Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (29 page)

On January 2, the Palace opened a preview exhibition of the works destined for New York. “We thought we should exhibit this material so that people could see it; then we would show it again on return so they could see it was the same work in good condition,”
said Chang Lin-sheng, the museum’s pellucid deputy director and the force behind Chin’s throne. The preview included everything going to the Met except the twenty-seven items on the restricted list. A label on the wall explained that since these pieces had just been displayed for the seventieth anniversary, they did not need to be exhibited again now. Had this statement been more diplomatically phrased, it was to be pointed out, perhaps the protests wouldn’t have happened.

The restricted list has little to do with fragility. Scrolls must be remounted every few hundred years but are otherwise stable. Rolling and unrolling, however, must be done with care. At the Palace, this service is performed mostly by old soldiers who came over with Chiang and were retired as “technicians.” One senior technician in particular tends to create strain marks. (“He likes to do a final twist and hear them go
ieieiek
,” said one horrified scholar.) The restricted list includes early works that were at one point being unrolled five or six times a week for examination. In the mid-1980s, Chin made up the restricted list to have an official excuse for refusing to accommodate visiting scholars. But the implication is that the pieces might vaporize if someone breathes on them, and the wall label at the preview reinforced that paranoia.

On January 3, as Chin escorted the vice director of the Legislative Yuan through the exhibition, a self-described “irate art lover” named Tang Hsiao-li, a young woman with the sinister gleam of obsession that one sees in old footage of Red Guards, began yelling about fragility. “If Director Chin had been polite to Miss Tang, instead of ignoring her, perhaps this wouldn’t have happened,” one observer said later. “But Director Chin is Director Chin.” Tang, who felt that art too fragile to hang in the Palace Museum should not leave the country, called around town, and on Friday, January 5, the
China Times
quoted her invitation: “Please wear black and come and sit quietly at the Palace Museum to protest fragile paintings going abroad, starting Saturday morning at 10 a.m.”

Saturday the sixth was a radiant, sunny day, and crowds gathered. (“If it had rained,” one curator said, “perhaps this wouldn’t have happened.”) Tang had rallied most of the people who would become
key players in the conflict, including several former Palace Museum employees who had left “under a cloud,” as is said there; a few people with personal grudges against Fong or Chin or both; and some genuinely concerned citizens. Chu Ko, an artist who previously worked at the Palace, wrote in the
China Times
, “I am absolutely astonished that these extraordinarily fragile paintings should be allowed to go.” His Palace connection gave him great credibility. Shia Yan, an oil painter, also wrote an inflammatory article; he had learned to mistrust the United States when a New York gallery dealt with him shoddily. Estimates of the number of protesters ranged from sixty to four hundred; dramatic photos showed up the next day on front pages throughout Taiwan. “Lending these works of art is tantamount to betraying our ancestors,” said the poet Kuan Kuan, subsequently photographed at the base of a pillar, positioning himself for a hunger strike.

By Monday, January 8, politicians had seized the stage. Chou Chuan, the whip of the opposition New Party, dropped in on Chin with a dozen reporters in tow. She also brought Chu Hui-liang, who at the time still worked at the Palace (and was the star of its badminton team), had recently earned her doctorate from Princeton (advised by Fong), and had just been elected to the Legislative Yuan. Chu suggested to Chin that he replace the originals with high-quality reproductions. “How can you, a museum-trained person, even suggest this?” asked Chin, but he got short shrift in the press. The same day, protesters gathered outside the Control Yuan, which monitors the branches of government. By now the Ministry of Education had been given responsibility for the Palace matter. In the Legislative Yuan, opposition party leaders banned the twenty-seven restricted items from export and called a public hearing for Wednesday, January 10, to consider how to proceed.

