PROLOGUE
One afternoon close to dinnertime, a child sat cross-legged on her parents’ bed, drawing on the coverlet with a red permanent marker. The coverlet was patterned with pink and yellow roses. The child drew three large red dots and watched, mesmerized, as the red ink soaked into the fabric. When she had finished, she capped the marker, climbed down from the bed and went into the master bathroom. She pulled a tissue from the box on the counter and sat down on the toilet seat. Spreading the tissue on her lap, she uncapped the marker and drew three large red dots and let the ink bleed through the thin paper onto her skin. There weren’t any sounds coming from the kitchen. Quietly, she blew her nose in the tissue, crumpled it up and placed it in the wastebasket beside the toilet.
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When she was learning to paint, she didn’t understand what abstraction meant. You must abstract from something, her painting teacher told her. They were sitting on a bench in the hallway of the art building and he was studying her painting of a tree.
Go look out the window, he said. A tree has bark and leaves and branches. Now, he said, look at Mondrian. The teacher opened a book of the artist’s work. You can see his thinking. For years, he painted hundreds of trees. Then all the forms began breaking down.
She flipped to the end of the book, where the realistic-looking paintings of trees had shattered into spangles and dashes and intersections.
He’s painting from a tree, the teacher explained. Mondrian was trying to create a new visual language for the rhythms and forces of nature.
So, abstraction was a style of painting that looked geometric and broken down.
No, don’t think about categories, the teacher said. Think about how what you are painting is not what the painting is about.
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Painting became a game. She would look at things and imagine all the ways they could be painted. The game was to create an illusion, like a magic trick. She tried to conceal that she was painting. She’d write a lot of words about what she was painting, then crumple them up. She made sculptures about painting, and paintings about hiding that she was painting.
A gallerist saw one of her paintings hanging in a show and wanted to sell them. He had studied philosophy in college but switched majors and earned his degree in religious studies, because he wanted to follow the progression of the world’s most important ideas. He thought religion was the more consequential subject, because it was built on skepticism and faith, and it shaped how people behaved in the world.
He said her paintings had juice. To her, painting was life itself.
For most people, painting was the same as quilting or duck hunting or doing crosswords. A way to pass the time.
For others, it was something to kill dead. Art was over. Some thought it had outlasted its purpose or been crushed by the weight of its own history. In any case, the question of what it was, or could be, was settled and its job was done.
How could it be over? She had barely begun. It was indescribably sad. She felt like the last one to know.
It had already died several times before she was born, she learned. She read essays that tried to take the pulse of the dead body. Art won’t save us, the authors insisted, and we can’t save art. Reality has slipped away beneath layers of illusion and abstraction. Art has become a coquette in an infinity mirror, self-regarding and severed from life.
Someone quoted a French philosopher who said that we no longer even believe in this world or the events that happen to us, like love and death, as if they only half concerned us. He compared everyday life to a bad movie. It went on and on. Technology and spectacle offer false comfort and distract us from fear, suffering and mortality. In times of political turmoil, artists can only symbolically dissent because they are beholden to the powerful systems they claim to oppose.
One essayist tried to offer hope. We are irrational, deranged and incoherent beings. Shouldn’t our art be this way? If art is to matter again, it must engage with the raw realities of existence.
So, art now was just representation without origin. A bunch of lines and no tree. We had locked ourselves in a hall of mirrors, rubbing bark and leaves between our fingertips and scratching our heads.
This she couldn’t accept.
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When were you afraid? the painter asked the student. The boy’s name was Rou Rou. Can you describe it? Something that scared you?
The painter had learned to warm up new students before they ever picked up a paintbrush by asking them personal questions. The questions were basic: What’s your happiest memory? What colors feel welcoming to you? She tried to keep it fun, like a game. She didn’t want them to think painting was just a technical exercise. Making her lessons friendly and relaxed was difficult enough on screens, with her in the United States and her students in Shanghai.
Close your eyes and picture a time when you were afraid, the painter said. Are there any objects or colors that pop into your mind?
The boy squinched up his face. He said: When Nancy Pelosi came and we had to stay inside.
The painter searched for the event on her computer without even averting her eyes. In August, 2022, the United States Speaker of the House visited Taiwan. In response, the PLA began joint naval and air force exercises around the island, including live-fire drills and missile tests.
Our walls are white, Rou Rou said. So white, I guess? Who’s Nancy Pelosi?
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There was always the problem of money, and it seemed as though her artist friends and acquaintances were all working, performing on stage, publishing novels, mounting exhibitions and writing films, while she had gradually stopped. These days, she only painted during lessons, when teaching students a technique. There was no single reason she had stopped. It was not as though she no longer enjoyed painting or had run out of ideas. Nonetheless, she’d stopped.
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During another lesson, a student wanted to show the painter something funny. India Today reported that a zoo in Taizhou, China was caught exhibiting Chow Chow puppies dyed black and orange to look like tigers. The zoo’s online promotional materials showed the animals in a pen, captioned with our tigers are huge and very fierce!
A visitor uploaded a video of the animals barking and the news spread. Millions shared outrage and jokes. Confronted, the zoo apologized, claiming they lacked zoo-like animals to exhibit. According to zoo officials, it was just a gimmick: the animals were marketed as dog tigers and not tiger tigers. It was all done professionally and no animals were harmed.
No one does counterfeit like China, a news anchorwoman said. That’s just China being China.
Along with the report was a picture of a smiling woman with long hair hugging one of the dog tigers. She wore a white jacket that could have been part of a staff uniform. Was she a spokesperson for the zoo? Was she the professional who dyed the dogs? India Today didn’t say. Who’s to say whether the zoo dyed the dogs in order to deceive visitors? If you didn’t know a lot about tigers, the student said, you might think, orange with black stripes, furry, four legs: tiger. The painter couldn’t believe that anyone had been convinced the dogs were tigers. She didn’t believe the zoo thought it could convince anyone that the dogs were tigers. Everyone knew what a tiger looked like. Surely, there was no one on the planet who would not recognize a tiger if they saw one.
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The painting was to be four feet wide and eight feet high, and it was to represent a bed sheet hung by its corners, patterned with pink and yellow roses. An actress had seen such a painting framed and leaning against a wall at a party in Los Angeles at a famous director’s house. She couldn’t stop thinking about that painting, she told the director, and wanted one just like it. She was beautiful and had a well-established career, and could finally take the time to properly appoint her newly remodeled home. She asked for the painter’s name, made contact, and they agreed on a price. The actress selected a vintage fabric and had the sample sent to the painter’s studio, and the painter travelled by train to a nearby city and bought a roll of heavy cotton rag paper, paint and supplies.
The painter estimated that it would take two, maybe three months to finish, averaging eight hours per day. The timeline was only a guess, because she had made the director’s painting many, many years ago and had forgotten how long it took to make a painting like that.
It was a good thing that the painting would be straightforward. There would be no experimenting with style or probing the subconscious for hidden associations. No accountability to the zeitgeist. No messy striving for tension between materials and ideas. The pattern was set. Pink rose, yellow rose, pink, yellow, pink, yellow. Fill in the blanks. She’d done it before. What she remembered about making the original painting was that for a very long time, it looked incomplete. The illusion didn’t appear until the end.