Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (21 page)

I thought again of Song Shuangsong’s haircut and I understood then why it had generated so much anger, and I saw in what terms it had been a success. I saw why even that trivial event was, in its way, more dangerous than a bomb. So long as art can assert its own danger, it succeeds. For this whole concept of individuality, this humanism of which Lao Li is the epitome, is something almost unknown in the People’s Republic. And if the idea were to penetrate to the vast population of that country, it would shift them toward self-determination. That would be the end of central government, of control, of Communism—it would be the end of China. With luck, this struggle between humanists and absolutists will never stop: for either side to win absolutely would be tragic. Injustice is terrible, but the end of China is also something that no one wants, neither Deng Xiaoping nor Lao Li and his circle.

Acceptance of Chinese contemporary art within the Western art world came more readily than acceptance of Soviet/Russian work. It has coincided with a rethinking of Western cultural history, in which what European and American cultures have exported to Asia is matched by what we have learned from Asia. Asian influence inheres only superficially in a taste for lacquer and porcelain; it resides more profoundly in philosophy. Minimalism and formalism are Asian ideas. Would Fluxus have been possible without Asian traditions celebrating temporality? Having ceased to disparage Asian contemporary art as plagiaristic of modernism, we must now reckon with the idea that modernism was in some ways plagiaristic of Asia. While Western artists learned a bit of technique from calligraphic brushwork, what they mostly took from character-based languages was the metaphoric richness of blurring the line between language and visual representation. Only lately have we acknowledged this debt.

Contemporary art from China, so marginal to Western consciousness when I first encountered it, has since become pivotal to any conversation about contemporary art, and works by Chinese artists have reached astronomical prices. In 2007, the Cynical Realist Yue Minjun set a record for Chinese contemporary art with the $5.3 million sale of his painting
Execution
. It was soon surpassed when a picture by Zhang Xiaogang, whose paintings had sold in 2004 for about $45,000, sold in 2008 for $6.1 million. Zhang Xiaogang’s record was exceeded that same year when Zeng Fanzhi’s
Mask Series 1996 No. 6
fetched $9.7 million; in 2013, his
The Last Supper
sold for $23.3 million.

Lao Li calls much of this work
Gaudy Art
, a term he made up to characterize the shiny surface and slick appeal of work that demonstrates “the powerlessness of art to shake the pervasiveness of consumerism.” He has referred to it as “a self-ironic response to the spiritual vacuum and folly of modern-day China.” Apolitical cynicism abounds. Cao Fei, a prominent artist from Guangzhou, said, “Criticizing society, that’s the aesthetics of the last generation.
When I started making art, I didn’t want to do political things. It’s all been expressed.” The painter Huang Rui said of the new generation, “They grew up during an economic period. They think economics influences their lives. They don’t realize politics can influence their lives even more.”

The Yuanmingyuan artists’ village was shut down by authorities in 1993. Lao Li, Fang Lijun, and Yue Minjun were among the first to migrate to Songzhuang, a peasant village about twelve miles from central Beijing. Many others soon followed. Town government was pleased to have tax revenue from this influx, but artists soon became embroiled in land disputes with local residents. Other artists set up shop at 798, an abandoned electronic-switching factory in the northeast of Beijing. This became a mandatory stop for art tourists and the cafés and boutiques that follow artistic efflorescence worldwide soon developed. Li Wenzi, a Beijing dealer, said, “The Yuanmingyuan Artists’ Village was a haven for idealists, for troubled souls seeking freedom and peace. From the very beginning, these other villages have been driven by money.” The government was eager to exploit cultural tourism, but its promotion of these areas pushed up rents, and many artists were soon priced out of 798. The problem was less acute in more far-flung areas, and over four thousand artists now work in Songzhuang, which is only one among more than a hundred artist communities on the outskirts of Beijing.

