Faye Yan Zhang

Winter 2015 - Possession

Full Circle: (Exotic) Odysseys Through (Oriental) Rainforests on (Outlawed) Tour Buses

Ah remember walkin along Princes Street wi Spud, we both hate walkin along that hideous street, deadened by tourists and shoppers, the twin curses ay modern capitalism.

–Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the spheres.

–Pythagoras

Peacock Princess

The dancers hop around the stage, dressed in polyester costumes, accompanied by the music of electronic lutes. The women are uniformly attractive in their false eyelashes and youth. Most of the men look mediocre, but two tall chiseled fellows keep pushing their way to the front of the ensemble, aware that they’re the stars of the display.

Now the dancers flit their way backstage for a quick change. Soon they’re back, some in flower cuffs that radiate petals from their necks, others in imitations of Miao, Hani, or Dai ethnic dress, beaded, tasseled and zipped up. It’s a production of “The Peacock Princess,” a Dai folk tale that parallels “Swan Lake,” in the largest indoor auditorium in the town of Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province.

The audience is overwhelmingly Han Chinese, and most of them are tourists. The town follows an official demographic policy of “three-three-three”: one-third Dai, one-third Han, and one-third other minorities. The province is known for having 25 of the People’s Republic of China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic groups. As tourism in China booms, however, more and more Han Chinese flock to so-called minority attractions to watch ensemble performances, tour ethnic villages, and eat and drink.

“Han run pretty much everything,” says a cab driver, a transplant from Jiangsu province. “The local people are too lazy.” After a moment, he reconsiders, “Well, not exactly. The Dai king is still a big shot around here. The government couldn’t build that new airport until he gave the go ahead.”

Indeed, the locals are far from complacent in this business. A tour of a traditional Dai village is often a classic fool’s gold scam. In this case, the gold is silver—a young woman brings a group of tourists into her family’s traditional Dai home, raised on wooden stilts, in an ostensible cultural exchange that ultimately turns into a marketing pitch for fake silver trinkets.

Not that tourists aren’t easily duped. At the end of her spiel, the woman brings out a black velvet-draped table hitherto hidden in a corner. She whips off the cloth to reveal gleaming silver bracelets, belts, cups, and bowls; a king’s ransom in ancient times. The tourists descend on the shiny things like magpies.

The Chinese tourism business is the business of spectacle. The production of “The Peacock Princess” imitates the most lavish of Broadway musicals or Disneyland shows, but without a multi-million dollar budget. It’s no Tchaikovsky ballet. Men in cartoon elephant suits pretend to play fake gourd flutes, while music emanates from speakers. The flute syncing is impressive, but when one player misses a beat, he smiles sheepishly at the front row and continues pretending. The show must go on.

Despite the peacock glitz and glitter of the production, certain movements emerge like jewels from sand. The dancer who plays the Peacock Princess is a slender, sickle-backed young woman. Her white dress billows from her body as she arcs around her prince in uncertain pirouettes. She circles toward him; their fingers nearly touch.

Bread Loaf Bus

A ubiquitous form of transportation in China, next to the classic motor scooter, is the bread loaf bus. Named for their shape, the vehicles are precariously top-heavy and so often tip over that their sale has been outlawed. Many buses, however, are still in service as tour vehicles. Prized for their large carrying capacity, the buses zoom cheerfully down mountain roads. I could swear I’ve seen their wheels leave the ground, but the passengers inside usually provide a heavy enough ballast against catastrophe.

Inside the bus, the tour guide, if he is a good one, is a combination of travel agent, marketing representative, and comedian. Our guide, the son of a Han father and Dai mother, quips trivia about the local culture. I wonder if he ever gets tired of repeating the same stories day after day, but he seems animated, if rehearsed. He’s a thin man with crooked teeth. When he walks down the bus to collect our ticket fares, golden rings slip and slide on his bony fingers.

“This is such a good deal,” he tells us. “If you had bought the tickets on your own, it would have cost two times as much.” We take him at his word.

The passengers in the bread loaf bus are a decent representation of the Chinese middle class. An older father tells us proudly that his children, a daughter and a son, are both enrolled in “international” schools in Shanghai. Two friends, women in their early thirties, trade iPhone photos on the WeChat social network. A family with an adult daughter hardly says a word the entire ride. Two families are accompanied by sets of grandparents.

The tickets in question afford entrance to a Dai Water Festival show. According to our guide, the Dai celebrate the New Year (in April by the Gregorian calendar) with a water fight from dawn to dusk. Capitalizing on this novelty, daily New Year’s Water Festivals have sprung up around the city. Before we make it to the show, we make an obligatory stop at a tourist-centered jewelry store, a common but unadvertised itinerary item on Chinese tour trips. For a commission, the tour guide drops his passengers off at a jewelry store in the middle of nowhere for an hour or so and “encourages” them to make purchases.

We eventually make it to the Water Festival, which takes place in a round amphitheater. Middle-aged local women splash water from a shallow circular pool onto giggling visitors, who stand all around the edges. At one point, a fully grown Asian elephant is brought out, flapping its ears at the arcs of sparkling water landing on its back. Like our tour guide, its feelings about all this are unreadable.

The festival is not one for those in search of authenticity, unless they can find it in the faces of the women selling plastic bags of dried coconut and papaya and sugarcane juice, or the peddlers weaving through the crowd, pressing flower and nut shell garlands into hands, for a price. This is the New Year, rehearsed and paid for, but perhaps no different from any other. Soon the water women are parading around the amphitheater, baptizing us with splashes from plastic bowls.

Mechanical Buddha

A gilt Buddha statue, 49 meters high, looms over Xishuangbanna. It’s the showpiece of the Mengle Great Buddhist Monastery, the largest Theravada Buddhist site in China. 300 monks pray at the monastery daily, but today not a one is to be seen. To reach the Buddha, we take 2,000 steps up a small mountain, interspersed with temple halls.

When we reach the temple at the feet of the Buddha, an angry old man bursts out its doors. He curses the tour guide, stuffs his feet into his shoes, and flies back down the mountain. We raise our eyebrows at his apparent irreverence and step over the threshold into the cool temple.

We soon discover the reason for the old man’s rage. A guide leads us clockwise around the temple, depositing us at successive stations like children at a craft fair. At each station, we are asked in solemn tones to buy commemorative candles, statuettes, or bracelets, items which become successively more costly as we rotate along the temple—all the better to reach nirvana. A woman tries to sell us a lotus-shaped candle for 25 yuan. When we don’t take the bait, she lowers the price to 15. We escape her clutches, and the eternal spiral, by stuffing a ten-yuan bill into a donation box.

