Testing.

Testing.


The other day the topic for our daily textbook reading was this Chinese test called the Gaokao, literally translated, kind of a shorthand for ‘High School test’. The test determines not only which college you attend, but also your major. The subject you study for four years. It’s the biggest moment of a Chinese student’s high school career. Easy to see why when it decides such a big part of your life.

So much for aptitude tests, right?


My roommate told me that the time leading up to this test was literally the hardest part of his life so far. After school activities? After freshman year, nothing. Sports? Maybe in your gym class. Going out with friends? Sorry, you have to study. All of your time is spent preparing, endlessly, for this one test.

My roommate looks up from his college civil engineering homework. “After school we didn't do anything else. Eating dinner took maybe 15 minutes. After eating I went back to studying.”

"It's not that the Chinese educational system has problems," he says, "It's that the Chinese educational system is a problem." The remark's a little hard to translate, but I hope the meaning comes through. The idea I get of this period in a Chinese student's life is that it's a black hole of studying. It's all that exists. Despite the problems, my roommate says, "There's no other way. You can't not take the test."


Gaokao lasts for two days: 5 hours a day with a break between morning and afternoon. This is a change from before when it was 3 days long. The Chinese government recently moved the test from July to June because they couldn’t turn on the air conditioning during the worst of the summer and it was too hot for the students to work.

In our classtime discussion, the Gaokao test was compared to the SATs for American students. “Don’t the SATs determine where you go to college?” our twenty-four year old teacher asks.

Well. Partly, I guess.


The SAT is long, sure. When I took it the test lasted 4 hours one morning. Stressful, of course. Life-defining? Not entirely. We American students have other activities. What are colleges looking at in the states?

1. What can you give us?
2. How many foreign countries have you been to?
3. What has been the defining moment of your life?
4. Tell us in paragraphs.

Looking back on it, it’s a pretty loose system, one that has benefited myself and so many of my friends. We have a choice. We have time to prove ourselves. We have our hobbies, we have our friends.


We certainly have more than just a number to throw at admission-folk in the US. Here? One of the sentences in our reading put forth rather matter-of-factly, "Chinese high school students don't have the time to develop their own interests." Your Gaokao grade is your major, it is your career.


In China, what’s left but the numbers? Think about the things you hear so often. Four babies. Billions of people. Ten percent growth. One chance. One test.

That China is killing us in math and science is an often quoted fact. How are the students getting there? The testing process isn't something you hear about when you hear about Chinese education.

You hear the numbers. You hear millions of engineers every year. Maybe some would rather study literature.

Going Out.

Going Out.


So this past Friday night we went out to a bar with a bunch of Chinese kids: students, roommates, roommates boyfriends and girlfriends. When I say we, I mean my friend Hannelore, myself and another CET student. All in all the score was 3 to 5 Americans to Asians.

We Went Out to Sanlitunr. An area of Beijing rampant with foreigners, it’s where the Kids go to drink, dance, etcetera.


Fun stuff, especially seeing as how that night was the first time my roommate, Hannelore’s roommate, and Hannelore’s roomate’s boyfriend had ever been to a bar. They’re all college sophomores or older in a country where the drinking age is 16, and yet this is the first time they’ve gone out. Gone Out, like the American definition.


So we showed them how to Go Out. The bar we went to actually puts dice in cups on the table for you, so we started off teaching them the traditional seven, eleven or doubles. So far so good. Our Chinese friends prefer beer to hard liquor, partly, I think, because the only Chinese hard liquor is baijiu, which is gross. Lots of beer and more dice later, obviously the girls set off to dance.

This wasn’t the biggest place and we had a table, so it was pretty easy to spy on the dancefloor. One of our Chinese friends is breakin’ it down by herself, clearly the best dancer in the place. Hannelore’s roommate is dancing with her boyfriend. Though not quite what we would call ‘dancing together’. There was a notable lack of crotch-ass interaction. Hmm.


So what’s left? I’ve often heard it said that Chinese college students’ romantic relationships are like America’s high school awkward pairings. I’ve also heard that this is because they really are kept from dating in high school. Maybe it’s high school in college, but they still mean it. The two that are dancing together are still cute and obviously enjoy eachother’s company. It’s just that they’re not as, um, intimately involved as the American equivalent.

They can still drink just fine. The roommate and her boyfriend and my roommate keep up, beer and shots later, back to dancing. The dancefloor has a stripper pole. The couple takes turns wrapping their arms around the other and conversely fighting away the other’s advances.


There’s that, and then there’s the other thing. Another Chinese girl came with us. She spent a lot of time flirting with one of our fellow American students, dancing in such a way that she could keep up in any college frat basement. Every so often she would start dancing in front of a mirror, by and for herself.

“I’d get into trouble dancing like this in America, right?” Eyes immovably fixed on some far away point, she runs a hand through her hair and smiles.

Pace Beijing.

(This post marks my first report on Chinese contemporary art. I hope it will be continued by many more)


Pace Beijing is beautiful.

Last Wednesday I went to the 798 gallery district in Beijing, so named because it lays on 798 street in the northeast of the city. 798 is an interesting place because it’s only really appeared in the mainstream awareness in the past few years, but it’s grown to such an astonishing degree that it has become one of the top 3 tourist attractions of China. It goes without saying that right now, Chinese contemporary art is pretty huge.


