Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Wen C. Fong, sixty-five, came from Shanghai to Princeton University as a student in 1948, and when the revolution began back home a year later, he stayed on. He is now a professor of art and archaeology at Princeton and chairman of the Asian art department at the Metropolitan Museum. Fong, an imposing but cheerful man, is also a member of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, the island’s most advanced institute of higher learning, and enjoys access at the highest levels—the most coveted commodity in Chinese societies. Taiwan’s art world is full of his former students, and being in Taipei with his blessing is like being in Oz with the kiss of Glinda the Good glowing on your forehead. Fong’s scholarship is sterling, his opinions rigid, his passion exhilarating. When, during an early meeting about the Met show, Palace Museum officials tried to withhold some paintings, Fong suggested that it might be better to do just a ceramics show. The paintings went back on the list.

Fong has made the Met’s Chinese collection first-rate, and his seminal book Beyond Representation narrates Chinese art history through that collection. He had always coveted the work in Taiwan, so when the Palace Museum loaned a few pieces to the National Gallery’s Circa 1492 exhibition in 1991, he told Philippe de Montebello, the Met’s director, “This is our moment to strike.” Fong went to the National Gallery opening in Washington to press his cause with Chin Hsiao-yi, director of the Palace Museum in Taipei. Chin, who had been Chiang Kai-shek’s amanuensis, is now in his seventies and has the stiffly gracious manner of a minor deity. He and Fong have a friendship as carefully tended as a military alliance, within which the terms of the Met exhibition were negotiated. The contracts were finally signed in 1994.

Taiwanese politics caused trouble right from the start. Even though the $6.2 million show seemed an obvious blockbuster, Mobil backed out as a potential sponsor in 1994, worried that any support for Taiwan would offend the Chinese government. In August 1995, under pressure from Beijing, Citibank withdrew its sponsorship as well; Acer America, a subsidiary of the eponymous Taiwanese computer company, pulled out when the protests began.

Protectionism is not unusual in the art world. Popular protests occurred in Mexico against the Met’s big Mexico show, in Italy against the Vatican show, in Greece against Greek Art of the Aegean Islands. Nor is it unproductive for exhibitions to have diplomatic goals: the Met’s 1978 King Tut show ameliorated perceptions of Egypt as that country eased out of war with Israel. For societies whose history transcends their modern reality, artifacts of that history are as potent as weaponry or wealth.

In this case, more than internal Taiwanese politics was at stake: the tenuous relationship among China, Taiwan, and the United States had come into play. If Taiwan can sustain order and wealth and democracy, as it seems to be doing, then it becomes a model for democracy in China. American support of Asian democracies advances our foreign-relations goals in China more than economic boycotts or statements about human rights. Though China’s militant Taiwan policy has many causes, hatred for that democratic model is a major one. Being the host country for this show would be the perfect cultural complement to our economic support of Taiwan, so the emerging crisis over the show was our crisis as well.

It is impossible to separate the history of the Palace collection from the history of China. Most of the work had political underpinnings when it was made many centuries ago, and it continues, amulet-like, to exert political influence today. Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan, or Parliament, understanding the Met exhibition to be a diplomatic matter, allocated $3.1 million to help pay for it. “Since the current status of Taiwan prohibits its government from making statements about politics to its primary ally—the US—it must communicate with economics and culture,” Fong said. “Cultural communication is about to rise to the same level as economic.”