ART & SOUL MAKOTO FUJIMURA
Julia Nason
Art & Yearning in China During a visit to China last June with fellow delegates from the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, I traveled along a dusty highway from Xi’an to Beijing. Having just visited the famed 2,200-year-old Terra Cotta Warriors, I looked out the window of our bus and mused on the mysteries of this country characterized by contrasts and a yearning for eternity. Here is a country that will spend millions to preserve Xi’an’s 8,000 Terra Cotta Warriors but at the same time create a dam to wash away an ancient village. A country that creates thousands of jobs in rebuilding Beijing’s main road to Beverly Hills-level glamour, yet simultaneously enforces a retirement age of 55 to make room for younger workers and then displaces these younger workers in order to make room for the tourists as the Olympics open. A country that invests in a vast cultural infrastructure, supporting its artists both at home and abroad, but at the same time carefully censors the news through every media. A country that prints Bibles domestically and yet persecutes and arrests Christian leaders in rural areas. China is a country that highly values harmony between people and nature and yet has one of the worst pollution problems in the world.While riding through the glitzy Beijing streets choked with smog, we asked an official if a marathon can take place in such polluted air. “Oh, they will shut the factories down for two months before the Olympics,” we were told. No other country can be so matter-of-fact about moving half a million workers out of the region to make room for tourists.
During our tour of the “Egg,” the new performance center being erected in Beijing, one of our delegates commented to me,“There’s no way we could do this in the US. We don’t have access to enough concrete!”Told that the center would be completed within the year, we marveled, “There’s no way our unions would allow us to build so fast!” Throughout our visit, the China Daily was delivered to our hotel rooms, featuring front-page articles about the exact places we were to visit and often the exact issues we were to discuss on a given day. We began to feel like players in a Chinese version of The Truman Show: The Chinese could recreate a city in several years, build the largest performance center in the world in a short time, and control how it is reported to impress a small foreign delegation. Shaking our heads, we all had to admit that, however surreal, it was still quite impressive! The vacuum left in China by the Cultural Revolution, when millions of families were exiled from the lives they knew, is now being filled by the nation’s fantastic drive to bring the world to the Olympics (’08) and then to the Expo (’10). The arts scene is also burgeoning. A group being touted as “China’s New Creative Class” is said to be heralding “the next cultural revolution.” Parallel to the US/China economic race is a creative one, and it won’t be long before we see which culture takes the lead. Spending time with China’s Minister of Culture Sun Jiazheng revealed why the country is making such headway in the cultural domain. Sun is a charming Renaissance man who freely quotes philosophers and poets and who humanized our meetings by taking off his tie and jacket and shaking each delegate’s hand. But what truly moved me was his own poetry, shared at the banquet on our last day, in Jin an Fu Palace (“Place of Eternal Happiness”) in the Forbidden City. When invited to share his “Graveside PRISM 2008
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Reflections” poem, he explained that he had written it after his friend Ikuma Dan, a Japanese author/composer and president of the Sino-Japanese Cultural Exchange Association, passed away suddenly during a visit to China. The final verse: Oh, honored colleague! The blossoms have fallen, but spring still comes in all its splendor. You left with no warning; with whom can we share The fathomless depths of our loss? It would have been a courageous enough act to reveal such a personal journey in public. But his offering was even more daring because of the current tense relationship between China and Japan. Just a few days before, the Japanese papers had questioned Prime Minister Abe’s visit to a Japanese holy site where many war criminals are buried and honored, including those invading China. And the Chinese have demanded an inquiry into the forced prostitution of Chinese women by the Japanese military in the 19th century. In that setting, Sun’s poem was not just a balm to soothe historical wounds but was also a principled reconciling act based on common humanity. Jacques Maritain once wrote:“Poetry is spiritual nourishment. But it does not satiate, it only makes man more hungry, and that is its grandeur.” That hunger cannot be filled by even the greatest of banquets in the Forbidden City. In Minister Sun’s poem, and in China itself, so full of contrasts and striving, I glimpsed the longing to resolve the irreconcilable brokenness within our hearts, a yearning for that true “Place of Eternal Happiness” that is set into the hearts of every man and woman. ■ Makoto Fujimura is an artist living and working in New York City. His new book, River Grace: A Journey of Art and Faith, is available at iamny.org.