Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (20 page)

East Meets West

“The West tends to equate civilization, modernization, and westernization,” Zhang Peili said. “But it is only in this modern period that the West has arrived at new ways before China has. In past eras, we were the more advanced civilization.” The Chinese hate the Western habit of taking credit for industrialization. “You look at a factory and you say that it’s Western,” Bo Xiaobo, a Shanghai journalist, said to me. “But we’ve had factories here for a hundred years. Westerners started using gunpowder immediately after they found it in this country, but no one speaks of the American Revolution or the First World War as Chinese. If someone gets in a car and drives or goes to a factory and works, that’s not Western life; it’s just modern life.”

The West also tends to take credit for all art that is not brush painting. Today, the Chinese employ visual language that was developed in the West. But paper originally came from Asia, and all works on paper are not deemed Asian. Why should every oil painting be called Western? Why is it that the West feels it owns conceptualism, installation, modernism, and abstraction? The Hong Kong dealer Alice King, who shows work that uses
guohua
styles in modern ways, asks, “What is a Chinese painting? Is it any painting made by someone from China? Any painting made by someone who is ethnically Chinese? Or is it a stylistic question? Can a Westerner make a Chinese painting if he uses rice paper and a brush?” Westerners sometimes dismiss Chinese work as derivative. “We must as artists solve the problems of China, even if they’re boring for the West,” said the painter Wang Yin, one of the artists of the Yuanmingyuan village.

Li Xianting pointed out that until Western literature reached China during the Qing dynasty, a great gap existed between Chinese written and spoken language: “Classical Chinese is a very vague, open-ended language in which much of the content is left to the
reader to determine. Only when Chinese scholars read foreign books did they imagine that there could be a direct correlation between the written and the spoken word. After that, our written language took on this Western precision. But it was still the Chinese language; the subjects were still Chinese. If I hand you a recent Chinese novel, you will not say, ‘But this is in English!’ No more should you say that of our art.” One could say much the same thing of Chinese economic and social reform, for which the West, to the intense irritation of the Chinese, seems far too often to claim responsibility. “Now it’s a one-way situation,” the Shanghai New Revolutionaries said, “with every Western thing and idea in China, and no Chinese ideas or things in the West. It must balance.”

The extent of Western freedom—that natural corollary of democracy—is a subject of constant discussion among the Chinese. Gu Wenda, who now lives in New York and, with Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing, is a leader of Chinese art abroad, told me that while his exhibitions in China had been closed down for “inappropriate political meaning, something about a code for political secrets,” he had found in New York that when he showed work made with traditional Chinese medicines, including a powder made from human placenta, the authorities once more closed down his work, saying something about abortion. For him as an artist, there wasn’t so much difference.

Last year, Ni Haifeng won a German arts prize and lived for three months in Bonn, where he befriended local artists. One of them invited him to a potluck dinner and said, “We were hoping you’d make something Chinese.” So Ni Haifeng made a soup of which he was particularly fond. “I served it to everyone,” he told me, “and they all said they loved it. I tasted it last and realized at once that I had done something very wrong. The soup was terrible. At first, I thought everyone was just being nice to me, but people ate many bowls, and I finally understood that they all really liked it. But I felt guilty about having served them bad soup, and so a few weeks later I had everyone to my house, and I made the soup again. This time the soup was perfect. ‘Well,’ they said to me, ‘this is okay, but not nearly as good as last time.’ And they took very little of it.”

The Chinese are amused by Westerners’ inability to understand
their cultural standards. One evening in Hangzhou with Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, and other friends, we got onto the subject of two women from their school who were “like unsellable goods from an old department store.” Both had found happiness with Western boyfriends. Zhang and Geng described having dinner with the family of one of the boyfriends, whose mother kept whispering that she’d never met a girl “so beautiful.” “Our next big export,” they said, “will be the ugliest women in China. They can all marry attractive rich Americans.” Then they put me through a sort of quiz. “Look there,” they’d say. “One of those women is pretty and the other plain. Can you tell which is which?”