Escape leads us to an observation deck, high above the city. From here, everything is a miniature kingdom. Bridges and cars are toys, and the river is a distant ribbon. The Buddha presides over a circular plot of land, a wasted area like some Tolkienesque fortress. Officials plan to one day turn it into a park.

As we descend from the deck, we enter into another hall, occupied by a statue of a sitting Buddha. Touring monks from Thailand snap cell phone pictures. Above them, large paintings depicting Siddhartha Gautama’s life encircle the hall. They start from the entrance and end behind the Buddha’s back, like a continuous comic strip.

The paintings are strange. The usual clouds and halos mingle with weird futuristic imaginings, some downright psychedelic. In one painting, the Buddha is flanked on his left by a metallic city full of steel-blue towers. On closer inspection, floating vehicles zoom between the buildings, and in the sky are what look like flying saucers. On his right is a misty, wooded glen: Between two columns of rocks issues a mysterious blue light.

Following the progression of the paintings, I walk behind the statue. There, in the darkness cast by the Buddha’s back, is a wall to ceiling painting of a demon. His eyes bulge from his red face. His tongue lolls, and horns sprout from his veiny head. I step back quickly, but in retrospect, maybe I should have paid more attention. For if the golden Buddha could hide a demon behind his back, there may very well be an accountant inside his belly.

Market Economy

Any good trip requires an inventory of the food consumed. The complimentary breakfast buffet, an industry standard in China, is vast enough to fill any intrepid belly. Staples include steamed buns and noodle bowls, as well as sliced white bread and pastries. Buffet trays of vegetables—bok choy and potatoes fried to an oily sheen —line a banquet table. A pot of bitter Arabica coffee and a kettle of Pu’er tea, both produced in Yunnan, are nods to the local flavor. The backdrop to all this is the main Xishuangbanna hotel, boasting marble floors and a diorama with real Land Rovers.

Another staple is the convenience shop, though not the chain markets familiar in the United States. Although these small shops sell much of the same goods, they are independent, manned by their owners who sit and fan themselves behind the cash register. The shops themselves are often little more than an alcove just off the street. The narrow shelves, cluttered or neat depending on the owner’s inclination, are stocked with items like mango creme Oreos and Pocky. Each has an ice cream freezer, crammed with mung bean popsicles and ice cream cups. In warm Xishuangbanna, the freezers are insulated with a thick cotton blanket to cut refrigeration costs.

The nocturnal sibling to these shops is the Jinghong night market, which winds under the bridge over the Mekong river. Here, anything imaginable is for sale, from electronics to nail decals to long underwear to real tattoos. But we’re really here for the food, which comprises an overwhelming majority of the market. Fruit juice vendors jostle for space with barbeque stands, which will grill anything imaginable: river eel, cuttlefish, fungus, potatoes, and more. The entire scene buzzes under hot fluorescent firefly lights rigged to generators.

If the night market and the convenience shop go hand in hand, then their natural antithesis must be Xishuangbanna’s only Walmart store, at the anchor of a busy intersection. Entering the store, however, the same variety of goods and foodstuffs are found for similar rock-bottom prices. The only major difference seems to be that the store is air-conditioned and the workers are uniformed in Walmart’s trademark blue.

Land Dam

The winding old road from Kunming (the capital of Yunnan province) to Xishuangbanna to the Yunnan Tropical Botanical Garden will be replaced within the year by a new highway, which will cut travel time in half. The bones of the highway are already laid down. They embrace Xishuangbanna like prehistoric ribs.

The electric zing of steel and concrete can be heard for some time when driving on the old road, but the sound is soon lost among the banana trees, which stretch out as far as the eye can see. The trees are not tall; these bananas are a short, fat variety that must be protected against the cold night air. Each banana is individually wrapped—they look like small sleeping bags dangling from the trees.

Not to be outdone, the rubber trees, like bent beggar men, are outfitted with one wooden bowl each, tied to the trunk to catch their precious sap. Hordes of these odd couples, these stout banana trees and slender rubber trees, march over the mountains. Tourists, rubber, and bananas, in their overrunning glory, are the three mighty pillars which hold up the region’s economy.

The mighty Mekong river shoots through Yunnan province before it curves through Laos, Thailand and Cambodia and reaches the South China Sea. An inflatable boat trip down the river reveals the full scope of the highway project. A series of latticed concrete beams hold back the mountains, which have been scooped away to make way for the road. Eventually vegetation will grow between the lattices, but for now they are bald and empty. The red earth of the mountain bulges through the gaps, as if threatening to burst through. River swallows scream at the sky, and farther down the river, the forest is thick as tree moss.

Our boat docks in a tiny bay. The boatman tells us to get off and take a break as he reels in a fishing net, cast earlier that day. We climb some steps to find construction in progress. In a flat clearing, space has been made for a sandy volleyball pit. Above, workers pour gravel into metal chutes, the sound like breaking glass or miniature avalanches. Thick stacks of bamboo are everywhere. Eventually, this clearing will become a riverside resort.

We snap photos and return to the boat. The boatman has finished reeling his net. “Nothing today,” he says. “But once I caught a fish that weighed a hundred pounds.” He casts out the net again. It whirls and wheels out over the water and sinks into the current. We get back on the inflatable boat, the engine sputters to a start, and we head back toward the city.

Earthly Mysteries and Celestial Spheres

Xishuangbanna marks my third trip with a Chinese tour group. The first was a journey through Qingdao in Shandong province, best known for German influences that culminated in the form of Tsingtao beer, and its official designation as China’s Most Livable City.

The second was through Hainan, an island in the southernmost tip of China. We were plied with coconuts and fried tofu, and stuffed to the gills with seafood. Our tour guide tried to con us a couple of times, bringing us to the wrong hotel and several jewelry stores.

In each of these tropical paradise destinations, there is one constant. Red-beaked seagulls migrate every year from Siberia to winter on the temperate coasts. Since 1985, tens of thousands have alighted each winter on Kunming’s Dianchi Lake, where the local people call them “the winter angels.”

Residents and tourists, gather each year at Dianchi to greet these familiar friends. Parents, who remember the first bold flocks, now bring their children. Carts along the lake sell fluffy loaves of French bread for a few cents per bag. The visitors toss pieces of bread into the sky. With steady precision, the gulls swoop and catch. The cool lake, which rivals Lake Ontario in size, shimmers and reflects their enigmatic flight.

