Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

When I wrote my story for the Times in 1993, three of China’s greatest artists—Xu Bing, Gu Wenda, and Ai Weiwei—were living in the United States. The artists I encountered in China spoke of them and I met them when I returned home. Ai—artist, poet, architect, activist—is by far the most explicitly political. The son of a poet exiled during the Cultural Revolution, he gained fame for designing the “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the 2008 Olympics, but enraged authorities by describing the games as a “false smile” from the Chinese government. Trouble escalated rapidly after he began a “citizen investigation” into the deaths of thousands of schoolchildren in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, most at schools that did not meet building code. He catalogued their names and collected and displayed their little backpacks, deeply embarrassing the government. When he attended the trial of another earthquake activist in 2009, he was assaulted by police officers and beaten until his brain bled. He posted a photo of himself with a tube through his skull to relieve the hematoma and a bag with the draining blood in his hand. Disillusioned with Gaudy Art, he wrote in 2012, “Chinese art is merely a product. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity. The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretense. To me, these are an insult to human intelligence and a ridicule of the concept of culture—vehicles of propaganda that showcase skills with no substance, and crafts with no meaning.”

Ai Weiwei has many detractors within China. “It’s all stunts, phony posturing,” said one curator in Beijing. “It’s not so different from the government’s propaganda, but a type that’s aimed at pulling foreigners’ heartstrings.” Ai said of such critics and artists, “They always stand on the side of power. I don’t blame them. I shake hands, I smile, I write recommendation letters for them, but . . . total disappointment.”

Anger is a corollary of hope, but sorrow is the upshot of despair. Yue Minjun’s countless self-portraits, in all of which he is laughing riotously, are perhaps the most recognizable images to come out of China in these past two decades; he cannot keep pace with collectors’ demands, and counterfeits of his work are all over Beijing flea markets. Yue Minjun is categorized with the Cynical Realists. But one curator said that over time his works have come to exude “a sense of melancholy rather than cynicism.” The poet Ouyang Jianghe wrote of his work, “All immemorial sadness is in this laughter.”

SOUTH AFRICA

The Artists of South Africa: Separate, and Equal

New York Times Magazine, March 27, 1994

I first went to South Africa in 1992, then returned in 1993. Even in that short time, the change wrought by the waning of apartheid was irrefutable, though that gruesome system was not fully abandoned until the first free elections in 1994. South Africa is the redeeming narrative. The art of protest has shifted somewhat as the occasion for protest has been diminished. For some artists, this has proved liberating; for others, extremely difficult.

I had already covered the art scene in both Russia and China and so thought that a South African assignment would call on relatively familiar skills. Soviet Russia or post-Maoist China, however, had essentially two camps: the “official” circle that benefited from and celebrated the existing power structure, and the counterrevolutionary underground whose members attempted to redeem their own identities from dehumanization. But in South Africa, the authorities had not limited artists to the production of cultural propaganda, so no body of imagery reinforced the apartheid status quo. All the artists I met—black and white—aspired to a just society, even if they did not entirely agree on how it would look.

My own role was discomfiting. In Moscow, no one had supposed that I was a party member, and in Beijing I was never mistaken for a Red Guard, but in Johannesburg, I was white and therefore incriminated. Allowed to go where black people generally couldn’t, I had no claim to innocence. At the least I was a privileged spectator in a country where the majority was brazenly disenfranchised.

This piece had a particularly rough time in the editing process, so I returned to my drafts and notes and reworked it substantially. It felt like cheating to drop the artists who have faded into obscurity, or to call much more attention to the ones who have become superstars. I have therefore tried not to change the perspective from what I perceived then, instead restoring material that was edited out and paring back other passages to reflect my original intentions.