Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (30 page)

So
Splendors of Imperial China
will open at the Met after all, but without thirty-six of its crowning splendors. Sadder even than the absence of
Early Spring
or
Travelers amid Streams and Mountains
is that the elegant narrative coherence and balance of the planned exhibit has been substantially undermined. It is still, however, in many ways the greatest exhibition of Chinese art ever staged in the West, and the work will be displayed and lighted a thousand times better than it has ever been at the Palace. It may also be the last show of its kind: given the frenzied protectionist sentiment during January’s fracas, much of this work is unlikely to leave Taiwan ever again.

The unrest in Taiwan was strange for two reasons. First, Taiwan is hardly anti-American. An enormous number of Taiwanese travel to, and study in, the United States. Much of the population speaks English, and the occasional bar fight about Fan Kuan notwithstanding, as an American you tend to feel at home in Taiwan more easily than in almost any other East Asian country. Seven of Taiwan’s seventeen cabinet members hold PhDs from American universities. Taiwan is the world’s third-largest purchaser of American armaments, our eighth most important trading partner. “The educated population here is as much American as anything else,” a young artist told me.

The second reason the protests were so surprising is more subtle and important. Taiwan has been in turmoil for a long time, and particularly in the past five years, about whether or not it is China. The “one China” policy is the most pressing political issue of the day: Will Taiwan at some point be reunited with the mainland—by
force or otherwise—or will it eventually declare independence? The official stance of mainland Communists and Taiwan’s KMT is that Taiwan is a province of China; both Taipei and Beijing claim to be valid rulers of China. To the casual Western observer, the situation seems ludicrous. Taiwan has a separate economy, political system, and educational system; citizens carry Taiwanese passports. But Chinese nationalism is deep-seated. Some Taiwanese like to feel that they are part of a great nation and not, as one essayist wrote, “citizens of another piddling Southeast Asian provincial hole-in-the-wall country.” To many Taiwanese with close ties to the mainland, declaring independence would be like cutting off their own arms.

Not that the mainland will countenance independence. Since President Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan visited the United States in June to deliver a speech at Cornell, China has conducted ever-grander “standard military exercises” on the shores opposite Taiwan and in the sea off the island’s northern coast. So Taiwan, under constant threat from the mainland, must toady both across the strait and to the West. That the United States withdrew its ambassador in 1978 still provokes rage. There’s Taiwan—a peaceful democracy that the United States doesn’t recognize because we do recognize another country with a terrible human rights record, with which we do less than half as much trade, and which snubs us in its foreign and domestic policies.

Taiwan’s identity struggle fed the Palace protests. During the seventieth-anniversary celebrations, I encountered more people in Taipei art circles who wanted to disavow the Palace than who praised it. Though the Palace has always attracted tourists, most locals have avoided it—because of its forbidding air, because Taiwan has long been indifferent to art, and because the museum is, according to many Taiwan intellectuals, “alienatingly Chinese.”

A powerful ethnic tension exists within Taiwan today between the “mainlanders” (also called the “1949ers”), who came over with Chiang and their progeny, about 20 percent of the population, and the “Taiwanese,” whose forebears settled there earlier. This ethnic tension is perplexing inasmuch as both groups are Han Chinese, all tracing their roots back to the mainland; the indigenous aboriginal population is tiny. But Chiang’s forces arrived with the air of conquerors, and
from 1949 until the end of the brutal “Chiang dynasty” in 1987, the mainlanders of the KMT ruled, and the ethnically Taiwanese, despite controlling much land and wealth, were treated as an underclass.

Chiang’s government, still claiming to rule mainland China, and filling its legislature with representatives from every mainland district, was corrupt. But over the past nine years, the country has transformed itself with remarkable fluidity into a functional democracy with a highly educated population (the literacy rate is more than 90 percent, which in a character-written language is astonishing), enormous national wealth (including one of the largest per capita cash reserves in the world), and open elections. The legislature no longer professes to represent all of China.

