The Dissident

by Nell Freudenberger

  “I think Tianming’s East Village is a great title.”

  Martin hesitated. “You do?”

  “The East Village only exists in Tianming’s photographs. Where else is it? It’s a kind of legend now—who knows if it was ever there at all?”

  Martin smiled, but I could tell he didn’t like this kind of joke. He was a scholar—shy and deferential, but with an academic’s vanity. He wanted all of the precise details I could give him about the groundbreaking community and the radical activities of its inhabitants in the years 1993–94. He didn’t want airy speculations or stories, and who could blame him? You could hardly write a dissertation about a place that was never there.

  “I want you to know,” he continued seriously, “I don’t think there’s any question of authorship. I mean, the portraits are one thing, but the photographs of your performances? Modern Dance, and Drip-Drop, and Something That Is Not Art? How could those be anything but yours?”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Harry might feel differently. And I know I’m just a graduate student, but…”

  “That doesn’t matter,” I told him. “You shouldn’t be afraid to say what you think—why should your opinion matter less than anybody else’s?”

  Martin beamed; the student-painters looked on enviously; and all of a sudden I wondered whether I might not attend this art show after all. Once a work of art is finished, the artist is in any case superfluous. He may follow the work around a few paces behind, like an abandoned lover, but his claim is nostalgic at best. To night I would return to stand beside these paintings and, if there was sufficient interest, perhaps say a word or two about the dramatic time and place in which they were conceived. What artist could do more?

  “It’s so great to finally meet you,” Martin said. “And I have to admit, I’m relieved I’ll be speaking English to night.” He shook his head: “Is Harry ever going to be surprised!”

  “Yes,” I said. “He certainly is.”

  57.

  WHEN I ARRIVED, THE GALLERY WAS ALREADY FULL OF PEOPLE. THE TRAVERSES had dropped me in front of the entrance while they parked the car, and I’d thought I might slip in unnoticed, but I was wrong. Everyone recognized me as the famous dissident, in spite of my haircut, my conservative dress shirt and plain black trousers. On this one point, I reflected, my cousin had been mistaken. In Los Angeles there was no need to keep your hair long or wear silk pajamas; in fact, the less noteworthy you looked, the more authentic people were likely to find you.

  Congratulations. A woman touched my arm. I love your work, said someone else. I so admire your political commitment…your use of color…your unique emotional style… In that moment, I wished for my mother. I wanted her to see the table with its symmetrical cups of red and white wine, its cubes of orange and white cheese, its twin heaps of green and purple grapes. I thought the bottles of Californian wine and imported water were at least as beautiful as the paintings, a few of which I could see behind the immaculate white wall. This was exactly what she had always imagined for me, and as people swarmed in front of that wall, obscuring the text in tall, red letters, all of my mother’s dreams were realized.

  “Mr. Yuan!”

  I looked up to see Martin Lu, waving frantically and making his way through the crowd. Right behind him was a tall Chinese man, with thinning hair, sloping shoulders, and a shy, oval face dignified by a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. Harry Lin hadn’t changed since his visit to the East Village in the spring of ’94. We had been eagerly awaiting him—a Chinese professor from a distinguished American university—and we all had been a little disappointed when he finally arrived, by his modesty and his shabby clothes. Of course we warmed up right away when the professor raved in print about our collaborative performance piece, Drip-Drop, and called Lu Kou “the best new journal of Chinese experimental art.”

  Harry’s eyes met mine, and the blood rose to my face. Did he remember me? Shouldn’t I have known for sure? His smile implied recognition, but it had been seven years since he’d met me, and I’d been naked at the time, apart from a pair of satin boxing shorts.

  “Here you are!” Martin exclaimed. “Say something to Harry—he doesn’t believe me!”

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello,” Harry said. “Welcome.”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t recognize me,” I said.

  “It hasn’t been that long,” said Harry.

  “He just picked it up, staying with the Traverses,” Martin said. “Isn’t that amazing?”

