China was not a place I thought I would ever see. As a small child, I loved to sit for hours in the shade of my father's garden with a red-painted wooden-handled spade digging deep holes to China, and two of my favorite picture books were The Story about Ping, a naughty yellow duck who lived on the bank of the Yangtze River, and Yen Fob, a book about a wise young boy who tied his queue to the ceiling over his head so that when fatigue set in and he began to nod over his studies, the braid would jerk his head up and he could continue learning. China was a faraway, magical place into which I had never seriously inquired. Thus, when the invitation came, so many years later, to be the first foreign lecturer in the Department of Art History and Theory of the Zheijiang Academy of Fine Arts (since renamed the National Art Academy of the People's Republic of China), I wondered whether I ought to go. They wanted me to give a series of lectures on the subject of art and psychology. Would anyone there know anything about psychoanalysis? About Western art history? Would the students understand my American English? What about the reputedly repressive Communist ideology?
A scholar in Hangzhou named Ding Ning had read my work in the mid-eighties and had begun a correspondence with me which resulted, after many airmail letters and confusing bureaucratic delays, in this trip.
Flying in to mainland China for a landing in Shanghai required a brief stopover at Tokyo's Narita Airport, my initial encounter with Asia. In my bleary, slumped, and crumpled condition after the twelve-hour flight, it seemed that nothing could please me. I surveyed the swarm of faces, surprising in their great variety but similar in that they did not smile much. I noted the starched suits, orderly, antiseptic corridors, and overpriced goods, and missed the messy informality and bustle of an American or European airport. I heard announcements enunciated in crisp, too-perfect English, saw faces that reminded me of the great Japanese woodcuts. Alienated, exhausted, and embarrassed at being so, I wondered whether I had made a mistake.
But today, the day of my final lecture, I know I have done the right thing. Already I feel sad. The trip has been so wonderful, despite its frantic start. The day before we left for China was Rosh Ha-Shanah, and after synagogue I had had to change air tickets because of sudden news that a friend was critically ill in Los Angeles. We needed to see her before departing for China. Despite this, I wanted desperately to make time to dash into the
Museum of Modern Art and pick up two dozen colored postcards for my students-to-be.
Yesterday, after the morning lecture (I have been lecturing each day all week), I passed out a sheet to the twenty or so graduates and undergraduates in attendance and asked them to write their names for me both in calligraphy and in pinyin (the official transliteration of Chinese characters into letters of the Roman alphabet). With this sheet in hand later on in my room, I was able to inscribe each of the museum cards with a short note, one to each student, and today, after class, I shall give them out with my good-byes. The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, I remember reading, when he was practicing pediatrics at Paddington Green Hospital in London, always used to give each of his child patients a small souvenir to take away after the visit, sometimes just a piece of folded paper. He felt, in keeping with his dearly held notion of transitional objects and intermediate space, that this giving would be meaningful and comforting to the children. Similarly, I wanted my Chinese students to take away something tangible, a colorful memento of their week with a foreign lecturer.
How strange it is that already I feel attached to them. But it has been very intense. I was told in the United States to be prepared for icy politeness, but they have responded with enthusiasm and warmth. Their eyes follow me as I lecture, and I try to make contact with each of them. I can feel them straining to extract meaning from sounds that must seem alien. After every few paragraphs I pause, and either Ding or Pan Yaochang (chair of the department) or Fan Xiao Ming (another professor) translates my words so that the students can fill in meanings and check the accuracy of their impressions. This is the first time I have ever lectured with a running translation, and the pauses make time for coming up with new ideas, metaphors, connections, and for graphic visual aids on the chalkboard. Since the students' English is weak, I am pantomiming and concocting diagrams (unconscious, preconscious, conscious; id, ego, superego). Gestures occur spontaneously, invented on the spur of the moment to supplement the spoken words; points get illustrated with stories that pop into my head; slides stay projected on the wall (there is no screen) until everyone has had time to gaze at length at these unfamiliar works of art.
