I’ve been intending to write this for a little while now, not least as a token of my appreciation for all the times Chengdu Living has been an invaluable ‘go to’ source of information for me. I held off on writing this until now so I could at least feel some way qualified to give an authentic point of view on the thrills and spills of adjusting to life in the ‘Du. It’s been just days shy of a year since I leapt out here with only one eye open, and I finally feel like I’ve settled into being a part of Chengdu. It’s been every bit worth the frustration.

And so to the following: six things that will either have you in an eternal spin, or if you get your act together and practice using even a little common sense, will steer you towards a far easier transition than you might have thought possible. I’ve either made half of these mistakes myself, or have been rightly entertained by the tales of woe told by other poor souls who too should have perhaps known better.

I’ll keep these points brief, but will very likely expand on each as a separate article in the coming weeks.

Tip #1: Plan Ahead & Build Contacts

This one is a no brainer (no, really!), but I’ve seen examples of bad planning that have even shocked me. One such post in the Chengdu Forum read something like: ‘Oh my god, I just got here and I don’t know where I am, and only have $xxx in my wallet. Help!‘. No need point out the epic failure to plan ahead in this instance, but you get my drift.

Before you even get here you should have built up a foundation of knowledge, and where possible, contacts of people who may (or may not) be useful to you. You’re already one step ahead if you’re reading this. Chengdu Living forums were a massive leg up for me before arriving, eventually steering me toward the visa agent who handled my change of visa upon arrival. Knowing what you’ll need to be taking care of ahead of time and planning for it might be common sense, but only if you’re actually practicing it.

Tip #2: Get Reliable Information & Secure The Right Visa

Again, this one is fairly obvious unless you relish the idea of being detained, deported, or denied entry from/into Mainland China. Yes, dozens (as in hundreds!) of people have played it to the wire and managed to fix things at the final hour, but why go through all the hassles and stresses when you could have had it all worked out smoothly ahead of time?

Know why you’re coming, and plan accordingly. I know from experience that even outside of China, when you step into a Chinese consulate on your home soil looking for a visa, you are in fact entering the twilight zone. The best piece of advice I could give anyone coming to China is always (always!) do your research, no matter who you have telling you ‘this is how it is’, because 9 times out of 10 you will be receive conflicting information. Make sure it’s always you who is the informed party, and you’ll save yourself most of the running around you’d be dealt otherwise.

Tip #3: Scout Out a Place to Live

So I don’t have to repeat myself any further, the key word is planning! Circumstances will be different for many of you, but we all want to have a place to call home, and leaving it to chance will put you in all manner of awkward situations. There are agencies with an online presence, though you should expect to pay higher rents if this is your chosen route. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to be as informed as possible when it comes to renting an apartment/house/other in Chengdu. Standards are just not the same here, and your protection is all but non-existent, so do your homework and invest some time in figuring out what will make your being here more livable.

Agents are everywhere, so the first thing is choose wisely. Know that they will expect 1 month as a deposit, and typically 3 months in advance. This is often negotiable, particularly if they expect you to be staying for an extended period of time. Agents will also seek 50% of 1 months rent commission. Before you sign anything, double check everything, and make sure some form of maintenance/upkeep clause is included in the contract to protect you from anything unforeseen. Lastly, expect something unforeseen!

Tip #4: Eat Good

Everyone’s got to eat, right? It might sound simple (and it is!), but you should give this some thought if nutrition is even half way important to you. I’ve seen too many sorry looking (Western) souls sitting in a Pizza Hut, kidding themselves that ‘this is really good food’. Language aside, you can eat extremely well here in Chengdu.

You just landed in Sichuan, and whether you know it or not, the food here is awesome. Scary stories of recycled oil, fake eggs, and pesticides aside, getting out and about in Chengdu, and in particular your neighbourhood, will have you eating like a King without having to break the bank. You’ll find Supermarkets selling pretty much everything you’ll need, but the adventurous souls will be stumbling upon food markets that sell an awesome array of fruits, vegetables, fish, meat, and a host of condiments. The prices in the markets also mean you can buy much larger quantities for less.

Be adventurous here, and don’t be afraid to put yourself in potentially awkward (pointing) situations. There’s an abundance of eat out joints that will serve up some of the best food you’ve tasted in your life. Enjoy!

Tip #5: Get Around and ‘Know Your Hood’

Forward planning (damn it!), and doing your homework aside, you will need to figure out where everything is at and find your bearings. It might take some time, but it shouldn’t be daunting. There are a number of ways to approach this, so figure out what works for you, and get going.

I approached this half methodically, half haphazardly… I started by spending the first day literally walking around the entire area my apartment was located in, with nothing but a GPS pointer on my mobile to remind me which way I was facing. In the next few days I hopped on and off just about every Metro stop, and proceeded to do the same in each area. I looked online ahead of time for cafe’s and restaurants, so I could stop off for coffee or eats along the way.

Google Maps and Google Translate will get you a long way. Translate on my mobile has been massively useful to this day, storing all of your searches in memory, so flashing a destination at a taxi driver will have you on your way immediately, and is a good back up should you get lost.

There’s always the bike or scooter option too, and you can be up and running on a new scooter for as little as 2,000 RMB ($325 approx.), zipping around Chengdu with all the other stunt drivers. Which leads me nicely to my next, and final point…

Tip #6: Stay Sharp & Look Ahead

This one doesn’t just apply to the insanity that is all things Chengdu/China traffic related, this applies to everything I’ve covered and more. Hopefully I don’t need to say it again, but unless you think out all the possibilities ahead of time, you can expect to be facing some headaches. And don’t take it for granted that this applies only to the bigger issues, it doesn’t. No matter how trivial, or otherwise obvious to you and I, get ready to be infuriated at times by what at first may seem like sheer ignorance. Soon enough you’ll find yourself waiting to step out of an elevator, or off of the bus, only to be faced with 50 people trying to occupy the exact space your feet are planted on before you even blink. No one hates you, it’s just the mix we’re all in, so get used to it and play along!

