Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (28 page)

So, on January 3, two weeks before the art was to be packed for shipping, the protest movement began. The export of this “cultural patrimony”—whether China’s or Taiwan’s—had incensed many people on the island. By midmonth the situation had become a crisis. Whether the art should or would travel dominated the evening news and the front pages of Taiwanese newspapers and became a rallying point on university campuses. Legislators and ministers, poets and painters found themselves in an unlikely alliance against the Palace Museum, in a bizarre but telling display of Taiwan’s deep identity crisis. No one could say whether the show—the cornerstone of the Met’s season—would be canceled. Nor could anyone say what the protests meant for the future of Taiwan.

Wen C. Fong, sixty-five, came from Shanghai to Princeton University as a student in 1948, and when the revolution began back home a year later, he stayed on. He is now a professor of art and archaeology at Princeton and chairman of the Asian art department at the Metropolitan
Museum. Fong, an imposing but cheerful man, is also a member of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, the island’s most advanced institute of higher learning, and enjoys access at the highest levels—the most coveted commodity in Chinese societies. Taiwan’s art world is full of his former students, and being in Taipei with his blessing is like being in Oz with the kiss of Glinda the Good glowing on your forehead. Fong’s scholarship is sterling, his opinions rigid, his passion exhilarating. When, during an early meeting about the Met show, Palace Museum officials tried to withhold some paintings, Fong suggested that it might be better to do just a ceramics show. The paintings went back on the list.

Fong has made the Met’s Chinese collection first-rate, and his seminal book
Beyond Representation
narrates Chinese art history through that collection. He had always coveted the work in Taiwan, so when the Palace Museum loaned a few pieces to the National Gallery’s
Circa 1492
exhibition in 1991, he told Philippe de Montebello, the Met’s director, “This is our moment to strike.” Fong went to the National Gallery opening in Washington to press his cause with Chin Hsiao-yi, director of the Palace Museum in Taipei. Chin, who had been Chiang Kai-shek’s amanuensis, is now in his seventies and has the stiffly gracious manner of a minor deity. He and Fong have a friendship as carefully tended as a military alliance, within which the terms of the Met exhibition were negotiated. The contracts were finally signed in 1994.

Taiwanese politics caused trouble right from the start. Even though the $6.2 million show seemed an obvious blockbuster, Mobil backed out as a potential sponsor in 1994, worried that any support for Taiwan would offend the Chinese government. In August 1995, under pressure from Beijing, Citibank withdrew its sponsorship as well; Acer America, a subsidiary of the eponymous Taiwanese computer company, pulled out when the protests began.

Protectionism is not unusual in the art world. Popular protests occurred in Mexico against the Met’s big Mexico show, in Italy against the Vatican show, in Greece against
Greek Art of the Aegean Islands
. Nor is it unproductive for exhibitions to have diplomatic goals: the Met’s 1978 King Tut show ameliorated perceptions of Egypt as that
country eased out of war with Israel. For societies whose history transcends their modern reality, artifacts of that history are as potent as weaponry or wealth.

In this case, more than internal Taiwanese politics was at stake: the tenuous relationship among China, Taiwan, and the United States had come into play. If Taiwan can sustain order and wealth and democracy, as it seems to be doing, then it becomes a model for democracy in China. American support of Asian democracies advances our foreign-relations goals in China more than economic boycotts or statements about human rights. Though China’s militant Taiwan policy has many causes, hatred for that democratic model is a major one. Being the host country for this show would be the perfect cultural complement to our economic support of Taiwan, so the emerging crisis over the show was our crisis as well.

It is impossible to separate the history of the Palace collection from the history of China. Most of the work had political underpinnings when it was made many centuries ago, and it continues, amulet-like, to exert political influence today. Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan, or Parliament, understanding the Met exhibition to be a diplomatic matter, allocated $3.1 million to help pay for it. “Since the current status of Taiwan prohibits its government from making statements about politics to its primary ally—the US—it must communicate with economics and culture,” Fong said. “Cultural communication is about to rise to the same level as economic.”

