Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

At twenty-six, Feng Mengbo is among the youngest of the circle around Lao Li and has an unusually sharp understanding of the relation between Eastern and Western dynamics. Chinese kids in video arcades play Western games in which they take the part of good guys trying to kill off evil. Feng has suggested that this is not far from the behavior of young people in the Cultural Revolution, who similarly took a stance as good, blew up anyone they thought was bad, and got lots of points for doing so. He has done static paintings indicative of a series of video games he would like to produce, based on Mao’s Revolutionary Model Operas. Another series shows a video game featuring Mao in his customary pose, his right hand extended in a wave of benediction. Feng Mengbo has called the game “ ‘Taxi, taxi,’ says Mao Zedong,” playing both with Mao’s pose and with the Chinese habit of quoting every word of Mao’s as though it contained ultimate truth. In the game, Mao stands by the side of the road with his hand held up while taxis speed past. Mao loses every time because none of the taxis ever stops for him. In the eyes of many Chinese, the Cultural Revolution was like a game, and the new interaction with the West is another version of the same game, and perhaps a less interesting one.

Most of the artists in the Chinese avant-garde are below the age of forty, and so their relationship to the events of the late sixties and early seventies is passive; they were aware of what happened, but insofar as they participated, they did so without understanding these events. Among the older generation, the avant-garde movement was smaller and more dangerous; almost all its artists have emigrated. Yang Yiping, the sole artist in the Stars group still in China, was the son of a well-placed party member, and when the Cultural Revolution came, he got a position in the army, the safest place to be. Yang stayed in Beijing, doing propaganda paintings for the military and discussing ideology with friends until he recognized the disastrous side of the Cultural Revolution and joined the Democracy Wall movement in 1978.

His current paintings are enormous black-and-white images of young people, their faces suffused with idealism, walking out of the canvas toward the viewer. They are set in Tiananmen Square, and Mao’s portrait at the gate of the Forbidden City is always at the center of the picture. These achingly sad paintings, the color and mood of faded snapshots, bear witness to a youthful clarity of purpose that seems, in retrospect, almost unimaginable. I stood in Yang’s studio and looked for a long time at those shining, almost implausible faces rising above the collars of their Mao suits; then, turning away, I saw a small black-and-white photograph—a young Yang Yiping, wonderfully dashing in his army uniform. I saw in those eyes, too, the unthinking self-assurance of a young person ready to save the world. “I believed in it all so ardently,” he said. “And then there was the Democracy Wall, and the Stars.” We stood looking at his paintings. “That was my youth. I didn’t understand what I was doing. Now I’m sorry that I did it—but how happy I was then! I couldn’t give it up, nor would I.”

Jiang Wen, thirty, China’s leading young actor, is directing for the first time. He has chosen to adapt Fierce Animals, one of the bestselling novels in China last year, which is set during the Cultural Revolution. I talked to Jiang Wen on location at a school where he had mixed professional actors with enrolled students. To give the students the feeling of the era, he had taken them for “indoctrination programs” in the countryside. It was spooky going from the classroom on the right side of the hall, which has been converted for the film, where everyone wore matching trousers and cloth shoes and the picture of Mao reigned on high, to the classroom on the left side of the hall, where school was in ordinary session, and the kids wore track suits and spoke in or out of turn. Echoing a sentiment that I heard many times, Jiang said, “People in the West forget that that era was a lot of fun. Life was very easy. No one worked; no one studied. If you were a member of the Red Guards, you arrived in villages and everyone came out to greet you and everyone sang revolutionary songs together. The Cultural Revolution was like a big rock-and-roll concert, with Mao as the biggest rocker and every other Chinese person his fan. I want to portray a passion that has been lost.” He was not blind to lives sacrificed at that time, but neither did he think they were the whole story, any more than romantic war poetry and war movies in the West erase the blood lost in other fights.