XI’AN, China — This year, in a drive to promote awareness of China’s national heritage, the government introduced a free-admission policy at the country’s public museums. Officially the cultural establishment greeted the news with smiles.
But the look of anxious exasperation on the face of a curator watching crowds of schoolchildren swarm through a gallery of ancient ceramics here on a recent morning told a different story. They touched every exposed surface, leaned on glass cases and smeared them with fingerprints. Body contact and the art experience seemed to be inseparable.
A running joke is that once only a few people came to these institutions to see the art; now many will come, not for the art but for the air-conditioning.
Such are the growing pains of museums in a country that feels both older and newer than any place on the planet. Archaeology pushes its history ever deeper into the past; a racing market economy makes Chinese-ness a mutable identity, under continuous revision. The country and its art institutions seem caught in the tension between self-images: the sovereign civilization apart on one hand, the ambitious scrambler in the global game on the other.
Or so it feels to an art critic on a monthlong visit here, taking the measure of the Chinese art world against a panorama of devastating earthquakes and hectic preparations for the Olympic Games.
China’s museums come in all sizes and types, from the majestic Shanghai Museum to shabby rooms in small-town Confucian temples. The artifacts are fabulous; what looks from afar like a dim little nothing display can leave you floored. (Contemporary-art museums are for the most part in a separate, still shaky category, an amalgam of public and corporate, for-hire affairs and collectors’ vanity showcases.)
Yet most art is an unsettled category in China — “cultural relics” is the preferred term — and museums have complicated uses. They provide aesthetic delectation to be sure, but also moral education, pop entertainment and political propaganda. In a country that, culturally speaking, always has one foot on the gas and the other on the brake, art museums tend to be both innovative and conservative. They’re postmodern or premodern but skip the in between.
There are exceptions. The new city museum in Suzhou is a Modernist showcase par excellence, pitched to international consumption. Designed by I. M. Pei, who spent part of his youth in that city of canals and scholars’ gardens, its clean lines and cream-and-gray architecture would look equally at home in Paris or New York. So would the spartan galleries, which exude art-speaks-for-itself Western taste and are as suited to party giving as art viewing.
From outside, the splendid Shanxi Museum in Taiyuan looks far more exotic to the Western eye. Its inverted-pyramid shape is a kind of Chinese version of chinoiserie, like the New Agey mood music that emanates from fake rocks in public parks here. Yet the installation of archaic ritual bronzes will feel familiar to anyone who frequents the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s display of the same type of material in New York, so similar is the presentation.
Almost shocking in their fierce, ponderous delicacy, they are joined here by complete sets of caldrons for ancestral offerings, carillons of giant bells and entire herds of fantastically fashioned beasts. The sight of them lined up in spotless cases, as if in a celestial department store, is an experience of formal perfection that an art specialist dreams about and comes to China for.
The History of Chinese Art
But it is not necessarily a typical experience here. With the goal of emphasizing the history over the art, other museums reject this “pure” form-as-content mode. Instead they emphasize not the precious object but the glorious, time-honored civilization that produced it. And in a country that has no encyclopedic world-culture museums, or even significant pan-Asian museums, that civilization is almost invariably China’s.
To do so they call on exhibition devices — dioramas, stage props, ambient sound, films, interactive digital displays, extensive interpretive texts — often associated with museums of natural science, ethnology and archaeology. In utterly un-Met style, for example, the Shanxi Museum sets its magnificent group of Buddhist sculptures in a gallery of rough-textured, faux-sandstone walls honeycombed with niches.
The intent is to evoke the famous rock-cut grottoes at Yungang elsewhere in Shanxi Province and visually to reconnect a religious art to its original concept. While a handful of progressive art institutions in the West have experimented with this sort of approach, it is routine in museums in China.
Even less acceptable from a Western viewpoint is the casual approach some Chinese museums take toward exhibiting copies of artworks in place of originals. Fragile works that cannot survive gallery exposure may be represented by photographs. And when a well-known piece of art is unavailable, it may be considered preferable to display a copy — perhaps not acknowledged as such — rather than disappoint visitors.
One kind of art in short supply, except at major museums like the Shanghai Museum and the Palace Museum at the Forbidden City in Beijing, is old masterpiece ink-and-brush scroll painting. Its absence may seem odd, considering that for centuries traditional scholarship has celebrated painting and calligraphy as China’s peak aesthetic achievements. An explanation lies at least partly in politics.
The Political Aesthetic
In 1949 the Chinese Nationalist Army, retreating from Communist forces, packed up vast chunks of the art holdings amassed by the late Qing emperors in the Forbidden City and shipped the material to Taiwan, where it remains today as the National Palace Museum.
