一 日 千 秋: 'One Day, a Thousand Autumns'

Guozijian Street, Beijing. Photo: Luise Guest

In this time of isolation, anxiety, and various kinds of sorrow both deeply personal and globally shared, a time that Nick Cave described in his newsletter as making us 'become eyewitnesses to a catastrophe that we are seeing unfold from the inside out', writing is something that I and many others are turning to. For some that takes the form of a diary or frequent social media posts, for others it might be letters to friends and family. For me and other suddenly unemployed writers it's blog posts like this one. Whatever form they take, they are all  like letters in bottles cast into the ocean. The days seem very long, and somewhat shapeless, recalling the Chinese idiom: ‘One day, a thousand Autumns’.

Guozijian Street, Beijing. Photo: Luise Guest

Looking back over this blog since I began writing it at the end of 2010, I suddenly remembered the optimism and unfettered joy of my earliest trips to China. That astonished desire to exclaim, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, ‘Well Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore!’ is something I’d love to recapture. I had been so looking forward to taking my two grown-up daughters to Shanghai for their first experience of China, before Covid-19 brought the world as we knew it to a screaming halt. I am still hoping to do that eventually, although the news of China closing its borders to foreigners this week sent a chill down many spines, virus or no virus.

Hutong view near Dashilan'r. Photo: LuiseGuest

I’ve been looking back at my travels, to a time before they mostly became work trips for the job I have now lost – a sudden and unexpected redundancy that has profoundly shaken me, even in the midst of global turmoil. I’m hoping to regain my old adventurous spirit in the future as an independent writer and researcher, untrammelled by external strictures and obligations.

So, aiming for optimism and planning a new future even while living day to day, as we all now must, here are some of the things I love about China – and about Beijing in particular:

BEIJING GREY

Beijing Grey. Photo: Luise Guest

There is a particular Beijing grey (and those who know me know that I do love grey!) It’s the grey walls of the hutong alleys and courtyard houses and their grey tiled roofs, echoed very often by grey and polluted air that makes those rare blue-sky days all the more miraculous.  Grey walls are offset by red doors and brightly coloured washing drying on lines, fences, or draped over powerlines – less so than in Shanghai where it used to be called ‘Shanghai flags’, but it’s still a thing. 

Hutong Washing. Photograph Luise Guest

SUDDENNESS HAPPENS

'Beware lest suddenness happens' is one of my favourite 'Chinglish' warning notices (in the Beijing Zoo). And suddenness does indeed happen. Constantly. To follow the sound of music at 9 o'clock at night, enter the park and find more than a hundred people ballroom dancing in the dark. To come upon the water calligraphers still absorbed in brushing their beautiful characters onto the pavement at dusk. To round a corner in the park and find a man taking his songbirds in their cages for a turn around the lake. One morning I came out of the gate of my lane onto the street and found all the young real estate agents lined up outside their office with their hands on their hearts while the national anthem was played. This was quite a sight – they were usually fully occupied with lying across their motor scooters playing games on their phones, playfully pushing and shoving each other or vainly combing their hair and gazing into their mirrors. 

Blossoms in Caochangdi Gallery courtyard. Photograph Luise Guest

PEOPLE

And that brings me to the people. My first encounters were so open-hearted and generous, from the translator I hired who told me his English name was Stanley (‘Why Stanley?’ ‘Stanley Kubrick, of course, Miss Luise’) and constantly told me to wear warmer clothes, to the very young doorman at the hotel that I had booked in my complete ignorance of Beijing geography, on the wrong side of the city. Wearing a much too big PLA greatcoat and a battered fur hat he grinned each time I left and called out ‘Man zou ah!’ (Literally, ‘walk slowly’, but meaning ‘take care’.) Because Beijing was my first Chinese city, and because I made friends in that first six-week trip that I hope will be friends for life, it has seemed almost like home to me ever since. People are incredibly kind and open-hearted, and I hope that the recent, widely reported suspicion of foreign-ness will not change that. 

