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Having spent most of my working
life abroad, including several years in China, yet staying in close
contact with Italy throughout, or at least the Veneto region, lately
I have noticed a sea change in the attitude of the people of my native
city towards what only yesterday they would have called my “exotic”
interests. At the beginning of my career I was defined as a sinologist,
an unfortunate umbrella term for an expert in all things Chinese,
though mainly its philology, and – even worse – referring
to historical periods that predated us by at least a thousand years.
When therefore I returned to Vicenza and took a stroll across the
square and ran into friends or acquaintances, their customary exclamation,
delivered in dialect, in the expressive sing-song lilt of the Veneto
that I will not even attempt to reproduce here, went more or less
like this: “Well, at least your eyes haven’t gone all
slanty from eating all that rice!” Nowadays their tune has changed:
they’ll lower their voices and remark, “Have you heard?
The Chinese have bought the bank and the restaurant over there as
well!” Now, apart from the smiles these Goldoniesque comments
might bring to the faces of a public from other places, with a higher
cultural level than that of my upbringing (like the Florentines,
most definitely; it is no accident that this exhibition is being
held in Tuscany, and not in Venice or even Lombardy), there is,
in the final analysis, only one meaning to attribute to them. And
that is this: China, which everyone is going on and on about without
really saying anything at all, was and is a great unknown, if not
to say an utter mystery, and for the most part people’s ignorance
is virtually total: a universe, and we have only scratched the surface.
While the Chinese were once regularly stereotyped as cyclists and
rice eaters, now they are the planet’s nouveaux riches and
represent a threat to our economy (especially our small-scale economies,
like the Veneto). When I started studying the Chinese language and
culture, China was a country that had just emerged from Maoism,
with decades of devastating political upheaval behind it. All we
know about China was that there had been a revolution that to us
Europeans, perhaps because it happened so far away and was harder
to understand, seemed better than the Russian one. Then we knew
about all those bicycles, the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the
emperors of the distant past, and then Mao Zedong. We knew the people
spoke a language that was just impossible and, lest we forget, ate
all that rice. China was so far away that it was perfectly suited,
when you were angry and all the avenues for dialogue were closed,
to telling people where to go: “Just go to China!” meant:
it’s like talking to a brick wall, there’s no point,
end of story. So just go packing, will you, to the ends of the earth.
And stay there.
I don’t know if this expression is still used today; I do
know no one tries it one me any more, since I lived in China for
over nine years. Nowadays, going to China is no curse but a dream
shared by many, and for some an actual trip they are planning. If
I may just indulge a bit longer in these breathtaking generalizations,
that remote nation where, in Italian at least, you told people to
go – on a one-way ticket – now seems to be very near
indeed, and it would be interesting, in this regard, to draw up
a list of events that have been organized in Italy in recent years,
or articles that have been published, with exactly the same title
as the original “La Cina è vicina” – China
is near.
Now it’s all: China, Eldorado, “a country with enormous
potential,” “a market made up of a billion people,”
“over a hundred million millionaires,” where Ferraris
sell like hotcakes and skyscrapers are erected overnight; China,
“a massive challenge for our economy,” and on and on
in this vein (mind you, there’s no democracy there).
And when I try to explain to my Chinese friends in China exactly
how the perception of China has changed in Italy, or at least in
Vicenza, they just shake their heads. On one hand, they are pleased,
of course, to find themselves better off, economically and materially
speaking: to have a decent apartment instead of the room without
bath or cooking facilities which served as their home and their
office as well – this being the rule up to ten years ago,
or maybe less. They are happy to own cars and earn enough money
to invite me out to the finest restaurants whenever I pass through;
and the chance to travel abroad with little hassle. On the other
hand, many of them – or at least the ones I know, who belong
to that middle-aged generation whose adolescence fell during the
Cultural Revolution – are highly skeptical about any real
progress having been made in the West’s understanding of their
country and their culture, despite how often anything Chinese comes
up in conversation lately. Now that we are so close to each other,
in theory, it’s as if we can see more clearly how far apart
we still are.
It must be admitted that our culture (the European culture, in
which I include North America as well, as far as “high culture”
is concerned) has never considered “others” as real
partners in dialogue on an equal footing (just take “the others
among us” like the Jews, for example, and how they were treated).