“The Palace Museum is a nice place, but it’s too Chinese and insufficiently Taiwanese,” said Chen Shih-meng, deputy mayor of Taipei and former secretary general of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The DPP, one of two major opposition parties, stands overtly for independence. “Whether Chiang Kai-shek took that material rightfully or wrongfully, I don’t know, but we need a Taiwanese place to complement the Palace Museum. We deserve to understand ourselves as Taiwanese. I was taught that I was a part of a Chinese culture to which I never truly belonged. We must raise the consciousness of our next generation. We must help them toward cultural freedom from the mainland.” Then, as is typical given the tense politics of Taiwan, Chen fused the topic at hand with the more essential matter of independence: “The leadership here says that to avoid irritating the mainland, they must speak with creative vagueness. This vagueness, meant to confuse Beijing, confuses the people of Taiwan more than it does the enemy. If China uses military force, we will counterattack. We could destroy their economic zones incredibly fast. We will not win by pitching threats against Chinese military experts, but if we use our military capacities to sow fear among the economists, we can divide that leadership to triumph. We must make our plans clear to the mainland. Developing a native cultural awareness is a part of this policy. The Palace Museum does not enable such objectives.”

Chang Lin-sheng of the Palace Museum said of those who would advocate an autonomous Taiwanese art, “These are rootless people.
Did you know that the aboriginal tribes the localists love so much have no word in their language for art?” She paused dramatically. “Democracy is not good for art.” She wrung her hands and laughed. “Communism is worse. Capitalism is a good approximation of an imperial system and is very good for art. There is no Taiwanese culture. It’s not like the racial problem in the US—we are all Han people, and our culture was at its greatest in imperial courts.” The Palace Museum, she insisted, was the best answer to the Taiwanese search for dignity.

The greatest landscapes of the Song dynasty will not be on view in
Splendors of Imperial China
, but masterpieces of calligraphy and later painting will be. It is fashionable to note the failure of Western medicine to reconcile the mind-body split, and to look to the East for holistic cures. The Western division of word and image, sundering literary and artistic history, is no less troubling a split. It does not exist in China, where the character is at once a verbal representation and a visual language, and where the components of a painting are almost as iconic as literary vocabulary. Calligraphy is still the hardest of the Chinese arts for most Westerners to grasp: language is not metaphor but object, and what is signified is to some extent the process of signification. The writing and the content are harder to dissever than the dancer from the dance. It can be epistolary and spontaneous, with an ink trace that is entirely expressive, or it can be formal and ritualistic.

Visitors to the Met will see Huaisu’s
Autobiographical Essay
, a self-congratulatory drunken celebration of cursive forms, dated 777. In it, Huaisu explains that he writes best when inebriated. As he grows drunker, the text becomes less literary, but the quality of the calligraphy is exalted. The characters flow into one another as the brush charges forward, making fluid patterns of line—rhythmic, pulsing, almost erotic. Zhao Mengjian, writing in the thirteenth century, said that Huaisu “grasps his pen grandly like a frightened snake, rings it about roundly, and yet is very strangely spare.” Huaisu himself wrote, “Good calligraphy resembles a flock of birds darting out of the trees, or startled snakes scurrying into the grass, or cracks bursting in a shattered wall.”

Every student of Chinese art studies Su Shi’s
Poems Written at Hangzhou on the Cold-Food Festival
of 1082 as the apotheosis of calligraphy, and the most powerful part of Wen Fong’s masterful catalogue for the Met’s exhibition is his close reading of this work. An essayist beloved of Emperor Shenzong (to whose first triumphs
Early Spring
alludes), Su Shi became a policy critic at court, narrating contemporary problems through historical analogy. Given a series of provincial appointments, he became increasingly concerned about the life of the people and petitioned the court constantly to reduce taxes. This enraged the emperor’s chief adviser, and in 1079 Su Shi was convicted of having slandered the emperor and was banished to Huangzhou. He became a poet, turned to Buddhism, and wrote some great classics of Chinese literature, including
Ode to the Red Cliff
, to which later artists often alluded when they wanted to make indirect criticisms of government. His poems were disseminated throughout China by his powerful friends, and in exile he became a hero of the intelligentsia and the cultural elite, until in 1084 he was finally invited back to the court—only to be banished again a few years later.

