A VISIT TO THE FUTURE

Can Westerners understand China? We had better try. They’re winning! I think the whole inscrutable thing is to keep the West off balance. If we can’t figure out what’s going on in China, that’s advantage China, a big competitive edge. So they draw their language in pictures, using thousands of characters while we get by on 26, they sort of sing instead of talking deadpan like we do, and they write fortune cookies we can’t understand. 

 

Even worse they’re hardcore communists and the world’s greatest capitalists at the same time. It’s almost like the Chinese created the whole concept of being Chinese just to confuse us, like Axl Rose created the whole concept of Chinese Democracy to cover up that he couldn’t finish the album.

 

With a population of over 1.3 billion, China is probably way too big to understand anyway. It’s nearly five times bigger than the US and the US is already too hard to understand because it’s far too mixed up. China is worse. China is more like a planet than a country. They have dozens of cities with populations of more than a million that we’ve never even heard of, and the ones we have heard of are hard to keep track of because they keep changing the names. First it’s Peking, then Peiping, then Beijing. They’re trying to mix us up, just like in Italy. Just when I get used to Leghorn, it’s Livorno. 

 

But the Chinese are even sneakier than the Italians. I could accept Luchino Visconti, Bernardo Bertolucci and Pier Paolo Pasolini as communists, even though they were glamorous, but the Chinese tell us they are communists and then they beat the hell out of us in business and finance, the very essence of capitalism. The rich commies dress in Parisian designer clothes, they drive Mercedes-Benz sedans and mix their Château Lafite with Coca-Cola right under the shadow of Mao’s statue. Forget the Little Red Book, now they have Chinese Vogue.

 

But even then it’s not simple. The Beijing Administration for Industry and Commerce has now ordered the removal of words such as “luxury”, “royal”, “supreme” and “high class” from billboards. This suggests that they intend to disguise the workers in designer clothes and develop discreet conspicuous consumption. Pretty soon it will be “People’s Prada” and the Great Leap Forward by Versace.

 

The economy of China is the world’s fastest-growing economy and it will soon surpass the US. In the US we still buy a lot of stuff, maxing out our credit cards, but in China they produce, produce, produce and they don’t buy anything of ours, except Buicks, bootleg Michael Jackson CDs and millions of pounds of chicken feet. How did they pull off this miracle? One answer is that China is run more like a major corporation than any other modern state.

 

Having only one political party it doesn’t have to worry about the wasted motions involved in maintaining even a token opposition. In the US and in Europe we have political gridlock. The main agenda of one party is opposing whatever the other proposes. And no long-term projects can be accomplished because leadership changes every few years, before things get done. In China, everybody is pulling their oars the same way, to the same beat. You have the board of directors (ie the Communist Party) and you have the CEO, and everybody understands the flow chart. The Chinese are proving that capitalism doesn’t really lend itself to democracy. Business loves cheap labour and China still abounds in that, which is why wealthy American businessmen use their tax breaks to create jobs. (In China and India.)

 

I visited Beijing not long ago to attend an art event sponsored by a major luxury manufacturer. I didn’t know what to expect from China, but when I got there I definitely felt like I had travelled into the future. I had an inescapable feeling that, some day, everywhere would be more like this. More dense, more crowded, more uniform, more high rise to high rise, horizon to horizon.  Sometimes it even felt like another planet, as when I found myself staring at the sun through a dense orange cloud and feeling as if I were on the surface of Venus.

 

To get to the Great Wall you must drive about 70km from the centre of Beijing, but you never actually leave Beijing. It’s city all the way. They might as well call it the Great Wall of Beijing. And the Great Wall is the Great Mall. When you arrive, you are immediately taken to the Great Wall Coffee Shop, which also houses the Great Wall Gift Shop, which also contains an expensive antique store that contains absolutely no antiques. Which is not to say that the giant Buddha replica antiques aren’t impressive; they might be just the thing for your mistress’s penthouse on the 56th floor in Guangzhou.

  

When you get up on the Great Wall you realise that every inch of it is covered with graffiti – scratch-itti, actually – in Chinese characters. I wanted to write SAMO©, but I couldn’t find space for a tag. Probably fortunate. Standing on the wall, looking in the opposite direction to Beijing, you realise that it was built to keep out the Mongols and the Manchurians, but looking back towards Beijing you realise: “It didn’t work.” Everybody got in. Everybody. And this wall won’t keep them in. It’s just another fake antique, and it’s not really visible from space.

 

My guide at the Great Wall said the structure is visible from space, which is not really true, although that was widely believed in the 19th century, even before anyone went up to check. Instead of arguing with her I simply stated that the Long Island Expressway is also visible from space. She also told me that, no matter what I said, the antiques in the gift shop were real antiques, although I believe she meant that they were real simulated antiques. Sort of like vegetarian duck.