How they found their way across the frigid miles to Kunming is a mystery, but generation after generation they come. They must be attuned to the magnetic stars, to the music of the celestial spheres; when they are startled by some invisible sign, they lift from the lake like spirits. They come, and they leave. Where they go once winter ends, no one knows. What remains only is the hope of their return.

Summer 2015

Harajuku Days

At the age of thirteen, I went to my first concert. It was performed at the Qwest Center in Omaha, Nebraska by Gwen Stefani—Gwen, the modern blonde bombshell, fashion maven, and self-declared American ambassador of all things Harajuku. The performance was part of her Sweet Escape Tour. She slid up and down the stage, platinum hair set unwavering on top of her head, accompanied by four dollish Asian women who mouthed lyrics, fluttered hands, swayed their asses to the beat of “Wind It Up.” My then-best friend, who had invited me to the concert, waved her renegade camera in the air (no smartphones yet in 2007). To sneak it past security she’d hidden it in an empty tampon box. Her younger brother, forced upon us by her mother, fell asleep in the row in front of us.

For the next few months, I would listen to Gwen’s “Hollaback Girl” on repeat on my MP3 player, lying on top of the cool sheets in my parent’s bedroom. It was July, but their windows faced west, so in the late afternoons the room was always cool and dark, permeated by that kind of woozy clarified shadow which filters through Venetian blinds. Sometimes, my friend and I would sit, bare-kneed on the hot cement in her backyard or mine, and we would look up pictures of how to tease our coarse black hair into perfect ringlets. It was the summer after seventh grade. She was more popular than I was, and she always wanted to make me over by painting my nails, as if a different color were the secret to a second skin.

The highlight of that summer was when she received, as a birthday present, a set of Harajuku Lovers fragrances, including bobble-headed bottles of Love, Angel, Music, Baby, and Gwen herself wearing plastic Marilyn Monroe hair and a so kawaii outfit. For those who don’t know, Love is the pretty one, Angel is the sporty one, Music is the artsy one, and Baby is the cool one. Gwen is the leader of their posse. In commercials and music videos, she stands in front; their images are encompassed by hers. In the bathroom, my friend would choose one of the Girls, perform a temporary decapitation (the spray nozzle was underneath the bobble head), spray her wrist and necks, and set the little bottle on the counter, where it would sit smiling among its sisters. I would imagine that the little perfume figurines had travelled all the way from their native land: Tokyo’s Harajuku fashion district, an expanse spreading from Harajuku Station to Omotesando, where, according to legend, otakus roamed freely in their dark makeup, Lolita dresses, and almost-perfect curls.

And then I would be so bored, in my hot midwestern summer with my nails painted a sparkly pink, quickly chipping as I dragged them back and forth over concrete sidewalks. I wondered how Gwen’s Harajuku Girls got to be so beautiful—and they were beautiful, though always silent. Only Gwen ever sang, or spoke. The Girls only meowed, sometimes, dressed in cat costumes with black whiskers streaked on their porcelain faces, in the music videos or under bright concert lights, their red-red-lips barely moving save to replicate that cattish “O”. A round spot of blush on both cheeks, a cultivated body, a patch of red on the lips—was that really all it took?

As if in answer, an emphatic “No” comes from Harajuku district, in the 2000s dominated by Japanese street fashion. In the first years of the millennium, a movement gains momentum called Decora, which takes accessorizing far beyond even the standard set by Gwen and posse. In Decora, beauty is found in excess. A Google image search produces pictures of Decora girls—and boys—wearing colorful wigs, long socks, a medley of layers, and ring upon necklace upon bracelet upon ring. In a documentary, a Decora girl says she takes two hours to put on her outfit before heading out to walk the streets with a group of similarly-dressed friends. Some cover their mouths with faux medical masks, as if guarding against a disease of plainness, the dull life of a salaryman or woman.

A secret: There is no such thing as a single Harajuku Girl. She is a block of city by the train station, she is fantasy, she is pure Gwen creation. In the Harajuku district, if you take a walk around the block, the women are mostly civilians. The humdrum crowd is occasionally interrupted by a variety of mostly young people, teenagers, pimpled and sweating under a vast array of subculture styles, wearing gothic Lolita dresses, or covered in pastel amulets, or smelling faintly of hairspray. They are not all alike. They are not all beautiful.

***

I couldn’t quite tell the Girls apart when they were onstage. Their outfits were different, each one embroidered with her name—Love, Angel, Music, Baby—but their makeup was the same. Perhaps they were intentionally cast that way, but I couldn’t tell them apart however I tilted my head. Gwen calls their identity a ping-pong match of culture, America bouncing back the best of couture Japonais. The Girls don’t speak in public, by contract. They hover around Gwen like four silent familiars or human Decora accessories. I wonder if they all use their own perfumes, beheading and recapping their tiny selves each day.

But perhaps Gwen is right, and cultural back-and-forth is an accurate description. A slice from the Japanese side of the table: One of Japan’s most popular pop phenomenons, a girl group called Morning Musume, will turn seventeen this year. Fear not, the group members never become old. Membership is renewed as older performers “graduate” and fresh girls move up the ranks. The group has become a veritable institution, a nation in and of itself, fueled and fed by fans ranging from preteen girls to adult men. This year marks the twelfth generation of performers. The girls grow up together, perform together, and promote themselves together.

Morning Musume’s mastermind is a bleached blond man-child who goes by the name “Tsunku.” In photos, his face is surgically smooth, and he’s usually surrounded by his girls, who pout and make victory signs with their hands. Until the early 2000s, Tsunku headed his own band, a Japanese rock group called Sharam Q. Nowadays, he commands the Hello! Project, a vast network of interchangeable girl groups of which Morning Musume is but the flagship. Hello! Project has a performer for every taste. The name of the groups sound like space cadet units in some alternate universe, where fruit and dessert names are bubbled with sexual references: Pocky Girls, Shugo Chara Egg!, Coconuts Musume, etcetera. One popular group, Minimoni, auditions performers with the caveat that their height must be under four feet eleven inches.

Members are moved from group to group as the need arises and as their ages change, but over the entire empire presides the constant and omnipotent Tsunku. No matter the group, Tsunku designs the costumes, writes the songs, determines the makeup, and choreographs the dances. No matter the group, the girls are expected to remain virginal, at least in public. In 2007, the same year as Gwen’s Sweet Escape tour, group member Yaguchi Mari (Morning Musume, founder of Minimoni) was caught in a relationship with a member of a boy band. She was eventually ejected from Hello! Project. Despite their enforced purity, the girls are each expected to publish swimsuit photo books for their fans, the sales of which are so popular that they require their own charts.