Despite the insatiable appetite of Chinese consumers for Western products, the West, in the eyes of the Chinese, doesn’t really count. I had dinner one night with the wife of an artist. She said, “You know, my husband would be furious if I went out for supper with a Chinese man.”

“But dinner with me doesn’t matter?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Of course not.”

I was similarly struck by the availability of the
International Herald Tribune
, by the fact that many people get the BBC World Service, by the tolerance for Gilbert & George. At first, I supposed that this represented a loosening of ideological barriers; only later did I understand that imported Western ideas cannot really affect anyone, whereas something much slighter in a Chinese forum—a haircut, for instance—could trigger a revolution.

China officially ended its isolationist policies in 1978, but the isolationist mentality lives on. “We were so cut off for so long,” Zhang Peili said, “it’s as though you are in a dark room and suddenly the curtains are opened. You cannot see the view because your eyes are still adjusting to the light.” The Shanghai artist and critic Xu Hong said, “People speak all the time of mixing Western and Eastern influences, as though it were like mixing red and blue ink to paint pictures in purple. They do not think of what it means to understand these cultures and to try to incorporate their different ways of thought.” Every artist I met explained why his work was really not as Western as it looked. “And how can it be Western?”
asked Zhang Wei, a university teacher who lives in the village at Yuanmingyuan. “Of course, we have come of age in the era of the so-called open-door policy, but we all understand that it is at best a door-ajar policy. And we know that that door will never really stand open, that people will never be allowed to pass back and forth through it as they choose.”

It is difficult for artists to cut themselves off completely from Chinese tradition. The abstract painter Ding Yi lives quietly in Shanghai, where he has produced large, beautifully colored canvases in which simple patterns are arranged over graphic spaces. He has recently started to produce these abstract paintings on bamboo and paper fans. “I needed to tie myself to the Chinese tradition,” he said. “And I wanted simultaneously to make this Western principle less frightening for Chinese people.”

Other artists, meanwhile, are doing work with Chinese media and Western form. Lu Shengzhong studied folk art at the Central Academy in Beijing, and his specialty is paper cutting. Traditionally, a rural woman should be able to cook, sew, and cut paper; Lu Shengzhong tells of old women who, having lost all other facilities, can do nothing but cut paper and who express themselves with their elaborate narrative paper cuts. He is a master paper cutter and the author of several books on the subject. In his recent work, he has limited himself to the single form of the “universal man,” and he cuts it over and over in different sizes, always from red paper, to create enormous, mystical installations. Lao Li dismisses such work. Many Chinese find this mixing of peasant tradition and modernism almost unclean. They resent the West’s enthusiasm for material that looks so Chinese but is so connected to Western thought. It is as though Lu Shengzhong has prostituted himself and the culture, giving something to the West that they should not have, selling something off too cheap.

A voice of nationalism emerges in the persistent, strong rejection of the West. The Chinese, competitive always, will take from the West whatever they can put to their own use. “Western culture reigns,” Lao Li said. “In a past era, Chinese culture was the highest. Right now, the West is in a state of decline and China in a state of ascendancy. Soon, we will cross paths.” Gu Wenda said simply, “If China had been
the strongest after World War Two, artists of the West would use my language and not I, theirs.”

The matter of China’s ruling the world is discussed as routinely in China as though it were already settled. The only matter for debate is when it will happen. Some think it will take only twenty years; some think it could take more than a century. Artists expect their international position to be paramount when China has risen above all other nations. “I am the guard of God and the voice of God,” the painter Ding Fang, author of terrifying Wagnerian mythological landscapes, told me. “I create a renaissance of the spirit and spiritual elevation. My work will last forever, as surely as the sun will go on rising; only the blind will not see it. With this work, China will return the spirit to the humans of the world.”

A Dangerous Idea

In the artists’ village at Yuanmingyuan, everyone calls Yan Zhengxue the mayor. At forty-nine, he is older than the others and has been in the village longer. Yan does not particularly look like an artist; he has short hair and ordinary clothes. His big ink paintings are decorative and traditional; his manner, unassuming.