Perhaps I should close by saying patience really is a virtue, and the sooner you get some, the sooner you’ll settle into the change of pace and attitude that exists here. Remember Chengdu is a 2nd tier city, and although it has come a long way in recent times, there’s a stretch to go before you’ll find people holding doors open for you, or remembering that you agreed to meet at 1 o’clock, and not 3! You already took the leap of faith to get here, so go with it and make the best of every opportunity and experience that comes your way. There are countless people you’ve yet to meet will tell you it’s worth every effort.

I for one hope you work it out.

Once tutored by our previously featured artist He Duoling, Tang began his study at Sichuan Pedagogical Academy (Oil Painting department) in Chengdu. He encountered the works of Caravaggio, Tiepolo, Rembrandt, Rubens, Velazquez, Sargent, Goya, and Dali (the latter of whose influence can be seen from Tang’s use of floating fish and eyeballs) and was inspired by their razor-sharp precision and faithfulness to movement and form, their exquisite renderings of light and shadow- a precision of motion that 20th century animators would carry to whole new realms.

Whatever Flies in the Sky

As far as standing out among the crowd goes, Tang is a modestly rebellious intellectual. He’s not advertising full-on eroticism, psychedelic candy colors, or ubiquitous culture cues, but there is enough of the present culture in his work: just look at the popular video game Legend, which he likes to play. Tang Wugang’s paintings are broken, interrupted, and sliced through, even demented at times. He may keep things to scale, but he will offer multiple perspectives, painting a gloomy abscess where light and emptiness reveal the pieces of exploded persons, helpless and breathless, war-torn, drowning under wreckage. Arms, legs and heads disappear as if ripped off, suspended in depth. Moodily sketched female busts and the lingering impressions of war heroes, frozen in place and space, await the end of some struggle or the punishment of some crime.

I visited Tang’s house on a frigid Saturday night in his cul-de-sac near the Chengdu airport, tucked away in the southern reaches of the city. Unlike spaces in modernized He Tang Yuese, his house is a cozy three-story affair- no high ceilings or modern facades. In the lower part of the house are his dining room and studio. We ate together with a number of friends. The household help set out simmering hotpot with Korean-style paocai, lotus root soup, rice, and dishes of spicy vegetables, a meal prepared in observance of a showcase of Tang’s work that day at the nearby Millennium Hotel, where we’d been earlier to photograph his works.

"General" Canvas Painting

After dinner, he led me to the adjacent studio where I took pictures of paint sets, worktables, and canvases as tall as me. “Why is the head missing and an apple floating at the same level?” I asked the artist of one armor-clad figure, warily drawing toward three others. I got a piecemeal answer which, as we walked from studio to hallway, up the stairs, through the study and sitting room, typified each response he gave me: incomplete. A painting hung on every wall. Though Tang remained aloof about the meaning of his work, every portrait and landscape seemed to have a special significance that tied it in with the rest.

An absence of overt explanations challenges any easy interpretation of Tang Wugang’s dream landscapes. The artist’s symbols are of purely personal and, he’s hinted, mythical significance. Wu Yongqiang, a Sichuan University art professor, writes:

“Tang Wugang is absolutely not a painter who believes in ‘repetition as power.’ He is never a follower of domestic contemporary art trends, painting a symbol again and again until it’s dead… [He] prefers to egotize through his works, rather than sell them as a brand product. He chooses targets at random… Everything, whatever flies in the sky, swims in the river, grows in the soil, gets delivered from the womb or sprouts from seed, can be found in his works.”

The artist takes a look at a recent work in his studio in Chengdu

Colors are muted: shadow and rust are rubbed away, revealing dim exteriors, eerily torn. Fish, apples, eyeballs and other objects appear injected into the atmosphere as in a gel, often propped on the end of stems, or else fixed onto long, spindly ejections of fluid. Tiny fish eat through the empty space like worms in woodwork, suggesting underwater decomposition. At times solitary figures are caught at a crossroads. This recalcitrance of space, the cross-section of the underwater and above land, the absent and the present, make for an uncomfortable viewing experience. But Tang’s palette permits only partial visibility. The cool and removed atmosphere evokes ravages of distance and time which prohibit any actualization of movement. But ravages don’t mean surrender; this is Time trying to resurrect itself. Tang’s bodies don’t speak to a present, riotous existence, screaming to be heard; but rather to a confused, disintegrating, implacable past.

"故国悲风" Oil painting on Canvas

In the shadows of one image was the head of a faded general from pre- Minguo (Gregorian) times in China; a marauder scavenged from the annals of history. His mustache appeared to be fluttering on the winds of a whole, crumbling city, which turned out to be the scene of his own or his kingdom’s demise. I took him for a Western figure, like one of Velazquez’s, but Tang insisted that this Chinese helmet was part of the war regalia having very precise characteristics that he’d taken the time to research. In another work was a boy Tang could recall from his childhood- they were classmates- rimmed by a crushed piece of paper (a homework assignment), and more objects from school: an apple, red stars worn by high-achieving students in the old days of the PRC. There was a man, further in the distance, his back to the viewer (the artist or the boyhood friend?) bent and looking troubled, in despair.

From Chengdu to Ke-lo-ah-ke

In the sitting room lay a traditional Chinese tea service- an yixing clay teapot on a tray, surrounded by little figurines sculpted playfully into animals; a turtle and a monkey. “I’m the turtle,” Tang Wugang said, pouring tea over the clay turtle; the woman beside us happened to be born in the Year of the Monkey, and he drenched the monkey in tea and handed it to her. I’m a Tiger; there was no tiger, but there was wonderful, deeply scented, rich Pu-erh tea, with a scalding bite that made me think of charred conifer leaves.

The artist in his studio

Tools of the trade

Beside us were two birds in cages- one was a female named Wei Wei. The other, a male, had no name. In addition to being a connoisseur of history, Tang Wugang has a special fondness for exotic birds and other rare species. The shelves in his house are stacked with books from end to end on art and history, and tapestries and ornaments fill the upstairs of the house, as well as a large tropical fish tank, displaying his love of wildlife. His images always reflect these collections of esoterica. Whether it’s purely an aesthetic appeal, I’m not sure. Like a man of the Renaissance, Tang did not have the opportunity to view his favorite Western art directly when he was in growing up, so he’s developed a style that Westerners may perceive as derivative- leaning toward ideas and themes that appear out of context in place and time. Such derivation typifies much Chinese contemporary work, both because Chinese students are instructed to sketch the plaster heads and busts of Greek statues, and because, as full-grown artists, they often try to work from memory… a model that loses its substance after a while.