Lao Li is director of the Songzhuang Art Museum and the Li Xianting Film Fund, which for ten years organized the Beijing Independent Film Festival. In a 2010 interview, Fang Lijun stated, “Lao Li was like the sun in the sky, shining down on all of us.” In August 2014, authorities closed the festival the day before it was to open. More than a dozen police arrived to confiscate documents from the festival office; officers detained Lao Li and two collaborators, forcing them to sign papers assenting to the cancellation, then turned off the electricity at the festival venue. They later blockaded the space where the Li Xianting Film Fund had for many years offered a workshop for aspiring filmmakers, which now moved to a secret countryside location. The organizers were bewildered. “Our main goal is to open our students’ minds—to teach them new ways to think about life
and cinema,” said Fan Rong, the festival’s executive director. “Nothing we want to do is against the party or the government.”

After bringing his 1993 lawsuit over abuse at the hands of the police, Yan Zhengxue, the “mayor” of Yuanmingyuan, was sent to a reeducation labor camp for two years. He produced some hundred paintings of dark landscapes oozing blood under black suns, each divided by a central vertical line—the result of his attempt to conceal the true themes of his pictures by painting only half at a time. To get them out, he would stuff them into plastic bags, conceal them in his underwear, and then drop them into the vats of excrement that passed for camp lavatories; his children and friends would go there to retrieve them. He has been brought into police custody more than a dozen times since his release. In 2007, he was imprisoned for “subversion of state power.” He made no art during this two-year sentence. “I was tired of fighting,” he said. He attempted to hang himself.

Transgender performance artist Ma Liuming was jailed in 1994 on charges of pornography. All performance art became illegal after Zhu Yu displayed a video of his performance allegedly eating a fetus in the 2000
Fuck Off
show in Shanghai organized by Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi. Wang Peng, who grew up in a rural village but works in Beijing, knew nothing of the Tiananmen massacre until 2002, when he gained access to software that broke China’s Internet firewall. He abandoned abstract painting to work with bloodied surgical gloves retrieved from clinics where forced abortions take place. He said that learning of the massacre “made me want to rip open the most shocking and ugly side of society. It made me realize beauty is not what’s important, reality is.” Chen Guang was one of the soldiers at Tiananmen, and the memory of that horror informs his blood-soaked imagery. After he staged a private show at home in 2014, he was taken away by the police, who came to his humble apartment with four armed vehicles. In 2015, Shanghai artist Dai Jianyong was arrested for “creating a disturbance” after he sent friends a Photoshopped image that showed President Xi Jinping with a mustache and crinkled eyes; he faces five years in prison.

Shipping crates of Zhao Zhao’s work were seized by authorities
in 2012. After they were taken, he was told that he had to pay a fine of about $48,000, though he was charged with no crime. He would not get his work back in any case, but after he paid, he would be allowed to see it once before it was destroyed. He had no means to raise such a sum. Asked if he was afraid following this incident, he replied, “I don’t want to become cautious.”

Wu Yuren was arrested in 2010 for protesting in Tiananmen Square against the government’s seizure of his studio and the studios of several other artists. Many important artists came to his trial, including Ai Weiwei. Wu was released in 2012. Shortly before the 2014 Chinese New Year, Wu Yuren was sent a leaked document. An official notification from the Beijing Domestic Security Department, it instructed officers to act against “the unsafe, suspect population throughout the city.” They were to keep such people away from central areas. The memo ended, “Stop the harmful influence caused by people gathering.” The anonymous sender added a note to Wu Yuren, almost a dare, saying, “If you post this, the government will come and grab you.” Wu Yuren posted the document on his WeChat channel and four hours later, after his post had been shared by many people on WeChat, he received a police invitation to “a cup of tea.” It was the middle of the night, but he headed out. On the way to the teahouse, Wu was confronted by four police officers and some additional heavies. At the police station, one of the officers said, “The New Year is coming up, and you’re going to be here. We’re not going to let you go home.” Wu replied evenly, “Actually, I’m cool with that. I haven’t prepared at all for the New Year’s celebration. I’m really behind schedule. This is a great excuse.” This time, insolence worked; he was released a half hour later. “My parents of course want me to leave the country or to stop criticizing the government,” he said. “It’s something all parents would want. I don’t want my own child to live in China, especially under the current circumstances. People of their generation all say that there’s nothing you as an individual can do, so stop trying, it’s not worth it.”