           

You would think that the oldest civilization on earth would have good antique stores, wouldn’t you? But they don’t. We bought the antiques back when we were selling them opium, and now the rich guys are buying them all back and putting them in their mistress’s high rises. You need some groovy ancient drawers to keep the rhinoceros horn and tiger penis in. My hosts in China, after showing me around extensively, said that I had free time and asked what I would like to do. I said I’d like to go antique shopping. They looked suspicious, but they got me a car and driver and sent me to what I was told was the antique district of Beijing, where I saw a great many brand-new antiques. I did find some cute Mao porcelains and Mao alarm clocks, but everything else seemed to have been made and distressed quite recently. I did find a cool fake-antique fake-ivory opium pipe, but I couldn’t find any fake-antique opium. But I suppose I wouldn’t smoke opium in China anyway. If they’re going to make toothpaste out of ethylene glycol antifreeze, what are they going to put in the opium? My Mao alarm clock, with an arm that holds up the Little Red Book, is the real deal however.

 

I did have better luck with peking (or Beijing) duck, and either way it was awesome, even better than at Mr Chow in New York, London or LA. I prefer the way the Chinese eat it, with sugar sprinkled on it. I thought I would eat everything I was offered in China, but I found I could not bring myself to eat sea cucumber, which is considered a great delicacy. Sea cucumbers are actually nothing like cucumbers, being more like slugs. They are animals so dumb they are almost plants. They creep across the ocean floor, emitting hormonal messages, although since they have no brains, what the messages say we can only imagine. (Horny?) sea cucumbers have an unusual body formed of collagen that they can loosen or tighten at will (although where the will resides, who knows?), allowing them to liquefy themselves to squeeze through the tiniest openings and then reform. No doubt, some day, they will be used extensively in night-repair creams. But I suspect the sea cucumber (known as sea ginseng in China) is really prized as a delicacy because, like most delicacies there, it is supposed to be an aphrodisiac. When threatened, the sea cucumber stiffens up and shoots water. This is not an appetising image, and I have enough troubles already.

 

It might take me a few more visits to China before I figure out how the world’s biggest and currently most dynamic nation will save itself from a terrible black hole-like entropy, but in the meantime, I do kind of like it there. I wouldn’t want to live there, but it’s a great place to visit. They have some really outstanding new buildings, like the campus of the recent Olympics, with the outstanding Herzog & de Meuron Bird’s Nest, the Beijing Olympic basketball stadium (architect Gu Yonghui) and the swimming stadium, the Watercube (PTW Architects). I was so taken with the towering Rem Koolhaas CCTV headquarters, nicknamed by locals “big boxer shorts”, that I snuck a snapshot of it despite being told not to. (I felt somewhat protected by my OMA hard hat.) Anyway, it’s a building as great as the programming emanating from it is bad. As with much contemporary architects you know it was built that way just because they could. Only more so. I don’t mind architecture in your face if it’s that in your face. Mussolini would have been jealous.

 

Unfortunately although they seem quite able to produce extraordinary new buildings, the Chinese don’t seem to understand the value of the hutongs, the ancient one-story brick communities that they’ve been tearing down to build forests of inferior new towers. The hutongs were the world’s first housing projects, some dating to the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Although some are still maintained as tourist attractions, most are being demolished. Which is probably why they don’t have any antiques. I hope the Chinese never wind up owning Connecticut, but you have to give them points for not being sentimental.

 

Anyway, some Chinese do realise that the hutongs are valuable, as is the past, and that maybe enough tall buildings are enough. One of them was an artist I met, Huang Rui, a former dissident (who lived and worked in Japan for years when he was not welcome in China) who built his big beautiful studio from the bricks he purchased from a demolished hutong. Huang Rui is a wonderful artist who has made wonderful pop paintings of the labels from official Chinese government liquor bottles and he has a musical ping pong table in his studio.

 

I am not a huge fan of the Chinese art scene, since it seems to be mainly another luxury strategy, boosted to give the Chinese rich (and exotic speculators) the chance to buy Chinese, but there are some artists in China who are the real deal. Artists such as Huang Rui and Ai Weiwei, who push against the immoveable, making art out of old-fashioned culture hero instinct.   

What you get a lot in China are impressive mass things. What you don’t get a lot are impressive individual things. The mass seems so abstract and immovable and I love anyone who pushes against the immoveable, because I believe where there’s a will, there’s a Weiwei. And while Western art has entered a period of astonishing market-driven entropy, the sheer life-and-death nature of genuine art, literature and film in China gives it an inspiring quality that we may catch on to sooner rather than later in the West, when we realise that we are in a life-or-death situation, too. 

www.barbican.org.uk

by Glenn O’Brien


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