 

Beijing street scene, 2016. Photo: Luise Guest

I have always struck up conversations (in my sadly still non-fluent Chinese) with old men sitting out in the hutongs, with mothers watching their children in the park and – especially when my daughter was expecting her first baby and I was feeling very far away – with grandmothers wheeling prams or holding hands with red-cheeked toddlers bundled up in so many padded clothes that they look like miniature Michelin men. They were probably a bit bemused by the laowai’s unsolicited ‘I’m also going to be a grandmother!’ but they were always very kind. Dancing aunties ask me to dance with them in the park, singers explain the words of their revolutionary songs, and shopkeepers sometimes run after me with change I have forgotten or gloves I've left behind: all these encounters are woven into the threads of my memories.

A feast from the Caochangdi artist hangout 'Fodder Factory', now sadly closed. Photo: Luise Guest

FOOD GLORIOUS FOOD

And finally, of course, the food. It must be said that  food has figured largely in the fascination of my time in China. The visual richness of street vendors of all kinds was a feature of any walk in Beijing – sadly many have now been moved on or returned to far provinces – and the foods on offer changed as the weather changed. Tiny sweet clementines that I have never found anywhere else in the world, whole pineapples on sticks, pomegranate juice, grilled corn, chestnuts and walnuts, congee and pancakes and baozi, sweet potato sold from braziers, and cakes: Beijingers love their 'xiao chi' (literally, ‘little eats’, i.e snacks).

Girl selling pomegranates, Beijing 2015. Photo: Luise Guest

And I remember the beautifully coloured dumplings on my very first lunch with friends in Beijing, at a tiny restaurant that I could never find again, the duck at different ‘Lao Beijing’ famous restaurants, and the fabulous hand-pulled noodles. And the cakes (some delicious, some ... odd) from Daoxiangcun, an old ‘Beijing brand’ cakeshop established in 1895 -- or 1773 depending on who you believe.

Beijing is changing – it is already a different city from the one I fell in love with ten years ago. The gentrification, the ‘Great Bricking’ that made the old hutongs that had teemed with life more blandly homogeneous, the closure of street markets, the removal of migrants who had flocked to the city from all over China and the loss of their tiny, flourishing businesses – hole in the wall noodle joints, flower shops, bicycle repair stalls, tailors and convenience stores – all this has made Beijing cleaner, certainly, but perhaps less interesting. But constant change is a given in China, and its people are nothing if not resilient and adaptable. I just hope I will see it again, and spend much more time there than I have been able to in the last five years of brief work visits.

Hutong shopping. Photo: Luise Guest

I hope the terrifying children's rides are still there, too, but I fear all these little shops selling an extraordinary mixture of dongxi will be gone with the gentrifying winds of change.

Just for the record, I’m pleased that my second-favourite Chinglish sign was still to be found in public toilets on my last visit. It says: "This is what I have been wanting to talk to you about. Please flush the toilet. You are the best."

Chinese - Tai Nan Le! - 太难了!

Laurens Tan, 'Kuai Le Wan Ju', image courtesy the artist

I have been giving myself a number of self-imposed deadlines, writing in a fast and furious fashion about my interviews with Chinese artists; reviewing exhibitions; reading numerous books (often several at a time) in an attempt to make sense of my kaleidoscopic impressions of the fast-changing Chinese artworld on my last visits to Beijing and Shanghai. At times it seems like a form of insanity. But the topic continues to fascinate. I have been reading a new book of essays, 'My First Trip to China' in which scholars, diplomats and journalists reflect on their first encounters with China - it contains some wonderful insights and fabulous anecdotes from the 1950s to today. Jerome A. Cohen, who went on a US diplomatic and scientific delegation in 1972 and met Zhou Enlai, finished his account by observing that he agreed with the humourist Art Buchwald that, after a stomach-full of China watching, an hour later you're hungry for more. I can only concur!

I am  beginning to plan a trip for later this year, when I will be staying in Beijing for a couple of months to write, research and explore artists' studios, galleries and China in general. I am hoping to go beyond Beijing and Shanghai this time, and see more of China than the view visible from the windows of the high-speed train. Although this too was completely fascinating to me.

As I write this I should be at my Chinese class. But am not. Oh dear."Tai Nan Le! Too hard! - 太难了!" I am feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of trying to learn this difficult language and feel that I will never improve beyond the stumbling baby Chinese that I can manage right now. And as for character reading, forget it! My strategy today turns out to be one of avoidance. Probably not recommended. Next week, I WILL do the homework and go to class, I tell myself sternly. We'll see.... 

