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| A view from the studio of Bing Yi Huang, reproduced with permission of the artist |
I sat this morning at my tiny table at the window, with the noise
from the street and the market floating up to me, immersed in a book of short
stories by Yiyun Li. Her first collection, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers”
was the first contemporary Chinese fiction that I read before my very first
trip to China, and it has haunted me ever since. Her stories are achingly sad
but filled with the ordinary details of daily life so they never seem forced or
artificially constructed. The first story in “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl” is simply
told in the voice of a woman who has never married, works as an English
teacher, and lives alone following the death of her parents. Her army service
in a far province was the only time she has left Beijing. A meditation on
kindness and cruelty, it has made me look at the middle-aged women walking down
Tuanjiehu Zhong Lu with their bags of shopping and speculate about their past
lives.
The second, told in the voice of Teacher Fei, is so sad that I had
to put the book down and leave the house. “At eighteen he had been an ambitious
art student about to enter the nation’s top art institute, but within a year,
his father, an exemplary member of the reactionary intellectuals, was demoted
from professor to toilet cleaner, and Teacher Fei’s education was terminated.
For the next twenty years, Teacher Fei’s mother accompanied his father from
building to building, one hand carrying a bucket of cleaning tools and the other
holding her husband’s arm, as if they were on their way to a banquet. Yet, in
the end, even she could not save her husband from despair. Teacher Fei’s father
had killed himself two years after he was restored to his position at the
university.”
Artist Jin Fei has described China’s history as “brutal and
tragic” and I have been watching some of the very old men I see in the local
park, with their walking sticks, Mao jackets and cloth shoes, and wondering
about all they have seen and experienced. The past and present often seem to
merge in China; or rather it sometimes appears as if the present is a very thin
veneer laid upon the past, which can bubble up through it unexpectedly.
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| Listening to the group singing in Tuanjiehu Park, Sunday morning |
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| Tuanjiehu Street Market |
I have settled into something of a routine after my first week in
Beijing: a morning walk around the neighbourhood which always ends with a
circumnavigation of the lake in Tuanjiehu Park, somewhat voyeuristically
observing the extraordinarily rich and diverse activities taking place from
early morning till nightfall. Today I entered the gates to discover perhaps 100
people energetically exercising in unison, very seriously (although with a
smile for me and my camera.) As usual
there are groups engaged in beautifully fluid qi gong, and elderly people
everywhere exercising vigorously. Men and women who are clearly well into their
seventies use the park benches and railings to stretch their legs, revealing a
flexibility and suppleness that I can only envy. One area of the park has open
air fitness equipment and there they all are, pedalling furiously, doing
push-ups and handstands and even more frenetic stretches. Hundreds of people
walk and jog around the lake, many of them vigorously slapping themselves as
they go, which I have realised is something to do with stimulating the circulation
rather than a form of self-flagellation. And, magically, strolling home after dinner with some other Redgate residents, we followed the music coming from the park and discovered a large group of people dancing in the dark. Quite extraordinary and enchanting.
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| Qi Gong, Tuanjiehu Park |
The thing which forcibly struck me this morning, though, is the
visible presence of old people. Apart from the exercisers, elderly couples are
sitting on benches watching the lake, old ladies walk in pairs carrying their
vegetables from the market, and the really old and frail are being pushed in
wheelchairs by sons or daughters. Their presence made me realise how much more hidden
away from view old people are in the west. As I left the park at 9.00am today
the exercisers had been replaced by the water calligraphers and old ladies
lined up in their wheelchairs; and three old men were arguing about how to
place a very rickety ladder to remove the red lanterns from the trees, marking
the end of the Golden Week national holiday.
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| Removing the red lanterns from Tuanjiehu Park after Golden Week |
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| Water Calligraphy in Tuanjiehu Park |
I spend a little time each day studying one of my various maps of
Beijing – all inexplicably different, and most appearing to bear little
resemblance to the actual physical streets – to plot a route for grocery
shopping, to the English language bookshop, or to a gallery or artist’s studio.
The maps bear inscribed upon them the extraordinary changes this city has
undergone in the last century. “Five Dragon Pavilion” and “Former Residence of
Princess Hejing” are juxtaposed with the Beijing Workers’ Stadium, the Working
People’s Cultural Palace, and the Monument to the People’s Heroes. And then the
map shows the location of every McDonalds and Pizza Hut in Beijing – and for
good measure, Hooters. Cognitive dissonance!
It seems that everything is tumbled one upon the other – the
imperial past, the revolutionary years and the capitalism ( or rather the “Socialism
with Chinese characteristics”) of the present . Late this afternoon as I walked
towards Ritan Park I passed a long queue of people waiting outside a dental
clinic, and more waited outside the
attractively named ‘Beijing Hospital for Proctological and Intestinal Disease’.
Old men cycled past with huge loads of recycling piled up on the trays of their
tricycles. Suddenly an enormous shopping mall appeared in view – glitzy in the
extreme, and filled with fashionable sculpture and high-end shops. The mall
could be anywhere – Singapore, LA, London. The same shops too – GAP, American
Apparel, Kate Spade. Although clearly so new that it was not quite finished, in
typical fashion when I visited the toilets of this establishment the taps had
come loose from the wall and none of the doors closed properly – near enough is
usually good enough in new buildings here. But one block further down the
street and I was back in China – little carts whizzing by selling snacks, and
groups lounging on street corners playing cards.
This layering of past and present has been a feature of my
conversations with the artists I have met this last week. By pure chance in my first week in Beijing I interviewed an artist in her twenties, one in her thirties and one in her late
forties. Each woman has experienced a different China. Of course to some extent
this is true everywhere – the world my daughters inhabit is not the one in
which I grew up. But in China those differences are far more marked, and the
artists themselves are very aware of it.
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| With Ma Yanling in her Songzhuang studio Saturday October 5 |
Ma Yanling believes that the young artists today cannot understand
the experiences of her generation, who saw the brief flowering of the
avant-garde in the late 1980s, only to have their ideals crushed after 1989. The young Liu Shiyuan spoke of her generation,
children of the 1990s who came too late for the art boom, and must find their
place in an incredibly competitive art world. There are just so many artists in
China, all struggling to make work, to be seen and heard, to find ways to keep
going. I have been in beautiful studios in Songzhuang, with courtyards and
goldfish ponds, a high-rise apartment studio on the 21st floor
looking down at Beijing spread out below, and spacious studios in Caochangdi. Today
I spent some hours with the extraordinary Bing Yi in her studio on the central
axis of Beijing – a Yuan Dynasty temple near the Drum and Bell Tower.
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| Bingyi Huang in her studio, explaining her series of ink on paper works |
I am
hearing stories of struggle and survival and steely determination. I am talking
to artists who regularly cross the globe, to New York and Helsinki and Moscow
and Montreal and back to Beijing, which pulls them back again for so many
reasons. I am discovering that in some ways the differences between each of these artists is more dramatic than the things that unite them.
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| Han Yajuan explaining her work in her Wangjing studio Thursday October 3 |
In my next post I will start to pull some threads together from
the interviews I have conducted so far - with Han Yajuan, Liu Shiyuan, Ma
Yanling, Huang Jing Yuan and Bing Yi - and start to think about the connections as well as the discontinuities between the work and experiences of these very different women.
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| Bing Yi, ink on Chinese Paper, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist |
