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Trapped in Heaven
Ye Yongqing
The seas and forests of Indonesia have exerted a strong pull on me. I’m always planning to wander them soon. I have set many plans to travel there. One plan that makes me happy as soon as I think of it is to travel the Sumatran Islands and the forests of Java, one I came up with over a decade ago. I still haven’t been to any of these places, aside from some short trips to Bali. I’ve been busy working, making money, holding exhibitions, watching TV and raising my daughter, so I couldn’t leave. I use my repetitive daily life to replace the mountain climbing and ocean crossing that would satisfy my wanderlust. But I still make plans, a joy that no one can stop me from having, even though I’m still stuck in daily life. I often dream about the day that I can roam the Indonesian archipelago, crossing the sea to see the forests and lakes I’ve always yearned for. But I keep getting older. Youth becomes middle age, and the time beyond middle age grows faster and worse. Sometimes I think that maybe to the end of my days I’ll never be able to go and see the forests of Java and the Sumatran Islands.
These thoughts are often on my mind.
One day I’m walking along Houhai Park in Beijing. This is an area that has more or less completely preserved the old face of Beijing. In this city, the “present” is devouring the “past”, and Houhai is like an isolated island, maintaining our links with our predecessors, with the life of past millennia, showing us that time has an origin, that it has depth.
But Houhai is now filled with the hustle and bustle of the bars. It has become dubious and seductive. The city’s new elite are changing this place with chaos, deception and self-praise – one bar at a time. I’m thinking that many years ago these buildings may have been home to poets, warriors and simple common folk. I know that one of these was home to Yu Dafu who travelled the southern seas. A friend told me once in that bar’s bathroom: we’re pissing in Yu Dafu’s house.
Then, I saw “Indonesia” in the Lotus Market at Houhai: bars linked together, “Lotus”, “Buddha”, “Face”, inside the giant windows were piled high with Bali style furniture, Buddha statues, masks, door hangings; under the glaring lights inside, the floors were covered in cobblestones and sea shells, tropical plants in the greenhouse…
Does coming to this bar count as going to Bali? to Sumatra?!
Then I thought of Pintor Sirait and Astari Rasjid, an artist couple living in Bali who I’d met when I was in Indonesia. I know those bars on the shore of Houhai have no connection with them. But with the “Bali craze” and “Southeast Asia craze” that have swept through Chinese city life on a massive scale in recent years, the Bali style and the Southeast Asian culture have been depicted and defined as a kind of fossilized cultural essence and have been turned into a kind of consumer product. People’s experience and imaginings of Bali, aside from the much lauded heavenly beauty of the island, are really nothing at all. But must “heaven” always voluntarily extend its beauty for outsiders and tourists to see? It was coming to know Pintor Sirait and Astari Rasjid, understanding their art and their almost legendary careers that gave such a know-nothing as myself a glimpse into the conundrum that is the reality behind Bali’s heavenly halo.
One evening two years ago I went to visit Astari Rasjid and Pintor Sirait’s studio. It was a lovely wooden cottage in a picturesque garden. A warm evening breeze blew, whistling through the grass. The ground was shaking with the sound of frog calls. The edges of the sky cut into the moon like a knife. We chatted all night on the veranda, enjoying the elegant music and the wonderful wine in our cups as I listened to this couple narrating their romantic love and their legendary experiences. That gathering gave me an unexpected artistic shock which was only outstripped by their thriving creativity and sizzling passion. The seemingly gentlemanly Pintor Sirait was full of inexhaustible explosive power. His works are made on sheets of stainless steel. He marks them by shooting them with a gun to create a strong, piercing visual effect. The bullet holes on stainless steel are like the flowers of life in bloom, coldly beautiful and grievous. The lovely hostess’s works seem to be the opposite of her elegant appearance: her self-portrait disguises a cold-blooded killer; the violent posture is covered over by lovely advertisement packaging. Obviously, their art has surpassed the idealized rural scenes and odes to the beauty of the tropics that I’ve gotten used to seeing around Southeast Asia. Pintor Sirait believes that most traditional Indonesian artistic expressions are beautiful and romantic, like heaven. Everything is peaceful and good. This kind of art has only one meaning: it is for foreigners and tourists. If we were to continue down this set path, there will be limitations. There’s no way to express the true self and the reality in which it resides. I don’t know much about Indonesian culture and history, much less the artworks of these two. But I can still feel them trying, through these kinds of creations, to express their strong sentiments for the world and society, to examine their own passionate feelings and their burning desire to enter into international artistic discussion as Indonesian contemporary artists. Just like the reality that art expresses, the repeated explosions and terrorist attacks that have rocked this island and the 9-11 tragedy in America have truly changed the tides in the world. After a long period of peace and prosperity, one surprise disaster after another have forced us to say goodbye to our wistful, simplistic, idealized and whitewashed understanding. Meanwhile it has piqued the artists’ curiosity towards the world. The heavenly world of Bali is not just made up of the fame and lives of those core colonizers of days past, the tourists and consumers; it also implies the pained faces of the Arabs, Javans and indigenous peoples. Oftentimes we are using our observations of others to understand ourselves. The world has already undergone sea change. Artists are also discovering that the self in those images has also gone through important changes, and those traditional limiting elements have evaporated with new questions emerging rapidly in their place.
Vanessa told me early this year that Pintor Sirait and Astari Rasjid would be coming to Beijing this summer to hold an exhibition at her 798 space. Their recent works are even more of a meditation on the globalized and post-colonial context of real society in Indonesia: in Pintor’s work, symbols of regional culture, Indonesian writing and shadow puppets, have been forcefully coupled with Western commodities; Astari has imagined her self-image as a heroine who can travel through the famous places in the world. These overly dramatized scenes have surprisingly pushed the artists’ works to a core position. The two artists’ depictions and imaginings of reality are anything but a preference for a certain type of decoration or material. They are more rooted in the artists’ extreme focus on man’s situation. They are events and depictions, especially the direct usage of finished objects and the revelation of their power. As they see it, they are providing the ways and means to directly touch and experience all kinds of people from reality. They have provided a reading of the issues of politics and culture that transcends the level of opposition and conflict. Their works exude a strong air of contradiction and crisis, and even go on to hint at the emptiness of man, even life and the universe. In uncertain times surrounded by terrorism, bad press and a falling economy, the artists’ creations give us inexhaustible imagination. After a disaster, the restoration of the heart is a greater task than that of rebuilding the city and its buildings. The artworks often touch on universal and fundamental issues of humanity. They point at reality, but also touch the heart, affirming our values and beliefs about life – how important is the function of art.
Heaven is still beautiful, though it is no longer peaceful. Paradise is also full of man’s perplexities: it conceals suspicion, hatred and violence. The work of these two artists springs from the modern anxieties of our time, realist portraits of when we face the extremes of life, reality or death. They also reveal the unease and perplexity that lies below heaven’s halo: they lead me to look back on myself and everyone else, who yearn for this utopian paradise, the tourists and seekers who journey to heaven, the shared depths of our hearts are full of insurmountable emptiness and self-trickery.
In these circumstances of increasing globalization, regional differences and civilizational conflicts, even if we’re in “heaven” we can’t silence our own souls.
Evening of June 27, Wangjing
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