Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The village is a mecca for Western tourists and journalists. Articles in dozens of countries have described the village as the center of the Chinese art scene because its blend of freedom and accessibility makes it look like a center to a Western sensibility. The Chinese are not an immediately open people: many artists of the avant-garde are secretive, elliptical to the point of obscurity, and emotionally inaccessible. In contrast, the village artists are easygoing with a casual professionalism in presenting their work. You can wander along knocking on doors and various locals will volunteer to be your guide. The traffic has become so intense that some artists say they have no time to work anymore.

With a few notable exceptions—particularly Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun—artists in the village are not particularly distinguished. Many imitate one another, unimaginatively combining Cynical Realism and Political Pop. Most of these artists are only a half step away from jade carvers or other practitioners of cottage-industry handicrafts for foreign consumption. Certainly it is the steady influx of Western money and Western interest that allows the artists to live like this. Mostly, their work is not sophisticated enough to have political meaning, but if they cannot always comment persuasively on freedom, they can live unconstrained personal lives.

“We’re part of the post-’89 phenomenon,” the painter Yue Minjun said to me. “Before ’89, there was hope: political hope, economic hope, all very exciting.” Yang Shaobin, another painter, picked up the thread: “Now there’s no hope. We’ve become artists to keep busy.” Talking to them, you feel that this rhetoric, too, sells well. Cynicism is the fashion in the village, but it is a flattened cynicism, more the stuff of student coolness than of despair.

Missing Mao

One thinks of the Cultural Revolution as a terrible time for intellectuals: many were killed, others sent to hard labor in mines, in factories, or on peasant farms. But you do not hear in China the tones of horrified disgust with which Russians speak of Stalin or that Romanians summon when someone mentions Ceauşescu. In avant-garde artistic circles, the love for Chairman Mao is ambivalent but incontrovertible. “Even those of us who were opposed were believers, at least partway,” Lao Li said late one night over tea. Branded a counterrevolutionary at the beginning of the revolution, he was imprisoned for most of it. “Mao was a very convincing man, and we intellectuals felt we were sad figures. In the Cultural Revolution, the people thought only of building a pure and perfect society. I disagreed with their particular idealism and fought against it, and would fight against it again, but I can say without hesitation that there is nothing in our commercialist society today that is equal to it. A misguided idealism is better than no idealism at all.”

Zhou Tiehai and Yang Xu, based in Shanghai, call themselves the New Revolutionaries, and they make enormous paintings in the style and spirit of the Cultural Revolution. One of these, recently criticized in the official press as decadent, is two by four meters, painted on newspaper, and features an odd juxtaposition of propaganda and commercial imagery with a portrait of Marie Antoinette in a bustier in the middle. The work is covered with slogans such as “To concentrate the day-to-day phenomena and embody the contradiction and struggle among them.”

“I was nursed on the milk of two mothers,” said Zhou Tiehai. “One was the woman who carried me. The other was Chairman Mao.”

Zhou Tiehai and Yang Xu dress in superb, matching double-breasted suits and brightly colored ties; they explain that this conservative costume keeps their political extremism secret. They both are handsome, and eerily young for Mao nostalgia. Their extreme pose may be ironic and certainly borders (intentionally) on the ridiculous, but they sustain it unflinchingly, speaking in the leaden rhetoric of which the Red Guards were so fond. “Mao taught us to tell the difference between good and evil,” they told me, speaking back and forth as though they were the two voices of a single mind. “But what has happened? We belittled dancing girls and prostitutes, but now only the most beautiful women can go into these professions. We need revolutionary thinking, to use the socialist spear to hit the capitalist seal. In the past, people were poor but they knew why they were living, and now people are rich but unhappy. We like the sixties, when at breakfast, at dinner, even when we slept, we read Mao’s book. These ideas are obscure for Westerners, but they are very accessible to the Chinese people.”