A pair of Tang Wugang's oil paintings side by side

“I listen, and I read about the West,” Tang, said to me, pouring out tea and emptying the teapot several times, trying to get the flavor to suffuse the pottery. “In college I read many Western books.” His hands moved eloquently, like a song. A CD recording of traditional Buddhist chants droned out from the stereo by the fish tank . (Tang Wugang said he’s not a Buddhist, but appreciates many aspects of Buddhism.) “I understand plenty of Western culture. What I understand, I like. I like the Beatles. Do you know Ke-lou-ah-ke?” he wanted to know, injecting an idiosyncrasy that I was forced to decipher. “Oh, yeah, On the Road,” I said. He took me off on a string of other pop and literary references; where they began and ended I wasn’t sure.

Art Imitates Life Imitates Theater

Three collections of Tang Wugang’s works are featured on his website: Outside the Circle and Inside the Dream, the strangely named Shutiao (French Fries) and Dog Chase Tomorrow, and finally, ‘Feiniao Tianchang’- The Flying Bird in Heaven. Two more series are discussed in an article by Professor Wu Yongqiang, mentioned above. Regarding the title of the first series, Professor Wu describes meeting the artist for the first time and getting a partial explanation:

“‘I am just amusing myself,’ [Tang said.] ‘Including with painting. I am not involved with the Circle and I know little about the Circle.’

…Anyone who has heard about the ancient martial art circles [in China] and the contemporary art circle existing today would be aware of the said ‘Circle.’ When I reflect on this, I have to move my eyes back to the warriors painted by Tang Wugang. Loneliness hides behind the glittering sword, and it suddenly occurs to me why the paintings in this series were named ‘Warrior-Departure.’ Armor, sword and horse ride on, incarnated as a human in battle upon the eye contact of the viewer. However, when you finally find out which is which, they are turning head to leave… now, you see the lonely Universe at their backs… Tang Wugang, who stands outside the circle, draws up the brush to amuse himself alone.”

Regarding the theatricality of the artist’s work:

“Aren’t we living in a cultural ambience full of historical theatricals? Aren’t people joking with history, not only now, in an era where we are ‘amusing ourselves to death?’ Isn’t the official history, which has always been transcribed by the elites, time and time again, made fun of again and again? The series ‘Wailing Winds of the Past’ is a theatre for the theatricals…Actually, these paintings are interrogating the theatricality of our culture.”

Finally, looking at Tang Wugang’s striking use of light and bold shadow:

“[His] paintings are colored, but the colorfulness cannot cover the black tones. He applies black in such diverse ways that I cannot help thinking about the charm of ink in Oriental art, not to mention the images in the ‘Warrior-Departure’ series being filled with a calligraphic quality.”

At first glance, Tang’s use of metaphorical signifiers, style, and overall visual language is difficult to decipher. To some it may appear derivative, lacking anything to distinguish it from typical Western fantasy art or graphic design. But the relationships are so mysterious that you must look again. Is there social rhetoric at work here, a rhetorical message? Whatever it is, it’s encrypted with a purely its own significance. I wonder: do Tang Wugang’s historical symbolist images, shadowy, broken, and mysterious, compare to at all- or do they totally disrupt and bastardize- the traditional Eastern practice of depicting persons from history?

I wish I could retreat into the woods and raise my children on a mountainside apart from this world of petty emotions, but that’s something that I want. My sons would mourn their exile.

And my wife would resist, because women know better than anyone the power of a tribe. Several moms together with their children walking the streets are surrounded by a bubble of impenetrability because their undertaking is of the utmost seriousness. Raising the next generation is something that we in our hearts realize is the number one vocation of humankind. Everything depends on doing it right.

But how do we know what is right and what is wrong? Even with all of the millions of words written on the topic, only trial and error work. We are constantly adjusting to a tiny individual as he/she blossoms beyond the point of attachment and into self-awareness. For that it’s nice to have like-minded people around to help decipher, to provide a comparison, and to improve the way one goes about nurturing a little human.

Mama Groups

Groups of women chattering while toddlers amble about gives me a warm sense of pleasure. I feel exquisitely male when I walk into a room filled with crying children and soothing moms. It feels right and natural that mothers should band together to raise children while I go about the less important business of making sure the roof stays over everyone’s head.

In my experience, children under the age of 2 need mom around all the time. Dad is cool and should be around as often as is dadly possible, but terror is the absence of mom.

In China mom and dad usually have to work a lot and childcare is given over to the grandparents. That rubs some moms raw. Not all women want to be rid of their children so they can work/play and not all grandparents share the same parenting vision as today’s mothers. Moms who have their own ideas about natural birth vs. c-sections, breastmilk vs. infant formula, plastic toys vs. wooden toys, jungle law vs. supervised playtime etc. must step in between the grandparents and the child in order to make their own visions real. They also need support because a mom alone against the clan in a struggle over “what’s best for Stinky” can quickly turn ugly.

So most moms in China turn to online baby groups (mom-ified chatrooms, basically) for information, support and baby products. A community forms online and spills over into real life as moms get out of the house for a trip to the park with the kids, or arrive en masse at my house to let the kids run wild. These communities are popping up all over the web (and in an informal preschool/Sascha’s office near you) and the key development here is not just the creation of communities, but the establishment of a philosophy of parenting that takes what mom’s in the West have already gone through and applies it to China.

Only the Best

Can you think of a more invasive situation for mothers than the One Child Policy and all that comes with it? I can. The education system here and all that comes with that. I’m not the only one who can see it: every baby group in China is grappling with questions like:

• Where can I get baby food that won’t kill my child?
• Where can I give birth in a beautiful, natural, loving environment?
• Is there anyplace I can send my kid besides state schools?

Which basically translates into, How can I get access to the best possible things for my child? Its not about survival anymore. It’s not about ducking your head down, not getting thrown in re-education camps and getting a job anymore. It’s about them being something more than what we are, giving them the choices that we never had. It’s about the New Chinese Man and Woman, not the old, terrified, shoe-less, obedient peasant.