Our culture has only turned to others to obtain whatever it happened
to deem interesting at a precise moment in history. Without straying
into the realm of philosophy (which is not my field, of course,
but could certainly broaden the terms of this debate), and remaining
within the ambit of the arts, which is better suited to my remarks
here, we might just consider the rage for chinoiserie in
the eighteenth century. Presently I live in Holland and have visited
the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on many occasions; it has a lovely
collection of Delft pottery. Now some of the plates and bowls on
display look as if they are 100 % Chinese; some of them even bear
made-up ideograms that may be unforgivable as calligraphy but are
exquisite as a Western decoration. It is pleasant to imagine this
lovely china gracing a pretty room in a Dutch house overlooking
a canal, and bathed in Vermeer’s cold north light, back in
a time when the East Indies Company virtually shuttled between Asia
and Europe, brining home rich samplings of the most fascinating
and exotic wares imaginable. The passion for these Chinese products
– and porcelain in particular – was so overriding that
the Dutch were driven to reproduce the blue and white aesthetic
which, as we know, became one of the key motifs of the Dutch national
identity.
Just outside Vicenza, the small and lovely city of my birth, on
the hill behind Andrea Palladio’s Rotonda there is another
noble residence, the Villa Valmarana ai Nani, which is famous for
its frescoes by Giambattista and Giandomenico Tiepolo. In the guest
quarters, painted by Giandomenico in 1757, there is a room called
the Stanza delle Cineserie, where China is depicted in the most
fantastical ways, which are essentially based on the visual material
and the fancy goods available in that are: prints, most likely,
as the pagodas and the monochrome landscapes that appear in the
background would suggest; china statuettes, which served as models
for the figures (the famous “mandarins”) that peopled
the scenes (not all of them with ‘slanty’ eyes, however);
silk fabrics and drapes (not very different, to be sure, from the
ones worn by Venetian nobles in the 1700s and portrayed in the adjoining
rooms). The bedroom is small, cozy, and utterly lovely. The view
from its windows is of the Valley of Silence and the soft, rounded
contours of the Venetian hills. Everything is aesthetically very
refined but not overly lavish, as befits a country home.
Certainly, the Venetian nobility of the Republic of Venice in the
period shortly before it came to its ignominious end may have well
more stories to tell than the China ruled by Qianlong, an emperor
who practically stands as an oriental version of Queen Victoria,
in terms of the length of his reign, the breadth of his views, and
the geographical extension of his realm (he ruled from 1735 to 1796
and abdicated out a sign of respect, as to not reign longer than
his grandfather). Qianlong was the last great Chinese emperor, perhaps
one of the most extravagant, in his intellectual ambitions: he had
“cultural advisors” at his court, European Jesuits who
tutored him in mathematics, geometry, and astronomy, and built him
a miniature, baroque Versailles on the outskirts of Beijing (to
each his Louis the Fourteenth, after all).
Indeed, the parallel careers of chinoiserie and rococo
are no historical accident; at that precise moment in history, what
interested us about China was just this “baroque” aesthetic
produced by an imperial dynasty, the Qing, that was not even really
Chinese but Manchurian – which, considering the Han Chinese’s
very low threshold of tolerance for other ethnic groups, is like
saying a group of nomadic barbarians sweeping down from the north
(managing to rule for almost three centuries, however). The true
Chinese aesthetic was that of the Ming, the last native dynasty,
deposed by these very Manchurians in 1644; it was much simpler and
more linear, almost minimalist, compared to the Qing. Nevertheless,
when Europeans refer to Chinese porcelain in general, they think
of the highly decorated kind first of all: the blue and white, as
we have seen, or the various rose ‘families’ or green
‘families,’ which are purely in the Manchurian taste.
They don’t think of celadon or the dehua porcelain also known
as blanc de Chine, extremely refined and rigorously monochrome.
The fashion for chinoiserie has never died, undergoing
a number of reincarnations that, for the most part, have always
been well received by the public (and the market) in the West. From
the japonisme dear to the impressionists’ hearts,
to Zen’s influence on abstract expressionists, we have always
been very good at taking what we needed without a thought for the
rest, without looking at the larger picture. This doesn’t
mean that no great art was to come out of this practice of ours,
just that it was undeniably an art that – like its creators
and its public – showed little concern for the problem of
that “the others” were really like: the others who had
invented the angular perspectives of Van Gogh, or the calligraphic
sinuosity of certain works by Jackson Pollock. The indifference
was mutual, and it certainly didn’t help that in more recent
times China was as if hermetically sealed off from the Western world,
for roughly thirty years. Its being a Communist country for half
a century, throughout the Cold War, didn’t help either. And
yet, as China has progressively opened to the world at large over
the last thirty years, we certainly haven’t been doing our
homework.
