The Phoenix Years

by Madeleine O'Dea

  He had been told that when he reached the mountain he would be able to see his way back from its summit but when he arrived all he could see was sand. Faced with endless dunes he began to doubt his compass and finally chose a direction and stuck to it out of sheer desperation. Unable to sleep for fear the sand would swallow him up, he hiked for five days, battling panic and thirst, forcing himself not to drink his last canteen of water. Finally, he saw a group of trees on the horizon. In the Taklimakan, where there are trees there are people. He felt a flood of relief mixed with fear that his senses were playing tricks. It was only when he smelt the sap on the air that he knew he was safe. Years later he could still remember the rough sensation of the bark against his skin as he embraced it to make sure the trees weren’t a mirage.

  ‘I was transformed by that experience,’ Aniwar told me, ‘and I found new hope. After I had been through all that confusion and found my way again, I understood more about the true relationship between life and art. I knew what real art is, and I knew I could only make art!’ He wasn’t interested in the material, the political, or the pop; he wanted to explore realms of artistic expression where words have no place.

  Over a decade since the late 1990s he had developed his own abstract language of painting. The vivid colours and their layering on the canvas—often over months, stroke by considered stroke—gave his work a mirage-like illusion of depth and space, which Aniwar thought of as their ‘force field’.

  Since his experience in the desert he had wanted to find a way to engage nature directly in his work, and in 2008 he had finally found one. That spring he had moved into a new studio with a courtyard, just as he was starting to work with water-soluble oil paints.

  His idea was to give the physical and sensual phenomena of weather and the seasons a role in his creative process. He took canvases he had worked on for many months in the studio, and placed them face up in the open yard. There he dripped pigment from above, letting the breeze scatter and drag it across their surfaces. Then he waited for one of Beijing’s famous spring or summer storms to break, allowing the first drops of rain to fall onto the canvases and pool, resulting in an opalescent quality.

  When all the elements cooperated, the pieces were finished in a single afternoon. Others were painted by the wind in January and completed by a rain shower in April. When I visited him in the late spring of 2009 he had been using this unique version of plein-air painting for more than a year, the canvases set up around his studio suggestive not just of wind and rain, but of stars swirling in space.

  But the day I arrived he wasn’t painting on canvas; instead he was working with hundreds of felt mats, rolling them one by one into tubes which he then adorned with a single stroke of blue paint. He had been asked to participate in a group exhibition about sound and music, and faced with the prospect of contributing still more noise he decided instead to offer silence.

  The rolled mats, made out of the kind of woollen felt that in Xinjiang adorned nomads’ houses, were going to line a room in the exhibition venue. Tightly placed side by side, the mats would cover the four walls and the roof until the room was perfectly insulated by the soft wool. He remembered how it had been years before, when he had been studying for his university entrance exams, and he had cocooned himself away in the wool dyeing room to read. There he remembered it had been so quiet that he had believed he could hear the sound of his blood pushing through his body. ‘The absence of sound will help you to really hear,’ he told me. ‘You’ll hear what’s inside your body, not outside. You will hear your own body living.’

  I smiled quietly at Aniwar’s idea, but I still went to the exhibition. It was called ‘Music to my Eyes’ and it sprawled over multiple floors of a new private museum in the capital’s CBD. Searching for Aniwar’s felted room I came upon a strange darkened box tucked away in a far corner of the show. Inside the box on a screen I saw a video of a girl. To a soundtrack she’d remixed of a Chinese punk-rock hit, she was working her way along a whitewashed wall, painting then erasing, then painting again, changing her clothes from a slick gangster-like suit to a white wedding dress, to a bikini and platinum wig, stripping naked in between, and then painting again. From time to time she would pick up a can and spray-paint the question, ‘Isn’t something missing?’

  She painted a headless man in a suit; a graffitied Hokusai octopus ravishing a naked woman; a fleshy-lipped man in close-up reclining on his side as if viewed from a neighbouring pillow. And then she spray-painted across his face, blacking out his eyes and tagging ‘miss you, miss you’. Finally, she returned the wall to its whitewashed state, leaving behind a scrolling LED sign which kept on asking ‘Isn’t something missing?’ over and over again.

  The work was exhilaratingly angry and exhausting, with its cycle of creation and destruction played out to a screeching soundtrack. I loved it. ‘I want the audience to feel pain too,’ the artist told me when I met her later, ‘because everyone is missing something.’

  Her name was Pei Li. She was 24 years old and disarmingly fresh faced when I met her, despite the cauldron of emotions brewing inside her. Her video had been inspired by a failed love affair, one that had left her in hospital after she had drunk so much vodka in her despair that her stomach had begun to bleed. ‘I liked the taste of it,’ she told me, not specifying if she meant the vodka or the blood.

  She came from the generation born in the 1980s, children of the one-child policy, the generation that older Chinese kept saying had no depth or insight. Cao Fei once described them to me as ‘the Instagram generation’. ‘They don’t look at anything for long,’ she said, ‘for them it is all snapshots.’