Chinese middle class moms want everything that American and European middle class moms have and they are banding together to learn the techniques, resist the local thought police and buy all of the best baby products available.

Something Revolutionary

Something I find fascinating is that Chinese do not generally meet up with strangers, in a stranger’s home, and let the kids run wild with each other. That’s actually not that common. Or wasn’t. Child-rearing here took into account the whole “it takes a village” idea in a very concrete way. Clans and extended families banded together and formed the village for the children. Most people in China don’t (didn’t) move around much, so the neighbors might just be family.

Now though, mom groups are forming up based on philosophy. It’s not about where you live anymore, it’s about how you live.

Conclusion & Photos

“I don’t want my daughter going to kindergarten with children who grew up drinking formula instead of breast milk, because that is unnatural,” said a member of a local Chengdu babygroup named Weimima. “Parents who make the choice to use formula instead of breastfeed will make other parenting decisions that will not agree with my philosophy.”

This, in my opinion, is the type of grassroots change that can bring about true social revolution. I admit it, all my life I thought (and when it comes to Wall Street, still think) that violent rebellion is a must before any real change can take place. Being a Daddy and walking in on a room of poopie-butts and mommies with one breast out has taught me that soft changes are the core of true change. I guess my job is just to make sure the roof doesn’t leak and body slam any men who dare disrupt playtime.

Promoters for real estate opening parties spend tens of thousands of RMB to set the stage for potential homeowners. Magicians and mini-skirt wearing violin players are commonplace, but none earn even close as much as the coveted Anglo-Saxon musician/clown. The “White Monkey,” as some call the foreign performer, is the ultimate showpiece for any Grand Opening, be it for a multi-billion RMB high-tech zone or an apartment villa in the cabbage-picking boondocks.

Paid in Full

I’ll never forget my first “laowai” gig in the fall of 2008.

At that time I was a senior college student in a foreign study abroad program. Money was tight, I had an English teaching job in Wenjiang every Thursday (5 classes back to back) and two of the classes consisted of 45 screaming kindergarteners, who could barely speak Chinese let alone learn basic English words.

The gig was an anniversary party for the Great Wall Wine company at the InterContinental Hotel. If you could bottle wealth, I could have made a fortune from selling the air. The chandeliered lobby featured a seafood buffet and bottomless bottles of liquor served by scantily clad models. I remember not having a white collared shirt, so my agent provided a frilly disco-esque shirt and a pair of black leather shoes several sizes too small.

 Born to Rock

There were four musicians altogether:

• A trumpet player from Singapore
• American saxophone player
• Canadian guitarist, and
• Myself on bass guitar

None of us had ever practiced or rehearsed songs together. Naturally I was a bit nervous about embarking on such a half-assed endeavor in this classy venue.

“So we are playing Autumn Leaves, What a Wonderful World, a Paul Simon tune, all easy stuff.” The trumpet player instructed confidently.

“Oh, I played Autumn Leaves in college jazz combo, it’s like E minor, A minor, F# B7 etc.” I replied.

“Yeah well we have backing tracks so don’t worry too much.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know an mp3 without words, it’s like a sing-along” He replied, smiling and pulling back his ponytail.

I watched the lobby fill with bespectacled, balding Chinese men accompanied by women 20 years their junior.

The gig itself was painless, within a few bars of each song I figured out the general chord pattern and plunked out a bassline, which was muted by the overpowering backing track. After each two song “set” the crowd applauded and soon we were approached by tall girls in qipaos (traditional Chinese skirts) asking,

“Shuai ge, keyi pai zhao ma? “(Hey handsome, can we take a picture?)

Posing for photos, I felt like an instant celebrity in a pre-packaged Ren & Stimpy kind of way. If you wanted Rock-star-in-a–can this was the place for it. In this industry one’s musical skill is not determined by their chops but rather if your cable can reach the soundboard some 20 meters away from the stage.

Admittedly, the first couple “gigs” were exciting and new, but the novelty of the White Monkey Gig wears off quickly when one sees the sociological forces behind the whole fiasco.

Some people actually make a career out of this…

Class, Class, Class

Historically speaking, entertainers in China are typically members of the lower class. I’m sure you’ve seen a movie or three in which an underprivileged street kid joins a traveling theater troupe either to rise through the ranks or to be dealt a cruel dish of reality. Same goes for modern day performers, many with high hopes get stuck in the net of mediocrity.

Dream of becoming a famous cellist or classical musician? I hope you look hot in a mini-skirt and can play a techno version of the can-can on the violin.

Dream of leading a R&B group or jazz band on saxophone? Sorry buddy, only Kenny G covers are allowed.

By and large, musicians and entertainers bastardize their skills to get paid performing at Grand Openings around China. I’ve met dancers and musicians of extraordinary skill who are forced to conform to the cookie-cutter line-ups at these Openings. They go like this:

• First, the Water Drum girls followed by a foreigner band and then a magician
• Announcement, ceremony and then the saxophone guy
• Foreigner band Take Two, followed by hot girl with a violin
• Ending with angry looking models waiting to step back into Boss Wang’s BMW. Applause from the peasant masses or upper crust bosses
• End show

Racism and The Hunt

The MCs and agents are actually unscrupulous pimps that will sometimes hold off paying you until:

1. you give up
2. accept less than previously agreed upon
3. get intimidated into paying up in full

The phone call. (translated from Chinese)

“Hello Wei Lai we have a show on the 25th”

“I think I’m free, what time and where?”

“Sunday evening in Deyang. *(note location is likely to be 1-2 hours outside of whatever city is named)

“There are no Blacks or Chinese in your band?”

“No… why?”

“Oh nothing, who’s singing?”

“A girl from Spain, I think you’ve seen here before.’

“Oh right the skinny one”.

“Yeah,… ok so what’s the payment?”

“1200 RMB for two sets of 3 songs.”

“Sounds good, see you then.”

No blacks, no Chinese? What the hell? What if I was an American born Chinese that only knew how to say ni hao?

Anyone who looks remotely Asian wouldn’t be approached for these jobs. A white guy who only knows power chords would be picked for a gig over a guitar virtuoso with an Asian face.

