Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

I had dinner at the apartment of Wu Wenguang, a filmmaker who recently completed a documentary called My Life as a Red Guard. He found five men who had once been Red Guards, interviewed each of them at great length, then edited the footage to show the curious mix of nostalgia and shame and pride and anger that these men felt about their own history. It was a good dinner, with an interesting assortment of guests, including the Cynical Realist painter Zhao Bandi; a director who had just finished doing the first productions of Sam Shepard in Beijing and would soon open his adaptation of Catch-22; Ni Haifeng; and various others. I asked Wu Wenguang whether he had felt disdain or horror at the role those Red Guards had played in the murderous history of their era. “Look around this table,” he said. “We’re all at the cutting edge of new thought in China. We’re the avant-garde, the ones who are pushing toward the next wave, believers in democracy, helping to build China into a better society.” I nodded. “How can we feel disdain or horror? If we’d been born twenty years earlier, we would have been Red Guards, every one of us.”

Old-Timers

In Shanghai, I visited the great scholar Zhu Qizhan, who, at 102, is widely regarded as China’s greatest traditionalist brush-and-ink painter. “In my youth,” he said, “I studied oil painting also, and it touched and influenced my work, especially the strong colors. I would say of the West that Chinese artists can use it, but for Chinese purposes. A Chinese man can ignore Western art, but he cannot ignore Chinese art. And if he sets out to mix up both forms and both kinds of meaning, he will likely be neither fish nor fowl.”

The Chinese painting tradition is based on the principle of escape, designed to raise the viewer’s soul to new heights. Perhaps the greatest difference between Chinese traditional painting—called guohua—and avant-garde art is that traditional painting takes you away from your problems, while avant-garde work forces you to look at them. Zhu Qizhan’s eloquent and remarkable pictures command the respect of younger artists, but demonstrate how much a departure, both in form and in meaning, the work of the avant-garde represents.

The vogue for realism began in China in 1919, and it thrives today. The work of the most prominent realist, Chen Yifei, is by Western standards too hackneyed for greeting cards. Chen has emigrated to the United States, but the meticulous craftsmanship of his paintings of young girls in turtleneck sweaters playing the flute still exerts its powerful fascination, primarily on Asians; in Hong Kong, his work can fetch $250,000.

I went to see Yang Feiyun, a portraitist of Chen’s school. His women, without flutes, have the photographic sharpness and plastic smoothness to which Chinese academic training aspires. “I was influenced most by Botticelli, Dürer, and Leonardo,” Yang said. “Maybe realism was too good for too long in the West, and artists grew tired of it. I cannot accept the Western way of rejecting the past, or even of rejecting your own past, of starting anew all the time. The pursuit of perfection is more important than choosing many ways. People have said that art has no limit, but this is true only when art stays in its own hemisphere. When West and East meet, art does have limits.”

Why Gilbert & George?

In recent years, China has been increasingly open to exhibitions from the West, which are accepted so long as the West pays for them. For about $25,000, you can take the upstairs rooms in the National Art Gallery for a month and, subject to certain approvals, you can hang whatever you like. Since Robert Rauschenberg broke the ice in 1985, several one-man shows have been sent by obscure artists with sponsorship from their own governments, along with a few international student projects and a big Rodin exhibition, which opened in June.

Gilbert & George, British avant-garde artists, have made a point of exhibiting their enormous, brightly colored, highly politicized photomontages internationally. Their Moscow show from 1990 is still discussed in Russian artistic circles. That exhibition was organized by a savvy and enterprising Englishman named James Birch; when he said to Gilbert & George, “Where next?”—they said, “China!”