They took him to the local station where relays of police interviewed him through the night. One group concentrated on his visa and his finances, while another quizzed him on his art and his ideas. ‘Do you hate the government?’ they asked ominously. ‘Do you think the students did nothing wrong?’
Occasionally they grilled him on details, hoping to prove he had never been in Tiananmen Square in the first place. Most of the time they tried to chip away at his position on the events. After some hours the lead interrogator said: ‘So you still think the government was wrong for what they did on June 4?’
‘Yes,’ Guo Jian replied, ‘I do.’
‘So tell us what they should have done instead.’
‘You had thousands of soldiers,’ said Guo Jian. ‘You didn’t need to kill anyone. You only did it because you were scared.’
One of the younger officers was furious. ‘Do you think I don’t understand about this stuff? That I’m too young? I’ve read books about it!’
After dawn a new officer turned up and calmly suggested a way out. ‘He said I should sign a self-criticism,’ Guo Jian told me later. ‘He wanted me to say I was wrong about Tiananmen Square, wrong in what I said to the media, wrong in general. He said to me: “This is not your business, you should leave this stuff to the leaders. Just do your art and leave this stuff to others.”’
Guo Jian then asked them what his punishment would be. Their first condition was that the diorama should be destroyed. Guo Jian had always planned to destroy it, so he readily agreed. ‘Then,’ Guo Jian told me, ‘they said there would be a short detention, and after that if I kept my head down, did my painting and didn’t talk to any foreign media it would all be fine.’
But then another group of police arrived and he realised it wasn’t going to be so straightforward after all.
By now the Australian Embassy had been asking questions, and suddenly the issue wasn’t Tiananmen Square or Guo Jian’s ideas or his art. The police were going to charge him over a visa irregularity. At 5 p.m., they took him back to his studio.
They gathered around the diorama and told him to destroy it. Guo Jian duly smashed it up, with the police video camera rolling. ‘I was sad about it,’ Guo Jian told me, ‘because it was a work I loved so much, but at the same time it was exciting, because from the beginning I’d planned to destroy it. To do it surrounded by police and them filming me, it really was kind of perfect.’
Finally, at midnight, they delivered him to the Daxin detention centre in Beijing. His penalty had been agreed: fifteen days’ detention, a 5000 yuan fine, and deportation to Australia. They told him the deportation period need not be for very long if he did the right thing: stick to his art and not talk to the foreign media.
His cell was about five metres long and already home to twelve other inmates who shared the eight beds between them. ‘I guess I was a bit scared at first, but then I realised it wasn’t much different from being in the army.’
The worst thing was the boredom. After breakfast they were told to sit on a wooden bench and they weren’t permitted to read or walk around the cell. They were monitored by video and if anyone stood up, even for a moment, the guard would blow into the microphone of the PA system, making a roaring bark that served as a warning.
The television, tuned to a special prison station, played documentaries about the enormities committed against China by foreigners: ‘There were shows on the Opium Wars and different foreign invasions, and about how AIDS was destroying the West.’ In the afternoon they could walk around their cell. On a few of the days they got one hour to walk outside.
He befriended a young man from Paraguay who also had visa issues, but had still not been able to get news to his family or girlfriend about his plight. His relief when he discovered that Guo Jian could speak English was overwhelming.
‘It’s a cliché but of course you think about freedom all the time when you are inside,’ Guo Jian told me. ‘And when you see a bird outside perched on the wire it really does remind you of how precious and fragile freedom is.’
After he had been in detention for a few days the television program suddenly changed. ‘They started broadcasting all these great movies into our cell, like Mission Impossible, number one through three.’
It turned out the improvement in programming presaged a consular visit by two Australian Embassy officials. Guo Jian didn’t know it, but his plight was big news in Australia, with the Australian foreign minister herself expressing concern. When the diplomats asked him how he was, Guo Jian could assure them that he was fine, and that he even had HBO.
On the day of Guo Jian’s release his friend from Paraguay still hadn’t managed to contact his family, and he begged Guo Jian to call his girlfriend when he got to Sydney. They had no paper, so Guo Jian carved the phone number into a piece of soap and slipped it into his pocket.
They took him to the airport and drove straight onto the tarmac to the stairs of an Air China flight. The crew settled him into his seat on an exit row opposite two of the attendants who would keep a wary eye on him throughout the flight.
Once airborne, he asked for a drink but the flight attendant told him in her best apologetic manner that they were under instructions not to serve him alcohol. He smiled and thought back to his first flight to Sydney twenty years before, when two Australian beers, far stronger than he was used to, had just about knocked him flat.
In Sydney, he stepped into the arrivals hall carrying the few belongings he’d been allowed to collect from his studio—his mobile phone and laptop and some clothes in a gym bag. In his pocket was the scrap of prison soap that would help him keep a promise to a friend.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE PEOPLE AND THE REPUBLIC
On January 12 2013 a choking blanket of smog settled across Beijing. In Sydney, my iPhone buzzed. It was my Air Quality Index app, still set to Beijing conditions. The message read: ‘Beyond Index. Hazardous. Stay indoors.’