Performers backstage at the gig waiting between shows

These days agents are a bit more opened minded about people with dark skin, however they are looking for a certain kind of dark-skinned musician; one with excellent music skills, good attitude and doesn’t seem “too African.” And sometimes they’re looking for the “Too African” stereotype.

Have Fun With It

A good friend of mine wrote a rock song about Sichuan Shao Kao (street barbeque), entitled “Basi De Hen” (Sichuan dialect for “Super cool”) which he performed regularly in 2009 at a bar in Jinli Street.

The chorus went:

Zui hao chi zui hao wan, shao kao ni shi wo de ai ren (“The most delicious, the most fun. BBQ you are my true love“)

I played this song with him for a crowd of 10,000+ in a suburb of Chongqing and had the place roaring. The peasants jumped the barrier and reclaimed the seats cordoned off for” VIP” guests. The lethargic security weren’t able to control the mayhem. Fireworks went off on stage, fog machines belched smoke and soap bubbles. It was rock and roll, baby.

If the setting is right, the audience will get into the music, especially the Chinese songs. Recently some friends and I performed a rendition of “Chun Tian Li” at a banquet dinner for a medical supplies conglomerate at a Chengdu hotel. The whole place was singing along, toasting baijiu glasses in the air and swaying their heads to the thumping E string on the chorus. The vibe continued throughout our bluegrass and funk tunes and we were asked for an encore. Perhaps there is room for baijiu banquet rock stars, after all.

Gotta Pay the Bills

My roommate, a Spanish-speaking university student about to graduate from Sichuan University said,

I can’t teach English and there are few opportunities for Spanish-teaching jobs. How else can I pay for rent? I’m forced to be an actor!

A good friend of mine and guitar player from Japan proclaims,

We’d never have these “Laowai gigs” in Japan. The people would just laugh at you. Why do the Chinese spend so much money on bad entertainment? Only professional musicians have performances in Japan.

Although I hate the system, it’s got me under its thumb. I sold out.

Alas, for now these types of jobs are my most lucrative income; the US stock market sunk, I graduated in 2009 into a jobless economy. I’ve worked in China for 2 years, as struggling writer and editor who will try anything aside from teaching English to make ends meet.

I try to justify doing these gigs by knowing that I’ll save money and use my experience in China to eventually work on environmental law and policy consulting in Asia.

For example, last year I saved up money up money from White Monkey jobs in hopes of doing independent media reporting at the G20 summit in Seoul. Unfortunately, my passport was stolen, so the trip was canceled, and using the refunded money I got a huge tattoo instead.

What say you? Are White Monkeys justified? Are they sell-outs? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

When I came across the painting Wild Garden, I thought, Pop Surrealism. The colors fit. The pastel frock has a rotundness against the painting’s muddled and blended background, similar to Mark Ryden’s use of pastel, and the whole thing treats of nature in a deliberately mocking way. The woman recalls the elegant nymph-like muses of Degas, however; she is not in the least grotesque. A vaguely Asian-looking person isolated against a desolate wilderness, she creates an overall mood too somber and earnest to be absurd. That right bunny ear jerks upward as though genuinely listening to, or for, something.

The artist is not a surrealist, but is widely regarded as one of China’s greatest living masters of realism. He Duoling (pronounced Huh Doo-oh-ling) resides in Chengdu, where he was born in 1948 and earned his art degree from the local teacher’s college in 1977. He went on to study painting at Chongqing’s Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in the late ’70s, and with a number of his colleagues in the early ’80s, founded China’s infamous “Scar Art” movement.

The Scar Artists were attempting to counteract a strict regime of socialist realist propaganda at the time. Insisting on more personal–and more reflective–themes, the Scar Artists co-opted the idea of the “real” for themselves while exploring subjects of humanism, intimacy, memory, emotion, and sexuality; in a reaction to the political ravages of the previous decades which had not been allowed to surface in art through critical dialogue.

Thanks to a friend, I was able to meet He personally and pay a visit to his studio. The studio, in He Tang Yuese, boasts staggered walls and windows of varying lengths and sizes, with one footbridge intersecting the structure diagonally in a cubistic temple to modern art. It is located near other outstandingly modern buildings and galleries, a true artists’ sanctuary.

The first painting I saw when I walked into the garage was in the same series as Wild Garden, entitled Shalott the Rabbit. Standing on a broad easel, across from the indoor basketball hoop, was this painting–it shimmered and floated in an otherworldly haze. Monotone, like the concrete pillars and structures of Chengdu, its green tint would be one I’d come to recognize. The painting deliberately borrows its imagery from the 1888 work The Lady of Shalott, by John William Waterhouse. The artist often plays on the romantic musings of the Pre-Raphaelites–painters like Waterhouse, Hughes, and Millais. Those Christian idealists attempted to resurrect what was dead or dying in an era of industrialization: feminine beauty and a sense of innocence and idealism, expressed through sincere renderings and faithfulness to “nature.”

He told me he wanted the rabbit version of Waterhouse’s Lady to be “limited,” meaning he wanted her to float in an isolated cubicle of water, like a tank–contemporary shorthand for innocence and beauty, which can be pummeled together with a prop and stage set.

He Duoling does sincerely respond to the Pre-Raphaelites; he does not merely parody them or extrude and rip off their imagery, like a pop artist. He’s also inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s famous masterpiece Christina’s World, which in one painting he simply copied, overlaying it with the image of a young Chinese girl lost in her own revelry. Just like the romantics, he starts out knowing what he wants to paint, creating a luminous base by applying many continuous background layers, outlining the foreground figures carefully, and composing his scenery with strokes of tinted oil liquid mediums. He creates a wash, also using techniques from traditional Chinese landscape painting. In his figures, who are mostly Chinese or look Chinese, the feeling of revelry and complacency reflects a sense of both national pride and personal beauty. An exaggerated light saturates the canvases, which are often glowing.

What bothers me about this work is not the way his paintings look; they’re beautiful. In their beauty, and also in the detachment and complacency of the subjects, there’s a uniqueness and an ascendent quality, as if the images were going to step out of the canvas and fly upward. But this is supposed to have radical implications for Chinese art. How different Chinese and Western sensibilities are! In the West, nothing’s threatening or subversive about depicting a beautiful woman, and pointing out man’s unbalanced relationship with nature is almost required.