James C. Y. Watt, a Hong Kong–born Chinese scholar who works under Fong, dislikes confrontation. He had come to Taiwan to oversee the preparation of condition reports and the packing of artwork. Now he found himself in the middle of a scandal. At the public hearing in the Legislative Yuan, he was the first speaker. As he ascended to the podium, the lights of ten television cameras blinded him, and the protesters, who had packed the building, began screaming expletives
as he tried to speak. “Shameless! Shameless! You’re crazy!” they heckled. He talked decorously about the Met’s commitment to cultural exchange. No one listened. When Watt stepped into the corridor, a reporter collided with a protester; they ended up in a fistfight from which Watt narrowly escaped. “I felt like I was stuck in an Ionesco play,” he said later.

By this time, de Montebello said, the museum had “a war room in New York.” He and Fong and Emily K. Rafferty, the Met’s vice president for development, stayed up most nights phoning Taiwan for news. Judith Smith, Fong’s special assistant, consolidated information and wrote up detailed daily reports. The team drafted letters to government officials and protesters—anxious letters, conciliatory ones. Some were sent and some were not. Every day Fong planned and canceled a trip to Taiwan; it was ultimately decided that his presence there would only further inflame the protesters. De Montebello reached Chou Chuan, the New Party whip, “but she had no sympathy for our cause,” he said. “For her it had become a matter of politics, the drama to be magnified for political ends, like [former senator] Jesse Helms on Robert Mapplethorpe, a populist stance that distracted voters from the real issues of the country.”

On Saturday, January 13, protesters gathered at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei. They had written slogans on strips of gauze and tied them around their foreheads, and they carried huge banners. The politicians present included one independent presidential candidate, who suggested that the leaders of the ruling KMT were exploiting their control of the Palace collection to reflect glory on themselves. Some young people, to whom democracy was new, seemed drunk on the power of protest. A surprising number of angry young men and women burning with Chinese nationalism had shown up. “We won’t grovel before the West,” said one. “We get the work forty days every three years, and you get it for a year? And we pay half the expenses of the show?”

Aware of the growing anger, Fong declared in an open letter to the Ministry of Education that he would forfeit two of the top three paintings in the show, asking only for Guo Xi’s
Early Spring
because it was on the cover of the catalogue (which had already been printed).
To Fong and Director Chin, all the fuss felt like politicized sentimentalism. “My grandmother or my maiden aunt would also say, to expose this is to destroy it,” Fong would later concede about the Palace collection. “But the time for such mawkishness is past.” The increasingly hostile Taiwanese press quoted him as saying, “quite arrogantly,” that he would cancel the show if more work were withdrawn. “It wasn’t a matter of my canceling,” Fong said, “but of there being no show with the cuts they’d proposed.”

In the Met’s war room, de Montebello and the others “made lists of what we could not live without,” he said. “We were willing to accept a show that was quantitatively reduced, but not one that was typologically reduced. No single major category of objects could be missing. It was necessary that the show sustain its goal of presenting a transversal history of Chinese art, that we not be forced to eliminate the Tang, Song, or Yuan dynasties from our presentation, that the curatorial vision be left intact. But being too pious in this matter would not have been public spirited. It was important that we not in our disappointment cancel a remarkable show. One day I thought our chances were at sixty percent; the next day it was thirty percent.”

The Met’s press office, which had been organizing expensive preview trips to Taiwan and printing color brochures, descended into hysteria. Interviews were forbidden and information was given so much spin as to become implausible. Attempts to control journalists could hardly have been more stringent during the Cultural Revolution than they were in January and February at the Met.

At another protest, on January 17 back in Taipei, the rumors flew: the Metropolitan Museum would lock the Chinese treasures in its basement and send back cleverly made copies; President Clinton would give the art back to the mainland; the US Congress’s guarantee of protection for foreign cultural treasures was no more reliable than the diplomatic relationship with Taiwan that it had terminated in 1978. “Neither at the Met nor elsewhere in the West do you know how to treat work on paper or silk,” one protester told me. When a Chinese friend of mine countered that the Met’s studio for the conservation of Asian art operates at a much higher standard than the Palace’s, people screamed insults at him. “This work is much too
sophisticated for you,” another protester said. “People in your country couldn’t understand or appreciate it. Sending it is just a waste.”