Laurens Tan, Beng Beng Prototype,Made in China.
 Fiberglass, Steel, Acrylic, Plastic, Wood, Baked Enamel, 62 x 30 x 11 cm, edition of 8, image courtesy of the artist.

Meanwhile, my interview with the wonderful Beijing/Las Vegas/Sydney based artist Laurens Tan has been published on The Artlife web site. I love the way that his work also deals with the traps and slippages of communication across language barriers. His is a practice that is absolutely unique. Tan went to China in 2006 speaking little Mandarin, and discovered a way to use Chinese characters as both the form and symbolic coding in his sculptural, digital and screen-based work. "There are different ways of operating as an artist but essentially I think art is always about embracing risk and letting go. And that’s the hardest part," he told me in a wide-ranging conversation in the (very noisy) cafe of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.  For my account of the interview, 'Laurens Tan, Art as a Vehicle for Thinking" - click HERE 

Laurens Tan, Babalogic II, Installation View. Computer-cut ABS, Light, Custom Sanlunche, Dual-Channel Projection, Variable Dimensions, image courtesy of the artist

Another article (previously published in a longer, slightly different form on Artspace China) about the continuing influence of traditions of calligraphy and ink painting on Chinese contemporary painters has been republished on The Culture Trip as 'Constancy and Change in Contemporary Chinese Ink Painting' - featuring the work of three very interesting young women artists - Li Tingting and Gao Ping from Beijing, and Shi Zhiying from Shanghai. Click HERE to see the article.

Li Tingting, Chandelier, Ink on Chinese paper, image courtesy the artist

Recently, too, my interview with Hong Kong based artist Lam Tung-pang appeared on 'Daily Serving'. Lam is currently in new York on an Asia Council fellowship and residency, continuing a discourse about ink painting traditions and making new work in a number of US cities. For the interview, click this link: Things Happened on the Island: Lam Tung-pang's Floating World

Lam Tung-pang in his Hong Kong studio, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

And my conversations with two emerging women artists in Beijing, Dong Yuan and Gao Rong, were published by Randian Online - click 'In Grandmother's House' to see the article.

Dong Yuan, Daily Scenes, oil on 42 separate canvases, image courtesy of the artist and White Rabbit Gallery

Dong Yuan, Hui Hua Chi Fan, oil on separate canvases, installation view, image courtesy the artist

My problem is not being able to type fast enough, nor go without sleep for long enough, to read, write and research as much as I want to. I should at least thank my mother for making me learn touch-typing when I was 16. She said, "Anyone who wants to work in the arts had better have something to fall back on", imagining, no doubt, a life of secretarial drudgery in an office, rather than adventures hiking around Beijing with a laptop.

Upcoming - an article about performance artist and painter Monika Lin and Beijing-based Huang Xu and Dai Dan Dan - 'Landmines in the Garden of the Literati' - watch this space!

Huang Xu, Plastic Bag No. 28, C-print, reproduced courtesy the artist and China Art Projects

Oops I forgot to learn Chinese

I'm sitting at my dining table, it's late at night but I can't sleep for going over and over all the things I should have remembered to do, buy, tell my children and/or pack before I leave Sydney for Beijing in the morning. I have started every day this fortnight with the very sincerest intention of doing some serious revision of my last two years of Chinese study - and every day work, life and the whole damn thing has intervened to prevent me learning some of those vital grammar or vocabulary points that always elude me in class. The ones that make me sound like a stuttering fool when I try to speak simple sentences about the incredibly irritating characters in my textbook. I have come to truly loathe the brash Wang Peng and his friends.

I've been doing 4 hours a week of Chinese classes all this year but I swear I am getting worse rather than better. How can this be? Last year when I arrived for the first time in Beijing I had only been learning for a couple of months but had all the crazy confidence of the complete novice. Fools rush in etc. Now I am at the horrible stage of knowing how much I don't know. And understanding just enough of CCTV or overheard conversations to be constantly frustrated.

But I persevere because it's so endlessly fascinating - and so beautiful when you begin to see the elements of silk, jade, wood or bamboo in the radicals of Chinese characters. And what's not to like about a language where the expression 'I'll come straight away' can be literally translated as 'I'll come on horseback'?

