33 Artists in 3 Acts (7 page)

As it happens, Ai’s education was effectively foreign. As the artist explained to me in London seven months ago, his French-educated father was his principal tutor. “When I was growing up, my father was forbidden to write but I still can hear the way he used language when he spoke.” Also, Ai lived in Manhattan for twelve years. “Before the airplane landed, we circled above New York City for about half hour,” he told
me. “It was nine o’clock in the evening. The skyline was a miracle to see. The brightness of the city was beyond the imagination. At that moment, everything you know disappears.”

In New York, Ai did all sorts of odd jobs—cleaning, gardening, babysitting, house painting—while he absorbed the New York art scene. He read and loved
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and back again)
and became a fan of Marcel Duchamp. “Duchamp saved me,” declared Ai. “Through him, I understood that art is a mental activity, an attitude, a lifestyle. He gave me an excuse not to do too much. It was symbolic. I could do something else and still think I’m an artist.” Ai remembers admiring Koons’s “basketballs in the fish tanks” (his “Equilibrium” series, which was first shown in 1985), but he hasn’t followed his work very closely since then. “It’s pleasant,” Ai said. “It has some contemporary sensibilities. The market itself has become part of the work.”

Through the window behind Lu Qing, among the bamboo, I see a marble arm coming out of the ground. It looks like it is giving me the finger. Some people have speculated about the timing of Ai’s incarceration. “He couldn’t have timed it better, career-wise,” one Beijinger told me. “It’s strange that Weiwei’s son is exactly the same age as Weiwei was when his father was sentenced,” said another. “Ai’s legend is empowered by his imprisonment,” admitted Philip Tinari (his translator at the Shanghai conference). These comments float through my head as I try to formulate a question that won’t add to Lu’s distress. If Ai sees
all
of his activities—from making art to blogging and agitating—as art, then can one see Ai’s imprisonment as an artistic act?

Lu puts the fist of one hand in the palm of the other, then lowers them both into her lap. She purses her mouth, and bites her lip. I offer that, sometimes, a single incident can bear witness to two opposite tendencies. Ai’s incarceration seems both arbitrary and destined to be. “It is hard for me to make any judgment,” she says finally, raising her palms gently. “It is not that it is inconvenient for me to say. It is genuinely difficult for me to tell.”

Zeng Fanzhi

Self-Portrait

2009

SCENE 8

Zeng Fanzhi

Z
eng Fanzhi’s studio is only a minute away from Ai Weiwei’s, but their artistic lives couldn’t be further apart. Zeng confines his endeavors to painting and avoids overt references to politics in his work. Like Koons, he is represented by New York power dealer Larry Gagosian and is one of the world’s most expensive living artists.

A few days after my visit with Lu Qing, I am in a cab with Belinda Chen, a PR woman from Christie’s, who will translate for me. François Pinault, the owner of Christie’s, is about to host an exhibition of Zeng’s work in Hong Kong. The Chinese art market has been booming but, despite foreign speculation, it is yet to be well integrated into the global art world, partly because many Chinese artists act as their own dealers. Having recently created alliances with both Gagosian and Pinault, Zeng evidently understands the strategic importance of dealer endorsement when it comes to having a vibrant international career.

Our taxi pulls in behind three glossy black Mercedes parked in the small lot that Zeng’s studio shares with his mainland dealer, ShanghART. It’s rare to see such an explicit juxtaposition of supply and demand—even Koons’s studio is a judicious few blocks away from the Gagosian flagship. A lushly landscaped path leads to a metal gate, which opens onto a courtyard featuring stone lions, bonsai trees, a koi pond. A
turquoise and yellow macaw chained to a metal perch greets or spurns us with a homely squawk.

Once inside, we are ushered past a standing gold Buddha, then through some theatrical curtains into a huge room filled with the Romantic boom of a Mendelssohn symphony. The sound comes from two freestanding chrome speakers, high-tech towers that look like they could communicate with life on another planet. Six skylights puncture the 20-foot-high ceiling. At the near end of the room, leather couches and chairs are arranged on a red Persian carpet around an oversized glass coffee table stacked with books. I’m offered a seat but resist, keen to investigate the scene before me.

Zeng’s studio is like a stage set full of objects that display his artistic accomplishments and erudite taste. Intricately carved Chinese antiquities, still lives by Giorgio Morandi, and a painting of a young girl on a couch by the eccentric European modernist Balthus help to frame the mise-en-scène, as does the pairing of a black-and-white photo of Pablo Picasso with a small color pencil drawing that Zeng made of himself when he was seventeen.

These objects endorse the room’s main visual argument, which is made by a careful selection of Zeng’s paintings and proclaims his high standing as a painter. The lineup kicks off with a 1990 self-portrait as a somber thinker in the style of Max Beckmann, a German expressionist whose work was labeled degenerate when the Nazis came to power. Next to it is an astonishing self-portrait from 2009, in which Zeng portrays himself as a monk with a smoking paintbrush. Then comes a range of landscapes in different sizes, but with the same epic composition: richly layered abstractions with dynamic black diagonal strokes in the extreme foreground and a smoldering fire of red and yellow patches in the middle distance. After this constellation of works come portraits of Uli Sigg (a Swiss collector with an impeccable collection of Chinese art), Lorenz Heibling (the dealer-owner of ShangART), and the artist Francis Bacon. The British painter is depicted in a blue suit with a vertical blur around his head that implies he is plummeting downward like one of his own screaming popes.

