Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  So the New Analysts Group has made up complex formulae to express its interrelationship; its members use these to produce graphs and charts. One recent piece begins, “A1, A2, and A3 are individuals before reaching the set quantity, and also stand for the order of action after reaching the set quantity. A1, A2, and A3 set arbitrarily their respective graph for measuring, i.e., graphs A1, A2, and A3. A1, A2, and A3 share a set quantity, i.e., table A.” This kind of deliberately arcane absolutism becomes a playful critique of the Chinese principle of conformity, delivered always in the most serious possible manner. The work, regulated though it may be, is some of the most original I saw in China. “Originality is the by-product of our cooperating according to rules on which we have agreed,” Wang Luyan said.

  They are an odd triumvirate. Chen Shaoping was sent to the mines during the Cultural Revolution and spent twelve years excavating coal; he is now an art editor for the China Coal newspaper. Wang Luyan spent the Cultural Revolution being reeducated as a farmer and is now a designer for the China Transportation newspaper. Gu Dexin is younger than the other two; he was a worker in a chemical factory until he decided to become a full-time artist.

  Mention Song Shuangsong and his haircut performance and these artists shake their heads. “Imagine growing long hair,” Gu Dexin says, laughing, “such that people in the market or at the bus station could tell you were an artist!” Their individuality is infinitely more powerful because it is camouflaged. When a recent Western exhibition that included the work of Gu Dexin ended, the packers confused Gu’s work with their own packing material and his piece was accidentally discarded. “I like for my work to be thrown away,” he said. “There is so much art in the world to preserve and study, and I don’t want to clutter further the history of art.” To this, both others nod: nonindividuality here is an almost unconscious impulse, opposite to what Chinese artists see as the appalling self-importance and egotism of Western artists.

  Zhang Peili and Geng Jianyi, based in Hangzhou, also play with these questions. Hangzhou is a beautiful city, an ancient capital of China, set beside the famous West Lake. Artists have a more relaxed time there than in Beijing or Shanghai: they are less frequently interrupted by international friends or by local dramas. Most Hangzhou artists are graduates of the Zhejiang Academy, and like Ivy League students who remain in Cambridge or New Haven, they have an ambivalent but affectionate relationship to their old student haunts. In the mode of students, they preserve an emphatic connectedness to abstract principles, but they bring a mature sagacity to these abstractions. They think more than artists elsewhere—and perhaps produce less. When I was in Hangzhou, I lived in the Academy, surrounded by students and student work. When I wanted quiet time to talk to Zhang and Geng, we took a boat for the afternoon and paddled around the West Lake, eating moon cakes and drinking beer and looking at the view of mountains in the distance. In the evenings, we would eat seafood and dumplings at outdoor tables set up in small market streets. Once or twice, we were joined at dinner by the artists’ old teachers from the Academy. Hangzhou had an atmosphere of sheer delight in art that was quite different from Beijing or Shanghai.

  Before the ’89 exhibition, Geng Jianyi sent a questionnaire to a long list of avant-garde artists. It went in official-looking envelopes, with a return address to the National Gallery, and purported to be one of the many bureaucratic papers that are an inescapable part of daily life in China. The first questions were standard—name, date of birth, etc.—but then “What are your previous exhibitions?” might be followed by “What kind of food do you like?” or even “What kind of people do you like?” Some of the recipients understood at once that this was an artist’s project and gave creative answers with funny pictures, but others, eternally paranoid in the face of bureaucracy, took it seriously and answered every question. For the ’89 exhibition, Geng posted these forms.

  Zhang’s and Geng’s identities were transformed after June 4. “Before the massacre, there was so much noise,” Zhang said, “a deafening roar of protest. Then the tanks came and everyone fell silent. That silence was more terrifying than the tanks.” Zhang and Geng made an enormous painting of a massacre victim and hung it by night on a pedestrian bridge. “Perhaps if you see someone being killed on the other side of the road,” Zhang said, “you will run across to stop the murderers, without thinking. It was like that.” Fearful after that, they went into hiding in the countryside, expecting all the time to be imprisoned.

