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 nor 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.
