Nourished by Ignorance
By Xu Bing
Translated by Richard King

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In a place this remote, the old ways still hold true. The first time I ever saw Huangjin wanliang [ten thousand ounces of gold] and zhaocai jinbao [bring in wealth and treasure] written in the form of a single character, was not in some work on local customs, but on the sideboard in the Party secretary’s house. I was amazed by it, an amazement that you couldn’t get by reading about it in a book. At weddings and funerals, a further aspect of the villagers’ ‘mentality’ would be revealed. For funerals, they make all manner of things with papier mâché, just like a folk version of Second Life. The old people would leaf through a few papers, and basing themselves on the strange characters written there, they would copy onto a strip of white cloth to make into banners for use in funerals. Later on, when they found out that I could do calligraphy, and had the proper ink for it, they would get me to do it. Subsequently I did some research and I found out that this was called ‘mystic scrawl’, and that it was a writing system for communicating with the spirit world. The principal manifestation of my importance in the village was that every time there was a wedding, they would ask me to go and decorate the bridal chamber, not because I had any abilities in installation back then, but because my family had what was traditionally called a ‘full house’, comprising mother and father, elder brother and sister, and younger brother and sister. If someone like that makes up the bridal bed, many children would be born in the future, both sons and daughters. These things I learned in Shoulianggou that are categorized as ‘ethnography’ have an uncanny quality which has attached itself to me, and has influenced my creativity since then.

Next I want to say something which has to do with art. You might say that my earliest effective study of artistic ‘theory’ and the establishment of my artistic aspirations were achieved on the mountain slopes facing Shoulianggou. There was a grove of apricot trees on the hillside, a sideline enterprise for the village. Looking after the apricot orchard was a job with the potential to annoy people intent on stealing the fruit, so the team sent me over to do it. Those summers the hillside became a paradise for me. Primarily because I didn’t eat a single apricot all day, making me satisfied by my self-control; and also because I could focus on appreciating the transformations of nature. Every day I would head up the hill with my paintbox and a book, but it wasn’t long before I ran out of books, so that one day all I could take was a copy of Mao’s Selected Works. I had memorized Mao’s best essays already, and was familiar with them to the point where I no longer thought about their meaning.

But the emotional effect and the benefit derived from reading the Selected Works that day under the apricot trees were of a kind rare in my experience, and the memory remains fresh in my mind. I read a splendid discourse on literature and art in an essay which had nothing to do with art:

Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land. Different forms and styles in art should develop freely and different schools in science should contend freely. We think that it is harmful to the growth of art and science if administrative measures are used to impose one particular style of art or school of thought and ban another. Questions of right or wrong in the arts and sciences should be settled through free discussion in artistic and scientific circles and through practical work in these fields. They should not be settled in summary fashion.(2)

As I reread it now, I really don’t know why I felt so moved by it; perhaps it was the discrepancy between this passage and the artistic environment of the day. Realization and indignation were mixed up in my emotional reaction: if Chairman Mao has defined the relationship so clearly, so rationally, what’s the matter with the workers in the fine arts right now! As I sat under the apricot trees, I read a few sentences, thought for a while, and looked around at the mountains, and pondered for the first time the great scope of the mission of art, its vast and resplendant meaning. The benefits gained from that day were buried in the heart of an amateur painter, and took a very important position there.

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(2) Mao Zedong, ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People [February 27, 1957]’, Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tse-tung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1971), pp. 432–79, qt. p. 462.

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