Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Lao Li lives in a small courtyard house, typical of old Beijing; it is the heart of Chinese avant-garde culture. Mornings are off-limits since he sleeps until lunch, but in the afternoon or the evening you can always find artists gathered there, sometimes two or three, often twenty or thirty. Everyone drinks tea; at night, occasionally Chinese schnapps. The conversation can be grandiloquent and idealistic, but more often it is simple and even gossipy: which exhibitions have been good, whether someone is going to leave his wife, a string of new jokes.

Lao Li’s house has just three small rooms and, like most courtyard houses, no indoor bathroom and no hot water. But once you have arrived at this cozy, comfortable place and crowded onto the banquettes, you can stay for hours. If the conversation goes late, you can even stay over. Once this summer, a group of us talked until almost 5:00 a.m.; miraculously, there was room for all eight and we were so tired by then that we slept soundly. If there had been twenty of us, there would still have been room. Lao Li’s house is like that.

It’s hard to explain exactly what Lao Li does. Though he is a fine writer and curator, his main role is to guide artists gently to a language in which they can experience and discuss their own work. Wherever I went in China, we spoke about Lao Li: his recent essays, whether it was right for one man to hold so much power, whether he thinks himself more important than the artists he discovers and documents, what kind of women he likes, whether he has changed since his travel to the West last year. “The artists bring him their new paintings the way children bring homework to a teacher,” said a member of the Beijing art circle. “He praises or criticizes it and sends them to their next projects.” Artists from every province in China send Lao Li photos of their work, asking for his help. He travels to see them, taking with him books and information. “It’s a kind of agriculture,” he said, “bringing these materials to the provinces to fertilize the culture.” Wherever he goes he makes slides; his archives document every meaningful artistic effort in modern China. When he finds interesting artists, he invites them to Beijing. Through Lao Li, the art world is kept constantly invigorated with fresh blood.

For all his scholarly accomplishments, Lao Li does not sustain a critic’s objective distance, and his detractors fault him for this. His response is always as much empathetic as critical, and his pleasure in work comes largely from his sense of moral purpose. Lao Li devotes himself to encouraging those ways of thinking that empower his society. This agenda is higher than, and different from, the interpretive mission of an art critic.

The artists in his circle define themselves as members of the avant-garde; one gave me a printed calling card with his name and, below, Avant-Garde Artist. At first, I found the definition bewildering: many of these artists were not, by Western standards, particularly avant-garde. As I talked to Lao Li, I understood that what was radical in this work was its originality, that anyone who cleaved to a vision of his own and chose to articulate it was at the cutting edge of Chinese society. Lao Li is individuality’s greatest champion. The quality of his singular humanism is to make way for freedom of spirit and expression in a society that, through its official strictures and internal social mechanisms, does not allow for original thought.

“Idealism?” Lao Li said at one point. “I hope that a new art can appear in China and that I can help it. Pre-’89, we thought that with this new art we could change the society and make it free. Now, I think only that it can make the artists free. But for anyone to be free is no small matter.”

Some History

“Chinese art rests on three legs, like a traditional cooking pot,” Lao Li explained. “One is traditional brush and ink painting. One is realism, a concept imported from the West at the beginning of the twentieth century. One is the international language of contemporary Western art.”