So, I'm not arriving on horseback but on Cathay Pacific 162. This time tomorrow I'll be looking at Beijing out of my window, and not breathing the jasmine scented air of a Sydney garden, but the cold winds of northern China. I'm looking forward to exploring more of the city that I loved from my first nervous walks around the West Beijing neighbourhood last year, and especially the old hutong areas where I took these photographs. I'm very excited about the many visits to artists' studios and galleries that I have arranged, and a little daunted by the task ahead of me. And by the prospect of extreme cold. But if the American art critic Barbara Pollack can have her 'Wild Wild East' experiences and turn them into a readable, if grammatically annoying, account of her adventures, then so can an Australian art teacher!

'Dreaming in Chinese'

I have been earnestly attempting to spend an hour every day over the summer revising Chinese, aiming to arrive at a lesson one of these days without feeling woefully inadequate, unprepared and unable to speak. I am told that at some point in language learning there will be a breakthrough - I am rather hoping for that day to come before I return to China in April. Meanwhile, I find myself dreaming about Chinese, and sometimes waking with whole Chinese sentences in my head. This must be my unconscious mind attempting to create some linguistic neural pathways. I have occasionally found myself breaking into partial Chinese in the middle of a sentence, much to the amusement and/or consternation of my daughters. "Want to go and get a coffee, zenmayang?",I hear myself say, or replying to a question with 'Mei wenti!" (no problems!). Looking for a particular volume on the bookshelf I discover that I am talking out loud. "Zhe ben shu!" (This book!) I say triumphantly. I even confess to texting my daughter, away on holidays, "wo ai ni!" (I love you). I have post-it notes stuck to chairs, tables, windows, doors, cupboards and kitchen utensils, in a vain attempt to remember their names. Embarrassing, and makes me feel like a sad loser, but what the hell, at this point I am prepared to do just about anything that might help in this mad endeavour.

'Dreaming in Chinese' is the title of a book that I loved, by Deborah Fallows, subtitled 'Mandarin lessons in life, love and language'. The author, a professor of linguistics who lived in China for three years, muses on particular words and phrases, and what they reveal of cultural identity and cultural differences. Notions of politeness, for example, prove to be very culturally specific, as anyone who has run the brusque gauntlet of "Mei you!" (Don't have!)  and "Bu Keyi!" (Cannot!) in a Chinese shopping centre can attest. Interestingly, many Chinese people told her that English requires way too many pleases and thankyous, making conversation between friends seem stilted and formal. In other words, language shapes us, and shapes our interactions and connections with each other. English speakers use too many of these elaborate politenesses when speaking Chinese as well; it feels so rude to just say "Give me coffee!" In contrast to western stereotypes of Chinese rudeness, however, there are so many delightful linguistic courtesies in Chinese. I was absurdly pleased every morning when the teenage bellhop, attired in a ridiculously large and ancient army greatcoat, called out "Man zou!" (Literally 'walk slowly', but used colloquially to mean 'take care') as I left my hotel in Beijing each morning, dodging cars driven by maniacs and bicycles carrying entire families.

Despite my constant struggle to learn and remember Chinese vocabulary, I tend to fall in love with particular words and phrases: current favourites include "deng deng" ('wait a minute', and also 'etcetera') and "gongong qiche" ('public bus'), purely because they sound so great. I also love the fact that the word for the colour pink, "fenhong se" is literally 'half red'. These are words I have no trouble memorising! Unfortunately I can't string my favourite words together to make conversation - unless I wanted to write dada poetry.

I enjoy the many poetic compound words such as "haohuai" (meaning 'quality', but literally "good/bad"), "zuoyou" ('nearly', literally "left/right")  and "gaoai" ('height', literally "tall/short"). My favourite, though is the word for 'stuff', or 'things', "dongxi" (literally "east/west" as in: "I am going to the shops to buy some east/west!")

The ultimate Beijing "dongxi" shopping destination is the Panjaiyuan 'Dirt Market', a huge, fascinating and, I confess, rather intimidating chaos of dubious Mao memorabilia, Buddhist statuary, and fake 'antiques' of every possible supposed dynasty. I spent time wandering, and chatting, and especially in watching the Uighur traders from Xinjiang Province and the furthest reaches of northern China with their arrays of beautifully displayed stones and gems, their faces also like polished walnuts. Intimidated by trying to bargain, hindered not just by my bad Chinese but also by my mathematical hopelessness, in the end I came away with just a snuffbottle (fake, no doubt) in the shape of a peach tree with two small children climbing its branches. "Good fortune," said my Chinese friend, and associated with the need to ensure the birth of sons. "Give it to your daughters", she said, before launching into a pop song of the "wo ai ni" romantic variety.