High in her hermetically sealed apartment in Beijing, Cao Fei imagined the end of the world. ‘If an earthquake happened,’ she wondered, ‘would the fire engines ever arrive? Would there be any help?’ Perhaps she should stock up on food, she thought.
Beijing is now so spread out, the scale hardly feels human at all. In Cao Fei’s home town, Guangzhou, she had been used to hearing the sounds of life all around her in its narrow crowded streets: the sizzle of cooking, the hammering of kitchen cleavers, the sounds of conversation. In Beijing, as she chopped vegetables for her family’s dinner, she could hardly hear anyone else at all. Looking out over the city it was as if someone had hit the mute button.
The smog that hit Beijing in the winter of 2013 was just a darker, more dangerous version of the haze that can choke the city at any time of the year now.
I was in Beijing in the northern autumn of that same year. Beijing’s October skies were once the stuff of poetry, but every day I was there the Air Quality Index app buzzed the bad news. At dinner parties you got used to being handed a face mask at the end of the night to get you home safely, where once you might have hoped for a piece of cake in a party napkin.
For Cao Fei the miasma embodied a kind of depression that she detected in the capital, a weariness, as if the density of the particles in the air were congesting people’s spirits, too. By the time she showed me her new film, Haze and Fog, I was thoroughly inside the mood that had inspired it.
The film takes place in and around a gated apartment complex, the kind of place where the cosseted residents hardly interact with the outside world at all, or each other. A silent army of assistants catered to their needs—couriers, maids, security guards, manicurists and even dominatrixes arrived to service them in their homes.
When the zombies appeared at the end, it was almost a relief, especially when I realised that the army of the un-dead included all the one-time support staff who had previously serviced their betters’ privileged, isolated lives, and were now chowing down on their remains.
China has no t
radition of zombie stories, but AMC’s The Walking Dead is a huge hit there. And some days it’s hard not to agree with Cao Fei that zombies might be quite at home in the People’s Republic now, as it struggles with pollution that makes many of its cities barely liveable.
Her film played on the feeling you often get in China, that really anything might happen. In a country where so many extraordinary things have occurred in the past four decades, would zombies be such a surprise?
A few months later in the spring of 2014 I went to see Jia Aili’s work in a new show in 798. On the vast canvases, lightning crackled across bleak alien vistas, and a small colony of humans eked out an existence in the sparse landscape. Some wore space helmets while they explored great craters in the ground, others huddled for warmth outside a craft shaped like a diving bell. Another stood alone, his head flaming as if struck by lightning. The wasteland in Jia Aili’s earlier works had become a blighted planet, with few artefacts of human life. Like Cao Fei, he seemed to be haunted by a post-apocalyptic world.
In the past decade things had rapidly improved for the people in Jia Aili’s home town. In 2003, after years of layoffs and closures, the government had decided to reinvest in the north-east of China, building new modern factories and cleaner industries. His home town of Dandong had become a major port, handling exports for the whole north-east, while Shenyang, where he had spent his college years, had been rebuilt as a ‘green city’. And yet, Jia Aili still felt a sense of loss.
‘People haven’t become happier just because they have become richer,’ he mused to me one day. ‘Today most people don’t have belief or faith, and they can’t find a direction in their life. There is a battle going on inside them between the spiritual and the material.’
Underlying all of this, he told me, was a wrenching sense of dislocation, because history had moved so fast. Dandong lies on the Yalu River, which forms the border with North Korea. He grew up playing on the banks of the river, from where he could look across and see the people living on the other side. When he was a child, life on both sides of the river looked the same; now it was if they were on separate planets.
‘Last time I went home,’ he told me, ‘I had this strange illusion. When I looked across the river I felt like I was a young child again because what I was seeing across the river was exactly what I had seen as a child. It was beautiful. But then if I looked behind me all my memories about my life and my parents’ life, and my grandparents’ life, were gone. They had all been overtaken by these new tall buildings and had disappeared.
‘You know, every Chinese person tries to find a secret spot, a place where they can go and feel connected to the past. For me it’s the riverbank. Nearly everyone has a secret path to take them back into the past. If they didn’t they’d go crazy. The speed of change would just be unbearable.’
When I first met Pei Li I didn’t imagine she thought much about the past. And yet when she was offered her first solo show she immediately chose to create a memorial to a China that was passing away.
Pei Li had grown up under the tutelage of her grandfather. Disappointed that she wasn’t born a boy, he decided nonetheless to ensure she had a classical education. At an early age she was given lessons in calligraphy and learned all the major styles, and later went to music lessons. As she grew up she watched her grandfather work on his beloved bonsai garden, making the constant, tiny refinements needed to achieve a perfect recreation of a classical ‘mountains and streams’ landscape. Then one day, after 40 years of painstaking devotion to his garden, the old man suddenly abandoned it.
‘He told me he was through with art,’ she told me. ‘He said it was useless.’ He wanted to embrace the possibilities of the new China, she said. Suddenly he was busy making money and dating younger women. Pei Li watched as the bonsai trees withered away.
