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Chapter 18
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
- Additional Information
18 Idon’t know whether cutting off my long hair for the first time in fifteen years was a farewell to the past or a self-inflicted punishment for that past. Afterwards I went to a hairdressing salon and had my jagged hair tidied up and dyed. When I returned to 798, many people didn’t recognise me: “Xiao Xiao, you seem a different person.” The psychological and external transformations caused a change of mood. After the extreme psychological shocks and thrills experienced by someone undergoing great upheaval follows a kind of over-stimulated prostration. I suddenly felt extremely tired and wished to return to Hangzhou to rest. Before leaving Beijing, I went to Song Liwei’s place in Song Zhuang to talk to him. After all, he was someone who counted, and I was hoping that he would genuinely be able to face up to me and to the whole business in an objective way. Spring in Hangzhou cast its spell. The peach blossoms and willow trees by the West Lake, the warm breeze on my skin dispelled all my worries for a while. The silhouette of the purity-preserving Pagoda in the distance became blurred. By this stage, I was no longer yearning for a shining white knight to appear on the horizon. I was quietly seeing what my future would bring. The business of 1989 already seemed to belong to the past. However, Beijing attracted me in some mysterious way, and I went back. It was very strange. I couldn’t even get into my studio this time. Zhao Xiaoshu, with whom I had been renting the studio, had changed the lock without prior notice. “What’s this about?” I asked him. “You’ve upset Big Brother.” “Big Brother?” “Instead of faffing around in Beijing, your type should leave 798 and get back to Hangzhou pronto,” Zhao Xiaoshu advised me in his friendly manner. Dialogue 194 I suddenly realized something. Song Liwei had a nickname in this circle. They called him “The Big Brother of Chinese contemporary art”. By “Big Brother”, Zhao Xiaoshu perhaps meant him. I had written four letters to him, and talked to him twice, about the right to be recognized as the creator of the work Dialogue. Did this have anything to do with Zhao Xiaoshu’s attitude? My mother rushed up from Hangzhou to get me to come back with her. All my life I have been open to persuasion but resisted coercion. It is not in my nature to run away under pressure, and I was not going to leave, whatever the cost. “Why should I? I might leave 798, but I’m definitely not leaving Beijing.” I’d really had no idea that things would get this complicated. Du Gao, an old friend of my mother’s, let me live in her vacant apartment. That’s how I came to live in Hujia Lou. My mood reached its nadir, and I hardly saw anyone. Only one female colleague, Anni, who lived in 798, fought on my behalf: “I don’t know who that Godfather thinks he is, but I know that you’re reclaiming your right as author of that work, and there’s no mistake about that.” Anni often came over to chat, and was by my side during that very difficult time. This is when you discover who your real friends are. In August 2005, while I was walking past a news stand in the street, my attention was attracted by the large red five-pointed star and the words “Since 1980” on the cover of Xin Zhoukan magazine. I bought a copy and started reading. There was an interview with Song Liwei in an article titled “Critical Historical Junctures in the 1980s”. I read: On 5 February 1989, during the China Avant-garde Art Exhibition at the National Art Museum in Beijing, Lan Jun and Xiao Xiao fired two revolver shots at their work Dialogue (an actual telephone booth), thus realizing the “Shooting Incident” which shook the whole nation. Art critics consider this the signpost of a paradigm shift in Chinese modern art from the 1980s into the 1990s, and the farewell performance of the ten years of Chinese New Wave Art of the 1980s. The day after, the Editor of Zhongguo Meishu Bao, Mr. Song, published a review of the incident. Under his forceful stewardship, that publication became the main front for propagating the wave of new thinking and new concepts. I immediately rang Song Liwei...