  Harry did not comment on my incredible English. “How are you enjoying your stay?” he asked instead. “You’re still comfortable?”

  From across the room, I could see my hosts talking with some of Dr. Travers’s colleagues. Next to them, the lady novelist was trying to catch my eye.

  “Very,” I said, turning back to Harry. “I’m afraid I don’t deserve their hospitality.” I was waiting for some sign from him, but the professor was unreadable. Martin Lu might have been praising my English, but for the first time since I’d arrived in Los Angeles, I felt at a real disadvantage speaking that language. A few words from Harry in our own tongue, and it seemed to me I would’ve known immediately where I stood.

  Harry put a hand on my arm (he was several inches taller than I was) and steered me toward another group. “Let me introduce Dr. Mandelbaum—also from Visual Art,” he said. “And Dr. Khan from Asian Studies.”

  Dr. Khan shook my hand.

  “It’s a tremendous plea sure, Dr. Yuan,” said Dr. Mandelbaum.

  “I can’t pretend to be a professor,” I said quickly. “Especially with so many real ones around.”

  “Nonsense,” said Dr. Mandelbaum. “Who would want to be a professor of art, when you could be an actual artist?”

  “That’s right,” Harry said. “I still think about one of his first pieces, in its debut performance in Beijing. It was called Drip-Drop.”

  “It was a collaboration,” I mumbled. If the professor was making fun of me, he was doing it very subtly. He seemed to be studying me: it was almost as if our positions were reversed, and he was trying to figure out how much I knew about him.

  “You should see the photographs,” Martin told Dr. Khan. “They’re going to be published in Harry’s new book.”

  “Martin thought you would object to the title,” Harry said, turning to me. “I told him I thought you were more thick-skinned than that.”

  “Are you still doing performance-based work?” Dr. Khan asked politely.

  This was a question I could answer: I explained that there would be no more projects like Drip-Drop, Something That Is Not Art, and Walking Up Coal Hill with Candles, since that work was decidedly site-specific. Even when they didn’t take place in our neighborhood, those projects grew out of the East Village, like misshapen vegetables from toxic soil. Once their substrate was destroyed, the performances stopped; even the artists who were still prolific were not doing collaborative work anymore. That kind of art seemed to belong to another time.

  To my surprise, Harry Lin disagreed. “I’m not sure about that. You may have turned away from performance-based work, but have all of the East Village artists?” He paused and looked around, including the others in the debate. “What about your cousin?”

  In that instant my heart began to slam against my chest, so violently that it seemed impossible no one else could hear it. The crowd around me appeared to press closer.

  “He also works alone,” I said, but it came out sounding like a question.

  “Who is your cousin?” Martin Lu asked eagerly. “Would I have heard of him?” The room, which had been very loud before, now quieted dramatically, as if everyone were waiting for me to answer that question.

  I looked at Harry, and then I saw the reason for the sudden calm: the professor was about to make a speech.

  “Excuse me a moment. It’s time for me to introduce you.” As Harry made his way to the podium, everyone in the room turned to look—not at him, but
at me. I fought the urge to close my eyes, like a child who hides by covering his own face. Instead I stared at the floor: it was gray concrete, marbled with white, exactly like the one in Tianming’s old apartment. I wished, more than anything, to be back there.

  I heard Harry Lin welcoming the guests, and thanking the benefactors of the Dubin Fellowship. Then he began to give a brief history of Chinese experimental art. Now everyone was paying attention to the professor, and so I was able to look around for my students: I saw Olivia standing with Katie and Holly, holding plastic cups of wine surreptitiously at their sides, and Catherine standing with her redheaded family near the door. As I’d expected, there was no sign of June, nor was Emily Alderman anywhere in evidence.

  At first I allowed Harry’s speech to wash over me, grateful for the respite from questioning. But as he continued, I began to listen more carefully. Although this was a show of acrylics, painted before 1989, Harry spent very little time on that period. In fact he raced ahead to the early 1990s, when I was a college student just starting to visit my cousin in the fledgling East Village, and then to even more recent exhibitions.

