Index
August
I visit a temple, and in this temple, eighteen generations of men in my family are inscribed behind the Emperor and Empress of Heaven. The house my father grew up: haphazard brick, naked wooden beams struggle beneath the cracked tile roof, a rotten freezer. Wires outline the throat of the house, and upstairs, posters of Chinese musical artists in teenage fashion. The day before, I visit one thousand arhat sculptures in the city. In Dong’an, I see the trembling hands of the villagers that remained, and they serve us tea. Here is the elementary school your mother went to. Here is where your father used to play, the fishing dock your grandfather made a life from. Emptied of its belly, the village arrives like a hook from the island, and I make a joke about wasting the year in Massachusetts. On the other side of the water, I see one thousand birds on the electrical lines. They swarm the street.
*
In a sonnet about Shanghai, the muse, Megan Fernandes writes, is mostly a bloodless tool. Outside of the mass of the Puxi, we sleep in a mall hotel in Pudong complete with life size casts of giraffes and an abandoned carousel. A robot delivers breakfast to our door. I teach a class about literary clarity, using poems about a funeral and a field of lightning rods. We see the Oriental Pearl, which in the daylight smog, appears like an 80s C-Pop star, muted pink and aged concrete. It is impossible to envision the past, but I can imagine myself imposed on it.
The obstensible emptiness of the financial district impressed me: despite the millions of residents, and thousands of visitors, somehow the central ring of the city, designed for tourism, was more or less empty. I keep saying Thank You, in English. The delta stripped of faces.
July
Mr. Xu attended the desk, two floors down. Across from the gallery, The New York Board of Taste. There was an herbal medicinal scent throughout, a spa underneath, a tattoo studio, and something like accountants; the gallery was on the corner of a street, and the corner of Tribeca, Soho, and Chinatown. In The Bell Jar, Plath opens with an electric summer, and not knowing what she was doing in New York. It was the summer I asked if I could do the art thing. I emailed the gallerists, because I had seen a line from a Diane Seuss poem titling a show of theirs, and I called them over the phone, was curious about markets, and I landed in the city, with an apartment in Yorkville, trying my best to help them. It is a funny thing to spend so much time with so few paintings. You would think that you would know them better than yourself by the end, but all you realize is that you likely do not know yourself at all, and that it is not much of a high bar. I conversed. With the long stream of writers, advisors, dealers, artists, designers, executives, and dates that pondered, for less than a minute and hours, I talked about process and product and the teeth of the herringbone linen and the fast visual culture. I was not terrific at it. Outside the gallery, they were painting the stairwell white. I thought of writing a novel.
*
In 2014-2015, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, then the Tate Modern put on a retrospective survey of the painter Marlene Dumas, after her painting “The Image as Burden.” The gist is, as much as the image is important to the artist’s work, and the image does its work to the painting, the painting itself changes, transmutes the image. The artist has the burden of the image, must cradle it, is held responsible for it. I cannot help but think that there is so much we are responsible for that we never dare to let cross our minds. When I was in elementary school, I kept losing jackets. Each time, my mom would scold me, and I understood that I was responsible for them, You can argue I was barely a cognitive being, but I knew it felt bad to lose it. As much as those lost jackets affect me, my childhood, I am responsible for them. I am responsible for how I choose to live, and my depiction of the way I live. I am responsible for the conversions of my past into my future, and that process of conversion, it is my burden, to represent it, which really is, to shape it into physicality.
June
The camera and the gun, the exhibition text read, are often compared: the aparatus with the strategic function, a mission. I spend a day, shooting paintings and sculptures, mainly paintings. Walk the length of Chelsea, weaving in each gallery, sparse hints of the population of Manhattan in the snaps of heels against concrete or wooden floors. The women at the desks are all thin. Gallerists take clients to private rooms, show them jokes painted by Murakami’s factory. Everything is at once industrial and slouching towards human emotion. I have no aim. I point and shoot. There is a turbine by Rauschenberg: it is metallic, with a crooked pole puncturing the pleated surface, three painted yellow chevrons are held up by the sculpture, all pointing down, telling me to go to hell. The show’s thesis is about the size of the human body, the point is to sympathize with the object. It is the size of a curled up elementary school student. People live long lives, not knowing exactly what they want or do — except, survival, the food on the table, nuclear bombs, how to make a killer sandwich. No woe. Rilke writes: Earth, Marina, we are earth, a thousand times springtime.
*
I drove one thousand miles. We passed lovers, warheads, and the Atlantic. When I arrive, everyone is a model and is smoking American Spirits, there’s some insanity to it, a conspiracy at play. I think a lot about foie gras during the night drives. You have to force the food down a goose’s esophagus, fatten it as to fatten its liver, subjugate its body with grain; the process is called gavage, from the French gaver, or to gorge. As if the goose is the one gorging itself, greedily. I’ve had it once. My dad served it to me at our family restaurant, a treat, though I cannot remember what it tasted like. I drove one thousand miles. We passed Atlanta, then the state for lovers and warheads, and had enough of the American spirit. I came, I thought, to have an aesthetic education in the shiny city. The goose is the one who is the victim here, I think. Or the man stuffing the goose, a victim of his hunger for this dish, or hunger for the sale. Either way: the geese, swollen like pomegranates. The churn of the night into day.