  Zhang found himself particularly disgusted by the expressionless manner in which China’s leading newscaster described the massacre. He decided that whoever determined what this woman was to say decided the fate of the Chinese people. “The news was so inescapable and this woman so omnipresent that I became obsessed with her, with how everyone in China understood our government through her. I found a connection to her through a friend of a friend of a friend. I asked her whether she would agree, for a fee, to read aloud from the encyclopedia. I needed to find a completely neutral text, one that was neither on her side nor on mine. She asked a lot of questions through the intermediaries, but I fooled her. I said I would use her reading of the encyclopedia entry on water for an exhibition about water, with displays of flowers. And so this woman, who is almost our government itself, agreed to read the text I had selected. It was an experience of immense power, for me, an unofficial artist who had been in danger of being arrested, to be able to manipulate an official symbol in this way. And it showed a lot about the status of money in our society. I couldn’t get over how easy it was: it had never occurred to me that I’d be able to do this so readily.”

  True to his word, Zhang mounted the exhibition he had described. To an uninformed observer, it was about water and flowers. But to a canny insider, it was an exhibition about commerce, integrity, and the manner in which the powerful can be captured by the powerless. “Humor and irony must be carefully dosed, so that they are part of the form of a work but do not become its content,” Zhang said. “I have never lost my independence: I have always stood at a certain distance from the events of China. An artist does not opt for such alienation, but once it has happened, it has happened. You cannot resist it.”

  “It is not just that our society does not encourage or support individuality,” Geng said. “We do not allow for it where it clearly exists.” He teaches painting and design at the Institute of Silk Technology. Last year, he suggested that instead of teaching technique the staff should teach the reasons behind that technique. He was allowed to outline his proposals to the staff of the school, who, having expressed interest in innovation, rejected them on grounds that they were incompatible with established teaching standards.

  Geng has a gentle lightness of touch. Zhang Peili is much harder, much tougher. Though his work is also often humorous, it has an edge of brutality. “There has always been anger in my work,” he said. “I need to make the work, but it does not relieve my anger. It’s not like going to the toilet.” Zhang has worked in video, performance, and painting. Before the ’89 show, he cut up white plastic medical gloves and sent pieces of them to various artists. Some were caked with red and brown paint. The artists who received pieces of apparently bloodied gloves were horrified and bewildered; more and more of these strange packages began to arrive in their households. Then one day, everyone who had been on Zhang’s mailing list received a formal letter, explaining that the gloves had been sent at random and spread like a hepatitis epidemic, and that the whole matter was now over. No further gloves were sent.

  During the Hygiene Campaign of 1991, when everyone in China was instructed on cleanliness, when an absurd and patronizing bureaucratic language interfered in the most personal aspect of people’s lives, Zhang Peili made his classic video The Correct Procedure for Washing a Chicken. The video is two and a half hours long. It is appalling and fascinating to watch the sufferings of the poor chicken as Zhang repeatedly covers it in soap, rinses it down, and lays it out on a board. The chicken goes free at the end, but you cannot hel
p suspecting that it will never again be the same chicken. Zhang’s flat delivery masks profound empathy; the ethical rhetoric of these government campaigns is revealed through such work in its hypocrisy, shallowness, and cruelty.

  The installation artist Ni Haifeng lives (in principle) on a remote island off the coast of southern China, but he is among the most social figures of the avant-garde scene and is often in Beijing, Hangzhou, or Shanghai. Ni is laid-back and humorous, with a broad-ranging if sometimes unfocused intelligence. He is in some ways the freest spirit of all, making art when and as the mood descends, a gypsy king in the avant-garde. Ni receives a teaching salary at the Zhoushan Normal School, but has been relieved of teaching responsibilities on grounds of being “too weird.” In 1987, he began to paint on houses, streets, stones, and trees; he covered his island with strange marks in chalk, oil paint, and dye. He has said that he wished to reduce writing to the “zero level” where it is without meaning. “When culture invades private life on a large scale,” he said, “the individual cannot escape being raped. From this viewpoint, my zero-level writing can be taken as a protest against the act of rape. I also want to warn people of the dangers inherent in cultural rape.”

