Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

On January 20, someone under the misapprehension that I was an employee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art hit me quite hard in the jaw. It was my last night in Taipei, and I’d gone with art-world friends for a late drink at an attractive bar near my hotel. On one side of us, some skinny young men with loosened neckties were using portable phones; on the other, two young women in chic Japanese eyeglasses giggled. Nearby, a guy with jeans and a leather jacket was punctuating his Chinese sentences with snatches of California-style English. It was Saturday, around midnight, and we were drinking beer with salted prunes in it, as is done in Taipei. I was quietly describing my dinner that evening with Chang Lin-sheng, vice director of the National Palace Museum in Taipei; Maxwell Hearn, the Met’s curator of Asian art; Shih Shou-chien, director of art history at Taiwan University; and others.

The guy with the leather jacket, who had overheard me, walked over and leaned heavily on our table. “Don’t mess with our cultural patrimony,” he said in a tone of voice that in America is not usually associated with the phrase cultural patrimony. “We’re onto your tricks.” He was speaking loudly, and several people clustered around. They did not strike me as a museum-going crowd.

“You’ll never get the Fan Kuan,” one of them taunted. “You’ll never get any of the twenty-seven. You’ll be lucky if you get a few Qing bowls.” The mobile-phone users, sensing trouble, had removed themselves to the other side of the room. The young women with the eyeglasses followed.

“The conservation status of works of art is awfully technical,” I said gently. It seemed a harmless enough remark, but I could not have raised the tension more if I had advocated the subjugation of Taiwan to mainland rule.

“You Americans don’t know a thing,” a round-faced man breathed through clenched teeth.

Then someone said, “What are you, a spy from the Metropolitan?”—and socked me in the face.

A friend grabbed my arm. “Come on, someone just said you do work for the museum—there’s going to be trouble.” He hurried me out into the damp night.

The conversation at dinner had been about the exhibition of Chinese art from the Palace Museum that was to open at the Met in less than two months. The show was the flower of more than five years of careful negotiation and represented economic, social, and cultural cooperation at the highest level. Many museum shows require delicate international diplomacy, but this one was unusually loaded with political meaning. At a moment when the United States was alternately currying favor with China and slapping its wrist over human rights violations, and when China was threatening to force a reunification with Taiwan, which it considers a renegade province, the exhibition would remind an American audience of Taiwan’s presence and its increasing hunger for self-determination. The opening date of the Met show—Tuesday, March 19—would be just four days before Taiwan’s first free presidential election, a display of freedom that had already led the mainland to rattle its sabers at almost deafening volume. Moreover, the show would be the greatest exhibition of Chinese art ever mounted in the West, curated to tell the tradition’s entire history—a history that is Taiwan’s, not China’s, to dispense because Chiang Kai-shek took all the preeminent monuments, paintings, calligraphy, ceramics, jades, and bronzes when he fled to Taiwan in 1949. The Chinese believe that the collection was stolen and should be returned to Beijing.

So, on January 3, two weeks before the art was to be packed for shipping, the protest movement began. The export of this “cultural patrimony”—whether China’s or Taiwan’s—had incensed many people on the island. By midmonth the situation had become a crisis. Whether the art should or would travel dominated the evening news and the front pages of Taiwanese newspapers and became a rallying point on university campuses. Legislators and ministers, poets and painters found themselves in an unlikely alliance against the Palace Museum, in a bizarre but telling display of Taiwan’s deep identity crisis. No one could say whether the show—the cornerstone of the Met’s season—would be canceled. Nor could anyone say what the protests meant for the future of Taiwan.