And the recently opened (August 8, 2008) Pace Gallery in 798 is on top of it. You may or may not know the Pace Gallery in New York city. It’s an important showcase for established contemporary artists already famous and the gallery comes pre-loaded with a taste for Chinese contemporary art, having taken on Chinese performance artist Zhang Huan. Pace’s Beijing gallery is a step towards the international art market and a show of faith in the Chinese contemporary art scene (Doubt: see Sotheby’s future canning of its Chinese contemporary art expert).

If the first show is any indication, Pace Beijing is going to be a great place in the coming years. It has the size, the capital and the potential to lead the Chinese art scene in becoming less ramshackle and more professional. On top of all of that, it has space. It has some of the best space for art that I have ever seen in my life. In short, it is fucking beautiful.


The show that’s on right now is called Encounters. It’s billed as a call and response conversation between the leading lights of American contemporary art and the stars of the Beijing scene. Most of the art deals closely with the idea of portraiture, a face, a person. All the usual suspects are there, Alex Katz, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman. The surprise comes when you see the names on the other side of the list, including the likes of Ma Liuming and Yang Shaobin, who have never before found this high-profile critical comparison. There are no explanatory labels or wall-text save for the artists names, presented in English and a Chinese transliteration. The show doesn’t need it. It’s a game-changer anyway.


Encounters is made up entirely of two dimensional works. It sets up a kind of leveled playing field where the action occurs in the arena of the canvas.* At times it seems like you can actually feel the works talking to eachother. Two particularly apt curatorial comparisons:

A Cindy Sherman Baroque portrait recreation next to a photo of Ma Liuming, early close collaborator with Zhang Huan. Both female artists are intensely focused on performance and both have an eminent, personal and physical presence to their work.

A Qi Zhilong painting of a smiling female Cultural Revolution era-worker, pure pop appropriation, next to a dashing Katz portrait of Ada.* Both are up close face, face, face. It serves to show off Katz’ brilliant surfaces and underscore Zhilong’s lack thereof.


The show is punchy, it has a rhythm to it, and to top it all off it’s filled with exemplary pieces of work from each artist. Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami are even there. Murakami presents a big stunning red skull right by the floor to ceiling windows in the front of the gallery. Yue Minjun’s manically grinning face haunts its own corner. Ma Liuming, an artist few may know before this, is a barrage of life force out of her portrait. Wang Guangyi, whom I had discounted before, shows a huge painting that leaps off the wall: COUNTRY –AND DNA. You really have to stand in front of these things. Baselitz is here but he doesn’t do much. But then he comes off better than Marlene Dumas’ white/black kids. Fang Lijun shows an enormous orange head surrounded by birds, cool for its presence but perhaps less than substantial. Jeff Koons’ painting, ordinarily a pet peeve, even looks good. The empty-headed, manic-bliss-shot barrage of pop seems to have something in common with the still teething Chinese painters. Far off in the distance Zhang Xiaogang’s closed-eyed silent dreaming head floats, untouchable as a memory.


Encounters is lucid. Encounters sets out to make a conversation and makes it without hedging. Encounters brings together some of the best examples of established American contemporary art that Beijing has seen in a while. The show puts Chinese artists, oftimes regarded as flashes-in-the-pan and accorded with less than respect, up against the favorites. And they survive. They cling tenaciously to their space. The fact that Pace’s first show tosses together such a heap of international artists and not only survives but thrives is, I think, a sign of things to come both for the gallery and the Beijing art scene.


More photos below the notes.

*1) Note: The Cindy Sherman is obviously a photograph and so were a few others. However, The term canvas is oh so much better than ‘false-space-created-by-a-c-print’

*2) Pretty sure it was Ada. Aren’t most of them? No title labels does create some problems.

Ping pong politics.

Ping pong politics.


Beijing so far is not about the architecture, the politics, the Olympic games being over, or the communism or the Great Firewall. Our experience of the city is about the people that cook for us, the people that teach us, the people we buy from and the people we live with. This is about an exchange.


We CET language students live on a converted Danwei, literally meaning Work Unit. It’s a communist-era set of buildings designed to provide everything a set number of people, men, women and children, could need. It has a cafeteria, housing, classrooms and recreation areas, all preserved from the Cultural Revolution. We mostly use the open plaza in the center of the buildings to play sports.


One day, after the lunch we always eat together in the campus’ cafeteria, we hung around outside playing soccer in the too-rare, too dusty sun. Not long after, a few of the cooks from the cafeteria came up and asked us if we wanted to play basketball. Of course, we replied in broken Chinese.


It was a normal game. One guy had a basketball uniform on, the others straight off their shifts. The same kind of thing was probably happening in a thousand different places at that instant. But despite how average it felt, living here as an average person requires a certain amount of compromise.


As students, we’re still learning to compromise what we know with what we’re discovering. We learned where some of the bars are, we learned where you can get a rather large bottle of beer for $.50 USD, we learned what normal food is. We have also learned that our Chinese roommates are used to sleeping 8 to a dorm room, that abortion is taboo as is promiscuity, and to never assume you know what’s inside a dumpling. You give up some space, you give up English, you give up some capacity to express yourself. It takes an effort to be normal after that.

It’s a back and forth, like ping pong.


Our Chinese roommates and our teachers are the other side of the exchange. What we give to them I’m not really sure yet, but what we get is real access to what it’s like to grow and live in the biggest city in China and one of the biggest on Earth. We share some habits, we don’t share others, but what comes out of living together is that at least we understand something at a basic level about each other and about two countries that are literally a world apart. More than language, it’s about collective giving and taking, being part of the push and pull that feels much farther away in America than it does in Beijing.