In 2014, police detained thirteen residents of Songzhuang for “creating trouble” after Wang Zang posted a picture on Twitter of himself holding an umbrella. The umbrella had become the symbol of Hong Kong’s
pro-democracy demonstrators. Police confiscated Wang Zang’s umbrella and took him into custody; still in jail two months later, he suffered a heart attack following sleep-deprivation torture. “Despite all these troubles, I think my husband did the right thing,” his wife said. A vast increase in police in Songzhuang immediately followed the arrest. Artists who had been marketing their work to anyone with funds now shooed away potential buyers. The painter Tang Jianying, who also came under increased surveillance, said that Wang’s error had been to use the Internet. “Among friends, we can speak freely,” he said. “But if you speak freely on the Web, they’ll get you.”

In the spring of 2015, President Xi Jinping said, “Fine art works should be like sunshine from blue sky and breeze in spring that will inspire minds, warm hearts, cultivate taste, and clean up undesirable work styles.” This rather novel description of springtime weather was followed by statements from the State General Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and TV, which expressed its willingness to relocate artists to rural areas so they could “form a correct view of art,” finding opportunities in the boondocks to “unearth new subjects” and “create more masterpieces.” The message could not have been clearer. As during the Cultural Revolution, artists who refused to self-censor would be sent into punitive exile.

When I wrote my story for the
Times
in 1993, three of China’s greatest artists—Xu Bing, Gu Wenda, and Ai Weiwei—were living in the United States. The artists I encountered in China spoke of them and I met them when I returned home. Ai—artist, poet, architect, activist—is by far the most explicitly political. The son of a poet exiled during the Cultural Revolution, he gained fame for designing the “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the 2008 Olympics, but enraged authorities by describing the games as a “false smile” from the Chinese government. Trouble escalated rapidly after he began a “citizen investigation” into the deaths of thousands of schoolchildren in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, most at schools that did not meet building code. He catalogued their names and collected and displayed their little backpacks, deeply embarrassing the government. When he attended the trial of another earthquake activist in 2009,
he was assaulted by police officers and beaten until his brain bled. He posted a photo of himself with a tube through his skull to relieve the hematoma and a bag with the draining blood in his hand. Disillusioned with Gaudy Art, he wrote in 2012, “Chinese art is merely a product. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity. The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretense. To me, these are an insult to human intelligence and a ridicule of the concept of culture—vehicles of propaganda that showcase skills with no substance, and crafts with no meaning.”

Ai Weiwei has many detractors within China. “It’s all stunts, phony posturing,” said one curator in Beijing. “It’s not so different from the government’s propaganda, but a type that’s aimed at pulling foreigners’ heartstrings.” Ai said of such critics and artists, “They always stand on the side of power. I don’t blame them. I shake hands, I smile, I write recommendation letters for them, but . . . total disappointment.”

Anger is a corollary of hope, but sorrow is the upshot of despair. Yue Minjun’s countless self-portraits, in all of which he is laughing riotously, are perhaps the most recognizable images to come out of China in these past two decades; he cannot keep pace with collectors’ demands, and counterfeits of his work are all over Beijing flea markets. Yue Minjun is categorized with the Cynical Realists. But one curator said that over time his works have come to exude “a sense of melancholy rather than cynicism.” The poet Ouyang Jianghe wrote of his work, “All immemorial sadness is in this laughter.”

New York Times Magazine
, March 27, 1994

I first went to South Africa in 1992, then returned in 1993. Even in that short time, the change wrought by the waning of apartheid was irrefutable, though that gruesome system was not fully abandoned until the first free elections in 1994. South Africa is the redeeming narrative. The art of protest has shifted somewhat as the occasion for protest has been diminished. For some artists, this has proved liberating; for others, extremely difficult.