With that, China lost the cream of its national collection, most notably the ink-and-brush landscape paintings that defined its elite painting tradition. They were the classical canon, China’s power pictures. One might call them its equivalent to the Elgin Marbles, a Greek national treasure taken to England, although the comparison is inexact, and China would almost certainly not agree. To do so would be to acknowledge that Taiwan is no longer part of China, a concession that it refuses to make.
Art is about power; certainly it always has been in China, with its ancient tradition of collecting and connoisseurship. The power to say “mine”; the power to control and manipulate images and ideas in the present; the power to claim the touchstone authority of the past; the power to advertise power. So it was only natural that, after 1949, the need for a new art canon would arise. And it would be built on art that was readily at hand, meaning art that was in China’s earth, which archaeologists redoubled their efforts to reveal.
Ritual bronzes, long revered as links to imperial China’s mythic beginnings, became renewed emblems of national pride. Sculptures of a more perishable kind gained attention. The most abundant were from the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-906), earthen funerary figures of big-haired court beauties, snoozy servants and strutting demigods who populated a vivid “Upstairs, Downstairs” vision of the afterlife. The most spectacular figures, though, were the earliest: thousands of slightly larger than life-size terra-cotta soldiers made in the third century B.C. and buried at the tomb of the first Chinese emperor near Xi’an in central China.
The first figures were discovered by farmers in 1974. Today the Terra Cotta Museum that stands on the site is one of the country’s most popular tourist spots. It is still an active excavation, but it is also an art museum, an anthropology museum, a research center, a recreation center, a theater, a nationalist monument and a theme park. And like any theme park it gives you lots to do.
After lingering over the soldiers lined up in their original earthen trenches, you can watch a filmed re-enactment (wrap-around screen, thundering score) of the imperial tomb being built, then weave your way to lunch through a live army of Chinese tourists in baseball caps. This leaves time to visit gallery displays of weapons and coins from the site and to hit the gift shop, where Yang Peiyan, one of the farmers who first came upon the figures, occasionally presides. Elderly now, he will consent, for a modest tip, to autograph a catalog.
Particularly striking was the current of patriotic sentiment running through the museum’s mix of action-adventure and history. For anyone coming to Xi’an directly from Beijing, the terra-cotta army might bring to mind other images, like the soldiers in Tiananmen Square at Mao Zedong’s mausoleum.
Messages in the Medium
Where do aesthetics and history stop, and politics start, in museums? This is a universal question. All museums are purveyors of ideology. Art is by nature promotional, pushing beliefs, broadcasting status, aggrandizing personalities. In some cases the dynamic of persuasion is a subtle one; in others it is not.
The Zhejiang Provincial Museum in Hangzhou uses the marvelous objects in its collection to trace a grand swath of local history, from the Iron Age to the founding of the People’s Republic. The display is fairly straightforward until it arrives at the early 19th century, a period of humiliation for China at the hands of colonial Europe. At that point, in an installation titled “Resist Foreign Intrusion,” the gallery labels become aggressively polemical.
Popular awareness of intrusion in the form of cultural pillage has grown with time. In 1999 the Poly Art Museum in Beijing opened with the stated purpose of buying back important art objects that had, illegally or otherwise, left China. A few years ago it acquired at auction, for a steep price, three 18th-century sculptures believed to have been stolen in 1860 from the old Qing summer palace when it was plundered by marauding British and French troops.
The purchase set off a wave of public patriotism: the nation had reclaimed a piece of its stolen inheritance. The sculptures’ value as art was almost beside the point. Their political history invested them with an intense charisma.
If China’s effort to regain its patrimony is still in the testing stages, so are its efforts to preserve its treasures and promote its museums, which are growing in number, size and ambition. No one can predict what impact free admission will ultimately have, but museum officials express confidence that all will be right. People will learn proper behavior, they reason. Meanwhile, museums are experimenting with daily attendance limits and beefing up on guards.
Experimentation is integral to China’s public museums. The old is big news. Institutions are still excavating and discovering, still defining what art is and what it means. The city museum in Xi’an, which opened new quarters just last year, is a bracing example.
I recently spent an afternoon there touring its galleries of carved jades, porcelains and Tang gold work before studying objects up close with curators in a storage area. Afterward, as they walked me out through a back hall, we came across a large form lying under a blanket on the floor. What was it? No one was sure, so we all crouched and lifted the blanket to see.
It was a life-size sculpture of a Buddha or bodhisattva carved in a local stone, caked with dirt on one side but still brilliant with centuries-old vermilion paint on the other.
Oh, yes, someone said, this just arrived. Workers found it in an orchard outside town. We all bent close. One by one we gently touched its surface, as if feeling for a pulse. As if touch were a form of seeing, we touched the past.