To use tautology, an art movement represents new ideas that should be taken in context. In China, art has always held on to the tenets of realism. True, Chinese art may be abstract; it applies a wide range of interpretations to the real. But from ancient times until today, a “master” of art has been someone who can render nature exceptionally well. In Chinese schools, from grade level through university, drawing from life is the most rigorously practiced form of art. It’s done with a seriousness that is rarely applied in any Western-style education.

In the 20th century, this use of realism took an ideological turn, in the name of social realism and propaganda. The Chinese consider figure and still-life drawing to be the essential underpinnings of a socialist art education, garnered by tradition. But regardless of use, China maintains a strong national pride in its beauty and quality standards in everything. According to some artists I’ve talked to, “realism” in Western terms means work that’s amateur or incomplete. Given the painstaking renderings of art students in China, from novices to graduates, it’s no wonder why many Chinese sniff at the work that hangs in galleries overseas.

But when I look at the Rabbit series, it’s not technicality that makes He Duoling’s work great. It’s the other aspects–color choices, distortion, the positioning of the figures. And it’s also radical political innuendo, harkening back to the 1970s. In all his images, isolated, despondent, or transfixed adults and youths, placed in rugged or watery or ill-defined settings, paint a picture of China entirely backwards: it’s in perfect economic suspense. They capture an idealized China that doesn’t require “social realism” to exist. Adapted from late 19th-century British poetry, its romantic and literary themes somehow speak to the post-modern condition.

I don’t know the reason for He Duoling’s success. The artist seems to delight in the vitality of his subjects, mostly young, who look transfixed in time and pleased with their own dream-like perfection. Many could well belong to another era. Or, to put it differently, the youthful world contained in his musings belongs to a present-day China, but one which seems to dream of the past. He Duoling has described his own work as “mystical” and “poetic,” suggesting that he doesn’t know what it means or doesn’t want to say.

My guess is, what makes it successful is a combination of things: the Chinese love of the “beautiful,” which privileges Eastern thought but delights in Western subjects; an art market enchanted with the Orient; a Chinese population that sees progress wherever there is change, and novelty when something is drawn from outside. Over the years, He has painted much of the real landscape around him, but he clearly manipulates the settings, flattening them; painting into them–metaphorically and literally–layer after layer of meaning.

“One look and this smacks of the old concessions during the Qing Dynasty, but there is one big difference. Back then the foreigners made us do it; this time we are doing it to ourselves.”

The bad press motivated local consultancy firm Maxxelli Real Estate to take over the PR and management for the development and I recently took a trip to Tianfu International with Maxxelli’s boss Peter Kuppens to see what is really going on there.

I have to admit, I was very impressed. The homes themselves are beautiful two- and three-story houses with impeccable interior design. The complex has a huge swimming pool with hot tubs and a spa center and an on-site multimedia building offers movies in 3D. A staff member was watching Avatar alone and as soon as I stepped in he jumped up and addressed me in English. He looked like a farmer in a uniform but he had obviously been rehearsing his lines for this very moment:

“Welcome to Tianfu International Community, sir. Would you like a tour of our complex?”

Although Peter was my guide for this particular trip, the man followed us around and pointed out the espresso machine (Very good coffee, sir) and urged us to go upstairs and check out the lounge area.

In a lot of the comments in the previous story, the idea of a “foreigner only” housing complex was lampooned. But most of the lampooning was done by young China vets with no intention of spending 30-40k yuan on anything, let alone for rent. The complex isn’t targeting young bums like me and my friends.

Wealthy white collars with corporate packages. That’s who this complex was built for and three families – two Dutch and one Belgian – have already signed on for a year. For Chengdu vets, it might seem preposterous to spend 30k on a home, no matter how beautiful the interior, how warm the pool, how 3D the theater … but I spent a year in Shanghai and it’s already been happening there.

What this really means is that Chengdu is coming up.

Finally Get that Card Game Going

In Shanghai I played a lot of Texas Hold-em with a lot of expats. We played 5/10 and 10/20. What this means is that the big and small blinds were at a minimum 5 and 10 yuan (Check the rules of Hold Em for details). Pots could quickly reach 2000, 5,000 and even 10,000 yuan.

Here in Chengdu most crowds play for 0.5 or 1 yuan on the blinds. Big pots might reach 100 yuan. Tiny, tiny potatoes. The major reason why is because Chengdu expats still number in the low thousands and most of us are living simple lives on simple salaries. More developed towns like Shanghai have more than enough expats who make big money to fill dozens of card games. Whenever one of them gets shut down by the police, another pops up.

What I’m getting at here is that with an increase in wealthy expats with 30k to burn on a home so wifey can maintain upper middle class status, we might finally get that card game going.

Taitais

Speaking of wifey: in cities like Shanghai and Beijing, the foreign “Taitai” (太太, wife) is a fixture of the scene. She usually gets dropped off in a fat Chrysler van, a couple kids in tow, shops till she drops and then has a baller meal at a place like Goga.

They enrich our lives. With taitais around, we can expect better restaurants (micro-brews anyone?), more young kids at the Bookworm, better international schooling, various support groups (knitting, wine tasting, cougar tutorials) to complement the snazzy “Single Malt Club” that we already have. Every international city of any standing has the socialite scene and the scandal that comes with it. We’re being gentrified and we should welcome it.

Hell, Chengdu Living might get itself a weekly post from an embedded high society columnist.

The instant I saw Luo Fahui in his palatial studio outside Chengdu, I knew I was looking at an artist. His piercing, good-humored expression gazed out at me from under his bald crown without sarcasm. Narrow shoulders clothed in the characteristic monotone shirt suggested a dark-clad modesty behind those scandalous paintings. It was the middle of the day and we were sipping tea from class cups in his tall whitewashed home. His wife had on a pair of purple tinted sunglasses. I felt like I was sitting inside a heated igloo.