  But Pei Li wasn’t like that at all, she looked at everything with intensity and in doing so she made me look at China in a new way. What she reminded me of most were the poets I had once drunk with under the stars at the Old Summer Palace. She told me she wasn’t even sure she wanted to be an artist, maybe she just wanted to be a punk. Later she would tell me about her traditional upbringing in Changzhou, in the heart of what I always thought of as ‘willow pattern plate’ China, deep in the Yangtze delta, a country of classical gardens and jasmine tea, of arching stone bridges and silk embroidery, of poets and pagodas. She had gone to art school in Hangzhou, famous for its West Lake, which had been celebrated by poets and painters over centuries, and which was now home to China’s version of Silicon Valley. She’d studied new media and video there and Isn’t something missing? had been her graduation work. They hadn’t thought much of it, she told me. ‘I wasn’t a very good student.

  ‘I’m often angry. If you have strong emotions it’s better to create than to destroy, isn’t it?’ she asked and didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I think in everyone’s deepest heart there is a violent side and I want to use that violent side to create.’

  Twenty long years of living separated her from the artists who had come of age at Tiananmen Square, but it was as if she had drunk from the very same source as they had done in the late 1980s when hope was new.

  I thought of what Pei Li had said about anger when I went to Sheng Qi’s exhibition just a few weeks later. It was June and the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen had just passed.

  Sheng Qi had started experimenting with painting in 2002, and for a long time he struggled for a style that would capture the mood of sadness he wanted to convey. His first efforts, he told me, were ‘too romantic, too beautiful, too much on the surface’ and he kept looking for something ‘more spicy, more harsh’.

  Finally, he found a dripping technique with paint, which gave his canvases the impression that rain—or tears—were running down them in rivulets. He chose to work predominantly in red and black, colours that to his eye embodied bravery. ‘If you have enough courage to stand up you will be heard,’ he told me. ‘If I chose black and white that would be weak, but black and red shows courage. To stand up is to be bloody!’

  Now he had completed a body of paintings that he would show in June 2009, twenty years after—and
in honour of—the events that had changed his life.

  It was only a day or two since his show had opened but it looked as if the place had been ransacked. Many of the walls were blank except for labels showing where the missing works had been. Sheng Qi wearily told me how it had gone down.

  On the day of the opening the police had arrived promptly to take down works that offended them. First among these was a painting of a smiling policewoman, in full dress uniform and holding up a 100RMB note as if it was her police badge. ‘They thought I was implying there was a connection between power and money and they didn’t like it,’ he told me. Then he added: ‘I was saying that, of course’.

  Their objection to a second group of paintings was more overtly political. These were paintings that featured Chairman Mao. In one a giant statue loomed over a prostrate crowd, in another a bust of Mao stood on a square filled with tiny people. Rendered in red, the Chairman’s head dripped across the black and white figures.

  But the paintings that they had let remain still told the bloody story Sheng Qi wanted to convey. One showed crowds of young people seated in Tiananmen Square, their figures black and white, the square awash with red; another showed a young woman lying as if sleeping, the paint weeping across her body; yet another depicted crowds sheltering under umbrellas as if shielding themselves from grief.

  A few days after my visit, the police shut the whole exhibition down. They also arrived at Sheng Qi’s studio to give him a warning. It was polite enough but the message was clear. After a decade of trying, he knew he had to leave China once more. ‘I thought, I don’t have any famous family to protect me from trouble. I am a son of nobody, so I have to go.’ In 2010, twelve years after he had returned home to China, he flew out again for London.

  Days after I saw Sheng Qi’s truncated exhibition I took a walk through 798 wondering whether anyone else had dared to show work about Tiananmen. There I found a gallery that had built a steel reinforced room with a porthole through which you could view the show. Inside the room, a firehose set to full blast kicked and arched, spraying water at the glass. The power of the water was extraordinary and despite the steel rivets a little of it still escaped to wet your face as you peered in. The title of the show was ‘Freedom’.

  And then in December, Liu Xiaobo was finally brought to trial. He had been charged with ‘incitement of subversion of state power’. There was no doubt that he would be found guilty. At the trial he tried to read a statement but the presiding judge cut him off after fourteen minutes, ruling that his statement in defence could not be longer than the statement by the prosecutor. Fourteen minutes was all the time it had taken to argue that he should be imprisoned.

  ‘June 1989 has been the major turning point in my life,’ he began, describing a life which was then just over a half century long. It was this event that had made him a dissident.

  In the statement he declared that he had ‘no enemies and no hatred’ and spoke of his love for his wife Liu Xia, who had not been permitted to attend his trial: ‘Your love has been like the sunlight that leaps over high walls and shines through iron windows, that caresses every inch of my skin and warms every cell of my body. Even were I ground to powder, still would I use my ashes to embrace you.’

  Calmly he made the case for his innocence and spoke poignantly of his optimism for a time when China ‘will be a land of free expression . . . a country where all political views will be spread out beneath the sun for citizens to choose among, and every citizen will be able to express their views without the slightest fear’.

  Westerners can read this message of hope in the full published text of the defence address. But the judge never heard it. Liu Xiaobo’s time to speak had by then run out.

  He was sentenced to eleven years in prison.