Once, when I showed them Magritte's painting, Euclid's Promenades, they actually rose from their seats and crowded to the wall to examine the image. Pointing and chatting, they were utterly fascinated with the idea of a painter's canvas superimposed on a window and with the congruence of the two scenes. Their excitement reminded me of a scene from Dead Poets Society. Later on, realizing that in traditional Chinese painting the place of linear perspective is often taken by ladder perspective, whereby higher on the page translates into farther away, and one reads up the page for distance from the frontal plane, I realized just how perplexing Magritte's image must have been for some of them at first glance. This parodic painting parallels a conical tower with a street vanishing according to Western rules of one-point perspective. These rules, however, while familiar and self-evident to Western viewers, are not necessarily so to Chinese eyes; my students therefore had to struggle not only to process my rather sophisticated interpretive remarks but even to read the image itself. They needed to see what Magritte was doing with the space, then grasp how he was spoofing it, and finally try to understand the psychological motivations involved.
Insights like this make me nostalgic that today is my final session. Loving the material so, I wonder whether I have done justice to it. One young man came into class proudly with a translation of selected Freudian texts into Chinese. Others have brought me photos, notes, and small tokens of appreciation. I will miss these wonderful, intelligent, dark-haired, earnest-eyed, intense young people whose minds have been, so briefly, lent to me.
Today, my allotted teaching time being over, the Academy has arranged a treat for us—a trip to a scenic lake three hours from Hangzhou toward the interior of China and inaccessible by train. We have encountered no Westerners at all.
The driver of our private car speeds with abandon at breakneck pace on roads where old people and children are walking and biking, and where simple vehicles lunge and jolt under heavy loads. Several times he has come dangerously close to manslaughter, but miraculously no one has been harmed. My daughter Rivi, reading A Tale of Two Cities on an assignment from school, nods knowingly as I lean over and whisper to her that I feel we are passengers in the Monseigneur's carriage.
One of the misty islands, which we reached by private speedboat, delighted me with a swaying footbridge suspended over a deep ravine between rocky cliffs—the kind one always associates paradigmatically with Chinese landscape painting. Hearts in our mouths, we all traversed it, and Guo, our guide, then told us it is called the Bridge of One Hundred Years. According to legend, everyone who goes over it will live an entire century.
Today we were taken to the beautiful parklike Hangzhou Zoo, whose giant panda, behind a glass wall, sat facing away from us, its back massive—white on top and bottom, bisected by a thick black stripe. Looking more like a mammoth raccoon—in fact, the panda's closest living relative—than like a bear, it gorged itself impassively on bamboo shoots, a strange sight—for the giant panda, I read, is an ancient species that should by rights be extinct.
Even more than the panda, I had hoped to see the Manchurian tiger. All at once we spied him—in a gloriously wooded habitat, where he gleamed out all gold and sable from the surrounding foliage, making me think of paintings by Henri Rousseau and of William Blake's Songs of Experience.
After the zoo we visited a dimly lit antique store run by the government and crammed with vases, plates, and pots from the Qing Dynasty, the last of the Chinese dynasties and the only one whose art and artifacts are allowed to be taken out of the country. Works gleamed on crowded shelves in glass cases rimmed with lush old mahogany. Encouraged by the manager, we opened the unlocked cases and handled the porcelain—a sensuous delight—and placed selected pieces under adequate lighting on a central table. I showed Rivi how, when you hold the porcelain to the light and place your fingers behind it, their shapes will appear through the translucent medium.
What I love best about this pottery is its fusion of delicacy with color, its lightness, grace, and self-conscious artfulness. Not simplistically decorative, it offers seductive combinations. Imagine rich peach hues and a warm, exotic mustard yellow, a silky turquoise or soft robin's egg blue, a lavender, a pink—and a breathlessly evanescent linearity, strokes that spread and then lift, barely grazing the surface. And the everpresent calligraphy—black marks of inky magic that dance in orderly rows over bumpy glazed surfaces.