Tsunku says his role is benevolent. He has said that his girls are so busy with their performing lives, that they don’t have time to experience the normal emotions of adolescence—so he recreates those emotions for them in the lyrics, the thoughts of a teenage girl written by a middle-aged man. A typical Musume music video involves choreographed group dance with kawaii hand gestures, elaborate baby-doll dresses, simple upbeat lyrics, and plenty of computer-generated sparkles. The singing is nearly purely choral. Everyone opens their mouths at the same time, and even if one voice is singing, it comes as an overlay as the performers strike poses and smile into the camera. Like the performers themselves, the songs resist time. A section of 1997’s “Morning Coffee” could be transplanted into 2014’s “What is Love” with little notice from fans.

Tsunku’s imaginings must strike some marketable chord. Morning Musume has sold about 18 million album copies in Japan alone. The American market, however, has proven harder to crack. Morning Musume’s second ever concert in the States was held at the Best Buy Theater in New York on October 2014—a single 4 p.m. show on a Sunday, it was hardly a knockout event. Perhaps American audiences are uncomfortable with the power dynamics and sexual politics governing the group members. More likely, though, the ultra-cute aesthetic and ultra-synchronization, not even translated from Japanese language, had not quite found their place in the American pop lexicon.

This miscommunication has forced American audiences to depend on the cultural translation of performers such as Gwen Stefani. Like Tsunku, she becomes the intermediary between reality and representation. The lyrics to her song “Harajuku Girls” are easy to understand:

You’re looking so distinctive like D.N.A.,

?Like nothing I’ve ever seen in the U.S.A.?

Your underground culture, visual grammar?

The language of your clothing is something to encounter

A Ping-Pong match between eastern and western

Did you see your inspiration in my latest collection?

Just wait ‘til you get your little hands on L.A.M.B.

’Cause it’s super kawaii, that means super cute in Japanese.?

The streets of Harajuku are your catwalk, bishoujo you’re so vogue.

But what exactly is she translating? Does she draw upon the aesthetics of Morning Musume or the titular Harajuku district? If so, are the girls of the real Harajuku district mimicking a mass produced pop culture, or are they subverting it through excess? Japan is silent on the matter; few people in the country are fans of Gwen. Like Morning Musume’s lackluster appearance in the States, Gwen’s Japanese platform never quite took off.

None of these thoughts came into my mind in the summer of 2007, as I lay on the cool sheets, mouthing the words to “Hollaback Girl.” In the music video, Gwen and the group perform “American High School” the way pop culture imagines it to be. Like Tsunku, Gwen dresses her girls in school uniform, albeit in short cheerleader skirts instead of sailor suits. They prance their way through the traditional high school type spectrum, from punk girls to jocks to band geeks, though, in this high school, everyone is inexpressibly cool. My thirteen-year-old self would have wanted to be a part of her posse, even if I’d have to remain (contractually) silent.

The Harajuku Girls have dispersed now, gone their own ways. Their real names are Maya Chino, Jennifer Kita, Rino Nakasone-Razalan, and Mayuko Kitayama. Maya lives in Los Angeles and teaches at a dance academy, Jennifer performs in hip-hop companies, Rino is now a choreographer, and Mayuko was a backup dancer for Britney Spears’ Onyx Hotel tour—after that her internet trail is lost. In memory, Gwen’s girls are as virginal as Tsunku’s. They never had a life, save that brief one lived as silent priestesses at the altar of pop rock.

Two years after the concert, my friend is working at a local ice cream store, when she swears Gwen Stefani walks in the door and orders a chocolate sundae. She wore sunglasses and sweats, but she had her trademark hair and signed her name on the receipt “G. Stef.” I don’t believe her, because of the unlikelihood of Gwen Stefani visiting a Coldstone Creamery in a Nebraskan strip mall, but it’s a pleasant fantasy.

***

There is an antiquated philosophical concept that regards the movement of the celestial bodies—planets, sun, and moon—as the movement of glass spheres. When ancient astronomers looked to the arc of these bodies across the sky, it must indeed have seemed like they were attached to invisible surfaces in the sky. The concept explains that as these glass spheres move, they rub against each other and emit harmonics: musica universalis, the music of the spheres. This music is imperceptible to human ears, but it resonates under all of nature. For the Pythagoreans, followers of Pythagoras in the 5th century B.C, mathematical patterns governed the music of the spheres and, in turn, mortal harmonics and rhythms.

The 2014 Morning Musume song “Beyond Space and Time” takes a very literal interpretation of this astronomical concept. The music video begins with the girls, dressed in gauzy blue dresses, pretending to play invisible instruments. It pans out to reveal a galactic background, filled with floating chrome spheres and a rotating vortex of stars. The girls dance with mathematical precision. They form a line and arc their arms in perfect succession. The lyrics go:

By the time we are united

Beyond the time and space

I wonder if this planet?

Will be purified.

Gwen never released any outer-space-themed songs. That mantle was taken up by another bleach blonde and fellow Japanophile by the name of Lady Gaga, whose given first name, coincidentally, is Stefani (the two could be twins) and who became the next big thing with the release of her 2008 album The Fame. By that time, I had graduated from my first concert to awkward eighth grades dances, almost always tuned to the beat of “Poker Face” and “Just Dance.” In the big gym decorated with fairy lights, my classmates and I would sway in circles facing each other, staring from face to sweaty face, uncertain in our femininity, if that was even the right word. Eventually, the more bold among us would pair up and drift into the interior circle (where the chaperones couldn’t do a thing), enacting a carnal ritual which Morning Musume’s cheery choreography never reveals, though it pulses under the surface.

Five years later, Lady Gaga released her third studio album, Artpops. The cover, designed by artist Jeff Koons of balloon animal fame, features Gaga with a shiny blue sphere wedged between her legs, surrounded by fragments of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Gaga promoted the album as a cross between pop culture and high culture, an elevation of her music and a catapulting of her body into the realm of art.

By comparative metrics, Artpops flopped, with first week sales at less than a third of Born This Way’s. Critical opinion on the album is divided; some call it over-the-top and euphoric, while others find it relentless and exhausting.

While Artpops’ sales chart followed a downward trend, Gwen Stefani updated her Harajuku Lovers fragrance collection, giving it a new look and a new name: Pop Electric. The perfume bottles are the same bobble-headed figures of Love, Angel, Music, and Baby, but with what she calls a modernized design. In a 2014 interview with the Home Shopping Network, Gwen officially lexiconized “artpop” by using the word to describe her collection. This prompted an ecstatic tweet from Gaga: “I love you even more Gwen Stefani. Thank you for using ARTPOP as an adjective. It made me smile #ARTPOP.” The collection’s sales description reads, “Harajuku Lovers Pop Electric are inspired by modern street murals and sculpture, looking like they were formed in simple vinyl, dipped in molten, lustrous color scheme, then frozen in time as the metal drips over the doll’s body.” A full set sells for $200, retail. The scent of each perfume is still tailored to each Harajuku Girl, as if a perfume could capture the essence of a person.