  The next year he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. His wife—now under house arrest—was not allowed to attend the ceremony in Oslo. The Nobel medal stayed in its small wooden box and Liu Xiaobo was represented on the stage by an empty chair.

  CHAPTER TEN

  AMNESIA AND MEMORY

  We gathered our provisions on the way. In roadside shops we bought incense, candles, long red coils of fireworks and paper money. The goose was waiting for us at the village, Guo Jian’s cousin told us.

  We were travelling in convoy: Guo Jian, his cousin, nine of his former classmates and me, on our way to ‘sweep the grave’ of Guo Jian’s grandfather.

  In spring, at the festival of Qing Ming (‘pure brightness’) on April 5, Chinese people around the world gather at the graves of their ancestors to honour them and make offerings. This would be the first time Guo Jian had performed this traditional duty for his grandfather.

  The day had started hazy and cool but by the time we were nearing his grandfather’s village the sun was burning hot and high in a brilliant blue sky. As we headed south towards the border with Guangxi province, the limestone karst peaks grew sharper against the horizon, and the foliage a deeper green.

  We had begun the day in some hilarity, but making our way through the fields to the gravesite our mood turned solemn. We walked in silence, all of us in single file except for Guo Jian, who had been joined by an old ‘auntie’ from the village who helped us carry bamboo sheaves to place around the grave.

  Everyone carried a separate offering—white mourning streamers to hang from the bamboo, rice spirit for a libation, fireworks, candles, incense or paper money. In the lead, Guo Jian’s cousin carried a beautiful grey and brown goose, its feathers scalloped in white. Dangling by its legs, it curled its neck up to look at the sky.

  The grave was in a remote spot far from the village’s official cemetery. It was in a patch of uncultivated ground, a place designated for outcasts, for babies or for others who were deemed to have died too soon, a place for the unlucky and the unblessed.

  Guo Jian’s grandfather had committed suicide at the age of 37, inside a mountain cave where he had taken shelter from the communist forces in 1951. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had entered the southern province of Guizhou in 1950 as they pushed south to complete the takeover of the country which Mao had declared as the People’s Republic of China in October 1949.

  Before the communists came, Guo Jian’s grandfather had been a small farmer whose education had singled him out as a leader. He was a respected figure in his village, but a modest man. When he was approached to represent his district at the national assembly of China’s pre-1949 Nationalist government he had declined, writing simply that he was ‘very proud to be nominated, but too humble to go’. But in the new People’s Republic even before this tenuous link to the Nationalists was discovered, his status as a ‘landlord’ meant that he was doomed. The fact that his teenage son, Guo Jian’s father, was off fighting with the PLA elsewhere in the country was of no account.

  He fled from his village into the safety of the hills, but someone reported the smoke from his cooking fire. With the cave surrounded he decided to shoot himself rather than give himself up.

  The soldiers tied his body to a plank and carried it down to the village where they paraded him like a trophy through the streets. His wife, Guo Jian’s grandmother, could only stand and watch. Later his body was dumped outside the village in the outcasts’ graveyard. It would be more than 30 years before Guo Jian’s father could raise a gravestone on the spot and 40 years before Guo Jian persuaded his grandmother to tell him the story.

  By the end of 1951 almost two million ‘landlords’ had been murdered in China as part of the process of communist ‘land reform’. In this period Mao set a nationwide goal that one person per thousand should be killed, but in Guizhou, where popular resistance was strong, the toll rose to three dead per thousand. There was never any chance that Guo Jian’s grandfather would have survived if he had not cheated the party by taking his own life. His two brothers would die, too: one would be executed and the other would commit suicide, overdosing on opium that was smuggled to him in prison.

  We gathered quietly around the
grave. Guo Jian set out small porcelain cups at the base of the gravestone and filled them with rice spirit, while his ‘auntie’ set up lighted candles. On a small mound above the site we planted the bamboo sheaves and hung them with white strips of paper for mourning. Guo Jian’s cousin quietly took out a small scythe-shaped knife and slit the goose’s throat, letting the blood fall on the stone in front of the grave. Each of us stepped forward to dip paper money in the blood and set it on fire, waving the smoke towards the sky.

  Guo Jian and his cousin knelt, and with bundles of incense smoking in their hands bowed to the grave three times, filling the air with scent. Finally, they unrolled a long coil of bright red firecrackers, snaking it around the gravestone and up onto the slope then down around the graveside once more. In his final act of homage to his grandfather, Guo Jian lit the fuse and we stood back as the cacophony echoed off the hills, ricocheting from peak to peak until the whole valley filled with sound. After the final explosion the thunder rolled on, as if the hills themselves were applauding.

  The next day Guo Jian and I walked along a disused railway track, the same rail line that he had taken as he had headed off to war 35 years before. The line was being diverted for a new ring-road around the city, part of a grand plan to connect his home town Duyun with a neighbouring town to create a new mega city, Da Dayun (‘big Dayun’).

  The village he had grown up in had almost entirely disappeared. The Dayun of his youth had nestled below the hills, but the new one fought with them, confronting them with skyscrapers and massive bulldozers, which would level any that stood in the way of development. One hill had already been trucked away to make room for a ‘development zone’.