It often happens that when I’m in Beijing chatting with the
taxi drivers while we’re stuck in traffic (which has become
a nightmare), when I reluctantly confess to being Italian (as I
dread to be drawn into extremely technical and for me impenetrable
discussions of our entire soccer season, from the Premier League
down), the drivers regularly point out to me that I do come from
the birthplace of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Titian. And now allow
me to ask my dear readers (very few of whom, I fear, are taxi drivers),
if they recognize these names: Ni Zan, Shi Tao, and Dong Qichang.
I could be wrong, of course (and in my heart of hearts I hope I
am), but I have the slight suspicious that not very many are aware
that the above are some of the greatest painters in the Chinese
tradition, absolutely comparable to our own great masters, many
of whose works are on display very near here, at the Uffizi: comparable
in terms of creative genius, technical skill, and intellectual depth.
To tell the truth, from a Chinese point of view, in a sense our
great Renaissance painters are little more than expert draftsmen,
while theirs were also literati, intellectuals, theoreticians, and
often politicians as well. “Renaissance men,” as it
were.
Now although it may not be readily apparent, all of the above is
strictly connected to the socio-artistic context underlying an exhibition
like the one presented in the Strozzina spaces. The recent frenzied
interest – economic, for the most part – that has been
aroused by the explosion of the “China phenomenon,”
has completely disoriented the West. What? A country that was nothing
but bicycles and rice just a few years ago now has a GNP that is
galloping past that of the United States (9.6 %, according to news.xinhuanet.com/English/2006-12/content_5495645.htm)!
Our economic experts are quietly aghast at this phenomenon. Obviously,
something must be done: exactly what, however, appears to be hard
to decide or discern accurately, especially since the experts tend
to think it shouldn’t take much; our theories and our terms
of comparison will surely explain the whole story and convince the
Chinese to buy everything from jewelry to smelting works. But the
Chinese don’t like to waste money like the Americans, and
their personal idea of luxury is almost never flaunted the way ours
is. Oh, that’s right: they’re different, aren’t
they?
As far as contemporary art is concerned, the situation is practically
the same. Right now, the prices that a certain kind of production,
mainly pictorial, can fetch (indeed, you could call it “export
painting, “ the way they said “export china” in
the 1700s to talk about the porcelain produced in China from designs
and decorations provided by the West), and the “China phenomenon”
in general, have drawn curators, collectors, and gallery owners
to the Middle Kingdom from all over the world. Although I haven’t
actually lived in China for years, what my artist friends in Beijing
tell me when I go back is that many of them are practically living
under siege, with the collectors, Chinese or not, dying to own the
paintings, outside the door. I have heard about waiting lists (at
least a year, I believe) to purchase works by certain artists (and
I don’t mean those that command prices of over a million dollars);
basically, the work is sold before it has even been made, and purchased
sight unseen. On the name alone. And it goes without saying that
you no longer see any works in the artists’ studios –
not like when you used to drop in on an artist and chat for hours,
drinking beer, smoking, eating sunflower seeds, and talking about
this and that, and sometimes art, too. Now many works go straight
from the artist’s studio to the collector’s warehouse,
and that’s the last anyone sees them – at least, any
of the public for whom those works ought to have been created.
If artworks do make it to the West, the majority of them have been
produced with this particular market and public in mind (“export
painting,” as we have seen above): which translates into allusions
to dragons, bound feet, an S & M nude here and there; Mao, any
way you like him, in all the colors of the rainbow and in every
possible get-up; and lots of red, loads of stars; mediocre renderings
of the Cultural Revolution’s iconography; and a lavish use
of citation of famous paintings from East and West, “re-interpreted”
in postmodern Chinese mode. Take the artist Yue Minjun, for example,
who revisits Manet’s Execution of Maximilian, and
when it gets around that there could be a hidden allusion to the
Tian’anmen Massacre, the painting beats the record for the
highest price ever fetched for a Chinese painting (up to now) by
roughly six million dollars…
This is what you see and all you see on this side of China, and
not only in Italy: never a solo exhibition (unless it happens to
be a pet project of New York’s orientalist bourgeoisie, like
Cai Guoqiang, to whom a show is dedicated at the New York Guggenheim
this February); never a ‘theme’ exhibition, never a
particular slant. No, inevitably it’s just “China!”
with that exclamation point, often made even more topical by adverbs
of time like “now,” or verbs like “go,”
or rhyming couplets, at least in Italian (la Cina è vicina,
China is near). In any event, associated at all times with slogans
that grip the imagination. It’s as if another continent put
on one exhibition after another, the only common thread at the curator’s
disposal being geography: like “France Now!” or, a better
analogy, “Europe Now!”