A tangled web of Chinese grammar...

trees and powerlines, photographed near Duolun Street, Shanghai, April 2011

My second term of Chinese classes has come to a close. Am I any closer to feeling confident to speak? Shamefully, the answer would have to be no. I am struggling with the basics even now - word order in Chinese sentences so often seems completely counter intuitive and my tones come and go - sometimes apparently quite accurate and sometimes hopelessly wrong - and as for remembering vocabulary, what a disaster! Every week is a process of coming face to face with my own hideous inadequacy, and sometimes I think 'What am I doing?' 'Who am I kidding?' or, more primally, 'Oh my God, let me out of here!' Sometimes I think of excuses for not going, and almost drive home instead, but then tell myself sternly to get in there and have a go. And, amazingly, find I am enjoying myself. I love learning the phrases and grammatical constructions, as language has always been totally fascinating to me. I love listening to the speech cadences of the very patient Xiaoyu as she corrects our mangled speech. How clumsy and barbaric we must sound to her. And I am always amused by the surreal dialogues between people who inhabit a parallel universe of ice skating, karaoke, shopping and dancing: people found only in foreign language textbooks. If only I could find a trick to shift it all from my short term to long term memory, I'd be as happy as a clam.

The tangled jumble of Shanghai powerlines and rooftiles is a good metaphor for my hopelessly tangled brain attempting to understand, then reproduce, and then remember, the complementary adverbial adjunct...

And  for the other part of my Sinophile obsession: art. As is usually the case now, there is an enormous amount of Chinese art to occupy my mind,ranging from the Shen Shaomin exhibition at Gallery 4A in Chinatown to the big show of contemporary art currently on at the National Museum in Canberra. More on Shen Shaomin in a later post - suffice it to say that we eventually worked out that the naked man in the corner of the room at the opening was not an amazingly life-like sculpture! I opened a recent edition of Artist Profile magazine and was surprised to see an ad for a local gallery featuring a work by Pu Jie that I last saw and photographed leaning against the wall in his studio in Shanghai.

 Pu Jie, 'Heavenly Gate', to be shown here in Sydney at Gallery Barry Keldoulis, photographed by the author in the artist's studio, April 2011 and reproduced with the permission of the artist

I enjoyed this artist's articulate and thoughtful explanation of his technique - of the images that are hidden below the beautifully painted red, yellow and vivid green surfaces of the work, usually images relating to unspoken and terrible events of the Cultural Revolution, events which profoundly affected his own family. Layered one over the other, in semi transparent glazes, the present is literally hiding and overshadowing the past, and yet the past is always there, just under the surface. In the painting above, a sad male figure from the revolutionary period lies under the Tiananmen Square image: still a potent and politically charged sign of dissent. In other works, the pop-infused images of modern Shanghai and consumerist desire are underpinned by Young Pioneers in their red scarves. The works are simple on one level, and visually slick and appealing, yet they possess an undeniable and powerful charge, that sense of the extraordinary pace of change and transformation that is everywhere in China, and most particularly in contemporary artworks of every type.

Pu Jie in conversation with the author, Shanghai, April 2011

It seems that artistic barriers between China and Australia have dissolved into a state of complete permeability, and the constant ebb and flow of international exchange between artists will have unanticipated consequences. Is art a kind of visual Esperanto? Can artists be thinking locally and acting globally?

Works by Pu Jie are reproduced with the permission of the artist

Yibian xuexi Hanyu, yibian ku

The Emperor's Garden in the Forbidden City - attempting to learn Chinese is like scaling  rocks!