Last October, I attended the celebrations for the Palace Museum’s seventieth anniversary. The Song dynasty (960 to 1279 AD) is to China what the Renaissance is to the West, and for the anniversary exhibition, the museum had brought out its greatest masterworks by Guo Xi and Fan Kuan. The issues of representation at which the West arrived after the invention of photography—those complex webs of abstraction and uncertainty that were opened up by Cézanne and taken up by Picasso and Duchamp—can be read in these Chinese works from a thousand years ago. The same paintings can be interpreted historically and contextually; artists of this era invested their
work with secret political signals, using painting to communicate what was forbidden. Such painting is also full of a native vocabulary: every tree has its meaning, sometimes multiple meanings: plum trees, for example, can refer to sexual potency among old men or to someone surviving a harsh winter; a plum tree that grows in a back palace courtyard can symbolize a neglected lady whose beauty has passed, or, by extension, a courtier who was favored but is no longer sought by the emperor. Pine trees are held to be principled gentlemen for staying green all through the winter while other trees change color. Each season means something, each kind of rock, each enveloping cloud of mist.

This work both reflects and demands a specific, meditative, exalted state of mind. Nearly one thousand years ago, Guo Xi—whose
Early Spring
shows a dynamic feeling of movement and excitement, half fantasy and half reality—wrote, “It has been said that there are landscape paintings one can walk through, landscapes that can be gazed upon, landscapes in which one may ramble, and landscapes in which one may dwell. . . . If one looks with the heart of the forest and the streams, they will be lofty. But if one approaches them with an arrogant eye, they will appear diminished.”

Guo Xi was the court painter for the exuberant new emperor Shenzong, who had come to power in 1067, five years before
Early Spring
was painted, bringing with him dramatic plans—the New Policy—to change China. Early spring is the time of renewal and change, and the painting is an allegory for the political reworking and social reordering of the society: peasants and fishermen are at the bottom of the picture, monks just above, an official on horseback a bit higher than that. It is an entire peaceful but shifting hierarchy revealed in layers. Mists obscure certainty, but at the height of the painting is a perfect clarity, for at the helm of the society was the exquisite conviction of Shenzong. Despite that flattery, the painting is honest, too; it lacks compositional stability, as befits the beginning of a new emperor’s reign. Next to Fan Kuan’s earthier
Travelers amid Streams and Mountains
, which is dated about fifty years earlier,
Early Spring
looks like an explosion of whim and air.

Nowhere else can you see such works side by side and thereby
understand so much of the ethos and aesthetics of dynastic China. The museum where the Imperial Collection is housed opened in Taipei in 1965, though the Palace Museum was officially established in 1925 in Beijing. The seventieth anniversary was celebrated in both Taipei (where the collection resides) and Beijing (where the name
Palace Museum
is used to refer to the Forbidden City); in Taipei, you felt as if you were at the Pope’s birthday dinner in Avignon. I was with a New York delegation that included Philippe de Montebello and Wen Fong. We were shepherded into an auditorium for lectures, then to a party. President Lee Teng-hui, the prime minister, and the most important legislators from the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party were in attendance, but virtually no one from the art world was present. De Montebello called it “the most peculiar museum event I have ever attended.” The officials whirled around Fong; I could little have guessed what rage against him I was to encounter three months later.

If there were an emperor in Taiwan, he would probably choose to live in the Palace Museum. Situated on a green mountain at the northern edge of Taipei, the hyper-Chinese building reigns over and embraces the city at its feet. If you lean over the carved banister that runs up its 130 marble steps, you can take succor from the gardens below: the pools of carp, as happy as the Taoist writer Zhuangzi could imagine; the pines, emblematic of the Confucian virtue of constancy; the tea-drinking pavilions, crowded with schoolchildren on field trips; and the beautiful rocks, to which young brides come daily to have their wedding portraits made.