He Tang Yuese (荷塘月色, Moonlight on the Lotus Pond) is where Luo built his home. One of a collection of fourteen artist lofts, including that of He Duoling, Luo’s home is a testament to what an artist can accomplish in China and also what the artist needs: opulence and solitude. Hanging above the fireplace in Luo’s lush apartment is one of his recent acclaimed works, a picture of a very young boy and a tiger. The boy’s features are obscured and he’s mounted atop the small tiger as though riding it, its head in profile and one eye almost on the viewer. Both tiger and boy look hastily painted, in a flurry of passion–at first. But then you look closer: many deliberate strokes and a bleeding of the paint coalesce to give these bodies a heightened transcendence, an eye-popping ethereality.

Chengdu artist Luo Fahui

I asked him what he thought was most significant about this boy’s posture. One of its hands is thrust into a fist in mid-air while the other clutches the tiger’s neck. My friend, Liang Wei, interpreted for me:

“The boy is based on a character from classical Chinese literature, Wu Song. Originally, he battled the tiger and killed it. But this painting does not depict the original scene, where Wu Song wields a spear and takes the life of the tiger and gets away…In this version, the boy is not subduing the tiger, he’s just mounting it cockily, and he is missing his weapon, his spear. The boy is meant to symbolize China’s overconfident middle class. There is some serious political and social commentary at work there.”

Gesturing toward the back of the apartment, Luo took us through the door into the 90-foot-square garage where some of his recently-treated canvases were being aired out to dry. We chatted in front of an electrifying blue, turquoise, yellow, and gray painting with an illuminated, almost religious-looking figure in the center. We had about a half an hour together, then Luo and his wife slipped out the door very quickly to catch their flight to Scope Basel in Miami, the site of his most recent show.

I am standing transfixed in the studio loft of Luo Fahui. Beside me, sculptures of both convincing and cartoonish nudes posture about the heightened suggestiveness of grimacing skulls and opening rose petals. Huge canvases stretched over frames cover the walls, their colors–gray, orange, red, green, yellow, blue, turquoise–unmistakable. Unmistakably Luo’s.

The Body Discovered

The Spanish art critic, Marcos-Ricardo Barnatan, wrote in his introduction to the artist’s book: “…In the West, the nude corresponds to an invincible need for the absolute, an inevitable search for essence…But this breaks down once and for all in the modern era, where all systems of property disintegrate and the body is literally discovered…allowing eroticism to flow freely…that is the procedure followed by a modernity that paints those glorious bodies– distorted, damned, exalted, embellished or simply manifest…It is this modern game…to which the painting of Luo Fahui subscribes. (22)”

Luo’s work is not just erotic, but dirty. In some of his paintings, this dirtiness is straightforward- we get to see a woman’s legs spread out in front of us, or a naked subject seductively stroking a flower or skull as if it were an impressionistic take on tattoo art. At other times, the flower is exploding, gushing forth its bloody red entrails, or the subject is likewise bleeding. All of his work is partly sexual, partly about decay. There is little of struggle or fighting. There is a lot of dominance and submission. Even the boy and tiger look to be caught in a sadomasochistic lovelock rather than a death match.

One thing that’s increasingly clear is what has become a trademark of much contemporary Chinese painting: its color. All color in painting is symbolic and in China, the significance of color is potentially explosive. When Luo chooses red and gray to emphasize his subjects’ vulnerability, their woundedness and alienation, he is not only speaking to a post-Modern sexual appeal, he is evoking the destruction and resurrection of hurt in China’s Cultural Revolution and the shaking historical events of the past half-century. Chinese artist and scholar Wang Lin writes of one such painting, Female and Flower: “[The painting]’s being a symbol of desire is but a secular metaphor; from this starting point, Luo Fahui aims to probe, seek out and expose the physical, psychological and spiritual changes that happened to the Chinese people after they entered the so-called socialist market economy.”

To put it otherwise, Luo’s work parodies many Western concepts of the nude and nudity, but not in a way that we are used to. Spun into his work, along with the bodies, are ideas–ideas of things we may not recognize: a person from Chinese mythology, a scene from Tiananmen Square. In the nudes are both the objectivity of desire and an untouchable frailty, a cosmic letdown. What is he depicting? Is it really sex?

Wang Lin writes: “First it’s image. No matter flowers, heads or bodies, in Luo Fahui’s paintings, they appear so clear and bright, sparkling and translucent…Flowers are like sexual organs of women, gorgeous, delicate and fragile. Heads, that of grown-up male’s and female’s or infant’s and toddler’s…His body depiction usually displays vague features and ambiguous structures, as if made from flour…The background is either gray nihil, or turquoise sky. With such imagery, the artist creates an erotic atmosphere both illusory and fragile, and the viewers often find themselves shrouded in a soft and bewildered emotional state.”

Luo himself wrote, in one artist statement, “Painting is actually my expression of ideas, of my spiritual and emotional desire to be realized in an independent way. Painting is my own space where I hope for sublimation – to experience freedom of thought and perfection of life, to experience the language of the primitive and the inner emptiness. Such an easy and pleasant existence, and a passage of life which I wish to continue.

But the intentionality behind his paintings is not directly linked with politics. Thinking on this subject, Wang Lin writes, “He is not a thinking-type artist who challenges the social awareness with concepts and schema, but a feeling-type painter who depicts the potential changes in the society’s mental activities with his sensitive neurotic reactions.”

Photos by Jeff Weir

For excerpts of an interview with Luo Fahui, go here.

The devil in many cases is not just in the spectacle of a slowly decomposing city in the desert, but in the exorbitant fees being doled out to under-qualified and downright unscrupulous detailers who wouldn’t know a level from a jackhammer.

We Don’t Need No Ruler

Wealthy Chinese are buying up homes and they often sift through catalogues for a set package. The package is then handed over to a design firm or construction company that prints out intricate 3D renditions of the home for the client. The problem is, farmers can’t decipher 3D and most if not all of the workers putting together the cabinets, measuring out the dimensions of windows, and tiling the bathroom walls are cheap countryside labor accustomed to cheap countryside construction methods.

