The Artful Recluse

The 9th anniversary of the day on which He-Whom-I'm-Trailing re-located to Shanghai... One day disappearing into the next until we are surprised to find ourselves beginning our tenth year in China, at least seven more years than we ever expected...

Lately though, I've been far away from Chinese Curiosities, a month in the States, then two weeks back again in Shanghai, daunted, as I often am, by re-entry. For starters, it's hard to face the intractability of the internet connections here after a month of instant gratification back home. So I've been hiding in the tiny room that passes for my studio these days, steeping myself in color to mitigate the greys that surround me here...but that post's still in the future...

In New York, there was the huge pleasure of seeing The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in 17th Century China at the Asia Society. The paintings in the show are all by the figures in Chinese history that most appeal to my imagination, the wenren, 文人, the civil servants/scholars, who, abandoning their political posts in protest over dynastic changes at the end of the 17th century, turned themselves over to poetry, painting, drinking games and gardening. Their reclusion from society became both a political and an artistic stance.

The show ends on June 2 but the catalogue nearly makes up for it if you don't get to see it in person. (Hardcover only, & therefore, more expensive then a year's membership in the museum, which is also well worth having...) Especially satisfying are the extensive notes translating every single line of text on the paintings. That whole section of calligraphy on the painting that's usually described by the museum's wall text as "commentary"? You can actually read it! (From the painting above, a voice to accompany mine: "I found this sheaf of paper in a total of six lengths, made it into a long scroll, and began to apply brush and ink. From Wu [Suzhou] I set sail and slowly wound my way to Songjiang. In a month's time I [still] had completed less than a foot of the painting...") All those beautiful & mysterious red chops identified! Puns & allusions & homophones all illuminated! It's such a treat: I'll be reading it a good long while.

But just as wonderful are the paintings themselves, for the sheer beauty and variety of the ink marks, the carving out of the white space of the page into landscape, form & air. A detail below from one of my favorite's, Yang Wencong's Water Village (1644). I can hardly bear the sadness of those bare, tender trees, the silent houses, the landscape full of renunciation and loss.

In the famous 19ct. Chinese handbook, The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, there are lists enumerating the marks "used for modeling...brushstrokes like spread-out hemp fibers...like sesame seeds...like cloud heads or thunderheads...like lumps of alum...like skull bones...like the wrinkles on a devil's face....like horses' teeth..."

The artist, the handbook advises, must "first learn to still his heart, thus to clarify his understanding and increase his wisdom." He "must never let the influences of evil demons gain control of the brush point." And finally, perhaps my favorite direction, there's "avoiding the banal":

In painting, it is better to be inexperienced (young in qi*) than stupid. It is better to be audacious than commonplace. 

*qi = "the painter's spiritual resources"

Things that Don't Fit in a Drawer # 6: University Students

A big thank you to the students from the University of Shanghai for Science & Technology that came to my workshop at the American Culture Center last Saturday! The workshop theme was hat-making out of ordinary household items like the specialty hangers for drying underwear (see row 3, left & center, & below.) Not everyone bought into the idea but a lot of fun & invention filled the day. The students come to USST from all over China, and even from as far away as Ulan Bator, Mongolia (top center) and are as sweet a group as I have met in a long time. (Photos above are thanks to the photographers of the Center's new Media Center...below thanks to a Snake in my neighborhood...)

Jenny Tarlin, the director of the American Cultural Center, does some amazing programming (I say humbly) in her mission to introduce students to American Culture beyond Hollywood & the Big Brands. Two days after my show opened there, we had the wonderful culture-juggling experience of attending a workshop version of Pearl: the Opera, conducted by Sara Jobin.

Named for the daughter of Hester Prynne, the heroine of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the libretto for the opera was written by Carol Gilligan and her son, Jonathan Gilligan. Jobin, the first woman to ever conduct the San Francisco Opera, and Gilligan, the author of In a Different Voice, a hugely influential book on women's notions of morality, have together founded the Different Voice Opera Project; their mission is to foster the production of contemporary operas in which female roles come to something other than the traditional dire end. The music for Pearl, DVOP's first production, was wriiten by Amy Scurria. Click here to hear the "A" duet of the child Pearl and her mother.

(Fair warning: it's a long one...)

Drawer # 5.7 : Scraps & Fake Flowers

How one thing leads to another:

I was under some dark theft star one night last week, very unusual here: in the evening, a pickpocket, sneaking up behind me in the dark, tried to get into my purse; the following morning, I discovered that during the night some other knave had nicked the ceramic flower box that was home to our kitchen window morning glories, leaving all their poor naked roots dangling helplessly in the wind. The pickpocket I grabbed and told off (in my best Anglo-Saxon) & got on with things if a little shaky with adrenaline. But the flowerbox broke my heart. Our neighbor & housekeeper, Wu Fang, wrote 素质差 (su4 zhi4 cha4) on my phone which my (life-saving) Pleco translation app translated as “So ignorant! So uneducated!”

All summer the morning glories had brought pleasure to our neighbors who use the narrow walled-in lane behind our block of rowhouses, for washing vegetables in their outdoor kitchen sinks & hanging out laundry on the bamboo poles overhead. I’d look up from my own (indoor) sink to see someone paused in their path to gaze for a moment at the unexpected beauty of the vines. Once, an elderly man who had once lived in America as a chemistry professor, spoke to me approvingly as I watered the flowerbox: “I think you are very comfortable in China.” (Not.)

So morning glories gone but determined not to be robbed of beauty outside my kitchen window, I plotted my own theft…