Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

“The West tends to equate civilization, modernization, and westernization,” Zhang Peili said. “But it is only in this modern period that the West has arrived at new ways before China has. In past eras, we were the more advanced civilization.” The Chinese hate the Western habit of taking credit for industrialization. “You look at a factory and you say that it’s Western,” Bo Xiaobo, a Shanghai journalist, said to me. “But we’ve had factories here for a hundred years. Westerners started using gunpowder immediately after they found it in this country, but no one speaks of the American Revolution or the First World War as Chinese. If someone gets in a car and drives or goes to a factory and works, that’s not Western life; it’s just modern life.”

The West also tends to take credit for all art that is not brush painting. Today, the Chinese employ visual language that was developed in the West. But paper originally came from Asia, and all works on paper are not deemed Asian. Why should every oil painting be called Western? Why is it that the West feels it owns conceptualism, installation, modernism, and abstraction? The Hong Kong dealer Alice King, who shows work that uses guohua styles in modern ways, asks, “What is a Chinese painting? Is it any painting made by someone from China? Any painting made by someone who is ethnically Chinese? Or is it a stylistic question? Can a Westerner make a Chinese painting if he uses rice paper and a brush?” Westerners sometimes dismiss Chinese work as derivative. “We must as artists solve the problems of China, even if they’re boring for the West,” said the painter Wang Yin, one of the artists of the Yuanmingyuan village.

Li Xianting pointed out that until Western literature reached China during the Qing dynasty, a great gap existed between Chinese written and spoken language: “Classical Chinese is a very vague, open-ended language in which much of the content is left to the reader to determine. Only when Chinese scholars read foreign books did they imagine that there could be a direct correlation between the written and the spoken word. After that, our written language took on this Western precision. But it was still the Chinese language; the subjects were still Chinese. If I hand you a recent Chinese novel, you will not say, ‘But this is in English!’ No more should you say that of our art.” One could say much the same thing of Chinese economic and social reform, for which the West, to the intense irritation of the Chinese, seems far too often to claim responsibility. “Now it’s a one-way situation,” the Shanghai New Revolutionaries said, “with every Western thing and idea in China, and no Chinese ideas or things in the West. It must balance.”

The extent of Western freedom—that natural corollary of democracy—is a subject of constant discussion among the Chinese. Gu Wenda, who now lives in New York and, with Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing, is a leader of Chinese art abroad, told me that while his exhibitions in China had been closed down for “inappropriate political meaning, something about a code for political secrets,” he had found in New York that when he showed work made with traditional Chinese medicines, including a powder made from human placenta, the authorities once more closed down his work, saying something about abortion. For him as an artist, there wasn’t so much difference.

Last year, Ni Haifeng won a German arts prize and lived for three months in Bonn, where he befriended local artists. One of them invited him to a potluck dinner and said, “We were hoping you’d make something Chinese.” So Ni Haifeng made a soup of which he was particularly fond. “I served it to everyone,” he told me, “and they all said they loved it. I tasted it last and realized at once that I had done something very wrong. The soup was terrible. At first, I thought everyone was just being nice to me, but people ate many bowls, and I finally understood that they all really liked it. But I felt guilty about having served them bad soup, and so a few weeks later I had everyone to my house, and I made the soup again. This time the soup was perfect. ‘Well,’ they said to me, ‘this is okay, but not nearly as good as last time.’ And they took very little of it.”

The Chinese are amused by Westerners’ inability to understand their cultural standards. One evening in Hangzhou with Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, and other friends, we got onto the subject of two women from their school who were “like unsellable goods from an old department store.” Both had found happiness with Western boyfriends. Zhang and Geng described having dinner with the family of one of the boyfriends, whose mother kept whispering that she’d never met a girl “so beautiful.” “Our next big export,” they said, “will be the ugliest women in China. They can all marry attractive rich Americans.” Then they put me through a sort of quiz. “Look there,” they’d say. “One of those women is pretty and the other plain. Can you tell which is which?”