Barbarian Lost (30 page)

Unlike these fallen party members, Ai, the artist, wields no direct political power. But his presence is felt at court. His fame and power give him influence. He manages to fill a giant room in London with tiny made-in-China items. He amasses and arranges a roomful of rebar salvaged from shoddily built concrete schools destroyed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. He organizes thousands of bicycles into a massive aerial sculpture. His works are not only beautiful but clear demonstrations of power.

One can only imagine the costs of getting it all done—the labour involved, the energy requirements. Big money and international networks must be part of the equation. However he manages his grand productions, Ai's enterprise is complex and creative, leaving the artist exposed to aggressive government interpretations of complex laws. Since there is little transparency to the workings of justice in China, one might as well presume a measure of insincerity and fabrication in the government's methods when such important politics are involved.

Ai shows himself artful in dealing with the government and
its courts. His worldwide fame allows him to raise a substantial sum to pay for his legal defence, which he conducts with the same unflappable deadpan manner he shows me.

The fight goes on. For the moment, Ai's still standing, but his pulpit is now somewhat shaky. His ability to travel has been restricted. Much of his time and energy is now directed at holding off the juggernaut rather than at creating, educating or even making money.

Whatever happens, there is some solace for Ai. History in China is kind to the scholar-poets who speak truth to power and suffer ignominies—like the great historian Sima Qian, from the late Han, who gave unwelcome counsel to his king in a time of war. It was not a clement era and Sima was condemned to either death or castration, an easy choice for a young gentleman. Death was not dishonourable, whereas castration represented damnation, a kind of living death.

Sima chose the living death for a reason remembered to this day. He had started his book of history and felt strongly that he owed the nation its stories more than he valued his own honour. He would surrender his manhood, sacrificing all posterity to pursue his studies, to seek perhaps another kind of immortality, ensured by the endurance of his work, a book known over two thousand years later as the
Records of the Grand Historian
.

The emperor who took the visionary's balls is just another entry on a long list, but Sima's name lives on to this day. It speaks loudly and says, “The truth is worth it.”

I'm working an area in northeastern Beijing around the fabled Factory 798. A former armaments factory, 798 was converted into
a series of large exhibition spaces in the late 1990s. Art galleries and artist studios like Ai's have sprouted up throughout the surrounding area. Of late, the refurbished industrial area has also become a prime tourist destination for visitors to the capital, whether they love art or not.

The Beijing art scene has developed into a massive industry involving thousands of players and likely hundreds of millions of dollars. Art speaks to the tremendous new wealth to be found in the big cities of China. It goes with the intense property development that is occurring across the nation. The myriad new homes and apartments will not soon be furnished and decorated in modern art. This much is certain. But art will be present at the top and in the crevices throughout.

A thriving art scene reveals a society that has grown more diversified and allows its citizens more varied career options and consumer choices. But modern art cannot exist without innovation, without exploration, without danger.

In the car, I think about Van Gogh, whose powerful visions might well endure through the ages but who received nothing but torment from his life as an artist. He received little recognition, and little encouragement that he would ever be remembered—that his art, his suffering, were not in vain.

Is poor Vincent trying to make me suspicious of artistic success? Circumspect toward the demimonde of art, celebrity and gold?

No, the unease is larger. It's the light and noise of triumph and recognition that are overwhelming. I long again to see what hides in the quiet darkness, to scan the depths for the obscure middle managers and migrant workers. The place where no one goes and subjects to whom attention has never been paid. The person for whom a judge, a listener, an audience is a rare honour. For what
grand performance of a master, repeated over and over again, can better the one-off performances of nobodies? What trend can beat true singularity?

We are travelling to meet an obscure artist, Li Bo, whose work I'd stumbled upon in a Beijing gallery. His studio is in an area that almost breaks orbit with the city and slips into the countryside. Access is through a dusty garage door at the end of a long line of garage doors—another industrial area freshly conquered by hopeful artists.

Li is tall and skinny. In the manner of the Taoist monks, he has let a tuft of hair grow to great lengths from a mole on his face.

“Why would he do this?” I later inquire. It's a sign of power, I'm told.

The young man works with photographs of near-nude subjects, women in an intimate setting. The photos are not printed onto canvas or paper but laid onto patterns made of coils of rope and string that softly blur the portraits and give them a mysterious, almost totemic, feel. The images show a deeply personal world. They show cramped apartments with spot lighting and messy beds. They show young women in their undergarments, getting ready for something or posing for the artist's camera.

Lingerie, tattoos, naked curves and the occasional pubic hair all make appearances in the images. They are
osé
, possibly even a tad pornographic. They would not be hung in one's home without some embarrassment. I'm amazed to see them on easy display in the capital.

Li tells me that all the women in his works are his girlfriends.

The work is not so much about sex but intimacy, proximity. Sex may be part of the story, but it's much more about discovery of self than of body. Turned heads and faces blurred by light and texture ensure that these are not identifiable individuals. Still, they are clearly independent women exploring their freedom—conquering portions of space for themselves to be themselves, then sharing their new identities. Does this voyeurism take from the freedom of these subjects and reduce their poses to mechanical gestures for the uses of others? Or is the freedom of these women not enshrined, and allowed to grow among those who witness it?

Art is about what is both given and received. It's never a zero-sum game but an opening, a widening of possibilities, guided by mysterious forces. If they speak at all, Li's works do so to a city filled with freedom. They speak of nights filled with people tucked away in private spaces. Of men and women, taking chances, being young, carnal and foolish, looking for love, the elusive force that both preserves and negates our singularity.

Art must be considered a portal to the future, a way forward. Either the channel is open, speaking, offering new choices, or art is not present.

