Wedged between ancient grain fields and the emperors’ old Summer Palace, this drab, peasants’ village less than an hour’s drive west of Beijing shelters Communist China’s first officially tolerated artists’ colony and a bohemian lifestyle nurtured by an unprecedented global fad for modern Chinese art.
Bach organ music booms from dingy studios behind brick walls where beds share space with easels, and empty beer bottles serve as brushholders. A whiff from a marijuana joint and the giggles of lovers mingle with the holler of bare-chested vendors offering the last turnips and spring onions of the day from the back of flatbed tricycles.
In private galleries, former art teachers and art-school graduates paint commercially viable landscapes, or more contentious holocaust figures peering hollow-eyed from gloomy canvases. As visitors make their way through the maze of courtyard studios, local peasants glare and spit in disgust at the men with their long hair and beards and the women in billowing gowns.
Naked and twisted images stare down from walls. Wide-beamed women squat naked on blue bidets. Male and female nudism blooms in rainbow colors and in black and white. Medieval Renaissance vies with Surrealistic Pop. Linear, disciplined and sublime Chinese brush strokes explode into unshackled Western exuberance. On the market, Western-style paintings predominate.
It’s all part of a nationwide art frenzy that includes myriad amateur dabblers selling works on the streets that are often nothing more than clumsy copies of old masterpieces or motifs borrowed from catalogs.
The Ministry of Culture complained recently that only nine galleries in the capital were licensed to sell art while in fact 14,000 were operating and every corner shop and department store was peddling a painter.
“Old ladies in hutangs (alleys) now swing brush and pen to make money. Whole communities paint garbage for foreigners who don’t know what to buy but want to hang something eccentric on the wall,” said Michael Jansen, a Fulbright scholar from Chicago who has studied traditional Chinese art here for three years after graduating from Yale and Cambridge Universities.
“Sure, my main customers are foreigners. But we are here because conditions are better than elsewhere,” said artist Tian Zizhong. His mellow, sun-gilded landscapes depict his northern Jilin province on the Siberian border. He and his wife, Qi Dongmei, both art teachers, left their state jobs and moved to Fuyuanmen (Happiness) Village six months ago. Qi’s explicit female abdomens are flaming red.
“We feel safe here because there are so many of us. The authorities leave us alone,” Tian said.
The more than 100 painters from across China who have found an oasis of freedom in Happiness Village live in that peculiar Chinese twilight zone of timid tolerance that can end in a burst of official wrath.
In Beijing, the invisible censors recently passed the word that two paintings by Australian artist Rodney Pople had to be removed from his exhibition at the Holiday Inn Gallery.
Pople, 41, on a fellowship in China, said the sizable male genitals in both canvases were deemed offensive in a country where male potency and size are an obsession. A third painting, with the offensive organ in more minute dimensions, passed the scrutiny.
“It’s baffling,” said Jansen. “At my academy, female models turn up naked but male models have to wear shorts.”
There’s money to be made
The art boom has its roots in China’s economic reform and in the search by Taiwanese and Hong Kong entrepreneurs for a fresh and still cheap source of artwork. Many Chinese artists now have exclusive contracts with Taipei or Hong Kong dealers. But the dealers’ offensive has driven the price of a Chinese painting from 50 cents 10 years ago to a minimum of $200 today.
“China is still an artist’s mecca: Food and rent is very cheap, so is the material, and you can sell an oil painting for $200 to $300, which goes a long way,” said Jansen.
Sothebys holds regular auctions of 20th Century Chinese art in Taipei. A new fad is Chinese advertising posters from the 1910s to the 1930s with leggy ladies in cheongsams promoting “Pink Pills for Pale People,” cosmetics, batteries and medicines. The posters sell for $1,000 each.
Art institutions were told two years ago to make their own profits or take their own losses without state subsidies. Suddenly the barred doors of Chinese academies opened wide to foreign students-at a price: $3,500 for a year’s tuition and $1,500 more for a dormitory room, a fortune in China.
Stripped of state funding, art had to go commercial. At Beijing’s prestigious Central Academy of Art, 370 of 400 new students chose the new department of Western oil painting with an obvious eye to sales; the other 30 chose traditional Chinese art. Sixty of the new students who were accepted were foreigners, half of them from South Korea and Japan.
A government campaign this year first criticized the national media for promoting foreign art, then badgered corporations to set up “funds to revive the classical arts” such as ballet, the Beijing Opera, drama and painting. But the response was meek.
The influence of the West
Non-Chinese gallery owners complain that young painters have lost their Chinese identity in their zeal to imitate Western art. But art experts say this was inevitable. Chinese art students spent the first two years of their course painstakingly copying old masters and orchids, plums, bamboo and chrysanthemums. The switch to oil painting has not changed this method, but now the students copy Western masters, which influences their own creations.
Nobody at the Central Academy was arrested after the anti-government student demonstrations in spring 1989. The authorities found subtler methods of control, carefully vetting the works of applicants to root out rebellious minds. “If you submit nudes and impressionistic stuff you don’t have a chance for admission. The new crop of students are conformists,” said one graduate.
The sculptor who designed the Goddess of Liberty, a likeness of the Statue of Liberty, which was placed in Tiananmen Square during the height of the mass rallies, today sculpts statues of Mao Tse-tung and Deng Xiaoping.
“I am paid well and I can work,” he said pragmatically, while asking to remain anonymous.
One of China’s rebels with a brush, Xiao Guofu, 30, moved into Happiness Village in 1991, when only a handful of artists lived here. He acknowledges that there is a strong Western influence in modern Chinese art and that many young painters want to make a quick buck (all prices are quoted in U.S. dollars).
His studio is plastered with emaciated figures that seem to come from Nazi concentration camps. He wisely refuses to discuss this display of repressed humanity, simply describing them as creations of “my own war within.”
“By learning Western techniques we will eventually find our own style,” he said. “Painters through the centuries have always borrowed from each other.”
Not a perfect world
Not all is idyllic in Happiness Village. The painters live in an uneasy symbiosis with their peasant landlords, who often resent their free ways but covet the rent and the business generated by people with whom they do not socialize.
“They elbow us in the streets and sometimes curse us, but in the end they don’t want to lose us,” said Xiao. Like many painters here, he has received his biggest accolades at exhibitions in Brussels and England.
But Beijing authorities did ban the colony’s attempt this year to have an exhibition of its residents’ best and most controversial paintings. Each artist had contributed money to contract a major gallery.
Like their filmmaker counterparts, China’s non-conformist painters are allowed to create, but they may not show works that could incite or offend the party. So the artists cater to an alien audience that often hails their creations with prizes that remain secrets back home.