Our guide to Xiaoxing yesterday was a recent graduate of the painting department at the Academy. Zhou Jin brought photos of his work to show us on the car ride. Later that evening he came for us and led us through a dark maze of alleyways to his walk-up apartment-studio, which he shares with his teacher. There, in the narrow space, he invited us to sit on his legless bed and view his art. The moment returned me to Jerusalem, where in 1987 I had been a Freud scholar and Zacks professor of art history. There I had sat on a similar legless bed while Rivi, then ten years old, took her violin lessons from a young member of the Israel Philharmonic whose husband, a talented but frustrated painter, insisted I view his paintings in the studio adjacent. We all sat down, and Zhou Jin gave us each a paper cup of Coke before spreading his work on the floor before us. He unrolled each drawing—many were life drawings—and one nude female model kept appearing; occasionally, she was partly draped with what appeared to be a black and furry cloak. Done on large sheets of rice paper, these drawings were executed in a bravura brush technique borrowed from traditional Chinese painting, of which, we learned, Zhou Jin's father is a master. Zhou Jin had used black and sepia, with touches of color to accentuate hands or lips or nipples, and the overall effect was both sensual and cold, the images suffused with a whiff of perfumed decadence reminiscent of finde-siècle Vienna, of Klimt and Schiele.
Zhou Jin's work is not limited to the female nude, but these pieces are his most powerful. One was reworked on a sort of champagne-colored silk ground, the model lying splayed out on her stomach, her black hair partially covering her face, and a white cloth, painted on the underside of the silk, bunched beneath her, the figure tastefully designed on the page. Striking for its foreshortening, the delicacy of its line, and its overall combination of softness and clarity, the drawing was both erotic and frigid—an image, I thought, that does not leave one in peace. Perhaps its objectification of the human body implied an eerie disidentification, while clearly scoptophilic pleasure was also intended. In producing conflict, I thought, an image becomes memorable and successful. Its gold ground, the champagne silk, allures, and, while a feminist eye might well be offended, I think the image, by testing category boundaries, marks its creator as a searching if not yet mature artist.
After these drawings, Zhou Jin took out several canvases in response to my asking whether he had ever studied oils. China has no oil painting tradition, however, and his attempts were not up to the high quality of his other work.
I pondered this. In China the prime literary form seems to be poetry. Wherever one goes, shrines and monuments are dedicated to the memory of revered poets. This poetry, like the traditional Chinese painting we saw, and with which it is often allied, seems impressionistic and philosophical—wind rushes through a grove of willows, a river winds through a gorge, a water buffalo turns to gaze at its beholder, blossoms sway on a slender bough…
In the West, by contrast, we prize the complex novel rather than lyric poetry as our prime literary form, and not water colors but oils. Would it be foolish to wonder whether Chinese poetry might be to the novel as Chinese painting is to oils?—the Western forms being more tortured, anguished, worked over, their longer, slower techniques designed for exploring spatial and psychic depths, inner worlds of turmoil and conflict…
Taxis are red in Hangzhou. Waves of people ride bicycles rhythmically amid screeches of horns and clanging, tooting. Pedicabs have replaced the old rickshaws. Men wear loose silk jackets, often in rust, sepia, or gray. Girls' hair swings in sleek black ponytails. Bicycle bells jingle and car horns blare. China is in motion.
So many vehicles are passing us—a truck with sacks of potatoes in red and green netting, bicycles carrying trash cans or baskets. Men smoke cigarettes while pedaling. We move slowly in this sea of traffic—front ends of trucks made into carts, cycles hitched to platforms piled high with cardboard boxes. Rancid odors. The smells in China—putrid, fetid. Hot in October, and dusty. Truck after truck streams by carrying lumber, burlap, sacks that reek of something like burnt tar. Our van jerks down the road; we are in the middle of things.
Now, a soothing contrast: the quiet gardens of Suzhou. Stone patterns beneath my feet—delicate, nuanced, many grays. Lattice windows. Let me sit here for a long time and reflect among the reflections. Let me sit among the willows hanging and swaying with their tiny leaves. A thousand shapes. A thousand beauties.
Wood…stone…water…a gently curving bridge. A myriad of views—turning, changing, yet eternally beautiful. Rocks like sculptures. Pagodas with playful roofs. Twisting forms, subtle graduations—dark to light. We are climbing about together in this last garden at dusk. It is called the Lion Garden.
What do I want to remember from this trip? The sounds of Mandarin, a language pronounced with so many subtle inflections—rising and falling tones—that the same word, pronounced slightly differently, may mean many things. The dishes served sequentially from lazy susans on linen or cotton cloths, the Chinese cabbage, platters of seaweed, prawns, bean curd; ubiquitous bowls of steaming white rice, sticky and delicious. Green tea. Black tea. And the serious faces of my students, their shy smiles. Their happiness to have had one teacher from America.