structure. The “leader” of the Chinese avant-garde is Li Xianting, called Lao Li (Old Li, a term of deference, respect, and affection). “Sometimes it’s easier to say ‘Lao Li’ than ‘Chinese avant-garde,’ ” the painter Pan Dehai said. “Both mean the same thing.” Lao Li, forty-six, is a relatively small man with an eccentric beard and a quality of intelligent gentleness and considered kindness that sometimes borders on radiance. He is a scholar, highly literate, who knows the history of Chinese art and is informed about Western art.

  Lao Li lives in a small courtyard house, typical of old Beijing; it is the heart of Chinese avant-garde culture. Mornings are off-limits since he sleeps until lunch, but in the afternoon or the evening you can always find artists gathered there, sometimes two or three, often twenty or thirty. Everyone drinks tea; at night, occasionally Chinese schnapps. The conversation can be grandiloquent and idealistic, but more often it is simple and even gossipy: which exhibitions have been good, whether someone is going to leave his wife, a string of new jokes.

  Lao Li’s house has just three small rooms and, like most courtyard houses, no indoor bathroom and no hot water. But once you have arrived at this cozy, comfortable place and crowded onto the banquettes, you can stay for hours. If the conversation goes late, you can even stay over. Once this summer, a group of us talked until almost 5:00 a.m.; miraculously, there was room for all eight and we were so tired by then that we slept soundly. If there had been twenty of us, there would still have been room. Lao Li’s house is like that.

  It’s hard to explain exactly what Lao Li does. Though he is a fine writer and curator, his main role is to guide artists gently to a language in which they can experience and discuss their own work. Wherever I went in China, we spoke about Lao Li: his recent essays, whether it was right for one man to hold so much power, whether he thinks himself more important than the artists he discovers and documents, what kind of women he likes, whether he has changed since his travel to the West last year. “The artists bring him their new paintings the way children bring homework to a teacher,” said a member of the Beijing art circle. “He praises or criticizes it and sends them to their next projects.” Artists from every province in China send Lao Li photos of their work, asking for his help. He travels to see them, taking with him books and information. “It’s a kind of agriculture,” he said, “bringing these materials to the provinces to fertilize the culture.” Wherever he goes he makes slides; his archives document every meaningful artistic effort in modern China. When he finds interesting artists, he invites them to Beijing. Through Lao Li, the art world is kept constantly invigorated with fresh blood.

  For all his scholarly accomplishments, Lao Li does not sustain a critic’s objective distance, and his detractors fault him for this. His response is always as much empathetic as critical, and his pleasure in work comes largely from his sense of moral purpose. Lao Li devotes himself to encouraging those ways of thinking that empower his society. This agenda is higher than, and different from, the interpretive mission of an art critic.

  The artists in his circle define themselves as members of the avant-garde; one gave me a printed calling card with his name and, below, Avant-Garde Artist. At first, I found the definition bewildering: many of these artists were not, by Western standards, particularly avant-garde. As I talked to Lao Li, I understood that what was radical in this work was its originality, that anyone who cleaved to a vision of his own and chose to articulate it was at the cutting edge of Chinese society. Lao Li is individuality’s greatest champion. The quality of his singular humanism is to make way for freedom of spirit and expression in a society that, through its official strictures and internal social mechanisms, does not allow for original thought.

  “Idealism?” Lao Li said at one point. “I hope that a new art can appear in China and that I can help it. Pre-’89, we thought that with this new art we could change the society and make it free. Now, I think only that it can make the artists free. But for anyone to be free is no small matter.”

  Some History

  “Chinese art rests on three legs, like a traditional cooking pot,” Lao Li explained. “One is traditional brush and ink painting. One is realism, a concept imported from the West at the beginning of the twentieth century. One is the international language of contemporary Western art.”

  The period from 1919 to 1942 brought general disillusionment with traditional Chinese literati, or scholar-artist, ink painting; when Mao Zedong took power, a heroic style based on the Soviet model became the official language of revolution. Not until 1979 did the Stars group initiate the avant-garde movement. It was part of the Democracy Wall movement, which brought together social, cultural, and political impetus for change. “Every artist is a star,” Ma Desheng, one of the Stars group’s founders, has said. “We called our group Stars to emphasize our individuality. This was directed at the drab uniformity of the Cultural Revolution.” The members of the Stars group, who had never trained at official academies, could not show their work
, so in 1979 they hung their paintings on the fence outside the National Art Gallery. When police closed down their open-air exhibition, they demonstrated for individual rights.