Everything gets measured using the 差不多 (chabuduo = near enough) maxim, especially when the plans are written in the equivalent of a different language. Just because the home costs 100x what a farmer pays for his house does not mean the quality of anything in the home is anywhere near the same ratio. The concrete is watered-down, the wood is knotty, the metal is thin, the screws strip easy, the silicon peels, the tiles crack and every single measurement is off. So for one house I stood in and marveled at, the difference between the lowest point of the floor and the highest point was 15cm. That is quite a difference.

Most customers have no clue that the tiles in their bathroom are uneven, that the cabinets aren’t flush with the walls or that the walls themselves lean. For them it’s just a matter of dishing out the cash necessary for the designer couch, brand name toilet, the western style washer/dryer and surrounding everything with the best Ikea has to offer.

But if you happen to know something of construction, then you will end up puling your hair out in frustration as yet another crew of workers walk off of the site because they were required to add level after level of flooring just to reduce the discrepancy from 30+cm to 15cm and that is something that is just way out of line. The vast majority of a crew’s clients will never require them to fix or re-do a thing – when they are forced to do so for the same wage, then outfitting a house can stretch out across months and months.

And why go through all that trouble when it was good and chabuduo to begin with?

Everyone’s In On It

The new middle class wants things like washers and dryers, water softeners, international brand name toilets and sinks and they are willing to pay for them. The drive to not only be wealthy but seem wealthy gives construction firms the license to sell three water softeners to one home for $6,000 USD a pop when one will suffice for anything save Buckingham palace. (The parts to make one in China cost around $600 USD and a manual can be found online; a comparable water softener in the US costs between $600-800 USD).

International players like Kohler and G.E. are aware of the big bucks to be made off of wealthy yet ignorant Chinese homebuyers. Kohler manufactures sinks and toilets in China (definitely NOT for export). The sinks are often not flush and the toilet seat comes with one set of screws, nuts, bolts and clamps. If the set does not fit the design you had for your bathroom, then you are out of luck. Kohler does not service anything and will not sell one single screw. Kohler in Sheboygan and elsewhere probably has a different track record for service and quality, but in China they (or their local partner) can get away with bad quality, unresponsive service and still be able to charge more in China than for the same product sold in the USA.

G.E. sells their older model washers and dryers here in China. Not only are Chinese buying an older product for around 10,000 RMB, – almost twice the price of GE’s newest and most popular model - but few, if any, Chinese homes are designed with a washer and dryer in mind. Installing a washer and dryer is not rocket science, but it does require a bit of know-how; how many contract laborers scoured from the underpasses along Chengdu’s Third Ring Road have any clue how to install one? The answer is not many. One homeowner put her washer and dryer in a room in the basement. When the black mold took over the room and started invading the rest of the house, she called up and asked,

“You have a washer and dryer right? What do you do with all of the black stuff?”

The Bubble From the Bottom Up

In Chengdu, property value within the Second Ring Road has doubled in most places and tripled in others over the past two years. All of that value is speculation. The buildings themselves are already cracked and peeling. In some cases, such as the new high-end complex near Jiuyanqiao Bridge, low-quality steel and concrete is causing the building to actually twist toward the top… resulting in constant calls to Otis to repair the elevator…

But property owners are paying more for their apartments and investing everything they have into property because, regardless of what condition the building is in, the price jumps 100% every 6-10 months. Each jump allows brand name appliance and furniture companies to widen the profit margin an inch. Construction companies make more, design companies make more, fabric and wood suppliers make more. It also gives an army of laborers from the countryside a living wage and the ability to walk off of a demanding site to do another quick and sloppy job for some rich city slicker.

How long can it last? No one in the industry is asking that question out loud. If they’re smart they’re stacking cash for the rainy day when Chinese homebuyers either wise up to the pig’s ear they’ve been sold or the price train just plain runs out of steam and comes rolling down the hill taking everyone down with it.

Until that happens (if that happens), then homebuyers will have to take solace in the fact that, although not a single line in their new home is straight, the value still shot up from 4000 RMB/m2 to 12,000 RMB/m2 while they were getting the furnishings done.

The temple is currently being re-furbished and there are gingko saplings lining the road and the stairs up to the main temple complex. The complex itself seemed deserted until I banged on an old bell, rousting out the abbot who then scolded me for being a heathen. Most visitors are photographers coming for the colors: yellow leaves, red tiles, green leaves, and white cliffs. Some photographers have put together amazing shots, like Lao Yan, who visited in 2008.

There is little tourism here because the whole area is beautiful in a simple clean way. There are no major tourist attractions to draw the developers and their theme parks so a trip out to the deeper reaches of Dayi or Chongzhou is always rewarded with good air, good food and simple quiet pleasures. Below are my best efforts at capturing our trip (thanks Charlie for editing these):

Cuancuan and Xiaogui lead their moms up the mountain to the temple

Xiaogui takes a break on the way up

Zhuang and my youngest son, Damian

Man climbing up the steps towards the sunlight

Playing under the tree

A gingko branch hangs down over us

Trees accentuate the yellow and red of Tibetan Buddhism

This is the type of place I could sit in forever

There were prayer flags hung all around the temple

Imagine waking up every morning to gingkos and silence

I love the way the golden leaves look against the Sichuan sky

This blot of gold just burst out of the surrounding green leaves

Cuancuan makes a run for it

Baiyan Temple is Sichuan's only Tibetan Buddhist Temple outside of traditionally Tibetan areas

View Baiyan Temple in a larger map

Conclusion

I had a blast visiting Baiyan Si and considering it’s not far from Chengdu, it’s worth a visit. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments below.

I gave away some free tickets to the show on the forum and headed over with friends around 10pm. I had heard about this DJ before, Liman from Beijing, but hadn’t seen him perform before. He was playing alongside DJ Tomu from Tokyo and Chengdu’s D3F crew, but Liman stole the show with great stage presence. He climbed atop the DJ table, gestured to the crowd all night, and came in a studded leather jacket and punk rock persona. If you weren’t there, you missed out.

But even if you did, the good news is that Xiong Mao, three weeks after hosting DJ Shadow, is doing well and drawing a crowd. Catch me and friends there next week at Disco Death on Friday October 28th with DJ JCC. Come in a costume and get in for free.

Disco Death, Friday Oct 28th at Xiong Mao

Xiong Mao with DJ Liman Photos