On a mezzanine, lording over this all-male pantheon, is a portrait of none other than Karl Marx, in which he peers through a tangle of prickly shrubs with an amorphous white cross glowing behind him. The presence of Mao’s ideological inspiration is puzzling. At first, I think that, maybe, Marx remains in the studio because he is not a hot seller, but then I realize that the author of
The Communist Manifesto
must be deliberately on display. Yesterday, Liu Xiaodong, another eminent Beijing painter, told me, “The conceptual artist is a leader. He is like an entrepreneur whose main work is managing his company, whereas a painter is a peasant. He is an artist-craftsman who does it himself.” The pre-proletarian peasant is a common analogy for painters here. It signals both a belief in humble, honest work and an anxiety about rising conspicuously above the rest. Artists like Zeng, who was twelve when the Cultural Revolution ended, remember how such individuals were punished. In this context, Marx, a lapsed Jew who declared religion the “opium of the people,” may safeguard the artist’s studio like a patron saint.

As we take our seats, Zeng lights a seven-inch Cohiba cigar with a lighter in the shape of a handgun. Cohibas were once made under tight security for Castro and other Cuban government officials so that they could enjoy a premium product without fear of assassination.
*
Nowadays, successful Chinese artists enjoy smoking Cohibas and drinking French red wine. In the back room, Zeng has two climate-controlled fridges stocked with Bordeaux and other imports. “Artists are among the first Chinese to have become rich, so they are models of how to behave like a properly cultured elite,” Johnson Chang, a Hong Kong curator and dealer, once remarked to me.

Zeng has a round face with short-cropped graying hair. In embroidered jeans, a dress shirt, and a leather waistcoat, the artist looks like an urban cowboy. When asked about his high prices, Zeng displays his public relations skills. “It is just the beginning. I believe they will
increase further,” he says, one hand demarcating levels in the air. “But a good artist shouldn’t be overly influenced by the market. He needs an independent creative mentality.”

Zeng emphasizes his painting skills over his conceptual acumen. He has a staff of about ten, split between the studio and the office. “None of my assistants are allowed to paint for me, not even a stroke,” he says. “My studio is not a boring workshop. I enjoy the creative lifestyle.” Given the bohemian tang of his studio, I surmise that he means that, when the Bordeaux starts flowing, it can get a little wild in here.

Expert craftsmanship—not to mention evidence of time-consuming labor—remains a driving force in Chinese art. However, Zeng is careful to position himself as an artist. “Craftsmen don’t put their emotions into what they make,” he says with a wave in the direction of the photo of Picasso. “Picasso’s ‘periods’ reflect his feelings at different points in his lifetime. Picasso isn’t my favorite painter but I admire his changes of style. Bacon . . . I never get tired of Bacon.”

One of the strengths of Zeng’s oeuvre is that, unlike a lot of Chinese painters, he hasn’t become stuck in a single, monotonous, signature style. “I summarize myself into four periods,” he says, explaining that these correspond to the production of his “Hospital” paintings (1989–93), “Masks” (1994–2004), “Portraits” (1999–present), and “Landscapes” (2002–present). His mask paintings are his most celebrated and coveted. In these brightly colored works, the masks either hide the characters’ emotions or represent truthful feelings that social etiquette and political circumstances prevent them from revealing.

Zeng tells me that he chose to be an artist in order to escape mundane routines imposed by others. His mother was in charge of entertainment at the worker’s union; his father he describes as simply a worker. “When you graduate from university, you are usually assigned a job,” he explains. “I chose to be an independent artist because I wanted the freedom to paint what I liked without restrictions.”

The spontaneous reference to artistic freedom is intriguing, given the Chinese government’s policing of so many aspects of culture. What about self-censorship, I ask. “I paint out of enjoyment,” he replies. “It
may not be beautiful for the common people.” Something has been lost—I suspect intentionally—in translation. I decide to test Zeng, asking him about a taboo subject, the government-ordered massacre of several hundred young pro-democracy campaigners in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. One of his staff immediately interjects with a quick, vehement lecture to him in Chinese. Even so, he is willing to speak to me about it, and does so—but only off the record.

In the past few days, I have spoken to ten or so Chinese artists, all of whom invoked their superlative personal freedoms, which they see as completely different from political liberties. Attitudes toward Ai Weiwei are varied but lean toward the negative. One artist who has known him since they both lived in New York says that he is a “bully with little tolerance for differences of opinion and an egotist with a dictatorial style that mirrors the methods of the Communist Party.” Another deplores him as a “politician in the art world and an artist in a political context.” By contrast, Zeng is much more circumspect. About Ai Weiwei, he says, “No matter what he did . . . it is not right to put him in jail. It will be very sad if he is not released soon.”

Throughout our conversation, my eyes are repeatedly drawn to the extravagant self-portrait in which Zeng wears the vivid red robe of a Buddhist monk with bare feet and extra-large hands. Unlike the earlier self-portrait, in which the artist’s eyes are downcast, here he looks directly at the viewer with bluish, rather than brown, eyes. His face is slimmer and paler than in real life. In one hand, he holds a thin paintbrush from which a long wisp of enchanted smoke curves upward into a dark gray sky. This carefully painted character brings verve to a vague, bleak, lifeless landscape. I point at the painting. Your definition of an artist? I half ask, half state. Zeng looks at the canvas for a few seconds. “Yes, an artist is a solitary philosopher,” he replies. Although the artist is depicted alone, his stare acknowledges an attentive crowd. And even though his face looks terrifically serious, his charismatic brush is keen to entertain. To my eyes, the portrait suggests the artist has magical powers.