  In 1977, the art academies, which had been shuttered during the Cultural Revolution, reopened, and young artists began to go through the unspeakably grueling application process, taking their exams over and over for the few places in the Zhejiang Academy in Hangzhou and the Central Academy in Beijing. Between 1979 and 1989, as the Chinese government was liberalizing, exhibitions of Western art appeared at the National Art Gallery, and students would spend days there. In China, even those who railed against society wanted the academic formal training that they felt entitled them to speak and think. The Stars had brought in radicalism of content; now, the ’85 New Wave introduced radicalism of form. In 1985, five critics, including Lao Li, privately set up Fine Arts in China, a magazine that became a voice for new art movements until it was closed down in 1989. These other critics, who were as important as Lao Li, have since either emigrated or lapsed into relative silence.

  Many artists during this time signaled their disdain for social norms by ceasing to cut their hair (a radicalism to which Song’s haircut performance alluded). Ignoring the prurient repressiveness of Chinese society, they spoke freely of women, did not conceal the details of their personal lives, told dirty jokes. They sat up at night discussing Western philosophers, artists, poets. Much previously unavailable literature was suddenly published, and they read voraciously. Despite their general looseness, however, most had jobs and were painstaking in the execution of their duties. Art they made for themselves, showed with great difficulty, and sold only occasionally to “international friends” (the phrase, beloved of artists, was Mao’s euphemism for foreign sympathizers).

  As artists took up arms against their society’s values throughout the 1980s, they tended to use Western visual language. Some Western critics, looking at this art, have dismissed it as derivative. But that Western language was powerful in China simply because it had been forbidden; the use of it was calculated and meaningful. The artists of the Chinese avant-garde have no more copied Western styles than Roy Lichtenstein has copied comic books or than Michelangelo copied classical sculpture. The form looks similar; the language is imitative; the meaning is foreign.

  The last gasp of the exuberant Chinese art movement came just months before the June 4 massacre in Tiananmen Square. In February 1989, the China/Avant-Garde show opened at the National Art Gallery in an atmosphere of naïve ecstasy, its symbol the Chinese road sign for “No U-turn.” Ten years earlier, the Stars had fought to hang their work outside the gallery, but now the critics of Fine Arts in China joined with others to put on a monumental exhibition of the most radical work of all the new artists of the Chinese avant-garde. Many artists thought this show would give their work the official imprimatur it needed to reach the larger population. At the opening, two artists fired gunshots into their installation. Shocked officials closed the exhibition immediately, leaving the dreams of the avant-garde in ruins. Today, some artists have seen “confidential” memos in government files that say no measures will be counted too extreme to prevent another event like the ’89 show.

  The closing of the exhibition paralyzed Chinese artists; they were discussing the next step when the June 4 massacre took place. Artists and idealists realized that they had no influence on their country’s future. The critic Liao Wen, who is Lao Li’s girlfriend, has written, “Today, surrounded by the ruins of bankrupt idealism, people have finally come to an unavoidable conclusion: extreme resistance proves only just how powerful one’s opponent is and how easily one can be hurt. Humor and irony, on the other hand, may be a more effective corrosive agent. Idealism has given way to ironic playfulness since 1989. It is hardly an atmosphere conducive to the serious discussion of art, culture and the human condition. People these days find all that stuff irrelevant.”

  Some artists emigrated pre-’89; many others, immediately afterward. Most of the great figures of the old avant-garde have fled the country. Only one member of the Stars group remains in Beijing. Yet the idea of “No U-turn” goes on. Dozens go to Lao Li’s house every evening without fail.

  Purposeful Purposelessness

  Lao Li has defined six categories for contemporary Chinese art, some of which are more widely accepted than others. Artists complain that his categories are artificial, but the Chinese impulse to order things remains strong, and it is difficult to know how to begin to approach the variety of Chinese art without categorization. His taste extends more readily to painting than to performance, conceptual work, or installation. Of the categories of painting that he has defined, the two that are most discussed, debated, and, in the end, accepted are Cynical Realism and Political Pop.