But maybe all this is crying wolf. It’s been a decade, and Gwen regrets nothing about the Harajuku Girls. Maybe the Girls don’t have any regrets, either. For all I know, they could be making a killing on their former names; Gwen’s clothing line, L.A.M.B (Love, Angel, Music, Baby) can still be found on the occasional preteen at the shopping mall. And Lady Gaga, unlike Gwen, has succeeded in becoming popular in Japan. In 2013, wearing anime eye makeup and a bow bigger than her head, she participated in and won a kawaii-contest on Japanese television—defeating Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Japan’s current Decora queen bee. Maybe cultural translation has become easier since Gwen’s heyday in the summer of 2007. Maybe they’re doing the world a service. How many, like me, have listened to their music in the late afternoon, watching dust motes dancing in the light, imagining planets singing in their perpetual motion?

As for the immortal Tsunku: On April 4, 2015, he was invited onstage for the entrance ceremony at Kinki University, his alma mater. The new students were expecting him to sing some hit songs from Sharam Q. Instead he stood there for nearly a minute, saying not a word. Then a big monitor displayed a message: “I’ve chosen to live by throwing away my voice, the thing I had treasured most,” it read, “Regret would have no meaning. I will go forward from now on.” Tsunku’s vocal cords had been removed due to laryngeal cancer. While the audience looked on, he blinked under the blue stage lights, a tear shed or two, shy, smiling, silent.

Despite this setback, Kinki University was treated to a performance after all. When the message ended, Tsunku strummed a guitar, and his girls sang for him.

Winter 2014 - Trial

Last Rites: A Chinese Burial

I

   After my Grandfather died, he waited in line for one year. His ashes, inside a lacquered box, sat among the ashes of others in a cold concrete bunker nestled in the Chinese countryside. Each box bore a tiny black-and-white engraving of the deceased. The owner of the bunker kept track of burials by scrawling a name and date on the lids.

   A single light bulb hung from the ceiling. It was rigged to save electricity by shutting off when it sensed no movement. Whenever someone came in on funeral business, the bulb flickered on. Otherwise, the dead waited their turn in darkness.

PROPERTY RIGHTS

   There are seven million people living in Hong Kong, making it the fourth most densely populated city in the world. Its citizens are dying faster than ever, at numbers that have doubled since 1970. Forty thousand people now die each year from the standard gamut of reasons: drowning, old age, suicide, electrocution, severe allergies, traffic accidents, heartache, stress.

   A century ago, these 40,000 souls would have found eternal peace at the foot of some sacred, pine-forested mountain chosen for optimal feng shui. Such postmortem peace is now impossible, as most of this once-sacred land has been developed into condominiums or factories.

   The line between the yang world of the living and the yin world of spirits is vaguely drawn in Chinese theology (an amalgam of Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian beliefs). This line blurs more each year as millions of Chinese flock to live over the old bones of their ancestors, creating a literal juxtaposition of life and death.

   Property rights, for example, work for the dead in much the same way as for the living. In China, property exists in a state of perpetual leasehold. Whether a high rise or a hovel, residential property may be owned only for a period of 70 years. At the end of this period, the property is either re-leased or the hapless owners evicted.

   The dead, too, face the possibility of eviction. China’s most esteemed burying ground, Babaoshan (“??? Eight Treasure Mountain”) cemetery in Beijing, is not so much a holy mountain as a quiet gap in urban sprawl. Regardless, the upper echelon of Chinese society engages in bidding wars over its plots, which start at 70,000 yuan, or about 11,500 dollars for a 20-year lease. If a family’s fortune has turned by the end of those years, the formerly exalted government official or wealthy businessman is expelled from his resting place like a loaf of expired bread.

II

   Once Grandfather’s year in exile ended, our entire extended family packed into four Toyota cars and prepared to inter him in his (semi-)permanent resting place.

   It was raining that day. For a long while we drove into pine-covered hills, until an empty city emerged from between the trees. Tall black columns rose from stone steps which went up and up until they brushed the grey horizon. Blurry, colorless portraits stared at our small party from every direction.

   Cousin Jiang held up an umbrella to keep Grandfather dry. We climbed stone steps until we reached a small slab nestled between two columns. On it was Grandfather’s face, etched in ink. Elder Uncle Hu raised the slab with a tire jack, revealing an opening underneath.

   “Well—here it is,” Uncle said, hesitation in his voice.

SAFETY NETS

   Since Neolithic times, the Chinese have been obsessed with remembrance after death. To be forgotten by descendants is equivalent to hell. One’s ghost would enter the next world as a low-ranking personage, looked down upon by other spirits. To guard against this fate, the ancient Chinese buried their dead with plentiful provisions, including a large supply of the deceased’s favorite food and alcohol. In certain eras in ancient China, wealthy individuals would be buried with mementos, servants, or even wives.

   Today, wine is still poured into the grave-earth. Oranges, meat buns, and other delicacies are left on graves to fill the air with pungent smells of decomposition. Wax fruit, plastic jade bracelets, and paper Rolex watches are common offerings. A cigarette might be lit and left burning on the grave. Lung cancer is one of China’s leading causes of death.

   Despite strict rules governing food and alcohol provisions, religious requirements have long been lax. A wealthy family might have employed both a Taoist and a Buddhist priest to officiate the funeral, or invited an expert in the Confucian classics to preach filial piety as the dead were ushered away.

   Unlike their modern counterparts, the ancients enjoyed a short waiting period between death and spiritual peace. According to tradition, spirits remain on earth for seven days, after which they enter heaven, or hell, or are reincarnated. These seven days are fraught with danger for the family of the deceased. Traditions, some common, others unique to individual families, must be meticulously obeyed. Any small misstep—the presence of a mirror, the color red, the misuse of a title—might cause the spirit to transform into a vindictive ghost.

III

   “Turn around,” commanded Aunt Pearl.

   “What?”

   “Turn around. You can’t watch,” she repeated as she gripped my shoulders and steered me to another gravestone (marked “?? Zhang Xin”) a few feet away.

   “Why can’t I watch?” I protested, plucking at her lean fingers. “He’s my grandfather.”

