Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Another day we went to see Hsia I-fu, who paints landscapes in which only the trained Chinese eye can see corrupting traces of Western perspective and some nontraditional contrasts between wet and dry brushwork. “Western painting you go to when you are feeling quiet and it makes you excited,” he said. “Ink painting you visit when you are excited and it makes you calm. Ink painting is closer to religious experience: like a meditation, it purifies the mind. My work itself is not Chinese, not Taiwanese, but from the heart: for in our hearts here, what most of us really want is to be calm; and what you from the West want, and what these young avant-garde artists and DPP people want, I think, is to be excited.” He paused and looked around the room. “Elections; bombing raids; do we need art to excite us, too?”

Two years after I wrote this article, in 1998, the Taiwan Domestic Airport was closed down temporarily after missiles were fired by a citizen of mainland China who had arrived in Taipei just days earlier. Estimates range, but the official figure for the number of missiles involved in the incident stands at two hundred. Residents of northern Taipei were surprised but “not unduly alarmed,” according to one local report, by the flashes of intense light and the terrific noise. No injuries were reported. The closing of the airport had been negotiated in advance by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and the missiles had been fired by Cai Guo-Qiang, an artist then based in New York, in a performance for the opening of the Taiwan Biennial. His project, Golden Missile, was one of many radical works in an increasingly politicized approach to art in Taiwan.

TURKEY

Sailing to Byzantium

Travel + Leisure, July 1997

I was seriously depressed in 1996 and nearly unable to travel. But I had accepted an assignment—my first for Travel + Leisure—so I dragged myself off to the eastern Mediterranean coast. There I discovered a valuable truth: while exercise, medication, and psychotherapy are the most effective treatments for depression, a truly enchanting vacation can help, too. The Turkish coast was gorgeous; my traveling companions were delightful; the weather was impeccable; and I got better. I mentioned the experience in The Noonday Demon.

The ostensible purpose of the trip was to learn painting. On the first day, I said to Susannah that I couldn’t paint. “Nonsense,” she said. “Everyone can paint. You’ve never had proper instruction and I will change all that.” At the end of our first day, she said, “You’re right. You can’t paint. Perhaps you should try photography.”

Eleven amateur artists had signed up for the sailing adventure, and we were meant to learn painting. Every morning, we were out of our cradles within minutes of waking, endlessly rocking to the mild swell of the wine-dark eastern Mediterranean, the same sea first called “wine-dark” when nobler men dwelt on the earth and sang their warrior songs. Up on deck we would find bread and fresh butter, feta and olives, and cups of good strong Turkish coffee. The youngest of the crew served our meals. His name was Ibrahim, and he called us “sir” or “madam,” and he was always at one’s elbow just when one wanted honey or yogurt or Anatolian cherry preserves. Usually the sun was quite high by then, and the light soaked the air. Some people complained of having had too little sleep and too many of the captain’s special cocktails, but mostly there was only happiness that it was another day on the Arif Kaptan B. None of us minded getting up early, which, had you known us under other circumstances, you would hardly have believed. We hardly believed it.

After we had sated ourselves, the engine would start up or the sails would be hoisted, and we would journey along the contours of the land, following them as if they belonged to a lover’s body whose every curve we needed to know. Tom Johnson, managing director of Westminster Classic Tours, would tell us which of the old men on the piers were café owners in competition with one another, or about how new houses in traditional styles had been built “just there” (he would point) on foundations from the fourth century BC. Meanwhile, Andrew Hobson, an Oxford University classicist dedicated to preserving knowledge of the great early civilizations in a world divorced from its own origins, would tell us about events that were taking place when those foundations were laid. These shores seemed so busy with ancient history that they could hardly contain the present; when you looked at them, you saw their past. We talked about this as we smoked Turkish cigarettes and finished our coffee, reclined on pillows, rubbed sunscreen on one another’s backs, and began to turn the seaworthy color of our captain and crew.