Wondering how to avoid becoming completely demoralised about my efforts to learn Chinese, I have been dutifully going over vocabulary lists and repeating words and phrases out loud, much to the annoyance of my family. My feelings of frustration are partly my own fault due to juggling work, life and everything else and therefore neglecting to do the necessary amounts of homework, but partly it's the sheer difficulty of learning a language so different to any European one. Last week was the first lesson of a new term. I entered the room with great optimism and enthusiasm, and left it again two hours later feeling thoroughly dejected. In part this was due to the arrival of a new student with far more fluent Chinese than I feel mine will ever be, who can confidently engage the teacher in conversation, while my attempts are still stumbling simple sentences that make me feel (and no doubt look) like a halfwit. And partly due to a growing feeling that I have engaged on an almost impossible endeavour. I am ashamed of any moment in my 30 years of teaching when I have been less than patient with a student who has struggled with learning something new!


Here is a sentence from this week's chapter of 'Integrated Chinese' (but without tones indicated): " Xie Hanzi, kaishi juede nan, changchang lianxi, jiu juede rongyi" meaning "When you first learn to write Chinese characters, you would find it difficult. If you practise often, you would find it easy." 


I am sorry, but this is clearly a lie. My more truthful, indeed hearfelt, sentence is this: "Wo yibian xuexi Zhongwen, yibian ku" (At the same time as I study Chinese, I weep")



Speaking of lies, I have been reading Jan Wong's earlier book, 'Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now' which recounts her experiences as one of the very few foreign students at Beijing University during the 1970s in the crucial period of the power struggle between the Gang of Four and Deng Xiaoping. Unlike her more recent 'Chinese Whispers' (see previous post) this gives a more complete picture of the time, and of the experience of young Chinese of her own generation, the generation which missed so much of their education through being sent to the countryside to work alongside the peasants and study 'Mao Zedong Thought'. In 'Chinese Whispers' she discovers the consequences of her naive denunciation of a fellow student who had asked for assistance to leave China and go to the United States. Reading 'Red China Blues', however, I discovered that there was another, even more unforgivable act of betrayal: she is invited to dinner by a friend of one of her North American professors and his wife, two Beijing intellectuals whose careers had been destroyed by the Anti-Rightist campaigns. They asked for her help to get their daughter out of China. Without hesitation she reported them to university authorities. Embarrassed by being the daughter of the wealthy owner of a string of Chinese restaurants, she believed she was going back to Canada to be 'Beijing Jan', something  like 'Hanoi Jane', in order to bring revolution to the decadent West. Despite my unease about aspects of her writing, it is certainly brave to admit this youthful foolishness, particularly when it had such terrible consequences. She says, "I do not know what happened to Professor Zhao and his family...May God forgive me; I don't think they ever will."

 the image of revolutionary China as a socialist utopia  in which Jan Wong so fervently believed

The chapter that especially fascinated me, though, was about the popular uprising that took place in Tiananmen Square in 1976 after the death of Zhou Enlai. Thousands of people left wreaths and poems, many of them attacking the seventh century Tang Empress Wu Zetian, who reigned after her husband's death: a thinly veiled attack on Madame Mao. There were outpourings of grief in other cities too, in Hangzhou, Zhengzhou and Nanjing. This threat could not be tolerated - the wreaths and poems were removed and the square was cordoned off. The Ministry of Public Security reported that hundreds of demonstrators were beaten and four thousand were arrested. If there was a death toll, it was a state secret. There are some eerie parallels here to later events.


This afternoon at a picnic I met a teacher who studied at Beijing University in the early 1990s, on exchange from Sydney University. She described a very similar experience of constant monitoring and control of the foreign students, but not being a fervent convert to 'Mao Zedong Thought' such as Jan Wong twenty years earlier, she decided to come home and abandon her studies after a PLA soldier pointed a gun at her as she tried to re-enter her locked dormitory after curfew. So fascinating that the stories people recount to me about their experiences of China are all so different, yet there are threads which connect them, both positive and negative.



Jan Wong's book, and also Lijia Jiang's memoir of the 1980s, 'Socialism is Great' are evocative reminders of the daily life of so many people for so long - and the far-reaching effects of that time on current generations. But I thought about my meeting with artist Shi Qing in Shanghai, and his response when I told him how sad  I found his 'Factory Farm' installation, inspired by the Danwei (work unit) in Mongolia where he grew up. He said, "The past is neither sweet nor bitter, it just is." This says something about Chinese resilience, and also about determination, but like the workers leaving poems about Tang Dynasty Empresses as dangerous political comment, it also speaks of the interconnectedness of past and present in China.

