Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (16 page)

Corruption costs the Russian economy as much as $500 billion each year. Freedom House gave the country a 6.75 rating on a corruption scale on which 7 is the maximum score. Putin has invited criminals who have assets abroad to bring them back; in 2015, he signed
a law guaranteeing amnesty for such people, who will be protected from criminal, tax, or civil prosecution. Even so, an estimated $150 billion left the country that year. “We all understand that the assets were earned or acquired in various ways,” said Andrey Makarov, chair of the State Duma’s budget committee. “However, I am confident that we should finally turn the ‘offshore page’ in the history of our economy and country. It is very important and necessary to do this.”

Symbolic shows of legal rectitude are staged for the population. Moscow banned imports of European cheese and other foods in retaliation for sanctions. This boycott has had much less effect on its foreign targets than on the Russian people. To show that Russia follows through, state television featured huge machinery destroying over six hundred tons of contraband food. Such theater is patriotic, perhaps, but in a country where people are starving to death, many Russians found it ostentatiously cruel.

The economy has become one of the most unequal in the world, with just 110 people holding more than a third of the country’s wealth. The poverty rate increased by a third between 2011 and 2015. In the same period, a half million people fled to seek economic opportunity abroad. The Russian economy is afflicted by lack of diversification, over-reliance on oil markets, international sanctions, minimal worker productivity, corruption, and the lack of incentive to change. Moscow has sponsored large companies under government control, but not small and medium-size independent enterprises (SMEs). In the EU, SMEs produce 40 percent of GDP; in Russia, about 15 percent. This shift out of private enterprise is not economically promising. Oil and gas account for more than two-thirds of exports, which means that every time oil prices drop by a dollar per barrel, Russia loses $2 billion. Ongoing sanctions will reduce the country’s economy by nearly 10 percent. Russian workers remain singularly inefficient. Ian Bremmer wrote in
Time
that while an American worker contributes $67.40 for each hour worked, a Russian worker contributes only $25.90. However, financial training starts early; at VDNKh, a “young investor school” teaches financial literacy to children as young as eight.

Though over two-thirds of Russians report being distressed by the country’s
economic woes, the same number approve of Putin’s economic leadership. Most Russians get their news from state-owned media, which have portrayed the invasion of Ukraine and other acts as part of a “Russia vs. the West” scenario. “Putin knows what his people want to hear,” Bremmer writes. “It’s just not clear if he knows how to fix his flailing economy.”

Politics has grown ever more cynical. In 2014, Max Katz, twenty-seven and a sometime poker champion, was elected to the Moscow District Council. His campaign slogan was “The Moscow District Council is completely useless. It possesses no power whatsoever.” He claimed that he won because he “chose to be honest.” At twenty-four, Isabelle Magkoeva is both a boxing champion and an unabashed Communist—a face of the new Russian left who publicly describes Lenin as a “great revolutionary.” At twenty-nine, Roman Dobrokhotov, whose Twitter bio says, “Revolution is me,” has been arrested well over a hundred times. He sent Edward Snowden a letter explaining that since everyone knows that every conversation in Russia is monitored, he would find nothing to uncover in his new domicile.

Opponents of Putin protested after the elections in 2011 and 2012. They were led by Garry Kasparov, chess champion; Ilya Yashin, activist; Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov; Alexei Navalny, anticorruption campaigner; and Boris Nemtsov, member of a regional parliament. In 2015, Navalny and Udaltsov were placed under house arrest. Nemtsov was shot in the back as he crossed a Moscow bridge, hours after he posted a Twitter message asking his followers to protest Putin’s activity in Ukraine.

Georgy Chizhov, of Moscow’s Center for Political Technologies, said, “Russians are now divided between ‘us’ and ‘national traitors.’ Liberals cannot protest; they would be going against most of society.” Nikita Denisov, thirty-three, who had been an active protester, said, “We realized that going on these marches was actually useless, even unfashionable.” Yelena Bobrova, twenty-nine, said, “We took to the streets thinking that we could make a difference, but only met with indifference from not only those in power, but our friends and relatives, too.” So apathy has become a national pastime.

New York Times Magazine
, December 19, 1993

It can be hard to remember the presumption common into the 1990s that no art of merit was being made outside the West. After I had written about Russia’s new generation, my editors at the
New York Times
asked me what I’d like to do next, and I suggested artists in China without knowing whether there were any. I assumed that if so much was happening in Moscow and St. Petersburg, something parallel had to exist in Beijing and Shanghai. Work from the USSR had been incomprehensible to Westerners, but the work in China was inaccessible. Because the only art available for viewing internationally was state sanctioned, most critics presumed that everyone was working to Party decrees. Once I had landed the assignment, I panicked, but bit by bit I found introductions to relevant artists, initially via a German conceptualist I’d met in Moscow. Nowadays, half of modern art seems to hail from the People’s Republic, and Western exhibitions of Cai Guo-Qiang and Ai Weiwei have been among the most visited in the world.

I have restored some material excluded from the original published version of this piece.

O
n August 21, 1993, the
Country Life Plan
exhibition was scheduled to open at the Meishugan (National Art Gallery) in Beijing. Though the paintings were indifferent and had to the ordinary eye no hint of political significance, officials ruled that many failed to show the positive side of life in the People’s Republic and were therefore unacceptable: only about 20 percent of the work was approved to hang. The prime mover behind
Country Life Plan
, the artist Song Shuangsong, was furious that the exhibition had been edited. He told friends that on August 25 he would go to the gallery and cut off his long hair, a symbol of his individualistic way of life.

At noon that day, Song, his friends, a professional barber in a clean white smock, a reporter from Shanxi television, and I all gathered in the exhibition room. Solemnly, Song spread newspapers on the gallery floor and placed a chair in the middle of them. Chance visitors to the gallery stopped to watch. We all stood in fascinated silence as Song’s hair fell lock by lock to the floor. Song faced first in one direction, then in another, holding a serious expression for a while, then grinning and posing. After twenty minutes or so, Song had the chair taken away, and he lay down, cadaver-like, on the floor. The barber soaped Song’s face, produced a straight razor, and began to shave him. When his beard was gone, Song sat up for the final attack on his hair. But just as the barber began to cut again, the director of gallery security came in and saw the crowd and cameras. “Who is the authority behind this behavior?” he asked, his face tight with rage.

“This is my exhibition,” Song said, “and I take full responsibility.”

After a brief exchange of hostilities, the director of gallery security stormed out, only to return with threatening-looking minions. You would have thought, to witness the scene, that Song Shuangsong had been caught holding a bomb rather than succumbing to a haircut and shave. Everyone was thrown out of the room. The doors were secured with heavy chains and padlocks. The exhibition was closed
down immediately and permanently. Song was led out roughly between two guards.

One Westerner who strayed into the performance turned to me with a shrug and commented on how sad it was that these attempts to fight openly for democracy in China always failed. He had arrived at the popular Western conclusion that an artist who runs up against the state must be working directly or indirectly toward free elections and a constitution. This logic is grounded in a misreading of China and the Chinese. In this case, it missed the point: the haircut had in fact been entirely successful. The Chinese intelligentsia—including the vanguard “underground” artists, many of whom are or have been active pro-democracy demonstrators—are united in their firm belief that Western democracy in China would be not only a mistake, but also impossible. The Chinese like China. Though they want Western money, information, and power, they do not want Western solutions to Chinese problems, and when they protest for democracy, this is a covert way of pushing toward Chinese solutions. In the East, more than one artist emphasized to me, it is customary to ask for what you do not want in order to get what you do.

The very decision in China to act as an individual is radical. It runs against a five-thousand-year history of which the Chinese are intently aware and immensely proud, a history they frequently revise (sometimes violently) but never abandon. The members of the Chinese artistic avant-garde are individuals every one, but individualism carried too far is in Chinese terms ridiculous; artistry lies not in what the Chinese would deem coarse Western-style self-interest, but in balance. What seems to us to be a disowning of the Chinese tradition of uniformity is really more a means of stepping outside of it so as to prod it to evolve. China, despite its problems and cruelties, is highly functional, and that is much more important to the Chinese, even the Chinese intelligentsia, than any Western notion of democracy. Even iconoclastic artists, horrified by Deng Xiaoping’s government though they may be, are by and large surprisingly content with how their system works. The acts of defiance of the Chinese avant-garde function legitimately within their system; they are not designed to be interpreted within ours.

