Interrogative Mood

PEARL S. BUCK is a writer generally loved by both the Chinese Communist Party and the American left. Born to Presbyterian missionary parents, she grew up in Jiangsu Province, then spent formative adult interludes in Anhui and Nanjing, winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 1938. She wrote prolifically about China, and specifically about the goodness and suffering of its peasantry, and the depravities of its corrupt leaders before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Buck’s former residence on the campus of Nanjing University is preserved as a memorial and guarded by a seated statue of her—making her one of very few foreigners, let alone Americans, afforded such an honor. Inspired by her own family circumstances, she spent the later part of her life championing causes including accessibility and interracial adoption. Her final home, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, won a national prize in 2020 for a tour that details her activism.

But this dual embrace could never be complete. Unsurprisingly, Buck was targeted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Later progressive critiques of a Sinophone white woman, even one who “saw the Chinese as her equals” and rejected the term “heathens,” do not need rehashing here. But likewise, her 1969 novel, The Three Daughters of Madame Liang, completed four years before her death, is banned in China. Written at the height of the Cultural Revolution, it fits into the genre of multigenerational family sagas that have so often come to narrate China’s long twentieth century. Madame Liang, described as “a woman of old China who had managed to survive in New China,” worries that her daughters Mercy and Joy, who have emigrated to America thanks to a family friend from the Republican Era, will try to come home to a country that has become dangerous for people of their class background. Returning to Shanghai from a visit to her eldest daughter, Grace, in Beijing, Madame Liang finds her home marked with the words THIS CAPITALIST HOUSE MUST BURN TO ASH. She and her pedicab driver are beaten to death by a mob of Red Guards, who leave the scene singing.

Wang Tuo made the video Meditation on Disappointing Reading in 2016, after five years of living in Boston and New York, and just months before returning to China and settling in Beijing. Its structure is deceptively simple: Inside a suburban house, one late-middle-aged woman in a coarse qipao reads awkwardly Google-translated passages from Madame Liang as another in a denim shirt prepares a meal. They never inhabit the same frame. The cook is at ease in her kitchen and boasts exemplary knife skills. Things seem normal—shrimp, rice, bok choy, ginger root, cured beef—until she begins to slice and pan-fry avocados, an ingredient that appears nowhere in Chinese cuisine. In the final scene, the two women alternate on-screen, eating the awkward dish. The cook is Joy, and the narrator is her mother. Recalling the food of her Shanghai childhood, Joy has tried to re-create these flavors to call her mother’s spirit to her side. But after so many years of exile, she has forgotten how.

If Wang was fascinated by Buck’s unusual combination of appeal and taboo on both sides of the emerging great-power divide, he was also, after an extended sojourn in a foreign land, struck by the poignancy of Joy’s predicament, somewhere between immigrant, expatriate, and refugee. In New York, he encountered the layered diasporic social circle that often revolves around “Chinese art”—millennial PRC students and strivers like himself, but also an accretion of earlier subjectivities: the aging mainland generation who had resettled thanks to visa clemency in the wake of the June 4, 1989, massacre, as well as descendants of the illustrious families who fled as the Communists came to power decades before. He understood them as occupying a space in between, never quite fully inhabiting their roles as Americans, but also, more frighteningly, no longer in touch with China. Meditation was a memo to himself, and his American farewell.

Soon after resettling in Beijing, where he had previously lived during his graduate studies, he traveled to his hometown of Changchun, an industrial city in the Northeast region once known as Manchuria. There he reconnected with his childhood best friend, who had recently taken a job as a government investigator. Their conversations became the basis for The Interrogation, 2017, in which a narrator modeled on this friend recounts his vetting and hiring. On the screen, a younger man, who is probably but not necessarily the narrator nervously paces about while an older man confidently inhabits his study. The two perform a final job interview—a high-stakes interaction not fundamentally different from the corruption interrogations the younger man will conduct if successful. As the account proceeds, the boundaries—between him and his supervisor, between them and their subjects, between the artist and the system his work attempts to penetrate—become blurred. 

Voiced in concise, elegant cadences a literary half-step above daily discourse, the work unfolds in sequences of still images—the two main characters alone and together, punctuated by shots of Changchung’s gelid urban landscape—set to precisely syncopated music. Stylistically, The Interrogation foreshadows the conventions that would characterize Wang’s later works. Like many of his subsequent films, it contains an alternate storyline, this one lifted from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, 1966, about a nurse charged with caring for a stage actress who suddenly stopped speaking, their relationship evolving until they trade roles entirely. Ultimately, the piece’s power derives from the way it explores the psychology at the heart of the party’s social and political chokehold on its nation and portrays the basic protocol for any interpersonal relationship in the shadow of its specific breed of authoritarianism. 

Crucially, the interrogator is not a policeman for the general populace, but an investigator in the Communist Party’s Commission on Disciplinary Inspection, part of an entire parallel justice system for officials that is tasked with implementing, at a local level, Xi Jinping’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign. His position that requires superhuman capacities for discernment, judgment, manipulation, and self-protection—capacities demanded and cultivated in smaller amounts in everyday citizens. “Emotions, morals, humanities, beliefs, you can take advantage of them. During the interrogations, everything is a valuable chip in this game,” the candidate recounts. In conveying his professional mindset and tactics, the investigator encapsulates the post-traumatic, total-surveillance psychopolitics of contemporary China.