On July 2, Yan took bus line 332 from central Beijing to Yuanmingyuan. He tried to get off just as the conductor closed the door and a minor argument ensued. The conductor was aggressive and Yan was annoyed. At the next stop, the conductor deliberately closed the door just as Yan tried to exit, and so Yan was carried to the last stop, where the conductor accused him of having taken items from his money bag and summoned the police. The area is under the same jurisdiction as the village, so the three policemen who came all recognized Yan Zhengxue as the mayor. He recognized them as the policemen who had closed down an exhibition that artists in the village had tried to mount. Yan said he had never touched the conductor’s bag, but the police pulled him out of the bus, beat him, and threw him on the ground. Some local residents stood watching, too afraid to interfere.

Then the police dragged him to the station and beat him with
electric nightsticks. “I did not fight back,” Yan said, “but only kept asking, ‘Why are you beating me?’ But they didn’t stop.” We were talking in Yan’s small courtyard house in the village, and he produced photographs of himself burned, covered in blood and oozing blisters. “They hit my groin repeatedly.” He held out a particularly grotesque photo. “The electric sticks burn badly. They loosened my teeth, and they bruised my chest, back, bottom, head. They told me to kneel down, but I refused and then they beat me even harder. They said, ‘If you vomit, you will clean the floor with your tongue. We know who you are. Artist, who made you mayor of the village? You have no authority at all.’ ” Then they asked him to sign a confession stating that he had stolen from the bus conductor, and when he refused, they beat him unconscious and dumped him, at midnight, outside the station. At 4:00 a.m., a local resident wrapped him in a blanket and took him to a hospital, where he was treated for bodily injuries and loss of hearing.

A few days later, one of the village artists recounted this story to Wang Jiaqi, a lawyer who ordinarily works in a Beijing real-estate firm. Wang immediately contacted Yan: “I told him this fierce event violated the law. Our central government does not like such petty police violence. I suggested that we bring a lawsuit.”

Yan asked artists to sign a petition protesting his treatment. Fang Lijun was among the first of the Yuanmingyuan artists to sign; Lao Li kept a page of the petition at his home, asking those who visited to sign as well. Some Chinese journalists agreed to write about Yan’s lawsuit. As publicity spread, Yan got hundreds of letters from victims of similar violence. “Some asked how to bring a suit; others warned me that I would meet with a ‘sudden accident’ if I didn’t take care.”

Wang submitted papers including photos, hospital documents, Yan’s statements, and copies of the petition to the courts. “They agreed to hear our case,” Wang told me. “We won’t get any money and the police won’t be punished, but if we can get them to admit that they committed a crime, that will be something. I avoid speaking publicly of human rights and democracy. It’s too dangerous. I work on individual cases in legal terms. The Chinese people have no idea of
using law to protect themselves; they imagine that laws exist only to constrain them. We want to stand against that.”

As I flipped through the snapshots in front of me, showing Yan Zhengxue’s injuries in horrible detail, I said, “It’s funny that I am in China to write about art and about artists and that I have found myself listening to a story about civil rights and personal freedom. It almost belongs to another project.”

“This is a story about art and about artists,” Yan said. “The police hate me because I am an artist, disobedient, free in what I do. They resent their lack of control over this village, these unregistered people living here without work units, without schedules, with Westerners wandering through. I was a natural target. In this country, you can seek money, have women, drink, and as long as you are registered in a unit, it’s okay. But to be an artist”—he gestured at his big ink scrolls—“this is a problem.”

Wang nodded at this. “Mr. Yan is bringing this suit. He is continuing to disobey convention by pursuing the law. Because he is a strong individual, Mr. Yan was beaten badly, and as an individual he is not simply accepting this. Whether we win or lose, I hope we will give this idea to people, that they can protest, that they can find a way to stand up for what they believe, that they can live as human beings.”