Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

In the Met’s war room, de Montebello and the others “made lists of what we could not live without,” he said. “We were willing to accept a show that was quantitatively reduced, but not one that was typologically reduced. No single major category of objects could be missing. It was necessary that the show sustain its goal of presenting a transversal history of Chinese art, that we not be forced to eliminate the Tang, Song, or Yuan dynasties from our presentation, that the curatorial vision be left intact. But being too pious in this matter would not have been public spirited. It was important that we not in our disappointment cancel a remarkable show. One day I thought our chances were at sixty percent; the next day it was thirty percent.”

The Met’s press office, which had been organizing expensive preview trips to Taiwan and printing color brochures, descended into hysteria. Interviews were forbidden and information was given so much spin as to become implausible. Attempts to control journalists could hardly have been more stringent during the Cultural Revolution than they were in January and February at the Met.

At another protest, on January 17 back in Taipei, the rumors flew: the Metropolitan Museum would lock the Chinese treasures in its basement and send back cleverly made copies; President Clinton would give the art back to the mainland; the US Congress’s guarantee of protection for foreign cultural treasures was no more reliable than the diplomatic relationship with Taiwan that it had terminated in 1978. “Neither at the Met nor elsewhere in the West do you know how to treat work on paper or silk,” one protester told me. When a Chinese friend of mine countered that the Met’s studio for the conservation of Asian art operates at a much higher standard than the Palace’s, people screamed insults at him. “This work is much too sophisticated for you,” another protester said. “People in your country couldn’t understand or appreciate it. Sending it is just a waste.”

The Ministry of Education formed a committee to investigate the whole fiasco. At a big rally on Thursday, January 18, demonstrators wrapped themselves in a petition with twenty thousand signatures that had been gathered in a single day at Kaohsiung University. Particular rage was directed against committee members associated with Fong—though it would have been difficult to form a qualified committee free of Fong-trained scholars. Fong was still being advised to stay in New York. “You can do nothing but wait,” he was told by a friend on the committee. “I hope there will still be a show to save by next week.”

I was standing in the crowd outside the investigative committee’s first meeting when a television camera suddenly pointed at me. “I’m told you’ve actually met Wen Fong,” a journalist said. “Is he really as we understand him to be: greedy, arrogant, selfish, and mean?”

By January 20, when I met with Chu Hui-liang, the new New Party legislator, she was expressing regret over the debacle: “I worried about sending Travelers amid Streams and Mountains—I thought they were being irresponsible. People need to know what a ‘restricted list’ actually means. But I didn’t intend that the whole show be destroyed.” Within the high walls of the Palace there was frustrated sadness. “What is wrong with these people?” asked the Palace Museum’s Chang Lin-sheng, who was handling the day-to-day trauma of the protests. I had had to sneak into her office, since she was avoiding interviews; she looked tired. “Don’t they have jobs? Don’t they have anything to do all day besides march up and down out there with inaccurate slogans?” The phone rang. She talked fast for forty-five minutes, her tone conciliatory and irritable. “Wen Fong,” she said when she hung up. “I told him I can’t help him anymore.” She picked up a copy of a popular magazine with Travelers amid Streams and Mountains on its cover. “I suppose it’s something that now everyone in the country has heard of Fan Kuan, when recently this population couldn’t be bothered to see our seventieth-anniversary exhibition. The truth is, we all worried about sending Fan Kuan. Maybe one or two others are best left here, as the Mona Lisa stays at the Louvre. But for the rest—people should see it. How can the people be so suspicious of us? Don’t they understand how much we love that work? We’re all fragile. Should we never leave home again?”

Fong used a different analogy: “You don’t stop eating because you might choke.”