  An Artists’ Village

  In China, your housing is ordinarily provided by your work unit; if you strike out on your own, you sacrifice many protective services and must find yourself a home, which is both expensive and difficult. Officially, you cannot move without government permission. Many avant-garde artists therefore work at least part-time in official jobs; others manage to live just past the edge of legality.

  One place they live is the village commonly called Yuanmingyuan, about forty-five minutes from central Beijing. Built by local farmers in the late 1980s, it has dirt roads and a traditional layout: rows of one-story houses, each with a small courtyard and a tiled roof. There is one toilet shed and one telephone for everyone. Vines grow on some of the houses, and screen doors are always slamming. Nearby are farms and a park. In one direction lie the vast grounds of Beijing University and, in the other, the Summer Palace itself. The first artists here thought it close enough to central Beijing, but sufficiently removed so that they could live in relative peace. Many others soon joined them.

  The village is a mecca for Western tourists and journalists. Articles in dozens of countries have described the village as the center of the Chinese art scene because its blend of freedom and accessibility makes it look like a center to a Western sensibility. The Chinese are not an immediately open people: many artists of the avant-garde are secretive, elliptical to the point of obscurity, and emotionally inaccessible. In contrast, the village artists are easygoing with a casual professionalism in presenting their work. You can wander along knocking on doors and various locals will volunteer to be your guide. The traffic has become so intense that some artists say they have no time to work anymore.

  With a few notable exceptions—particularly Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun—artists in the village are not particularly distinguished. Many imitate one another, unimaginatively combining Cynical Realism and Political Pop. Most of these artists are only a half step away from jade carvers or other practitioners of cottage-industry handicrafts for foreign consumption. Certainly it is the steady influx of Western money and Western interest that allows the artists to live like this. Mostly, their work is not sophisticated enough to have political meaning, but if they cannot always comment persuasively on freedom, they can live unconstrained personal lives.

  “We’re part of the post-’89 phenomenon,” the painter Yue Minjun said to me. “Before ’89, there was hope: political hope, economic hope, all very exciting.” Yang Shaobin, another painter, picked up the thread: “Now there’s no hope. We’ve become artists to keep busy.” Talking to them, you feel that this rhetoric, too, sells well. Cynicism is the fashion in the village, but it is a flattened cynicism, more the stuff of student coolness than of despair.

  Missing Mao

  One thinks of the Cultural Revolution as a terrible time for intellectuals: many were killed, others sent to hard labor in mines, in factories, or on peasant farms. But you do not hear in China the tones of horrified disgust with which Russians speak of Stalin or that Romanians summon when someone mentions Ceauşescu. In avant-garde artistic circles, the love for Chairman Mao is ambivalent but incontrovertible. “Even those of us who were opposed were believers, at least partway,” Lao Li said late one night over tea. Branded a counterrevolutionary at the beginning of the revolution, he was imprisoned for most of it. “Mao was a very convincing man, and we intellectuals felt we were sad figures. In the Cultural Revolution, the people thought only of building a pure and perfect society. I disagreed with their particular idealism and fought against it, and would fight against it again, but I can say without hesitation that there is nothing in our commercialist society today that is equal to it. A misguided idealism is better than no idealism at all.”

  Zhou Tiehai and Yang Xu, based in Shanghai, call themselves the New Revolutionaries, and they make enormous paintings in the style and spirit of the Cultural Revolution. One of these, recently criticized in the official press as decadent, is two by four meters, painted on newspaper, and features an odd juxtaposition of propaganda and commercial imagery with a portrait of Marie Antoinette in a bustier in the middle. The work is covered with slogans such as “To concentrate the day-to-day phenomena and embody the contradiction and struggle among them.”