At the height of his exile, Su Shi wrote
Poems Written at Hangzhou
on the Cold-Food Festival
—a notion of spring almost opposite to Guo Xi’s:

Since coming to Hangzhou,

Three Cold-Food Festivals have come and gone.

Each year I wish to prolong the springtime,

But spring departs without lingering.

. . .

All in secrecy spring is stolen and wasted,

Wreaking vengeance in the middle of the night.

How does it differ from a sickly youth

Up from his sickbed, his hair already white?

. . .

Dead ashes blown will not stir to life.

The calligraphy is a study in balance and line, each character shaped and angled, the brush moved with an exquisite self-assurance
and constancy. This is not the madly exuberant curling writing of Huaisu; it is as graceful and intricate in its structure as the branching of a tree. Su wrote, “My writing swells up like ten thousand gallons of water at the wellhead, erupting through the ground, spilling over the flat valley, and running unchecked for thousands of
li
a day.”

Su Shi dismissed realism—which would obsess Western artists for the next eight hundred years—as “the insight of a child”; he also rejected art that served the state. Western art of the Middle Ages remains intensely formal, but Su Shi’s calligraphy bespeaks an almost expressionist realm of the personal. His is an art of process and artistic transformation, and as a viewer you are invited to join him in his journey.
Poems Written at Hangzhou on the Cold-Food Festival
is sad but also redemptive, for what is revealed is the struggle to know a self. Nine hundred and fourteen years later, its ashes, blown, still stir to life.

Splendors
includes several important Yuan paintings. Yuan painting is somewhat harder for a Western audience to understand than Song painting. The Yuan painters were striving for complete simplicity of style and subject, the imagination given free rein within tight confines. The painter Wu Zhen spoke of “flavor within blandness” when he rejected the theatricality of Song styles.

Huang Gongwang created the long hand-scroll
Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains
, between 1347 and 1350. Song artists had risen to the peak of naturalistic representation, hiding the brushstroke by using washes; they wished to delete themselves graphically from their work. Huang’s brushstrokes, like his sentiments, are everywhere apparent, as if he were writing the letters of his own heart.

Also coming to the Met is Emperor Huizong’s
Two Poems
, a fine example of his “slender gold” calligraphy. Done more than three centuries later than Huaisu’s piece, it stands in sharp contrast to it. Scholar James Cahill writes, “Each character, occupying its assigned space, exhibits order and stasis, as if engraved in stone.” Huizong was an incompetent emperor, ambitious about building great public gardens and vague about running the country, but he was a glorious patron and practitioner of the arts. “Only through creativity,” he wrote, “does one’s merit remain behind.”

Splendors
reflects and includes the merit of Chinese emperors, which sometimes lies more tangibly in paintings and calligraphy than in political achievement or military conquest. Wen Fong’s catalogue, significantly titled
Possessing the Past
, is in some ways an embarrassment to the Met. The cover shows Guo Xi’s
Early Spring
, which is not in the exhibition. The copyright page thanks Acer for the corporate sponsorship it withdrew. And the text refers at some length to work that will probably never be seen in this country, all of it illustrated in glowing color. (“Well, at least you have your book,” de Montebello told Fong when it looked as if the show would miscarry altogether.) Still, the book uses techniques of connoisseurship to narrate a thousand-year evolution of the idea of painting and calligraphy, balancing social and formal art histories. It explicates the force that won these Chinese masterpieces their canonical position and the force that canonical position has afforded them.

Possessing the Past
also seems to tell over and over the story of what happened in Taiwan in January, because this disaffection between a beleaguered population and an autocratic elite has recurred across many dynasties of Chinese rule. “How much high Chinese culture is there in China?” Fong asked me one evening this winter. “It’s all Western. So much has been lost and forgotten by Chinese people in the last hundred and fifty years. What they still have is so precious, but being proud of your heritage and having the will to understand it are two different things.”