Professor Xu Weixin in his studio.
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"It all began at Beida." A somber visit to Peking University.
The entrance to the school, and its new name
The hospital across the street.
Wanting only the best for Harris Binbin.
A happy dad and his daughter's future fellow students.
Air conditioning installed.
I interviewed two brave, bold artists in Beijing, Xu Weixin and Gao Qiang. I owe thanks to Dr. Rongfen Wang for putting me in touch with Professor Xu, I owe thanks to Professor Xu for putting me in touch with Mr. Gao, and I owe thanks to Yuan Yuan, known as “Kitty,” Professor Xu’s student and assistant, for translating for both.
I didn’t interview Professor Xu and Mr. Gao because they had any information about the murder of Bian Zhongyun. They didn’t. I took the opportunity of interviewing two artists to get other opinions on the concept of individual responsibility that had been uppermost in my mind since my first interview with Mr. Wang.
Professor Xu’s oeuvre is the victims of the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Gao’s oeuvre is the perpetrators. Their work is consistent with the approach of other Chinese. Dr. Youqin Wang has devoted herself to keeping the memory of the victims alive. She has painstakingly recreated as much about their lives and how and where they died as she can. Professor Xu has created a remarkable series of paintings of the victims based on photographs from the period. Symbolically, he has enlarged them to the size of Mao’s portrait that hangs at the entry to the Forbidden City. Among those he has memorialized is Bian Zhongyun.
Mr. Gao identifies the same perpetrator in his work as did Mr. Wang and the Chinese government, Mao.
Professor Xu is vice dean of the Renmin University School of Arts. We met in his studio. He had just returned from an exhibition of his work in New York. His studio could have been that of a New York based artist. Large and spacious to accommodate the size of his paintings the studio was well appointed with a modern desk, chair and computer, and a comfortable black sofa. The floors were blonde wood, natural light pored in through the windows and the artificial lighting maximized the ability to paint and see.
Professor Xu is a man of dignity and courage. He is charismatic and energetic. He is also a philosophical man. As an artist he undoubtedly has been asked the question, “Why are you doing this?” more than I ever will, and we each asked the other. Professor Xu explained that five or six years prior he had begun to interpret his thought on the individual. He had chosen individuals from the Cultural Revolution as subjects because he wanted to “transfer individual memory to collective memory.” This is consistent with Dr. Youqin Wang’s motivation in creating her website “The Cultural Revolution Memorial.” I asked Professor Xu how he had chosen the particular individuals that he had. He said that he first chosen those who had suffered.
At lunch he asked me The Question. My answer was, “Justice” and I briefly explained the importance that identifying and punishing the perpetrators has in American and international jurisprudence. Professor Xu vigorously nodded his head and pointed at me in agreement. I felt very comfortable talking with Professor Xu about the “meaning” of what I do and the meaning of his work, and felt that he understood better than most.
In mid-afternoon I went to Peking University. So much had happened there in the twentieth century. The May Fourth movement, an intense period of self-examination, began there. The Spring 1989 protests for democracy began there and many of the university's students were murdered in the culmination of the protests on June 4th. And I had always remembered a sentence from Mao’s Last Revolution, that whatever the causes of the Cultural Revolution, “It all began at Beida.”
When I get interested in a piece of art, or in a particular artist, sometimes I will read all that I can about the subject before I go to the museum so that I can better understand. But sometimes I deliberately go without reading beforehand. Art can be “felt,” perhaps more than it can be understood. I went to Beida without a guide or a map, I hadn’t read anything beforehand, I had no idea where I was going; I just walked around and felt.
The campus was deathly quiet. There was plenty of green space around a pond but no one was enjoying the tranquility. Indeed, rather than tranquility, there seemed an air of abandonment. The flora at water’s edge grew wild; it had not been trimmed in a long time. The water was dead still, its surface neither rippled by fish beneath or fowl above. The pathways were careworn, the buildings looked as unused as those in the Forbidden City, and much more in need of a coat of paint. I had never been on a university campus so devoid of energy, of life. Maybe the students were on break; maybe I had stumbled onto a part of the campus that was going to be rebuilt, but it was a somber place and my thoughts of what had happened here were somber and I walked around feeling somber.
We then took a taxi to the school. The former Girls School Attached to Beijing Normal University is shoehorned into a neighborhood not far from The Forbidden City. The school abuts a tree-lined street whose leaves and branches shelter it protectively. The school has been renamed; it is now the Experimental School Attached to Beijing Normal University. The hospital where the murderers had wheeled Bian Zhongyun’s lifeless body in a basket, was right across the street, just as Hu Jie dramatically showed it in Though I am Gone.
I wanted to go onto the grounds but the school was gated with a manned guard station. Reacting rather than thinking we decided to just go up to the guard station and ask where the admissions office was. The guard pointed the way and let us pass. I no longer felt somber. Although I was on a murder scene I felt the adrenalin rush of being sneaky. But Carmen and I now had to come up with something to say when we got to the admissions office and we had only the time it took for us to cross the basketball court to come up with it. Inevitably we bumbled.
I had hoped to meet the principal, a Song Binbin supporter, but only got as far as the vice-principal. We walked into the office and were greeted by a surprised receptionist. We made her understand that we wanted admissions information. She summoned the vice-principal to help with communication. We told the vice-principal that we were American lawyers and our law firm was transferring us to Beijing. No, we were in-house lawyers for an American corporation that was transferring us to their Beijing office. We said that we had a fifteen, no, a thirteen year-old daughter who would be in need of a good school and we had heard a lot about this school.
The vice principal explained that they couldn’t accommodate students who didn’t speak Chinese but we quickly assured her that Harris Binbin spoke fluent Chinese. With a quizzical look she asked us if she had been born in China. Yes, I said, we had adopted her. When she was ten years old, interjected Carmen helpfully, thus enabling little Binbin to have learned Chinese as a youngster. Anyway, we really had to run, did they have some literature that we could look over and take back to show our daughter? They did and gave us two impressive brochures. I leafed through one and saw a photograph of Bian in a section that I gathered was on the different principals who had served the school. The vice-principal invited us to come back in December with Binbin so that everyone could meet everyone. We said that we would.
We asked if it would be all right if we took a few pictures around campus to show our daughter. “Take as many as you want,” the vice principal said. We shook hands and thanked them and I gave the vice principal my Public Occurrences business card.
Back at the hotel I told Carmen to go up to our room without me; I was going to stop in the business center briefly to check email. When I got up to the room Carmen told me that the air-conditioning had been fixed. Such good news, the engineer had fixed it. She then told me to come around the side of the bed. There was a plastic wastebasket filled with melting ice. One on the other side of the bed too.
