Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The art at the Palace Museum hangs with eighteenth-century attributions despite recent scholarship suggesting that many of them are incorrect. “If they started reattributing paintings, they’d be accused of devaluing the collection!” one Taiwan art scholar told me. “Imagine the hysteria there would be in the Legislative Yuan if they said a certain work was not really Fan Kuan!” Instead, scholars at the Palace reattribute work in secret ways. In the Chinese tradition, important paintings hang in the autumn; if you see a Fan Kuan in spring, you know that Palace authorities believe it is not by Fan Kuan. The phrase This work is not characteristic of the artist’s style in a label also signifies reattribution. One of Wen Fong’s major negotiating triumphs was permission to hang work at the Met with his own attributions.

On January 2, the Palace opened a preview exhibition of the works destined for New York. “We thought we should exhibit this material so that people could see it; then we would show it again on return so they could see it was the same work in good condition,” said Chang Lin-sheng, the museum’s pellucid deputy director and the force behind Chin’s throne. The preview included everything going to the Met except the twenty-seven items on the restricted list. A label on the wall explained that since these pieces had just been displayed for the seventieth anniversary, they did not need to be exhibited again now. Had this statement been more diplomatically phrased, it was to be pointed out, perhaps the protests wouldn’t have happened.

The restricted list has little to do with fragility. Scrolls must be remounted every few hundred years but are otherwise stable. Rolling and unrolling, however, must be done with care. At the Palace, this service is performed mostly by old soldiers who came over with Chiang and were retired as “technicians.” One senior technician in particular tends to create strain marks. (“He likes to do a final twist and hear them go ieieiek,” said one horrified scholar.) The restricted list includes early works that were at one point being unrolled five or six times a week for examination. In the mid-1980s, Chin made up the restricted list to have an official excuse for refusing to accommodate visiting scholars. But the implication is that the pieces might vaporize if someone breathes on them, and the wall label at the preview reinforced that paranoia.

On January 3, as Chin escorted the vice director of the Legislative Yuan through the exhibition, a self-described “irate art lover” named Tang Hsiao-li, a young woman with the sinister gleam of obsession that one sees in old footage of Red Guards, began yelling about fragility. “If Director Chin had been polite to Miss Tang, instead of ignoring her, perhaps this wouldn’t have happened,” one observer said later. “But Director Chin is Director Chin.” Tang, who felt that art too fragile to hang in the Palace Museum should not leave the country, called around town, and on Friday, January 5, the China Times quoted her invitation: “Please wear black and come and sit quietly at the Palace Museum to protest fragile paintings going abroad, starting Saturday morning at 10 a.m.”

Saturday the sixth was a radiant, sunny day, and crowds gathered. (“If it had rained,” one curator said, “perhaps this wouldn’t have happened.”) Tang had rallied most of the people who would become key players in the conflict, including several former Palace Museum employees who had left “under a cloud,” as is said there; a few people with personal grudges against Fong or Chin or both; and some genuinely concerned citizens. Chu Ko, an artist who previously worked at the Palace, wrote in the China Times, “I am absolutely astonished that these extraordinarily fragile paintings should be allowed to go.” His Palace connection gave him great credibility. Shia Yan, an oil painter, also wrote an inflammatory article; he had learned to mistrust the United States when a New York gallery dealt with him shoddily. Estimates of the number of protesters ranged from sixty to four hundred; dramatic photos showed up the next day on front pages throughout Taiwan. “Lending these works of art is tantamount to betraying our ancestors,” said the poet Kuan Kuan, subsequently photographed at the base of a pillar, positioning himself for a hunger strike.