What looks radical often is radical, but not always in the ways you think. In Nanjing dialect, the sounds
i luv yoo
mean “Would you care for some spiced oil?” “What the West does, encountering our art,” the artist Ni Haifeng said, “is to think we’re saying we love you, when we’re only having a private conversation about cooking.”

Soul of the Avant-Garde

Chinese society is always hierarchical; even the most informal group has a pyramid structure. The “leader” of the Chinese avant-garde is Li Xianting, called Lao Li (Old Li, a term of deference, respect, and affection). “Sometimes it’s easier to say ‘Lao Li’ than ‘Chinese avant-garde,’ ” the painter Pan Dehai said. “Both mean the same thing.” Lao Li, forty-six, is a relatively small man with an eccentric beard and a quality of intelligent gentleness and considered kindness that sometimes borders on radiance. He is a scholar, highly literate, who knows the history of Chinese art and is informed about Western art.

Lao Li lives in a small courtyard house, typical of old Beijing; it is the heart of Chinese avant-garde culture. Mornings are off-limits since he sleeps until lunch, but in the afternoon or the evening you can always find artists gathered there, sometimes two or three, often twenty or thirty. Everyone drinks tea; at night, occasionally Chinese schnapps. The conversation can be grandiloquent and idealistic, but more often it is simple and even gossipy: which exhibitions have been good, whether someone is going to leave his wife, a string of new jokes.

Lao Li’s house has just three small rooms and, like most courtyard houses, no indoor bathroom and no hot water. But once you have arrived at this cozy, comfortable place and crowded onto the banquettes, you can stay for hours. If the conversation goes late, you can even stay over. Once this summer, a group of us talked until almost 5:00 a.m.; miraculously, there was room for all eight and we were so tired by then that we slept soundly. If there had been twenty of us, there would still have been room. Lao Li’s house is like that.

It’s hard to explain exactly what Lao Li does. Though he is a fine writer and curator, his main role is to guide artists gently to a language in which they can experience and discuss their own work. Wherever I went in China, we spoke about Lao Li: his recent essays, whether it was right for one man to hold so much power, whether he thinks himself more important than the artists he discovers and documents, what kind of women he likes, whether he has changed since his travel to the West last year. “The artists bring him their new paintings the way children bring homework to a teacher,” said a member of the Beijing art circle. “He praises or criticizes it and sends them to their next projects.” Artists from every province in China send Lao Li photos of their work, asking for his help. He travels to see them, taking with him books and information. “It’s a kind of agriculture,” he said, “bringing these materials to the provinces to fertilize the culture.” Wherever he goes he makes slides; his archives document every meaningful artistic effort in modern China. When he finds interesting artists, he invites them to Beijing. Through Lao Li, the art world is kept constantly invigorated with fresh blood.

For all his scholarly accomplishments, Lao Li does not sustain a critic’s objective distance, and his detractors fault him for this. His response is always as much empathetic as critical, and his pleasure in work comes largely from his sense of moral purpose. Lao Li devotes himself to encouraging those ways of thinking that empower his society. This agenda is higher than, and different from, the interpretive mission of an art critic.

The artists in his circle define themselves as members of the avant-garde; one gave me a printed calling card with his name and, below,
Avant-Garde Artist
. At first, I found the definition bewildering: many of these artists were not, by Western standards, particularly avant-garde. As I talked to Lao Li, I understood that what was radical in this work was its originality, that anyone who cleaved to a vision of his own and chose to articulate it was at the cutting edge of Chinese society. Lao Li is individuality’s greatest champion. The quality of his singular humanism is to make way for freedom of spirit and expression in a society that, through its official strictures and internal social mechanisms, does not allow for original thought.