Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

At noon that day, Song, his friends, a professional barber in a clean white smock, a reporter from Shanxi television, and I all gathered in the exhibition room. Solemnly, Song spread newspapers on the gallery floor and placed a chair in the middle of them. Chance visitors to the gallery stopped to watch. We all stood in fascinated silence as Song’s hair fell lock by lock to the floor. Song faced first in one direction, then in another, holding a serious expression for a while, then grinning and posing. After twenty minutes or so, Song had the chair taken away, and he lay down, cadaver-like, on the floor. The barber soaped Song’s face, produced a straight razor, and began to shave him. When his beard was gone, Song sat up for the final attack on his hair. But just as the barber began to cut again, the director of gallery security came in and saw the crowd and cameras. “Who is the authority behind this behavior?” he asked, his face tight with rage.

“This is my exhibition,” Song said, “and I take full responsibility.”

After a brief exchange of hostilities, the director of gallery security stormed out, only to return with threatening-looking minions. You would have thought, to witness the scene, that Song Shuangsong had been caught holding a bomb rather than succumbing to a haircut and shave. Everyone was thrown out of the room. The doors were secured with heavy chains and padlocks. The exhibition was closed down immediately and permanently. Song was led out roughly between two guards.

One Westerner who strayed into the performance turned to me with a shrug and commented on how sad it was that these attempts to fight openly for democracy in China always failed. He had arrived at the popular Western conclusion that an artist who runs up against the state must be working directly or indirectly toward free elections and a constitution. This logic is grounded in a misreading of China and the Chinese. In this case, it missed the point: the haircut had in fact been entirely successful. The Chinese intelligentsia—including the vanguard “underground” artists, many of whom are or have been active pro-democracy demonstrators—are united in their firm belief that Western democracy in China would be not only a mistake, but also impossible. The Chinese like China. Though they want Western money, information, and power, they do not want Western solutions to Chinese problems, and when they protest for democracy, this is a covert way of pushing toward Chinese solutions. In the East, more than one artist emphasized to me, it is customary to ask for what you do not want in order to get what you do.

The very decision in China to act as an individual is radical. It runs against a five-thousand-year history of which the Chinese are intently aware and immensely proud, a history they frequently revise (sometimes violently) but never abandon. The members of the Chinese artistic avant-garde are individuals every one, but individualism carried too far is in Chinese terms ridiculous; artistry lies not in what the Chinese would deem coarse Western-style self-interest, but in balance. What seems to us to be a disowning of the Chinese tradition of uniformity is really more a means of stepping outside of it so as to prod it to evolve. China, despite its problems and cruelties, is highly functional, and that is much more important to the Chinese, even the Chinese intelligentsia, than any Western notion of democracy. Even iconoclastic artists, horrified by Deng Xiaoping’s government though they may be, are by and large surprisingly content with how their system works. The acts of defiance of the Chinese avant-garde function legitimately within their system; they are not designed to be interpreted within ours.

What looks radical often is radical, but not always in the ways you think. In Nanjing dialect, the sounds i luv yoo mean “Would you care for some spiced oil?” “What the West does, encountering our art,” the artist Ni Haifeng said, “is to think we’re saying we love you, when we’re only having a private conversation about cooking.”

Soul of the Avant-Garde

Chinese society is always hierarchical; even the most informal group has a pyramid structure. The “leader” of the Chinese avant-garde is Li Xianting, called Lao Li (Old Li, a term of deference, respect, and affection). “Sometimes it’s easier to say ‘Lao Li’ than ‘Chinese avant-garde,’ ” the painter Pan Dehai said. “Both mean the same thing.” Lao Li, forty-six, is a relatively small man with an eccentric beard and a quality of intelligent gentleness and considered kindness that sometimes borders on radiance. He is a scholar, highly literate, who knows the history of Chinese art and is informed about Western art.