Shi Qing, 'Factory', installation photographed at ShanghArt Taopu by Luise Guest and reproduced with the permission of the artist and ShanghArt Gallery

learning chinese - shi ma??!!

Hutong View, Dazhalan, March 2011

Am feeling just very, very slightly less daunted by this huge project of mine - of one day being able to have a conversation in China, in Chinese. Am I mad? Quite possibly! In last night's lesson, with my 3 fellow struggling students, all hopelessly mangling our tones, I felt a little more confident to begin to speak and construct awkward, simple sentences. I love it when you feel you have actually mastered a colloquial phrase - the incredulous "shi ma??" or the dismissive "suan le". And how good to know that chocolate is "qiao ke le"! Our teacher finds it hard to disguise her dismay at our ignorance, and how slowly she has to read a passage in order for us to understand it. Who makes up the passages in language textbooks anyway? They remind me of my French textbook at school, with Nicole et Robert, and their Maman who was always, but always "dans la cuisine" in those pre-feminist days. In this case people are always introducing their friends to their older sister, or showing them a photograph of their younger brother, and politely asking them to go dancing, play ball or sing karaoke - not requests particularly relevant to the middle-aged in the middle kingdom, such as myself.

Wall photographed in Dazhalan, March 2011

I bought a book today on contemporary Chinese architecture, which includes those beautiful, minimal and simple Coachangdi courtyard studios and galleries designed by Ai Weiwei. I was so impressed when I visited Three Shadows Photography Gallery and F2, on the same day that I interviewed the wonderful Liang Yuanwei. The driver had become so hopelessly lost driving in circles around dusty roads, and stopping many, many people on bicycles to ask directions. I think an Australian taxi driver may have given up in a fury, but this guy was so cheerful, and so determined to help me find where I was going. I learned the phrase "Mei wenti", "no problems" from him. And subsequently heard it cheerfully uttered all over Beijing. Not so much in Shanghai!

Hutong Doorway, Beijing, March 2011

Learning Chinese Makes My Brain Hurt!

Shi Zhiying, 'Rice', 2011, image courtesy of the artist

Zhi

It's official - learning Chinese is impossibly difficult. My brain is still hurting from last night's class, where the teacher is very adept at pushing us outside of our comfort zone and forcing us to speak. She is lovely but also a master of that particular Chinese pedagogical style that makes you feel very, very stupid. I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I knew earlier in the year, and am struggling to form simple sentences about food and drink, much less anything more complex. I did at least learn the word for 'chocolate', which falls into that useful category that I discovered in Beijing when I experienced a great sense of triumph at being able to order a cheeseburger and fries in Chinese. Ironic really, as in Sydney I would never even enter through those golden arches!

Shi Zhi Ying, whom I interviewed in Shanghai, sent me this picture of her completed 'Rice' painting because she knew how much I liked seeing the work in progress in her studio. I was fascinated by the shift from painting monochromatic waves on the ocean, to blades of grass, to the textured surfaces of rocks, to the facets of diamonds, and finally to individual grains of rice in a bowl. She told me that she was searching for a subject to paint when she went out to eat dinner with her husband, and when she saw the rice on the table she knew it related with her 'sea sutra' series in which everything in the universe is seen as connected with everything else. She says, " My painting is like meditation; a slow and peaceful process that takes a long time to develop. Buddhist scripture suggests eliminating all that is inessential to distil the essence. Simplicity is reality".  Xing Zhao said of her brush strokes that they echo  the recitation of the sutras over the ages. "Like the pathways of one’s life, the brush strokes can be seen, although their ultimate destination remains unknown.”

I have seen the 'Chinese Nexus' exhibition at Stella Downer Fine Art, where I loved the new works on paper by Hu Qinwu in particular. Much as I enjoyed his earlier works with their rich and pulsating reds and blues, this 'Buddhist Volume' series, in which all unnecessary colour and expressive mark has been stripped away, revealing a spare visual language of the characters from Buddhist sutras underlying layers of tempera in a grid of subtle grays, is particularly beautiful and meditative. I plan to take my senior students this week, and I hope they can appreciate the subtle moderation of mark and grid found in Hu's work - they have been studying Mark Rothko, so I hope so.

http://www.stelladownerfineart.com.au/

Hu Qinwu, Buddhist Volume, 2010, courtesy of China Art Projects