Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Despite the insatiable appetite of Chinese consumers for Western products, the West, in the eyes of the Chinese, doesn’t really count. I had dinner one night with the wife of an artist. She said, “You know, my husband would be furious if I went out for supper with a Chinese man.”

“But dinner with me doesn’t matter?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Of course not.”

I was similarly struck by the availability of the International Herald Tribune, by the fact that many people get the BBC World Service, by the tolerance for Gilbert & George. At first, I supposed that this represented a loosening of ideological barriers; only later did I understand that imported Western ideas cannot really affect anyone, whereas something much slighter in a Chinese forum—a haircut, for instance—could trigger a revolution.

China officially ended its isolationist policies in 1978, but the isolationist mentality lives on. “We were so cut off for so long,” Zhang Peili said, “it’s as though you are in a dark room and suddenly the curtains are opened. You cannot see the view because your eyes are still adjusting to the light.” The Shanghai artist and critic Xu Hong said, “People speak all the time of mixing Western and Eastern influences, as though it were like mixing red and blue ink to paint pictures in purple. They do not think of what it means to understand these cultures and to try to incorporate their different ways of thought.” Every artist I met explained why his work was really not as Western as it looked. “And how can it be Western?” asked Zhang Wei, a university teacher who lives in the village at Yuanmingyuan. “Of course, we have come of age in the era of the so-called open-door policy, but we all understand that it is at best a door-ajar policy. And we know that that door will never really stand open, that people will never be allowed to pass back and forth through it as they choose.”

It is difficult for artists to cut themselves off completely from Chinese tradition. The abstract painter Ding Yi lives quietly in Shanghai, where he has produced large, beautifully colored canvases in which simple patterns are arranged over graphic spaces. He has recently started to produce these abstract paintings on bamboo and paper fans. “I needed to tie myself to the Chinese tradition,” he said. “And I wanted simultaneously to make this Western principle less frightening for Chinese people.”

Other artists, meanwhile, are doing work with Chinese media and Western form. Lu Shengzhong studied folk art at the Central Academy in Beijing, and his specialty is paper cutting. Traditionally, a rural woman should be able to cook, sew, and cut paper; Lu Shengzhong tells of old women who, having lost all other facilities, can do nothing but cut paper and who express themselves with their elaborate narrative paper cuts. He is a master paper cutter and the author of several books on the subject. In his recent work, he has limited himself to the single form of the “universal man,” and he cuts it over and over in different sizes, always from red paper, to create enormous, mystical installations. Lao Li dismisses such work. Many Chinese find this mixing of peasant tradition and modernism almost unclean. They resent the West’s enthusiasm for material that looks so Chinese but is so connected to Western thought. It is as though Lu Shengzhong has prostituted himself and the culture, giving something to the West that they should not have, selling something off too cheap.

A voice of nationalism emerges in the persistent, strong rejection of the West. The Chinese, competitive always, will take from the West whatever they can put to their own use. “Western culture reigns,” Lao Li said. “In a past era, Chinese culture was the highest. Right now, the West is in a state of decline and China in a state of ascendancy. Soon, we will cross paths.” Gu Wenda said simply, “If China had been the strongest after World War Two, artists of the West would use my language and not I, theirs.”

The matter of China’s ruling the world is discussed as routinely in China as though it were already settled. The only matter for debate is when it will happen. Some think it will take only twenty years; some think it could take more than a century. Artists expect their international position to be paramount when China has risen above all other nations. “I am the guard of God and the voice of God,” the painter Ding Fang, author of terrifying Wagnerian mythological landscapes, told me. “I create a renaissance of the spirit and spiritual elevation. My work will last forever, as surely as the sun will go on rising; only the blind will not see it. With this work, China will return the spirit to the humans of the world.”

A Dangerous Idea