The Fine Arts of Calligraphy and Counterrevolution

Between the inner and outer stone walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing, China, stand the barracks that housed the emperor's army for five centuries. Since the conversion of the royal family's palace into a public site, however, museum employees, not soldiers live here. For eight years, Wu Hung, now a tutor in the Fine Arts department, lived between these walls as a curator for the Palace Museum.

Wu Hung, who is also a graduate student living in Adams House, recalls that at first, the conditions were terrible. "It was a very old Chinese dwelling, with no heat and paper covering the windows. The courtyard was overgrown with grass and there were wild cats everywhere."

The museum's fewer than fifty inhabitants were isolated from the daily bustle of Beijing. They were not allowed outside after 9 p.m. "In the evenings they locked the gates, like in ancient times. Life there had nothing to do with modern China at all," says the art historian and amateur artist.

Political Prisoner

Before his appointment to this position, Wu Hung was imprisoned for three years in a labor camp on the Inner Mongolian border. Wu Hung was caught in China's Cultural Revolution, a time when Chairman Mao attempted to purge the country of traditional cultural and intellectual values.

China in the 1960s was a politically tense place, especially for those who showed an interest in Western ideas and culture. A student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Wu Hung was part of a small group of friends and fellow painters who shared an enthusiasm for Beatles records and Impressionist paintings, among other things. "Once the Cultural Revolution came," says Wu Hung, "all these things were seen in a political light."

Although Wu Hung did not think of himself as counterrevolutionary, his comments about the prevalence of Communist propaganda were considered dangerous by the government "I suggested we paint Chairman Mao quotations on the inside of our eyeglasses," Wu Hung recounts. "I paid too much for this kind of joke."

Wu Hung spent a year in his college's detention center before he was sent to a prison camp. "It was like they turned Adams House into a jail. They put me in a dark room, asked me to write down my faults, my crime," he says.

But Wu Hung does not see his experience as negative. He calls the Cultural Revolution the most significant time of his life. "Because both professors and students were prisoners, there were no boundaries. I stopped seeing my professors as big names, they became just human beings," says Wu Hung.

"Before the Cultural Revolution, I felt very insecure. Afterwards I was confident. Before I was alienated by my orientation to Western culture. I was a very marginal person in Chinese society. My insecurity was rooted in feeling myself to be a different person from those around me," Wu Hung says. "But after the camp I felt a very deep connection with people, not just with books and academics."

Wu Hung also turned to traditional Chinese philosophy in his search for some stability in a "country that was like a madhouse." He studied Taoism, which holds as its central principle that power lies in the mind, in the self, and not in action. "I don't think I achieved the inner peace of the Taoists, but I tried," remembers Wu Hung.

While in the labor camp, Wu Hung wrote four books about his experiences, but then destroyed them, for fear of disastrous consequences if they were discovered by officials.

During this time, Wu Hung began to believe in Marxism. For him, its appeal lay in seeing beyond the personal concerns of the individual. He recalls, "I criticised myself. I thought my interest in Western art was selfish. It wasn't really very mature thinking and I realized when I got out what an illusion it all was."

Ancient Objects

After several years of organizing exhibitions, and researching and writing catalogues and books for the Palace Museum, Wu Hung decided to return to Beijing's Academy of Fine Arts to get his Master's in Chinese art history. "It was a personal choice to leave the museum and go back to school. My work had stimulated an interest in Chinese art and I was tired of just dealing with ancient objects; I wanted to talk to people again," he says.

As soon as the doors were open between China and the West, Wu Hung applied to the graduate program at Harvard, where his father had studied in the 1930s. Wu Hung wanted to continue his work in art history. "In China we don't really have art history; we only have works of art," explains Wu Hung.

Arriving in the United States in 1980 with no knowledge of English, Wu Hung plunged right into classes in the Anthropolgy Department. "Of course it was a culture shock," he says. "That first year I worked very hard, day and night, to learn the language." Wu Hung eventually elected to write his doctoral thesis on bronze funerary ornaments of the Han Dynasty for an ad hoc committee of members from both the Anthropology and Fine Arts departments.

Wu Hung says he finds the Western style of teaching to be very different from the learning by rote method of China. He explains, "The Chinese education is taking notes. You listen, you take notes, you memorize. Here each person contributes. People raise questions; they argue."

The intellectual atmosphere is also quite a change for Wu Hung. "Here there is an urge to make your knowledge more up to date. There are more chances to challenge arguments," he says.

In the Fine Arts tutorial on Chinese figure painting which he leads, Wu Hung has adopted this method of free discussion and exchange. "Communication is my religion, my ideology," he says. "If I really believe in any one thing, that is it."

Wu Hung, who was also a section leader for Bronze Age China and several Chinese language courses, explains his approach to art: "When looking at an ancient painting, you have to imagine how the people back then regarded it. You have to recreate the atmosphere in which it was first seen."

This year Wu Hung is advising two seniors who are writing theses on contemporary Chinese art--Christopher Storey and Jamie A. Anderson. "Wu Hung is the one person who could really help me with what I'm doing," Anderson says. "Without him, the impetus for Chinese art studies at Harvard would be gone."

"It's one thing to be studying something that's academic and another thing to be studying something that's living," says Storey. "Wu Hung is a Chinese painter and he's a part of a society I'm trying to understand. He makes academics real."

Wu Hung explains that he paints as a release from "too much thinking. I feel sometimes that being a scholar is too rigid, too boring."

His watercolors of the New England countryside have a very Western, Impressionistic feel. Wu Hung says that while in Chinese art each line is essential, with a certain value assigned to each stroke, he himself is more concerned with color than with form.

"Chinese art is the representation of an idea," Wu Hung explains. "In Western art, there is less emphasis on the political attitude of the painter; instead, there is a personal relationship between the viewer and the painting."

According to Wu Hung, Chinese art now is in a transitional stage. He says he feels it's important to encourage young artists, and he has arranged a series of displays of modern Chinese paintings in the Adams House common room in order to stimulate interest in the Asian art scene.

"As an antiquarian who's deeply involved in contemporary culture, Wu Hung has done a great deal to further our understanding of Chinese art," says Rockefeller Professor of Oriental Art John M. Rosenfield.

Wu Hung isn't sure what he'll be doing after he receives his doctorate in January. While he wants to finish writing one or two more books here first, he plans eventually to return to his native country. "I haven't been back in five years and I feel very alienated from China. Everything I know is from The New York Times," he says.

"I hope I can find a way to go back and forth," Wu Hung says. "It's important that there be dialogues between Chinese and Western scholars and it's important that people exchange this kind of scholarship on a regular basis. Otherwise knowledge becomes dated."

But Wu Hung does have some reservations about leaving the U.S. "In China, of course, you have to do a lot of things you don't really want to do--negotiations, bureacracy, meetings. I can't afford the time for that."

"Among Chinese intellectuals, there's an anxiety about time, a feeling that we've already lost too much time. I want to make up for the years I've lost. I really want to use my time well."