Wang was born in 1984, a banner year for the Reform Era. That year China sent its first Olympic team to Los Angeles, and students greeted ascendant leader Deng Xiaoping’s parade car with a sign that read XIAOPING NI HAO as it made its way through Tiananmen Square on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the People’s Republic in an unprecedented gesture of familiar, egalitarian affection. Wang belongs squarely to the “Post-80s” generation of only children who, until Covid at least, had known only rising income levels. His path was not entirely conventional: He studied biology at a regional university before completing MFA degrees at Tsinghua and Boston University. His father, a painter and educator, exposed him to art and intellectual history, without steering him in any particular direction. Five years in the United States honed Wang’s understanding of his own ideological biases as he confronted those of his classmates and the local institutions he worked with. The works he made in America offer sharp caricatures, as exemplified by Addicted, 2017, in which television commercial actors arrayed in a Vanity Fair–style group portrait voice their secret obsessions in a ritualistic communal catharsis; or else empathetic engagements, as does La Bohème, 2015, shot in the Hudson Valley, which cuts between deadpan interviews with local artists who reminisce and plot as they work their day jobs. 

While there may be no substantive connection between these explorations and his most significant work to date, the “The Northeast Tetralogy,” 2018–21, it was these years of remove that gave him the clarity to see his home region as a palimpsest on which the complex modern histories of China and East Asia more broadly have been repeatedly inscribed. As Luan Shixuan, who curated Wang’s first institutional solo show, “Empty Handed into History,” at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in 2021, wrote: “The Northeast’s developmental path has always been a violently fluctuating line, filled with breaks . . . a giant stage where history plays out its drama, where either earthshaking change happens, or silence and stillness prepare the next great upheaval.” The “Tetralogy” weaves a complex web of stories, but its two most important characters are based on everyman protagonists separated by a century. Zhang Koukou was a migrant worker, executed in 2018 for the intricately plotted revenge killing of the three men involved in his mother’s death twenty-two years earlier, in a case that briefly gripped the Chinese internet. Guo Qinguang was a student at Peking University and is recognized as the first martyr of the May 4 movement, an anticolonial awakening in response to China’s marginalization at Versailles in 1919. 

The defining image of the “Tetralogy” is based on a historical photograph of the “white-robed youth” preparing what became the May Fourth protest in a classroom at Peking University. Taken candidly by a French journalist, it captures these activist intellectuals in a state of deferred self-recognition. The viewer can almost imagine being a photographer who has penetrated this room of intellectual sodality, revolutionary fervor, and overwhelming youth. The subjects glance back in startled assurance, as if suddenly aware of their centrality, but also of their fleeting place in an ongoing continuum. In Wang’s stylized re-creation, the nineteen young men move just enough to show that this is not a still: One shakes a jug, another barely trembles as he writes in ink and brush, until suddenly and in perfect unison, they turn to the camera. The banner hanging most prominently behind them exhorts: [LET THE] JADE BLOOD [OF MARTYRS FLOW] A THOUSAND YEARS.

Wang has described the longue durée of China’s modern awakening that began with May 4 as an earthquake, and the century that separates the predicaments of Guo Qinguang and Zhang Koukou as a natural interval between aftershocks. The transformations of the twentieth century are not over, and may have only just begun. In Tungus, 2021, the most ambitious film in the “Tetralogy,” two soldiers—Korean volunteers who came to China to fight the Japanese during World War II and stayed on to fight on the Communist side of the civil war that followed, experiencing the famine-inducing, and largely forgotten, 1948 Siege of Changchun—wander through snowy landscapes following a map they hope will lead them to a boat bound for Jeju Island. Their story is interspersed with episodes from Tao Yuanming’s fifth-century fable “Peach Blossom Spring,” as well as with scenes of a starving scholar preparing his own noose as he remembers his revolutionary youth three decades earlier as one of the men in the photograph. In his research and writing on the “Tetralogy,” Wang coined the term pan-shamanization, encapsulating the idea that “the physical bodies of people become the medium of historical consciousness.” The word has since been widely embraced and discussed by critics as a way of talking about the multiple temporalities and complex hauntologies of the Northeast, and by extension modern China.

In the depths of the three-year pandemic lockdown, Wang revisited his homecoming piece in The Second Interrogation, a work in which the tactics of The Interrogation are brought to bear on the field of Chinese contemporary art. Structurally, it is his most complex work to date, juxtaposing a single-channel video with a two-channel diptych. The diptych begins with an artist onstage for a public conversation, then floats in and out of internal monologues and exchanges between the artist and his censor. He explains a piece he is planning in homage to the “Seven Sins,” as the unsanctioned performances at the opening of the epochal 1989 “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition were later known. The performances are re-created in knowingly sharpened dramatizations based on limited—and, in the Chinese art world at least, iconic—archival images. One recalls Wu Shanzhuan’s “selling shrimp” performance, with the reenactor placing his catch on a yellowed copy of Fine Arts in China, the vital weekly organ of the 1980s avant-garde that was shut down in the wake of the student movement. Another retools Li Shan’s foot-washing performance, which originally employed a red plastic basin collaged with images of Ronald Reagan. Wang subtly substitutes the more obvious likeness of Mao, albeit borrowed from Li’s own “Political Pop” paintings of the early 1990s. The most famous of these performances—Xiao Lu’s Dialogue, in which she shot two bullets into her own installation of telephone booths, ending the exhibition and foreshadowing the gunfire of the coming spring—is framed by the fictional artist, in his conversations with his censor, not as a heroic gesture but as an admission of futility. “Just as the Seven Sins ruled out possibilities for art,” the artist ventures, “so the student movement eliminated the chance of reform.”

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