From the northeast, we travel south to an area along the eastern side of the central axis that is fast becoming the new business core. Sleek new towers everywhere give the capital a fully modern feel. No alleyways, no dust, nor sign of organic human inhabitation or use remain. The fantastic crooked arches of glass and steel of the new national television station hint at a possible future as well, one of fully engineered human life, existing entirely indoors, setting off into space.

Chen Danqing lives in a slick development due south of this quarter but across an expanse of highways and train tracks. His studio is several floors up and faces north toward the dense agglomeration of skyscrapers. The wide windows of the studio catch the white light of the north sky and the occasional rays reflecting off the shimmering buildings. We marvel at the new city from the slight distance.

I ask Chen if there is any loss involved in the creation of this new capital.

“Yes,” he says, “Beijing has already disappeared.” With a gentle, easy smile, he intimates that one should not be upset and that losses are not to be mourned.

Chen's an oil painter in the classic style. He paints portraits and grand scenes. Unlike those who deal in performance, capture or construction, the artist who pushes pigment around to depict reality has little workaround for lack of technical skill; even the most adroit figurative painters will be measured against the grand masters for their ability to conjure depth, light, movement and meaning. Chen is best known for his series of portraits of Tibetans done in the 1980s. The paintings are masterful. They're in the so-called new realist style of which Chen is a prime proponent.

During Mao's time, art was mostly reduced to Communist propaganda, depictions of the chairman himself in heroic poses or of his idealized people—hardly portals to a real future, for one does not command art but obeys it. While choking art of its daemon, strict Communist dogma did at least manage to bestow technical skill and rigour upon its craftspeople. When the old regime gave way to the new China, the formal prowess of young painters like Chen was suddenly put to bold use.

Human faces appear in his paintings as conjurations, their singular gaze held alive, a sign of a free conscience within. These are rough Tibetan faces, sunbaked and caked with dust. The heads are cloaked in hides and fur; the clothing, coarse and strange. Their eyes are expressive and full of life.

The new realism of Chen does not turn toward what is familiar to the Chinese but to the margins inhabited by others. The handsome and independent Tibetans are in sharpest contrast with any dogma. Let them be considered as they are, Chen's paintings say. Let them come into our lives and homes to speak on their own terms.

His best works show his
montagnard
subjects in action. The scenes are mundane: people walking down the road to the market or gathering in the field to discuss something. The movements are bold and new, quietly defiant. The subjects are not moving toward a common identifiable goal, as was Communist custom. They move freely, unpredictably.

Chen is nearing sixty years old, but he's youthful. His close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, the lines under eyes framed by 1920s-style round spectacles and his gravelly voice seem more the affectations of a young man playing an old one than the conditions of age. Like Ai, Chen spent decades outside China. He learnt to speak English and has mastered performing for foreigners. If Ai was largely emotionless, Chen is gentlemanly, neither forceful nor declarative, more suggestive.

In matters social and political, Chen proves himself no less a realist than he is in his paintings. Deep into the interview, he tells me that he knows of Chinese leaders who secretly think that “democracy is not fit for China,” that it's something for Western countries maybe, but that it won't work here. They believe this but
will “never speak it out loud,” he says. He's quick to note that he himself doesn't want to believe this, then adds, “But I suffer when the facts confirm it.”

He explains that his eighteen years in New York City make him see the huge distance between democracy in America and reality in China. Only a very few people in China can even imagine what that kind of democracy is. “Chinese people's real genius is for business,” he continues. “They always find their way around the rules. They are flexible. They don't have a mind for laws or rulers, but a mind for dealing with immediate issues. For this, they are very smart.”

I try to get him to consider tensions and problems to come, but he simply tells me that he's not afraid for the future. “The Chinese are too good at avoiding trouble,” he says. “They are good at surviving and not asking meaning.”

From what I see on display in his studio, Chen's more recent works are formal if a little uncanny. One painting depicts a scene of the late seventeenth century: a French nobleman's daughters in fluffy regalia sitting with their dog by the window. They're not moving. In the half-light, the faces seem real, their curious looks aimed at us are loaded. The curly haired girls, still and distant, peer toward us as if transfixed, searching for the strangers who might watch them from beyond.

Another painting depicts an illustration in a grand old book opened on a table. It shows a flat and celestial landscape in old Chinese style. Without movement or life, the work makes for a strange appearance in Chen's studio. Have faces suddenly grown oppressive to the artist? Is illusion and detachment now suggested? Can the old painter no longer carry the fiercer visions of youth?

He leads me to a big closet where he hangs some of his older works on sliding panels. He draws out a huge painting, potent and grave. Chen's a tenebrist at heart; patterns of white, yellow and gold shine on the darkened canvas. As in the best Caravaggio, the forms of light, though bright, seem frantic and fleeting, soon to be extinguished.

I inadvertently blurt out, “Now, this I love.”

He registers the slight but doesn't react.

The painting depicts a group of men in uniform, faces anguished and stricken. They're soldiers. In the corner of the frame, one is fighting to get free of restraining hands that tear at his clothing. The man's look is one of animal rage. Around him, his fellow soldiers are pulling him along, pushing each other forward across the scene, forcing their way toward some action. They're shiny and pale with sweat and emotion. Some are yelling words of anxious encouragement. Others are wide-eyed and ashen, numbed to fearful purpose in the night.

“Do you know what this is?” he asks.

Impressed as I am, I do not and mumble like an idiot.

“The June 4 incident at Tiananmen Square. The soldiers are going to the square and the people are trying to stop them,” Chen gently explains. “I can never show this piece in China. I've been waiting for nineteen years to show this painting,” he says with a laugh as he slides it back into its hangar.