The Ministry of Education formed a committee to investigate the whole fiasco. At a big rally on Thursday, January 18, demonstrators wrapped themselves in a petition with twenty thousand signatures that had been gathered in a single day at Kaohsiung University. Particular rage was directed against committee members associated with Fong—though it would have been difficult to form a qualified committee free of Fong-trained scholars. Fong was still being advised to stay in New York. “You can do nothing but wait,” he was told by a friend on the committee. “I hope there will still be a show to save by next week.”

I was standing in the crowd outside the investigative committee’s first meeting when a television camera suddenly pointed at me. “I’m told you’ve actually met Wen Fong,” a journalist said. “Is he really as we understand him to be: greedy, arrogant, selfish, and mean?”

By January 20, when I met with Chu Hui-liang, the new New Party legislator, she was expressing regret over the debacle: “I worried about sending
Travelers amid Streams and Mountains
—I thought they were being irresponsible. People need to know what a ‘restricted list’ actually means. But I didn’t intend that the whole show be destroyed.” Within the high walls of the Palace there was frustrated sadness. “What is wrong with these people?” asked the Palace Museum’s Chang Lin-sheng, who was handling the day-to-day trauma of the protests. I had had to sneak into her office, since she was avoiding interviews; she looked tired. “Don’t they have jobs? Don’t they have anything to do all day besides march up and down out there with inaccurate slogans?” The phone rang. She talked fast for forty-five minutes, her tone conciliatory and irritable. “Wen Fong,” she said when she hung up. “I told him I can’t help him anymore.” She picked up a copy of a popular magazine with
Travelers amid Streams and Mountains
on its cover. “I suppose it’s something that now everyone in the country has heard of Fan Kuan, when recently this population couldn’t be bothered to see our seventieth-anniversary exhibition. The truth is, we all worried about sending Fan Kuan. Maybe one or two others are best left here, as the
Mona Lisa
stays at the Louvre. But for the rest—people should see it. How can the people be so suspicious of us? Don’t
they understand how much we love that work? We’re all fragile. Should we never leave home again?”

Fong used a different analogy: “You don’t stop eating because you might choke.”

The investigative committee and its subcommittees decided to reconsider every object, not just those on the restricted list, and protesters threatened legal action against the Palace Museum. De Montebello’s backdoor approaches and “corridor diplomacy” did not seem to be working. Neither he nor the director of the American Institute in Taiwan, our de facto “ambassador” there, was ever able to reach the minister of education. To those in power in Taiwan, the strong wishes of the Metropolitan Museum were of little interest, and the Met, realizing that posturing would not protect the show, lapsed into relative silence. But Fong remained confident: “The government has to be seen to be responsive to the people. So pieces would be withdrawn. But if the whole show is canceled, the government will appear to be helpless in the hands of some hysterics. Such a display of weakness would run contrary to their interests.”

Still, the Met’s situation was getting scary. The packing was already a week behind schedule, and the exhibition cases the museum had commissioned couldn’t be built because no one knew what would go in them. The reserved cargo space on planes had been forfeited. Acer had withdrawn its $1.5 million sponsorship, and now the protesters were trying to halt the Taiwanese government’s financing. The standard greeting in Taipei art circles was “What news from Wen today?” But it had become clear that there was nothing that Wen Fong or anyone else in the United States could do.

Toward the end of January, reports of new Chinese threats to Taiwan pushed the art controversy off the front pages. On January 23, the committee announced a compromise that left all sides frustrated: twenty-three items, including several landmark pieces, were withdrawn, and nineteen other important works were restricted to forty days of display. Then the Met bravely decided to start packing without financial guarantees for one of the most expensive exhibitions in its history (although insurance and transportation costs were somewhat reduced by the exclusion of key priceless works). “We told
the board of trustees we would be picking up the gap of $1.5 million left by the withdrawal of corporate sponsors,” said Rafferty. “We also said there was a possibility that the $3.1 million from Taiwan would not come through. It was a gamble—$4.6 million from our operating budget wouldn’t have closed down the museum, but it would have been devastating.” De Montebello asked wryly, “Whom should it make anxious to have the work here and the money not?” In the end, Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry came through.