  “In particular, I’d like to talk for a moment about a show of experimental self-portraits at the Ancestral Temple of the Forbidden City, in November of 1998. Shi Wo, or in English, It’s Me, was not less important because it was canceled by the authorities,” Harry said. “In fact, the cancellation of the show contributed to its significance.”

  I had heard about the preparations for Shi Wo, and the dismay when it was shut down, but by that time I was living in Shanghai, working for my father, and I’d had no intention of attending myself.

  “We might contrast it with Zhang Yimou’s expensive production of Turandot, which took place in the Forbidden City only a few months earlier. Zhang Yimou had said that his goal was ‘to attract an international audience through adopting an Oriental pose.’” Harry adjusted his glasses and coughed softly. “The Shi Wo artists claimed the same object for their exhibition. However, the spectacles they were presenting turned out to be quite different.”

  The audience, who had perked up at the mention of censorship, were whispering now that Professor Lin seemed to be talking about opera. Several people made their way stealthily toward the cheese.

  “It’s Me was eventually reinstalled in the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. But by that time it had become a show about the cancellation of experimental art exhibitions in China, and was therefore not the same show at all. The original It’s Me could only have taken place in the Forbidden City.”

  I stared at Harry as he spoke; I didn’t want to look around me. I felt as if the professor was trying to tell me something, which I was just beginning to understand, and I was afraid that dawning understanding might appear on my face in an embarrassing way.

  “Just to night,” Harry continued, “Yuan Zhao has corrected my misunderstanding of certain performance pieces by the group of artists who lived for a short time on the outskirts of Beijing, in an area they referred to as the ‘East Village.’ Those performances are impossible, he told me, now that the East Village community no longer exists.”

  Now, for the first time during his talk, Harry Lin looked directly at me. “I wonder,” he said. “By transposing this show from China to Los Angeles, is Yuan Zhao giving us another kind of experimental self-portrait? Although the work hanging in this gallery was created before the artist became interested in performance, could we say that the presentation of this show to night is in fact another performance? One in which Yuan Zhao has resolved the central paradox facing the Chinese experimental artist? That in order to establish himself he must show abroad, while in order to remain authentic he must keep Chinese art in China?”

  Harry was excited, almost tripping over his words, and suddenly I did not want to be in the gallery. I looked toward the exit, but the way was blocked by bodies. There was no means of reaching the doors without causing a dramatic disruption.

  “If you asked me to choose a title for this show,” Harry projected (he was no longer using the microphone), “I would not choose DNA-ture. I would call to night: Yuan Zhao in America, and I would not hesitate to call it his best and cleverest performance to date.”

  There was a flash, and then another. The student photographer was taking pictures. All around me people were clapping. I was photographed with my hosts, board members of the Dubin Fellowship, and a curator from the Armand Hammer Museum, who slipped me his card and whispered something about “having a chat.”

  “Thank you,” I said, “thank you.”

  Finally the photographers brought Harry Lin to stand next to me.

  “Here we are,” Harry said, switching for the first time to Chinese: “My only regret is that Zhang Tianming isn’t here to capture it on film.”

  “You found a willing substitute,” I said, nodding to the student photographer.

  Harry laughed and put his hand on my shoulder. We smiled for the cameras.

  58.

  IN THE FALL OF 1987 A TRAIN TRAVELED NORTH FROM THE PROVINCIAL capital of Wuhan to Beijing. Yuan Zhao was sitting in the hard-seat compartment. He had been expelled from the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts for a daring piece of performance art. In Buried Alive No. 1, ten art students had interred themselves in a pig farmer’s field, breathing through flexible rubber tubes. Photographs were taken of the artists burying each other, one at a time, and of the finished field, empty except for its strange crop of stalky yellow rhubarb. No photographs were taken of the performance’s aftermath, in which plainclothes policemen “resurrected” the participants and dragged them off to be interrogated, like ghosts, their hands, clothes, and faces still dusty with the whitish, anemic earth.