Given a chance for a solo show in Beijing she set off for her home town to rescue what remained of her grandfather’s garden. In the exhibition space she re-created the old man’s project to perfect scale, the dead miniature trees precisely positioned in a pool of water darkened with black calligrapher’s ink. Tiny speakers floated on its ebony surface, each giving off an occasional sad sound like a foghorn at sea, which she created by slowing her favourite punk music track to a sonorous moan. Her work was a salute to a tradition whose very custodians had abandoned it. ‘I think he really loved those bonsai,’ she told me later, ‘but he didn’t want to get left behind.’
The first half of the 2010s found Zhang Xiaogang once again delving into his past through his painting. His new work portrayed his parents as they were when they were young, and evoked the simple interiors of his childhood. In many of his canvases, a simple household appliance—an unshaded light bulb or a bar radiator—was as prominent as the human figure in the frame, as if memory anchors itself as firmly to a mute object as it does to a face. Another series of paintings caught moments in time framed by a train window.
He began to introduce some traditional objects into his paintings too—items that carried a metaphorical meaning in classical Chinese art, like a sprig of plum blossom for renewal or a bonsai pine to signal longevity—juxtaposing them with more banal items, like the crisp white shirt and blue trousers that were the acme of style in the China of his childhood or the array of pills and medicines he took for his heart.
He was concerned with what had been lost in society even as China had become richer and more powerful. He talked to me about the corruption he saw, and the loss of connection. He pointed to the prevalence of scandals (such as people selling counterfeit medicines) as examples of how morality had broken down. ‘Rapid change has changed people’s values, and their concept of time, it has changed their understanding of life. The change is so great if you compare it to the previous 5000 years of Chinese history that many people just can’t handle it.’
Despite the darker dimensions of this dislocation, he saw an amusing side as well. ‘All this change means things that are not even that old become treasured like antiques!’ We chuckled about the weirdest examples we had seen, agreeing that the fetish for old thermos flasks was particularly endearing. These dowdy metal containers had once been essential to daily life in China, omnipresent in every school, office, hotel or home. Filled with boiling water from a communal steam room, they kept you in tea all day in the era before electric kettles.
We laughed, and yet it was these outdated and simple objects that Zhang used to create aching evocations of the past. In a portrait he had painted of his mother, she sat on a sofa gazing impassively at nothing. By her side were a lidded cup of tea and an old thermos flask.
In the early 2010s Aniwar was also connecting with the past, returning to the place where he was born and to the materials that he had known when he was just a child.
His birthplace, Karghilik, is an oasis town some 250 kilometres south-east of Kashgar. It had once been an important station on the Silk Road where traders would form their caravans before the journey into India. Long a sleepy backwater, it was now coming under increased pressure to change as Chinese development spread across southern Xinjiang, but the traditional culture in the town was still strong. There the local artisans still made woollen felt, known as kigiz in Uighur, and he longed to find a way to fuse his art with this ancient craft of his birthplace.
Kigiz makers start with a base of wool mesh on which they lay tufts of fleece that they then rake, water and roll over and over again until they produce the tough woollen felt that has traditionally carpeted Uighur and Kirghiz homes and been stitched into Kazak yurts. The felts they produce bear the natural colour of the wool, which can then be dyed or appliqued or embroidered. But Aniwar wanted to do something different.
In an echo of his layered painting technique, he cut coloured felt shapes and arranged them on the mesh. He then asked the kigiz workers to set their fleece on top, and begin their arduous production process. When they were finished, the natural wool of the felt was shot through with colour like a stone seamed with precious
minerals.
In the summer of 2014 he was invited to exhibit the rugs in Venice. He carried them there himself, a jet-age version of the Silk Road journey from China to Italy that his forebears had once travelled. Waking up on the first morning he saw sunlight gleaming on the wall, formed into a shining grid by the lattice window shutters. As he watched the sunlight play he remembered how lights used to flash behind his eyelids after he looked into the sun when he was a child.
In the summer of 2015 he returned to Karghilik and created a new series of rugs, each with its own arrangement of glowing colours overlaid with a lattice pattern in homage to Italy, the ultimate destination of the Silk Road, and a place where he had found himself feeling strangely at home.
In 2015 Gonkar decided it was time for him to come home. It was 23 years since he had first left Lhasa for Dharamsala. He had lived in London and New York, found great success as an artist, exhibited at the Venice Biennale and become a British citizen, and yet he had never stopped feeling like an outsider.
He had also felt the pressure to conform to people’s expectations of him as a Tibetan émigré. At every talk he gave there was always someone asking him why his work was not more political, why it was so mellow given everything that was going on. To him the question was complex. He felt deeply the pain of events in his homeland, but in his art he wanted to honour an artistic tradition, that of the thangka painters of his homeland, of intricate works which invited hours of contemplation, not instant comprehension.
‘I realised in my later years in the West,’ he told me, ‘that the Tibetan problem is not the only problem in the world and maybe it is just part of a wider problem. I began to look at things from a different perspective. In the early days I had a very narrow point of view, a very nationalistic point of view.’
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