The interior, however, is miserable: ceilings oppressively low or pompously high, lighting hideous, installation cases designed for security rather than accessible display, wall labels stunningly uninformative. You cannot linger on these inadequacies, however, because spread before you like a fool’s supper is the greatest art of China: Neolithic jades, Zhou drinking vessels, Song porcelains, Qing treasure boxes, and, most exalted of all, an astonishing array of Tang and Song painting and calligraphy. This work, accumulated by emperors over more than eleven centuries of dynastic rule, is still called the Imperial Collection. No Western museum has such a concentration
of great work, but then, no Western country has a history as relatively uninterrupted and permanently centralized as China’s.

The Imperial Collection remained in the hands of the last emperor until he was evicted from the Forbidden City in 1924. The next year, when the Palace Museum was established in Beijing, the collection, unseen by the public for a thousand years, was finally put on display. When the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, however, the collection was sent in twenty thousand wooden crates to Shanghai for safekeeping. It later went to a storage facility in Nanjing, and when the Japanese army was on the verge of taking over the southern capital in 1937, the crates traveled by boat up the Yangtze, by train over the Qinling Mountains, by truck to Hanzhong. Every single object made it to a safe location, despite a sequence of sinking ships and blown-up buildings worthy of James Bond. At the end of World War II the collection was returned to Nanjing, still crated, and when the Communists drew near in 1947, Chiang simply took the best with him to Taiwan, storing it in tunnels hollowed out of the side of a mountain.

There the work stayed except for one year, starting in spring 1961, when some two hundred pictures and objects—including Fan Kuan’s
Travelers amid Streams and Mountains
and Guo Xi’s
Early Spring
—toured the United States in
Chinese Art Treasures
, the show that, Fong said, “single-handedly created modern Western scholarship in this field.” After seeing that exhibition, J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, said to Wen Fong, “If all were to be destroyed on the earth except what we could fit in a single spaceship, some of these paintings would have to be on that ship.” Four years later, Chiang finally opened the doors of the new Palace Museum in Taipei. Despite having lost China’s great cities and most of its population and land, Chiang had retained one great treasure: the Imperial Collection.

People who work at the Palace Museum in Taipei do not leave. They enter it young, their good doctorates barely sufficient to earn entry-level jobs as tour guides. They will grow old within this place, which will be the locus of their social and professional lives. Those lucky enough to become curators will have their books published by
the Palace, and directly or indirectly, their books will be about the Palace. They will be trained in the weird history of the collection and allowed into the fabled storerooms, where 99 percent of the works lie in elegant silk boxes, carved wooden cases, or great metal trunks. They will play on the Palace Museum badminton team. “It’s the last vestige of the Chinese feudal system,” one curator said.

This collection does not travel even within Taiwan, which is why the decision to send its greatest objects—475 of the world’s most important works of Chinese art—to the United States became so incendiary. Among the items scheduled to go to the Met were twenty-seven from the Palace Museum’s “restricted list” of particularly exalted pieces, usually displayed for only forty days every three years. Whereas Americans tend to think of a museum primarily as an educational institution that mounts displays for the public, the Chinese think of a museum as a storehouse that safeguards cultural treasures. Art lovers in China enjoy looking at paintings, but beauty is considered incidental to historical value. Sending Fan Kuan’s painting abroad therefore is a bit like lending out the original of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

The art at the Palace Museum hangs with eighteenth-century attributions despite recent scholarship suggesting that many of them are incorrect. “If they started reattributing paintings, they’d be accused of devaluing the collection!” one Taiwan art scholar told me. “Imagine the hysteria there would be in the Legislative Yuan if they said a certain work was not really Fan Kuan!” Instead, scholars at the Palace reattribute work in secret ways. In the Chinese tradition, important paintings hang in the autumn; if you see a Fan Kuan in spring, you know that Palace authorities believe it is not by Fan Kuan. The phrase
This work is not characteristic of the artist’s style
in a label also signifies reattribution. One of Wen Fong’s major negotiating triumphs was permission to hang work at the Met with his own attributions.