The most important thing that is lacking is the historical consciousness
of how we ever got to that “Now!” When you stand before
Botticelli’s Spring in admiration, you usually know
that Giotto and the Sienese School came well before, Piero della
Francesca just before, and then Titian and Caravaggio. The same
holds for modern art: the Futurists, for example, who emerge after
the Cubists, but at the same time as the Surrealists. That is to
say, art is understood as the product of a historical and social
context, but above all an aesthetic context that has favored that
particular, exclusive form. Such an awareness also helps us to grasp
the exceptional nature of the art – because we have terms
of comparison. When it comes to contemporary Chinese art, however
(you never hear about modern art; perhaps there isn’t any?),
these basic prerequisites for a rigorous aesthetic and historical-artistic
appraisal are nowhere to be seen. We suspend our judgment. After
all, they’re Chinese.
An assortment of elements that seem Chinese will do just
fine, at least in our limited conception of what China should seem
to be (those “slanty eyes” I mentioned at the start).
Then it’s on to waving them around with a lot of red and exclamation
points ad infinitum; arranging exhibitions that are a cross between
a cultural event and a trade fair, with a pinch of this and a dash
of that – a Beijing artist here, a Cantonese over there. And
everybody’s happy. Because when it “seems Chinese,”
China wows everybody. More importantly, it’s still far away,
in a dream dimension, amidst fantasies of empire; not dangerously
near and so extreme anxiety-producing. This China is a mirror that
reflects our fantasies, our expectations, and our fears. What the
“Chinese” actually think, what these particular artists
feel and experience from day to day, and what they really have
to say about themselves, generally does not concern us since
“we know it already.” As Zhang Peili, one of the most
famous and committed video artists on the contemporary scene, recently
put it during a conference held in Holland, in the Westerners’
minds Chinese artists are never individuals, at least as
far as the curators are concerned. They are always considered collectively
and collectively only, as an ethnic group with its geographical
base in the People’s Republic of China (even if artists living
in Europe and America are thrown in, as well, as if it were the
same thing).
I have not had the opportunity to examine the content of the exhibition
I am writing about here. All I have been provided is the names of
a number of artists, but not the specific content of the works that
will be displayed, nor have I been told whether or not there are
specific strategies that will dictate the arrangement of the spaces
and the works inside the spaces, beyond the organization of the
show around three distinct curators. I cannot, therefore, comment
on the formal or aesthetic aspects of the event. I may, however,
venture the opinion that the idea of involving curators who actually
work in China strikes me as a great leap forward, indeed, compared
to the one-week tours that Western art professionals seem to think
are enough to experience and “master” the situation
in contemporary Chinese art today, taking their cues, perhaps, from
a list of names thoughtfully provided by others, or picking out
artists when leafing through the pages of Flash Art, Artforum,
or even Art News.
The one project I know the most about, “40 + 4,” uses
a series of interviews to document the art scene in a specific
place (not “China!”, but one city, Shanghai), and
at a precise moment in history (now), by putting an identical series
of questions to artists of varying ages, styles, and schools; selected
– Davide Quadrio declares – arbitrarily. (And, in fact,
there are only two women). This strikes me as a simple idea, an
absolutely necessary one, in truth; I’d go so far as to say
that it’s an obvious idea as well, and yet no one has ever
thought of it before, not even in other geographical contexts. How
obvious: to seriously, patiently, and above all humbly
document the state of art in China today, by starting with the grass
roots, so to speak: with what the actual protagonists think, how
they live, and what they have to say. As Lothar Spree explains in
his introduction to the project, regarding the filming technique,
the scenes were shot deliberately leaving out any hint of the exotic
or the underground, without any decorative embellishment, and always
in intimate, quiet places, to focus the public’s attention
on the words that are spoke instead of distracting them with all
those trappings that usually make it impossible for Westerners to
see China for what it is, and not for what it should
be.
The general design of this exhibition is quite stimulating, and
as far as I can tell, absolutely new in Italy. Let us hope it will
leave its mark. But it would also be intriguing to solicit the public’s
comments to see how willing it is to accept a China that doesn’t
“seem” like China. And in so doing, finally learn whether
or not that China can really interest us and fascinate us, even
when it is ‘near’ instead of ‘far away.’
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