   “Of course. And he was born in the year of the pig,” she said. For Aunt Pearl, no more explanation was needed. According to Chinese superstition, dogs and pigs have “?? mao dun,” instinctual conflict, and if I were to witness the interment, he would come back as a ghost and bring me bad luck.

   I glanced at my father, who stood near grandfather’s grave. He shook his head as if to say, Let it be.

   Sighing, I obeyed Aunt Pearl’s demand and spun around. She clicked her tongue with satisfaction and returned to tearing apart sheets of fake dollar bills. Each bill bore in clumsy English letters the logo “Hell Bank Notes” and the confident claim “guaranteed legal tender for spirits.” Later we would burn them on Grandfather’s grave to send him pocket money for trinkets and snacks in the other world.

   Uncle Hu grunted as he cleared debris from the grave. I scanned the other gravestones, which bore black-and-white portraits of mostly expressionless faces. I could tell the age of each person when he or she died. Most faces were old and lined. Every so often a young face peered out from the frame, with eyes black and cold.

   Aunt Pearl finished tearing the Hell Bank Notes. The pine trees rustled impatiently. Sounds slowed and faded, while the grey faces around me grew accusing and hostile. I felt a great desire to turn from them, to turn around, to look, to make sure my family was still behind me, to make sure they had not vanished into the other world and left me alone.

   A loud crack broke the quiet. I spun around in time to see the edge of a red lacquered box vanish under the stone slab, into darkness.

   We kowtowed in succession, three knocks each. When my turn came I could think only about the wet dark hole in which we had buried Grandfather. I kneeled dumbly on the cold pine-strewn ground until Aunt Pearl tugged at my arm.

   We set off firecrackers to frighten away evil spirits. They fizzled into the air and burst dully against the rain. Bangs echoed intrusively from column to column and suffocated among the pines.

   We squeezed into our four Toyotas before the echoes died. Uncle Hu drove the first car, his fingers pale against the steering wheel. We sped away and away from that empty stone city, none of us turning to look back.

HISTORIES

   Cremation was not always the norm in China. Although Buddhists regularly burned the bodies of their dead, other religious and ethnic groups considered cremation taboo. Tibetans, for example, believed only criminals should be burned. An auspicious Tibetan burial, known as Sky Burial, involved placing the body on a high mountain peak to be picked apart by vultures and the natural elements.

   In modern China, however, cremation has been law since 1956 when 151 communist party officials, including Chairman Mao Zedong, signed a Funeral Reformation proposal. Given the nearly half-billion Chinese deaths that occurred from the 1940s to 1960s, there was a simple logic to incineration.

   According to the China Funeral Association, modern China has a death count of over eight million people each year. Four million of these bodies are cremated, which brings the cremation rate to 52.7 percent. The Association would prefer 100 percent.

   At the Yishan Crematory, the workers are mostly middle-aged and balding. Ashes work their way under their fingernails, leaving the hands of handlers permanently black. The pollution that hangs as perpetual smog over China’s cities does not hold a candle to Yishan, a factory for processing the dead.

   Yishan is in Shanghai, a city of 14 million with a death rate of 100,000 people per year. Most of those 100,000 pass through the crematorium. Four hundred bodies a day are ferried by motorized lift to 24 incinerators. The incinerators belch toxic smoke into the air and into nearby neighborhoods, perpetuating some cosmic joke about the cycle of death.

   It is a most innovative facility. In previous years, blood drained from bodies was disposed through the sewer system. But the sheer volume of displaced blood eventually grew to become a health hazard. Yishan developed an embalming method that uses freezing instead of bloodletting to preserve bodies until they are ready for cremation.

   Many Yishan workers are kept busy digging graves or carving gravestones, but they never seem to keep up with demand. Some would-be customers resort to do-it-yourself mounds on the sides of railway tracks or on the hillsides of scenic preserves.

   Wealthy families have the option of circumventing the Yishan process altogether. Some send bodies abroad to be buried in the United States or Canada, taking advantage of various body shipping services that promise to deliver goods intact and in acceptable condition.

   With so many bodies going through the crematorium, mistakes do happen. Instead of servants or wives, some families burn a fire-resistant memento with the body. The object serves the dual purpose of comforting the soul of the dead and verifying the ashes’ former identity.

   According to the workers at Yishan, the funeral business is a business of life. They do whatever they can to smooth the post-death process for their customers.

IV

   In China, four (“? si”) is considered an unlucky number because it is phonetically similar to the word for “die.” The combination of four and eight (“?? si ba”) is even unluckier because it sounds like a curse - “?? die now.” Buildings often skip over the fourth floor and jump directly from three to five.

   Even in cemeteries, where the dead already reign, one rarely sees a fourth burial terrace or a tombstone numbered four.

FINAL DECISIONS

   The combination of Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian thought in China complicates end-of-life decisions.

   Taoism urges harmony with the Tao (“? the Way”). Death is a part of life, the flow of the universe. In dying, one returns to the primordial void.

   Buddhism urges freedom from suffering. To accept death is to accept the futility of suffering and to ease the suffering of caretakers. Life is transient and impermanent, and a single death has no effect on the scheme of the cosmos. Besides, there is always the chance one may be reborn as a being higher than human.

   Confucianism urges communal harmony, especially within a family. Followers of Confucian thought think constantly of their ancestors, their children, and their relations, however distantly related. If one person’s sickness creates discord and suffering for the family, it might be better to end the problem at the source. And if one’s relations make proper preparations, death and the journey that follows will pass like a dream.

   Despite the diversity of Chinese beliefs, the overarching message they impress on the Chinese psyche seems to be: Let go.

V

   “I can’t go,” declared Grandmother.

   “Mother,” said Aunt Pearl with impatience, “Not this again.”

   “I won’t go,” Grandmother repeated.

   “You must go,” said Aunt Pearl, “We buried the old father last May, and now we must go pay our respects. It’s the one-year burial anniversary. You’re his wife.”

   “I don’t care. I’m not going to that damned place.”

   “Dear mother, for heaven’s sakes, why not?”

   “Because you saw how he died,” hissed Grandmother, “Feeble, in his bed, with his bedpans. Such indignity. Smoking a cigarette until his last moments. Selfish. He was the type of man who kept his best thoughts for himself. When Hu was sent off to labor in the boonies, did he raise a finger? No! I was the one who walked miles for my son—your husband. But when Little Sister went to Beijing for college, who took a vacation in the big city to visit every year? Him, of course. The old fogey was selfish and self-absorbed. I was the one who kept this family together. How dare he leave me so suddenly, in that way, with such—such indignity. I will not go visit him. He should be the one to come visit me. He should be the one—he should be the one—”

   “Don’t say that,” exclaimed Aunt Pearl, aghast, “How would you feel if he really came back to haunt you? You’d have a heart attack, and we’d be burying you next!”