  Yuan Zhao was content to be expelled. Beijing was the only place in the country for real art: an artist might become known there. He found a place to squat in the artists’ village near the Yuanmingyuan, the old Summer Palace, where the Dowager Empress Cixi had once mortgaged her country’s future for the sake of a marble boat. After several unsuccessful applications, he was finally admitted to study at CAFA, Beijing’s famous art school. It was at CAFA that he became involved with the student protests, which would send him to prison for six months.

  After being released, Yuan Zhao went home to his parents in Shanxi, where (in a transformative moment the artist describes in Lu Kou, volume 1) he decided to give up painting. He didn’t know what medium he would use; only that it would no longer be colors on a flat canvas. Almost immediately he was back in Beijing, where he moved from place to place before settling in a slum on the eastern edge of the city. To his surprise, Yuan Zhao found that the neighborhood was inhabited by other artists.

  Because they had nothing—no paints, no brushes, no canvas—these artists began experimenting with themselves. One cut himself with a knife; another cooled himself in a freezing lake; a third locked himself in a metal case and nearly suffocated. One day a beautiful young man who wore his hair long (whose silky mane, along with his slim hips, sleepy eyes, and bow-shaped lips, would have been envied by the most ambitious starlet at the Beijing Academy of Dance) covered his naked body with melon paste and walked outside wearing only a woman’s bathrobe. He sat on the lip of an open sewage canal where the mosquitoes were breeding, and was almost arrested for the first time.

  Neighborhood workers saw the young man on the concrete canal, and immediately called the police. Friends warned him just in time. Yuan Zhao, who had watched the police arrive, went home and painted a picture of a mysterious young man with a white face, wearing a woman’s bathrobe. He painted the police lifting the bathrobe, jumping back in surprise, and the young man nude under the bathrobe, his body covered with star-shaped red sores. In place of a penis, he painted a cornucopia of vegetables and fruits, a horn of plenty borrowed from the disarming painting by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, whose peculiar portraits of Hapsburg emperors—their brows, noses, eyes, and lips composed of fruits, flowers, burning faggots, fuses, candle wicks, and cannons—had sp
arked his imagination.

  It was the last painting he would ever make. When it was finished, he paid the young man a visit, and presented it as a gift. The two artists proceeded to become friends, collaborating on strange performances. Later they met a young photographer, also an immigrant from the provinces, who began to document their activities with a double-lens Seagull camera.

  59.

  JOAN HAD SPENT MOST OF THE ART SHOW WATCHING YUAN ZHAO. HER suspicions about the dissident and the professor had been confirmed: Mr. Yuan had seemed extremely nervous around his old friend, and had escaped as soon as the speeches were over. You would think they would’ve gone out to celebrate the success of DNA-ture, but Joan had seen Professor Lin leaving the gallery afterward with a few of his colleagues. Yuan Zhao had not been with them.

  She had to admit that Cece had been right about the professor. Harry Lin was modest and intelligent, and there was even something pleasing about the combination of his serious face with a lanky, almost boyish frame. For the art show he had been wearing a well-worn, conservative suit with a pair of surprisingly stylish wire-frame eyeglasses. When Joan told him how much she’d admired Chinese Experimental Art: The Tiananmen Generation, the professor offered to show her the galleys of his new book. They had arranged a time for her to stop by the university the following week.

  The professor’s office was in the basement of a new Fine Arts Department complex. There were two casement windows at ground level, which let in a modicum of natural light and offered a view of some grass and a rusted storm drain. The walls were painted a sedate blue-gray, so the only color was provided by the spines of Harry Lin’s books, a vast library of exhibition catalogues and fat critical studies displayed on cheap, stackable shelves. Many of the titles were in Chinese. Hanging above the professor’s desk was a bilingual poster advertising Zhang Yimou’s Turandot, performed in 1998 in the Forbidden City.