  Cynical Realism is very much a post-’89 style. Its primary exponents, Fang Lijun and Liu Wei, and its other practitioners, including Wang Jinsong and Zhao Bandi (who doesn’t like to be called a Cynical Realist), all have high-level academic training and are accomplished in photo-perfect figurative painting. The work, brightly colored and highly detailed, shows people strangely alienated from one another. Fang Lijun paints men without hair caught in disconnected proximity: one is in the middle of an enormous yawn; one grins at nothing; black-and-white swimmers float in a blank sea. The characters are always idle, sitting or swimming or walking around purposelessly. Using sophisticated composition and exquisite technique, Fang depicts an absence of activity that seems hardly worth depicting. The result is often funny, lyrical, and sad, a poignant representation of what he calls “the absurd, the mundane and the meaningless events of everyday life.”

  Liu Wei and Fang Lijun are always grouped together artistically and socially. They went to the same academy and have been friends for years. They have a confrontational air: in Fang Lijun this seems like a front, but in Liu Wei it is an authentic streak of hooliganism. Liu Wei is the son of a high-level general in the Red Army, and he usually paints his parents. In the eyes of most Chinese, highly placed army officials live well and are happy; Liu Wei portrays “the helplessness and awkwardness of my family and of all Chinese people” in hilarious and grotesque pictures. “In 1989, I was a student,” he said. “I joined the democracy movement, like everyone, but didn’t have an important part of it. After June fourth, I despaired. Now I have accepted that I cannot change society: I can only portray our situation. Since I cannot exhibit in China, my work cannot be an inspiration here, but painting helps to relieve my own sense of helplessness and awkwardness.”

  Wang Jinsong conveys this scathing message with almost plastic smoothness. Zhao Bandi’s work is subtle, slightly twisted, a series of meticulous and beautifully colored monumental images of people imprisoned and alone. The Cynical Realist movement is not entirely cynical; the idealism of these artists lies in their portraying a cynicism their society would deny. These works are like cries for help, but they are also playful and roguish, presenting humor and insight as empowering defenses. “I want my paintings to be like a thunderstorm,” Fang Lijun said, “to make such a powerful impression when you see them and to leave you wondering afterwards about how and why.”

  Political Pop is popular with Westerners. Its leading figure, Wang Guangyi, loves money and his own fame, and his work has reached prices in excess of $20,000. He recently rented a $200 hotel room just “to feel what it was like to live like an art superstar.” Wang wears dark glasses even when he is inside, has a long ponytail, and is always mentioned by other artists as an exemplar of Western values in China. He is at work on a series called “The Great Criticism,” in which he plays on the comical parallels between the publicity Mao once negotiated for his revolutionary policies and the advertising campaigns of prosperous Western interests. The names Band-Aid or Marlboro or Benetton are placed against idealized young soldiers and farmers wearing Mao caps. “Post-’89, with people so vulnerable,” he said, “I worry that commerce will harm their ideas and their ability to have ideas, much as AIDS can de
stroy people’s love relationships or their ability to have love relationships. Of course, I enjoy my own money and fame. I criticize Coke, but drink it every day. These contradictions are not troublesome to Chinese people.”

  Yu Youhan, in Shanghai, paints Mao over and over, usually overlaid with garish patterns of flowers taken from the “peasant art” the Chairman loved. Mao mixes with common people or sits at ease on a folding chair; sometimes his face is clear, but sometimes a flower blocks one of his eyes or his nose. One of Yu’s recent paintings is a very pop double portrait: on the left is Chairman Mao, applauding one of his own principles; on the right, Whitney Houston applauds her own music. Both are copied from existing photographs, and the similarity is uncanny.

  Individualism by the Numbers

  Traditional Chinese painters trained by copying their teachers; originality was reserved for old age, when you might make changes so slight that they were almost imperceptible. The history of traditional Chinese art is rich but slow. The avant-garde goes at breakneck pace.

  The artists who engage fully with the question of individuality are perhaps the most interesting in China right now. Paradoxically, the New Analysts Group in Beijing, which includes Wang Luyan, Gu Dexin, and Chen Shaoping, has decided, as an experiment, to suppress the individual in art. After the ’89 avant-garde show, they adopted a resolution stating that members of the group could not sign their work. Shortly thereafter, they established rules of operation. The artists in the group conceive these rules together, pass them by majority vote, and agree to be bound by them. “Facing the rules, we are all equal,” Wang Luyan explained to me. “Since we regard the rules as more important than the artists, we express ourselves in a language of regulations. Symbols and numbers best convey our ideas.”