   “Oh, I would have some choice words for him,” said Grandmother.

   “Oh—dear!” Aunt Pearl quickly made a bow to Grandfather’s home shrine in the corner of the kitchen. The grey face in his portrait remained impassive. Uncle Hu, standing silent by the door, looked at his watch.

   With an air of finality, Grandmother sat down on a kitchen chair and repeated, “I’m not budging. I’m too old. I waited so many years, in bad weather, for him. He can stand to wait a few more years for me.”

   Aunt Pearl wavered between Grandmother and Uncle Hu like an indecisive bee. Finally she exclaimed, “Ai-ya! Have it your way, then. Don’t blame me if he comes back and haunts you for being a faithless wife,” and then, with genuine anxiety, “Mother, if you still insist on your blasphemy, make sure you hang a frond of palm and a clove of garlic over the door. You can buy palm fronds for cheap at the fourth street market. Oh, and the garlic must be extra pungent. That is the only way to ward away ghosts.”

   Aunt Pearl shepherded the entire family out the door. On the street waited four gleaming Toyotas, the same ones we used last year. As I climbed into a back seat, I looked back over my shoulder into Grandmother’s kitchen window.

   Grandmother stood in the middle of the room for a moment, arms folded, watching us go. Then, as the door of the last Toyota clicked shut, her entire body relaxed. Perhaps it was a trick of the tinted windows, but the lines of grief she had accumulated in the past few months seemed to melt from her face. Her lips formed a slow, secret smile.

   She sat down cross-legged, in the fashion of a small girl, in front of Grandfather’s shrine. With tenderness, she picked up his black-and-white portrait and placed upon it a single kiss.

Fall 2014

Portraits of Mao

*Cryogenic*

There is a building somewhere in the bowels of Beijing, beneath the gimlet sky and jungle streets. It is probably not too far from Tiananmen Square, where thousands of tourists scurry under the eyes of pimpled plainclothes policemen. On even the smoggiest of Beijing days, the air inside remains cool and dry. There are probably no windows and no indication of this building’s meaning or purpose.

This building holds national treasures of the People’s Republic of China, of no monetary value, yet zealously guarded: over 50 years’ worth of 15 by 20 foot canvases, all painted over in white. Each one-and-a-half-ton canvas was carted here in the dead of night, a monumental secret. To destroy one is a criminal act. If you were to scrape away the paint, a damaged but recognizable image would emerge: the face of Chairman Mao Zedong.

Like a game of spot-the-difference, each portrait would seem identical—receding hair, plump cheeks, mole on the chin—save for some slight detail. In some, Mao’s face would look stern and fatherly, as if disciplining an errant child. Recent portraits would present a flushed, benevolent Mao with a Mona Lisa smile. The earliest portraits would have him donning an octagonal cap and coarse woolen jacket.

All the portraits share one certainty. Starting from the first in 1950, each has hung for one year, more or less, over the gate to Tiananmen Square in Beijing. A small handful have been assaulted by rotten fruit, black paint, and even fire. During the Tiananmen Square protests of 1984, one was pelted with three ink-filled chicken eggs. Whether it survives its year-long tenure or not, each canvas comes to the same end. It is taken down, painted over in white, and placed in storage for an imagined future, when the country might need it again.

*Lifework*

If the storage building is a graveyard—a cryogenic vault—then another building tucked away in a corner of the Forbidden City is a birthplace. It is called “the metal shack” by those in the know. Built in the early 1970s, the shack is fireproof and would be air-proof if not for the vents near the door. Despite its utilitarian appearance, the metal shack is an art studio.

Here, Ge Xiaoguang has worked since 1976. According to rumor, the government pays Ge a salary of 250 dollars every month to lead a team of artists who paint China’s political leaders, from past heroes to modern luminaries. His main and most important job is duplicating the Tiananmen portrait of Chairman Mao, so that it may be replaced every September. Ge boasts that his nearly 40 years of practice allow him to complete the portrait in only 50 days.

“It is still hard to get him right, because it is more than just another piece of art,” he says. “Every year I try to make the painting better. This has been and will always be my most important creation.”

The official No. 4 Standard Photograph of Mao Zedong, owned by the state-operated New China News Agency, is Ge’s blueprint. He makes a few modifications. The official photograph is monochrome, so Ge remakes Mao in ruddy technicolor, aglow with a hearty red blush.

Ge analyzes the portrait’s pose meticulously. If Chairman Mao were to face straight forward, the portrait would lack dynamism and depth. So Ge turns Mao’s face slightly to the side. Not too far, however, for both ears must always remain visible. One of Ge’s predecessors was banished to a rural district to work as a carpenter, his punishment for painting only one visible ear. Authorities thought the arrangement might imply that the Chairman was but halfhearted in his attention to the voice of the people.

Nor were their fears entirely unfounded. Reports circulated of a visiting schoolboy, who pointed at the Tiananmen portrait and shouted, “Look! Chairman Mao has no ear!”

Some days, Ge ventures forth from the metal shack and into Tiananmen Square. He stands on a scaffold and works directly on the currently displayed portrait. Its giant size makes it impossible to take in at a close quarters, constantly compelling him to descend from the scaffold to view it from a hundred feet away. While he perches on the scaffold, Ge sweeps the painting with a fan brush to produce an airbrushed quality. Mao’s face glows jovially through the canvas.

*Workshop*

Ge was once a protégé. Now he’s the only one of his kind. Once, dozens of Beijing art students studied the art of Mao portraiture. His image was in constant demand. It hung in schools, workplaces, and factories. It was pasted onto banners, buttons, and badges.

From the years 1964–1976, Wang Guodong—a recluse who gave no interviews, and of whom no public photographs exist—was the only official painter of Chairman Mao. In his youth, Wang had been the errant painter who gave Mao only one ear. Banished by the Red Guard to a remote framing factory, he was forced to construct picture frames. But after two years in exile, Wang reclaimed his official title and kept it for two more decades.

In 1975 government authorities, perhaps anticipating Wang’s approaching old age, demanded that he take on apprentices. Wang selected ten Beijing art students—including a 21-year-old Ge Xiaoguang—more for their political reliability than their artistic talent. From the moment of their selection onward, they studied only political portraiture: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and most of all, Mao. Even with such bounds on their creativity, disparities in talent emerged. Some, like Ge, excelled. Others, it seemed, would never be able to capture Mao’s spirit. Their color palette was too yellow and sickly or their brushstrokes too crude.

