Yangshuo, Lost to Wind

(35 poems, 50 minutes, recorded version; written version is longer)

I had spent time in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, exhibiting in each place as a contemporary artist, so I was familiar with how vibrant these cities and their contemporary art scenes were.

Chinese history and culture is extraordinarily rich, yet in such places, the contemporary makes it difficult to see this long arc of time. And after Hong Kong, it was the very specificity of time and place that I was interested in.

After my time in Shenzhen and The 2014 Sculpture Biennale, I decided to go to Yangshuo. Set amongst the moody shapes of Karst limestone are small villages, winding roads, stone houses and wet (very wet) rice fields, tended by farmers with the help of water buffaloes. You would think it was a Chinese landscape painting. And it was – with the subject, the landscape painting of the Chinese and that of J.M. Turner, amidst what appeared a perfect harmony of man and environment. I would think of these fecund rice fields in relation to the philosophy of Daoism.

Across the Li River and the rice paddies, I was staying at the Zen Inn with a group of Chinese rock climbers, neurolinguistic programmers, and a quantum activist who recounted the cultural revolution and the contemporary surveillance state and relayed to me the idea of shaping man through training regimes.

With these two worlds – one of the ecosystem of land, water, rice, atmosphere, aquifers, cultivation, and the other body politic and the mind – I would consider how it is we come to find ourselves, to shape ourselves. These stories would be more factual, more historical, and the fancy of my imagination giving way to the actual. Perhaps it is because there is a matter of factness to the Chinese, or perhaps because rural Yangshuo is such a strong contrast to the almost futuristic feel of Shanghai, that I could sense the passing of time itself, this long arc of history. This arc itself, which is fantastic. The things we’ve done, the things we’ve seen, and where, oh where, do ‘we’ find ourselves today. What has time wrought?!

For Lost to Wind, as the piece was called, I stayed for a month in Yangshuo: learning about the history of rice and the Tao, reading the poets of the Tang Dynasty, studying quantum physics, mountain climbing, taking long bicycle rides, and walking, day and night, in the beautifully cultivated rice fields of the Karst mountain valleys.

In Yangshuo, I wanted (even if it was in a most cursory fashion) to traverse both ancient and contemporary China, both its continued emphasis on holistic and interconnected worldviews and its focus on balance and harmony.

I imagined myself living in the Tang Dynasty, that I was the poet Li Bai. One of the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup, a consummate drinker in China's long tradition of imbibers. Li Bai celebrated the pleasures of drinking, wrote of friendship, solitude, the passage of time, and the joys of nature.

Like Bai, this led me into the company of Daoists, literary men, and high officials, who would speak of animism, mountains, grottos, hermits, enlightenment, illumination, Buddha, and Bodhidharma. With my contemporary Chinese friends staying at the Inn, we would spend evenings speaking of the brain, the mind, pilgrimage, mysticism, travel, and unitive consciousness, until I had enough of speaking and others and I became a hermit.

I was then, soon enough, the Chinese landscape painter Gu Kaizhi; born in modern Wuxi, he was an eccentric courtier most famous as a painter of portraits and figure subjects. He is recorded as having been among the first to paint a representation of Vimala-kīrti, the Buddhist saint who became popular in China. (By this time, in the writing, I was very interested in Saints, how Saints and Hermits and Sadus take up the world: not this world, perhaps, but another.)

I would meet Lao Tzu and introduce him to Alan Watts; exchange text messages with the author of The Three Body Problem, contemporary science fiction writer Liu Cixin.

I thought of the social political technocratic aspirations of the 20th Century to remake and refashion human societies. I wanted again, as I had in my study of Chinese cinema which I presented in Still History at the Minsheng museum, to revisit the dreaded struggle sessions of the Red Guards and to see in a sense the horrors and madness of the 'we' – of the all, against all. What was the promise of the collective? Of the people together, united, never to be divided, becoming a frenzy and fury of conviction?

How could I not speak of Mao, who used history to build the present? Mao, who identified with bloodthirsty emperors and those he rescued for having expanded the territory of China, such as Sui Yangdi. His most direct inspiration was Qin Shi Huangdi (221-106 BC), the founding emperor of the Qin dynasty and an imperial China that would last almost two thousand years, the dynasty that began to build the Long City (the Great Wall).

Following the tradition of the Chinese emperors, Mao became the Yellow Emperor, father of the Han people (who make up 95% of the Chinese people). According to tradition, this emperor attained immortality thanks to making love with thousands of young virgins. Hence, one of the few critics who faced Mao, Peng Dehuai, accused him of being surrounded by a "selection of imperial concubines."

Mao didn't look at history as past but as present. The modern hero adopts all the faces of the classic heroes. We find this everywhere. And Mao was very aware of his role as founder of a new empire.

We, me, I – discourse on the Chinese and other communist parties – its pull and sway, its promise and horrors, its successes and failures, its formation and vectors of control, language, rank, force, its purges – taken up in the madness of the cultural revolution. I would contrast the mystic and the commissar, the contemplative and the revolutionary. All of this today quieted down, given a more polished veneer, but nevertheless very present in the creation of a new type of modern government, powered by data and mass digital surveillance.

Here is the promise of a perfectly engineered society: one in which artificial intelligence companies work hand-in-glove with police. In which public services reward for good deeds and punish for misbehavior, all delivered with mathematical precision and efficiency.

The Cultural Revolution aimed to create new model citizens who put politics above everything else. Today, the goal is to mold people who can contribute to the economic mission of the party state as it strives to be a “great strong country.”  This whole ‘strong country’ thing – empires to nation states, the ideologies of these conceits, the fury and the filth, ah, yes, the hermits and sadhus, saints and sinners.

I thought of my stories as part of the rich tradition of Chinese travel-writing, dating back to texts like Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian. Chinese travelogues, known as youji, often documented explorations, diplomatic missions, and religious pilgrimages. I would add my travel stories to this tradition during evenings at the Zen lounge in Yangshuo (my thousand and one nights compressed to a month), telling them to my contemporary Chinese friends who wanted to hear about my time in San Francisco and my start-up there.

Throughout this period, I became increasingly disturbed by contemporary Western critical opinions that glamorize and valorize Eastern ‘traditions’ in an uncritical manner, from an entirely orientalist and patronizing perspective. Eastern contexts, both ‘traditionality’ and 'modernity’ are complex and problematic areas, which are not abstract theoretical categories but real everyday concerns. (Yes: but who was I to say such things.)