The first time I went to Beijing, our professor Yomi introduced us to the blossoming underground of modern art in China by taking us to a guard house perched atop one of the few remaining segments of the old city wall, which had been taken over by a number of socially inclined artists and transformed into an exhibition space. For all its apparent informality, for all its dark corners and dank shadows, I marveled at the way the ancient cave of a building had been transformed into a museum of social criticism, a shrine to free speech and self-expression that stuck out like a wart from the glittering skyline of a city in the midst of self-congratulatory pre-Olympics modernization. A wart which, I remember thinking with some irony, if someone could find a way to pop it, would ooze the slick and very dangerously colorful pus of creativity and independent thought until it rotted rainbows into the shiny façade of comfortable apathy that stretched out around it.
Yomi had arranged a speaker for us at the gallery, an artist named Sheng Qi. Sheng Qi stood patiently in front of us, white and American and jaded as we were, and spoke humbly and unaffectedly about the art scene in China, about its influence and its ramifications and its significance. About his memories of a childhood in a society where it was illegal to paint or write or sing anything that wasn’t a form of propaganda for the Communist Party. About how, even after twenty years in an “open” society, modern artists in China still had to carve their galleries out of abandoned munitions factories and the rotting remains of old courtyard houses. About being at Tian’anmen square and watching as his own government turned on him and his friends, in retaliation for nothing more than a desire to speak their minds.
I was absolutely starstruck. And this was before I’d seen his work.
After the Tian’anmen incident the government went after Sheng Qi, putting a warrant out for his arrest for his part in the uprising. He was forced to flee China. But before he left, Sheng Qi cut off his left little finger and planted it in a flower pot.
“So a part of me,” he explained as he raised his maimed hand to show us, “would always be here.” These days Sheng Qi makes much of his living off of pictures of his hand sans pinky, his palm cradling nostalgic-looking photographs.
I was touched then on a level of passionate youthful angst. I was standing in the presence of a real revolutionary. Not a middle-class white boy who’d been mad enough at his white-collar upbringing to grow a pink mohawk, not a dreadlocked vegan peacenick protesting wars she would never be asked to fight, but a real human being who’d been asked to stand up for something he believed in. And had done it. And had risked his life – really and truly risked his life - in the process. All I wanted was to be like him.
As I grow older, though, Sheng Qi’s work takes on a new kind of meaning for me. As I learn, as I travel, as I am forced to move forward through the sometime discomfort of a life left deliberately unpadded by complacence, I see less in Sheng Qi’s missing finger of politics and heroism and more of the bittersweetness that comes necessarily from living a life that is complete and worthwhile. Of the sacrifices one is inevitably forced to make in the pursuit of something greater. Of the pieces one must shed of himself before he can become whole.
It strikes me that every time I have arrived somewhere new and then left again, every time I have made a friend and then had to say goodbye, every time I have made the effort to move forward instead of standing still, I have cut off a finger and planted it in a flower pot. I’m haunted by the phantom itches in the amputated digits: nostalgic memories of the lights in a city, a sudden whiff of an old friend’s perfume, a familiar song on a random playlist, and the fullness of my still half-lived life presses heavy on my chest. I am not as brave as Sheng Qi or his ilk, and I will not pretend to be. But every now and again I still feel as if there are pieces of me scattered everywhere, sprouting miniature unheeded flowers in neglected scraps of pottery.
And so I’m standing here again with my hatchet raised over my mangled stump of a hand, preparing to go somewhere else. Again. To once again move forward, to say goodbye, to leave cherished pieces of my soul behind like the rejected branches left behind on the ground after a pruning. One wonders whether all this docking will ultimately serve its purpose of making room for newer, stronger things to grow. Or if, in the end, I’ll just be left having to play the piano with my toes.
