Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Zhang Peili and Geng Jianyi, based in Hangzhou, also play with these questions. Hangzhou is a beautiful city, an ancient capital of China, set beside the famous West Lake. Artists have a more relaxed time there than in Beijing or Shanghai: they are less frequently interrupted by international friends or by local dramas. Most Hangzhou artists are graduates of the Zhejiang Academy, and like Ivy League students who remain in Cambridge or New Haven, they have an ambivalent but affectionate relationship to their old student haunts. In the mode of students, they preserve an emphatic connectedness to abstract principles, but they bring a mature sagacity to these abstractions. They think more than artists elsewhere—and perhaps produce less. When I was in Hangzhou, I lived in the Academy, surrounded by students and student work. When I wanted quiet time to talk to Zhang and Geng, we took a boat for the afternoon and paddled around the West Lake, eating moon cakes and drinking beer and looking at the view of mountains in the distance. In the evenings, we would eat seafood and dumplings at outdoor tables set up in small market streets. Once or twice, we were joined at dinner by the artists’ old teachers from the Academy. Hangzhou had an atmosphere of sheer delight in art that was quite different from Beijing or Shanghai.

Before the ’89 exhibition, Geng Jianyi sent a questionnaire to a long list of avant-garde artists. It went in official-looking envelopes, with a return address to the National Gallery, and purported to be one of the many bureaucratic papers that are an inescapable part of daily life in China. The first questions were standard—name, date of birth, etc.—but then “What are your previous exhibitions?” might be followed by “What kind of food do you like?” or even “What kind of people do you like?” Some of the recipients understood at once that this was an artist’s project and gave creative answers with funny pictures, but others, eternally paranoid in the face of bureaucracy, took it seriously and answered every question. For the ’89 exhibition, Geng posted these forms.

Zhang’s and Geng’s identities were transformed after June 4. “Before the massacre, there was so much noise,” Zhang said, “a deafening roar of protest. Then the tanks came and everyone fell silent. That silence was more terrifying than the tanks.” Zhang and Geng made an enormous painting of a massacre victim and hung it by night on a pedestrian bridge. “Perhaps if you see someone being killed on the other side of the road,” Zhang said, “you will run across to stop the murderers, without thinking. It was like that.” Fearful after that, they went into hiding in the countryside, expecting all the time to be imprisoned.

Zhang found himself particularly disgusted by the expressionless manner in which China’s leading newscaster described the massacre. He decided that whoever determined what this woman was to say decided the fate of the Chinese people. “The news was so inescapable and this woman so omnipresent that I became obsessed with her, with how everyone in China understood our government through her. I found a connection to her through a friend of a friend of a friend. I asked her whether she would agree, for a fee, to read aloud from the encyclopedia. I needed to find a completely neutral text, one that was neither on her side nor on mine. She asked a lot of questions through the intermediaries, but I fooled her. I said I would use her reading of the encyclopedia entry on water for an exhibition about water, with displays of flowers. And so this woman, who is almost our government itself, agreed to read the text I had selected. It was an experience of immense power, for me, an unofficial artist who had been in danger of being arrested, to be able to manipulate an official symbol in this way. And it showed a lot about the status of money in our society. I couldn’t get over how easy it was: it had never occurred to me that I’d be able to do this so readily.”

True to his word, Zhang mounted the exhibition he had described. To an uninformed observer, it was about water and flowers. But to a canny insider, it was an exhibition about commerce, integrity, and the manner in which the powerful can be captured by the powerless. “Humor and irony must be carefully dosed, so that they are part of the form of a work but do not become its content,” Zhang said. “I have never lost my independence: I have always stood at a certain distance from the events of China. An artist does not opt for such alienation, but once it has happened, it has happened. You cannot resist it.”