Guanxi Master

Modern Chinese art and the agony of global urbanization

“The new comradeship will be a comradeship in the task of preserving being itself, a comradeship in the work of facing future danger and menace…Without those values another and terrible possibility could emerge; man might succumb to the power of the anonymous” (Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World).

To understand China today, one sometimes has to take a painful look at what the Chinese are losing while they rise as the next economic force of this century.

In the Spring Showcase of Chinese modern art at the Galerie du Monde of Hong Kong, three famously striking and controversial images by artist Liu Bolin (劉勃麟) show a remarkable state of consciousness among the Chinese today. One chromogenic image called Hiding in the City #54 – The Whole Family displays the Chinese national flag with a family standing before it, painted as red as their background, blending in and only half-visible. It’s subject a couple, a husband and wife, and two children. The older child is a boy of about eight years old, and the sex of the younger is ambiguous, hair shorn in the country practice of delousing. It is the most haunting figure in the work, because as a result of China’s two-child policy, the cultural tradition has by default preferred boys (a general ratio of 6-1) leading to a social crisis that is being more and more acutely felt by Chinese young men. The family is no longer self-sufficient, but is inevitably blended into the urbanization that has eaten up the traditional village system in recent decades. As the title indicates, the family is “hiding in the city”, where they are invisible and without identity, a far cry from even a memory of the place of their ancestors. They are swallowed up by something that will in the end make them powerless to help themselves.

In a recently released book, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China, leading cultural anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh shows how the unprecedented scale of this social experiment which was far short of theoretical rigor and foresight. She points out that the methods of the human sciences were denigrated for a pseudo-science of politics and policy making, which manufactured a state birth planning method ex nihilo: “because there was no science of population to inform those efforts, they were guided by logics and techniques rooted in [political Maoism] and Marxian ideology.” The earlier population control theory of “later-longer-fewer was extraordinarily effective in achieving its demographic ends. Indeed, the policy produced one of the fastest fertility declines in modern history.” Despite this, the village values of rural China were not harshly infringed upon, and the policy was more or less accepted.

But this was not the end of it. As Greenhalgh explains: 

The one-child policy that followed the 1970’s “later-longer-fewer policy” in the 1980’s was based on a partial scorn of its “unscientific” and “backward” nature. The one-child policy became an even more rigid “scientific” endeavor and began to disregard the genuine human impulse to leave heirs and further the line of family ancestry. That is why families, still attached to the traditional Chinese heritage system, began to prefer sons who traditionally had the only right to inheritance and carry on the family name. This mixture of untested population science and traditional family values caused an ongoing crisis of gender disparity.

An earlier piece in Liu Bolin’s series shows a similarly painted Chinese man with a resigned expression against the background of the American flag. A subtle point is made about the Chinese individual through the metaphor of exile or displacement. The Chinese in America have lost even the sacred ties that go with family, as they are completely absent in the work. The values of the village itself entirely forgotten in a foreign land, whose loss is no tragedy to the second or third-generation Chinese American. Here, the individualism that America prizes is shown in its anonymous and despairing loneliness. China’s rulers still try to give them an identity as still part of the Chinese “global village,” but as a vaguely colonial “overseas Chinese.” This label of kinship is meant to be supportive for the Chinese immigrant, but the building of village immigrant life in a foreign cultural setting is a difficult and lonely endeavor.

Another piece entitled “Graffiti” shows the barest ghost of an individual blended into a background of ugly graffiti. This image is astonishing because the colors are dark, and the realism of the three-dimensional manikin and its paradoxical invisibility is unnerving. Something brutal has happened to the urbanized human creature. In the image, the man seems cut in half by a jagged letter and to his left on the wall is sprayed a gaping mouth with vampiric teeth bared, emitting a foul breath. He has been butchered and is about to be eaten by his urban environment. There is no sign of nature, family or national identity left. This picture seems the most apocalyptic, the most final and explicit. He has, in Guardini’s phrase, “succumbed to the power of the anonymous,” and shows the logical end of the destruction of the traditional village and its replacement with a dehumanizing urbanization.

As implied in Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death, China is finding that its quest for knowledge has brought material increase, but at the traumatic cost of shattering its families and creating the individual naught. China will now join the West in a state of existential crisis.