Art, Criticism and the Risks of Being Read
A horse in the wind, an eagle on a rock, a face unable to speak: an image can carry more than its subject first reveals. I want to look at a few Chinese examples that interest me, some through art history and others through people I was fortunate to know. They also raise a difficult distinction: an artist’s intended criticism is not always the same as the criticism a suspicious authority discovers in a work.
Historical Examples
Poetry and painting have offered ways of speaking when direct speech was dangerous. Su Shi (1037–1101), whose life included repeated banishments, is one of the best-known examples.[1] The verse in this montage turns from an allusion to refined music towards an old man’s very material problem: he has no salt for his food. It is a sharp change of register. The image presents a poem and a portrait, rather than a documented colophon attached to a painting.
Other forms of criticism are harder to pin down. A painter may withdraw from official life, or leave an image open enough for several readings. That ambiguity is part of what keeps these works alive for me.
Under the Yuan Dynasty
The Mongol conquest changed the conditions in which Chinese scholar-artists lived and worked. Their responses differed. Some refused service; others accepted posts under the Yuan. It would be misleading to treat all their paintings as the same kind of resistance.
Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322) was a descendant of the Song imperial family who nevertheless served the Yuan court.[2] In Horse and Groom in the Wind, the horse lowers its head while its mane and the groom’s clothing register the wind. I am drawn to a reading of exposure and pressure. That is a response to the image, not proof of a concealed anti-Yuan statement.
Gong Kai’s Emaciated Horse makes deprivation painfully visible: the fine frame of the animal remains, but its ribs and spine press through the skin. Gong Kai remained loyal to the fallen Song and lived in poverty after the conquest.[3] That context gives the animal’s condition a particular force. I would not reduce it to a literal illustration of hunger throughout the population.
The Cultural Revolution
During the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976, artists faced denunciation, humiliation and restrictions on their work. Here it is especially important to distinguish criticism made by an artist from a hostile interpretation imposed on a painting.
I had associated Huang Zhou with a story about four crabs being read as a reference to the Gang of Four. The sideways movement of a crab offers an obvious opening for satire. However, the claim that he was arrested specifically for painting four crabs is not established by the sources checked here, so I do not present that causal story as fact.[4]
Pan Tianshou
Pan Tianshou (1897–1971) was an important painter and educator who headed the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, now the China Academy of Art. He was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.[5] His eagles became targets of hostile political readings. In these reproductions, the rough, watchful birds have a stubborn presence that still moves me. That does not establish that this particular painting was intended as an attack on the Gang of Four.
The Stars and the Late 1970s
After the Cultural Revolution, the Stars group, Xingxing (星星), became an important voice for artistic freedom. Preparations began in late 1978; their first exhibition opened outside the national art museum in Beijing in September 1979.[6] I met several of these artists and became friends with some of them. Wang Keping holds a special place in my memory. Ai Weiwei was also associated with the group.
The montage below brings together Wang’s rounded wooden figure, labelled Big Belly in my image notes, and a photograph of him beside an image of a blocked mouth and closed eye. That face gives censorship an immediately physical form.
Xu Wenli
Xu Wenli, another person I was fortunate to know, spent a total of sixteen years in prison for his pro-democracy activities. He was released on medical parole and left for the United States on 24 December 2002.[7] I treasure a letter he addressed to me. I also kept an early issue of Wo Tu (沃土, Fertile Soil), from 1979, its handwritten pages reproduced by simple means. These fragile objects make that period tangible in a way a list of dates cannot.
Poetry and a Hidden Message
The final example uses the structure of a poem to conceal another statement. In the right-hand poem below, highlighted characters read diagonally as a demand that Li Peng step down and calm public anger. The documented newspaper episode belongs to March 1991, rather than 1989.[8] I find the device extraordinary: a text can appear to say one thing while its arrangement says another. The left-hand example carries a related message; its newspaper provenance is not established here.
These examples do not all speak in the same way. Some carry an explicit demand; others gain meaning through circumstance or a viewer’s interpretation. What connects them for me is the room an image or a poem can make for a thought that is difficult to say aloud.
An Extra and a Dedication
When I fell in love with a woman from Beijing in 1983 and we decided to marry, our relationship caused a considerable scandal. A marriage like ours was still unusual in the circumstances we knew. My student status was revoked and I had to leave the academy. I can laugh about parts of the story now, but at the time the situation felt seriously threatening.
Immediately after the wedding, we had nowhere to stay. We could not find a hotel willing to give us a room, and few people would risk helping. Wang Keping, already a friend, spontaneously offered us his studio. We found another solution soon afterwards, so we stayed only two nights.
Keping had clearly made an effort to tidy up: at least the path to the bed was clear. His expressive sculptures crowded the walls and, above all, the space under the bed. It was an atmosphere quite unlike any other for a wedding night. I dedicate this article to him for that kindness, and for much more besides. His generosity is inseparable, in my memory, from his art.
Footnotes
[1] For Su Shi’s life in exile, see The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s discussion of Su Shi in a Bamboo Hat and Clogs. The montage reproduces verses attributed to him; its translator is not identified. ↩
[2] See the University of Washington’s Chinese painting guide for the horse painting and Zhao Mengfu’s context. The older caption mistakenly used his birth year as the work’s date. ↩
[3] The Allen Memorial Art Museum’s entry on Pu Jin’s later copy discusses Gong Kai’s Song loyalty and the original Emaciated Horse, held in Osaka. The interpretation is more specific than a general statement about famine. ↩
[4] Huang Zhou (1925–1997) experienced persecution during the Cultural Revolution. The four-crab arrest anecdote is retained here only as an unverified story, not as a documented reason for arrest. ↩
[5] Hangzhou Normal University’s account of Pan Tianshou gives his educational posts and discusses his later life. He headed the Zhejiang academy in Hangzhou, rather than the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts. ↩
[6] Wang Keping’s own Memoirs of the Stars Exhibition describe the preparations, the September 1979 exhibition and the artists’ demand for freedom. The account is a participant’s recollection. ↩
[7] See Brown University’s 2003 announcement and the Dui Hua Foundation’s statement on his release. Sixteen years refers to the total served across two imprisonments. ↩
[8] The right-hand example is associated with the 20 March 1991 overseas edition of People’s Daily. See the 1991 scholarly discussion of its embedded political message. The slide shown here was used in my 2016 Vienna lecture. ↩
Image Sources
Zhao Mengfu: Horse and Groom in the Wind, National Palace Museum, Taipei; reproduction via Wikimedia Commons. Gong Kai: Emaciated Horse, Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts. The Pan Tianshou and Wang Keping images are comparison montages from the original article; exact dates are not independently established here.
Xu Wenli montage: upper-left photograph credited to AP in the image and reproduced via BBC News; upper-right photographer unidentified. The periodical and letter are from my collection. Translator and portrait source for the Su Shi montage are unidentified.
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