Despite the apprentices’ varying levels of aptitude, orders poured in from all over the country. Factory-style, the apprentices painted non-stop. Their sentiment was not creative. They viewed themselves as art workers, rather than artists. Like interchangeable parts, not a single portrait from Wang’s factory was ever signed with a name.

By the 1980s, as China entered its great economic revolution, the demand for Mao’s image had waned. Bicycles gave way to cars, caps gave way to blue jeans, little red books were cast aside for chat rooms. Mao’s face fell out of fashion as brand name logos became de rigueur.

Excepting Ge Xiaoguang, Wang’s apprentices turned elsewhere. The hand-drawn boldness of their propaganda style translated well to the world of advertising. Instead of replicating Mao, they drew movie posters, cosmetics labels, commercials, magazines.

By the time Mao portraits had become passé, Wang Guodong had already retired. He relinquished his brush in 1976, the year of Mao Zedong’s death, for the first time (even through his years at the framing factory, Wang had gone on painting). In 1976, for the first and only time in history, a black-and-white photograph replaced the technicolored portrait over Tiananmen, in an expression of mourning.

*Chopping Block*

In June 2006, online chat rooms across China exploded over the alleged mistreatment of a faded, gray, gilt-framed 1950 portrait of Mao. The painting, an early model for the larger one in Tiananmen, had long been kept under wraps by its owner, an anonymous Chinese-American collector. In June, the state-controlled Huachen Auction Company announced the painting would go up at a Beijing auction for an estimated 120,000 dollars.

“How dare they do such a thing,” wrote one user online. “If they sold Mao’s portrait today, they will auction off Tiananmen Square tomorrow!” Huachen Auction Company refused to comment, but quietly withdrew the portrait.

At a 2014 Sotheby’s auction, a 1977 portrait of Mao by Andy Warhol sold for about 12 million dollars—18 times the price it fetched when it was last up for auction in June 2000. The painting shows Mao with a yellow sun-halo over his face, casting his eyes and left side in a deep, inky shadow. His jacket is glossed in crimson.

Warhol often painted Mao: in green and blue and red, with clown makeup, or Marilyn Monroe-style. For some reason, all of Warhol’s portraits show Mao from an angle that reveals only one ear. It is unknown whether Warhol chose to imitate Wang Guodong’s failed portrait, or if Warhol fabricated his own portrait of Mao from existing images. Knowingly or not, he had depicted the Chairman as a bloody one-eared Van Gogh.

*Novelty*

Warhol’s repetitions of Mao are far outstripped by those of Ge Xiaoguang’s former peers. In an age of computer-manufactured graphics, these political art workers’ hand-drawn skills are out of fashion yet again. So they’ve returned to their roots, creating novelty items and nostalgic propaganda. Iterations of Mao now appear on bookmarks, posters, pins, playing cards, and liquor bottles.

A restaurant on the outskirts of Beijing called The East is Red goes a step further, repackaging the Cultural Revolution as a dinner theater. Giant black-and-red socialist-realist murals and stenciled portraits of Mao cover the restaurant’s walls. Waiters dressed in Red Guard costumes scamper between tables, while entertainers toting plastic rifles serenade customers with revolutionary songs like “March of the Revolutionary Youth” and “I Love Tiananmen.”

Wedding parties, birthdays, and reunions crowd the massive concrete atrium. Old ladies stand and wave miniature red flags, tears in their eyes. Banquet tables groan under the weight of dishes with translated English titles like “a peasant family is happy” (root vegetables and steamed bread), “recalls past suffering the food” (grain with sand or hard millet), and a speciality from Mao’s home province, “Hunan earth, Hunan passion” (corn cakes stuffed with wild nettle greens).

Younger customers, a generation removed from the Revolution, view the restaurant as an entertainment, akin to a Tudor-themed bar in England. “People in my generation barely ever hear or read anything about the Cultural Revolution, so restaurants like this are really fun for us,” says a young patron. “Today’s China feels so cold and detached compared to the land my grandparents lived in.”

For older customers, verdicts are mixed. “The first time I came here,” one says, “I was frightened. Sometimes, when everyone was singing, I felt like maybe the bad times were coming back. Maybe this could happen again. But then some songs made me so happy, too.” The performers onstage belt out rousing verses, “One after another following the party, smashing the evil of the old world! The East is red, the sun is rising, China has birthed a Mao Zedong.”

As restaurants dish out Mao-era specialities, Mao’s original portraitists and newcomers continue to churn out images for companies with nostalgic names like Red Years (a playing card manufacturer) and Red Star (a hard liquor brand). On city streets, Mao impersonators of varying levels of believability (some are women) pose for photos with tourists, like the costumed superheroes of Times Square.

*Posterity*

It is unknown whether Ge Xiaoguang will retire, whether he has selected an apprentice to succeed him, or whether he is even the real painter behind the Tiananmen Square portraits. Ge may simply be a photogenic face authorities have chosen to represent the artist, when the “real painter” is really an assemblage of dozens of interchangeable art workers.

But Ge does look right when placed next to Mao’s portrait. If he is the artist, then his years of work have transformed him into a convincing double of his subject, save for the lack of a trademark mole on the chin. Ge’s receding hairline follows the same pattern, his round cheeks glow with the same jovial flush, his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth possess something of the portrait’s keen benevolence.

Of previous official portraitists, little is left but a handful of faceless names: Zhou Lingzhao, Zhang Zhenshi, Wang Guodong. Unlike them, Ge Xiaoguang has become something of a minor Beijing celebrity. Walking the streets near Tiananmen, he is often recognized by passersby. The painter and the portrait have converged.

A picture exists of the painter that shows him standing on his scaffold, facing the Mao portrait with his back turned to the photographer. It’s a closeup shot, and all we can see of Mao are his eyes. At close quarters, they look bittersweet. Between them stands the artist—half turned, head tilted, lifting his brush to add one more stroke.

Faye Yan Zhang

Faye Yan Zhang

Archived Notes

Fall 2016

American Dream

Features

Winter 2015 - Possession

Full Circle: (Exotic) Odysseys Through (Oriental) Rainforests on (Outlawed) Tour Buses

Summer 2015

Harajuku Days

Winter 2014 - Trial

Last Rites: A Chinese Burial

Fall 2014

Portraits of Mao

Poetry

Winter 2016 - Danger

Mirror, Mirror

Summer 2016

Tangerine Moon