  “I was nursed on the milk of two mothers,” said Zhou Tiehai. “One was the woman who carried me. The other was Chairman Mao.”

  Zhou Tiehai and Yang Xu dress in superb, matching double-breasted suits and brightly colored ties; they explain that this conservative costume keeps their political extremism secret. They both are handsome, and eerily young for Mao nostalgia. Their extreme pose may be ironic and certainly borders (intentionally) on the ridiculous, but they sustain it unflinchingly, speaking in the leaden rhetoric of which the Red Guards were so fond. “Mao taught us to tell the difference between good and evil,” they told me, speaking back and forth as though they were the two voices of a single mind. “But what has happened? We belittled dancing girls and prostitutes, but now only the most beautiful women can go into these professions. We need revolutionary thinking, to use the socialist spear to hit the capitalist seal. In the past, people were poor but they knew why they were living, and now people are rich but unhappy. We like the sixties, when at breakfast, at dinner, even when we slept, we read Mao’s book. These ideas are obscure for Westerners, but they are very accessible to the Chinese people.”

  I went to see the painter Yu Youhan in his mother’s apartment in Shanghai, a few rooms at the top of the house that once belonged to his family. His father, a banker, was killed during the Cultural Revolution, and he went through reeducation after being denounced in school. But when I probed for anger, he shook his head and said, “When we reject Chairman Mao, we reject a piece of ourselves.” The Hong Kong dealer Johnson Chang, who represents almost all of the artists of the current avant-garde, said, “It’s like an unhappy childhood. You cannot dwell on it all the time and impose it on others, but if you disown it completely, you will be an artificial or incomplete person.”

  Fang Lijun does not, in general, care to talk about politics, but late one evening we got onto the subject of Mao. Fang’s family used to be landowners, and they had as bad a time as any during the Cultural Revolution. Fang once said he had become an artist because painting kept him busy at home; he could not go out because everyone felt entitled to attack him if the mood struck. “I will never forget the day that Mao died,” he said. “I was at school when they announced it, and everyone broke down immediately and began to cry. And though all of my family hated Mao, I cried loudest and longest of all.” When I asked him why he had cried, he said, “It was in the program, and we lived by the program.” And when I asked him whether he had felt sad, he smiled and said, “That, too, was in the program.”

  The Chinese impulse toward confor
mity runs deep, and I was repeatedly told that the Cultural Revolution had a luxurious quality for many Chinese people, who did not have to consider what to do, what to say, what to think, or even what to feel. Surely, I said to Fang, you must look back on that period with horror. “With some horror, yes,” he said. “But I am glad to have been through that. Younger people are jealous of me. Younger artists are trying to make themselves part of a history that never included them. Do you know, I went on June fourth to Tiananmen Square with a friend? We saw the tanks coming and heard the shots, and he ran away, but I went to the square. Not to be heroic, but because I was drawn there and had to see what was happening. I’ve always thought that my friend must regret forever having run away. You cannot run away from the Cultural Revolution, either. Maybe it’s a very Chinese way of thinking, but I believe you can have a happy present only if you have an unhappy past.”

  Ni Haifeng said, “Of course, many were killed in the Cultural Revolution. But many are killed in every era. These people were seized with a fever and could not see that what they were doing was wrong. They gave up a great deal to join the revolution and kill those they thought had to be killed, and that was courageous. I admire that courage.” Later, we spoke of Tiananmen Square. “We all demonstrated,” he said. “And what happened was terrible. But if it hadn’t happened—then maybe there would have been civil war in China, with hundreds of thousands of people killed. Maybe the country would have fallen apart like Russia. You cannot say absolutely that what happened there was wrong.”