Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

“It is not just that our society does not encourage or support individuality,” Geng said. “We do not allow for it where it clearly exists.” He teaches painting and design at the Institute of Silk Technology. Last year, he suggested that instead of teaching technique the staff should teach the reasons behind that technique. He was allowed to outline his proposals to the staff of the school, who, having expressed interest in innovation, rejected them on grounds that they were incompatible with established teaching standards.

Geng has a gentle lightness of touch. Zhang Peili is much harder, much tougher. Though his work is also often humorous, it has an edge of brutality. “There has always been anger in my work,” he said. “I need to make the work, but it does not relieve my anger. It’s not like going to the toilet.” Zhang has worked in video, performance, and painting. Before the ’89 show, he cut up white plastic medical gloves and sent pieces of them to various artists. Some were caked with red and brown paint. The artists who received pieces of apparently bloodied gloves were horrified and bewildered; more and more of these strange packages began to arrive in their households. Then one day, everyone who had been on Zhang’s mailing list received a formal letter, explaining that the gloves had been sent at random and spread like a hepatitis epidemic, and that the whole matter was now over. No further gloves were sent.

During the Hygiene Campaign of 1991, when everyone in China was instructed on cleanliness, when an absurd and patronizing bureaucratic language interfered in the most personal aspect of people’s lives, Zhang Peili made his classic video The Correct Procedure for Washing a Chicken. The video is two and a half hours long. It is appalling and fascinating to watch the sufferings of the poor chicken as Zhang repeatedly covers it in soap, rinses it down, and lays it out on a board. The chicken goes free at the end, but you cannot help suspecting that it will never again be the same chicken. Zhang’s flat delivery masks profound empathy; the ethical rhetoric of these government campaigns is revealed through such work in its hypocrisy, shallowness, and cruelty.

The installation artist Ni Haifeng lives (in principle) on a remote island off the coast of southern China, but he is among the most social figures of the avant-garde scene and is often in Beijing, Hangzhou, or Shanghai. Ni is laid-back and humorous, with a broad-ranging if sometimes unfocused intelligence. He is in some ways the freest spirit of all, making art when and as the mood descends, a gypsy king in the avant-garde. Ni receives a teaching salary at the Zhoushan Normal School, but has been relieved of teaching responsibilities on grounds of being “too weird.” In 1987, he began to paint on houses, streets, stones, and trees; he covered his island with strange marks in chalk, oil paint, and dye. He has said that he wished to reduce writing to the “zero level” where it is without meaning. “When culture invades private life on a large scale,” he said, “the individual cannot escape being raped. From this viewpoint, my zero-level writing can be taken as a protest against the act of rape. I also want to warn people of the dangers inherent in cultural rape.”

An Artists’ Village

In China, your housing is ordinarily provided by your work unit; if you strike out on your own, you sacrifice many protective services and must find yourself a home, which is both expensive and difficult. Officially, you cannot move without government permission. Many avant-garde artists therefore work at least part-time in official jobs; others manage to live just past the edge of legality.

One place they live is the village commonly called Yuanmingyuan, about forty-five minutes from central Beijing. Built by local farmers in the late 1980s, it has dirt roads and a traditional layout: rows of one-story houses, each with a small courtyard and a tiled roof. There is one toilet shed and one telephone for everyone. Vines grow on some of the houses, and screen doors are always slamming. Nearby are farms and a park. In one direction lie the vast grounds of Beijing University and, in the other, the Summer Palace itself. The first artists here thought it close enough to central Beijing, but sufficiently removed so that they could live in relative peace. Many others soon joined them.