Wild Shanghai Grass* MOLLY NESBIT In late April 1927 the writer Lu Xun sat as a refugee in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou and wrote a preface to his new group of prose poems, which he was calling Wild Grass . “When I am silent, I feel replete,” he began. “As I open my mouth to speak, I am conscious of emptiness.” Words came to him. Past life had died. Dead life had decayed. From its clay, no trees grew, only wild grass. “I love my wild grass,” he wrote, “but I detest the ground which decks itself with wild grass.” He pointed to the fires under - ground that would one day erupt red and devour it. At that point he would laugh out loud and sing, he claimed, and he repeated this laughing and singing, because this fierce turn of events was the fair proof that he had lived. 1 The poems that followed had been written to stand apart from the fray of the press . Pulled back and collected, they were a motley group. Freeform medita - tions rife with inversions, vicious observations, visions exploding; cackling, tart, wafting, they were his dreams, he said—his wild grass. These pieces were not uni - form. He shifted voices and cadences. He gave them titles that charted no path: “The Shadow’s Leave-taking,” “Snow,” “The Passer-By,” “Tremors of Degradation,” “The Wise Man, the Fool, and the Slave.” * A version of this essay originally appeared in Yang Fudong: Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (Beijing: Office for Discourse Engineering, 2008), pp. 34 –61. The essay was, in effect, begun at Utopia Station in Venice in 2003, where my conversations with Yang Fudong started. It would not have been possible now but for the aid and counsel of many people but I would like to thank especially Phil Tinari, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Angie Baecker, and Andrew Watsky. The films that make up Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest were exhibited over the years in the ongoing series of exhibitions and semi - nars that is Utopia Station, broadly construed, but Yang Fudong has had many important, scholarly exhibitions in which they have been included. These catalogues of record deserve special mention: Yang Fudong (Kunsthalle Wien, 2005); Yang Fudong (Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2006); The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China , curated by Simon Groom, Karen Smith, Xu Zhen (Tate Liverpool, 2007). 1. Lu Xun, Wild Grass , trans. Xianyi Yang and Gladys Yang (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2003), pp. 3 –4. See also The Selected Works of Lu Xun , 4-vol. ed., trans. Xianyi Yang and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1985); Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1990); Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity—China, 1900 –1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). OCTOBER 133, Summer 2010, pp. 75 –105. © 2010 Molly Nesbit. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00004 by guest on 24 September 2021 76 OCTOBER At the end of the collection he put “The Awakening.” That patch of wild grass began with Lu Xun sitting at his old writing desk at Peking University in April 1926; above him, bombers flew in to attack, and, mission accomplished, they departed; this had been his baseline reality. He had set himself to editing a pile of manuscripts by young writers, their words full of ambition, integrity, and anger— lovely words, he felt: “Their spirits are roughened by the onslaught of wind and dust, for theirs is the spirit I love. I would gladly kiss this roughness dripping in blood but formless and colorless.” He thought of Tolstoy and the thistle; he turned to the pages of the student journal The Sunken Bell . He quoted the stu - dents: Some people say our society is desolate. If this were really the case, though rather desolate it should give you a sense of tranquility, though rather lonely it should give you a sense of infinity. It should not be so chaotic, gloomy, and above all so changeful as it is.” China was being torn apart by civil war, and Lu Xun’s students were among those shot dead that year for demonstrating, but Lu Xun did not give those details. He wrote instead of the way events leave their mark. “The Awakening” had taken place in the depths of the night. It ended quietly: While I have been editing the sun has set, and I carry on by lamp - light. All kinds of youth flash past before my eyes, though around me is nothing but dusk. Tired, I take a cigarette, quietly close my eyes in indeterminate thought, and have a long, long dream. I wake with a start. All around is still nothing but dusk; cigarette smoke rises in the motionless air like tiny specks of cloud in the summer sky, to be slowly transformed into indefinable shapes. 2 Lu Xun resigned his post in Beijing and escaped to the South. Ultimately, he would settle in Shanghai. Wild Grass , along with his stories like the “Diary of a Madman” and “The True Story of Ah Q” marks the arrival of a modern Chinese literature. Mao Zedong would be one of his greatest admirers. The wild grass ran together in the shadow of fire, with echoes of Nietzsche, and Turgenev, and with the ongoing Chinese revolution, which is also to say, he let it run with the shifts in the ground we call history. How Long Does Wild Grass Grow? In 1991 Yang Fudong went south to Hangzhou, the old imperial city Marco Polo praised to the skies for the beauty of its freshwater lake, its plea - sures, pavilions, and delights; centuries later, its reputation as a paradise remained intact. Yang Fudong went there to study oil painting at the Zhejiang 2. Lu Xun, “The Awakening,” Wild Grass , pp. 122–26. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00004 by guest on 24 September 2021 Wild Shanghai Grass 77 Yang Fudong. Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest: Part One. 2003. Academy of Fine Arts, which had already been renamed the China Academy of Art, but no one called it that yet. The time was auspicious. A decade before, the Academy had become an inspired center of new experiment. Removed from the political imperatives of the Central Academy in Beijing, the Academy in Hangzhou was a place to think, to paint, to talk, to read. The state culture of realism was opening further; underground and overground the avenues of translation and exchange that Lu Xun himself had done much to promote were being re-connected; at the Academy they were listening to everything that came. Texts circulated. The circles of reference were increasingly unpre - dictable, unstable, electric. They watched the video of Joseph Beuys’ 1974 performance in New York where he arrived in an ambulance and then, wrapped in felt, lived in an art gallery, confined with a coyote and working on co-existence, proclaiming I Like America and America Likes Me . On another day at the Academy, the students were shown a video of an actual airplane accident played over and over again to gauge the degrees of numbness that came with repetition. Then there were the books. 3 For example, there was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , fin - ished in the wake of the first World War, a book that draws a limit to the expres - sion of thoughts, as summed up in a sentence: “What can be said at all can be said 3. Zhang Yaxuan, “The Power from Behind,” interview with Yang Fudong, first published in Chinese in Contemporary Art and Investment (September 2007) and translated into English by Daniel Nieh for Yang Fudong: Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest , p. 170 ff. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00004 by guest on 24 September 2021 78 OCTOBER clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” 4 It was not unusual to have the echoes ricochet across history from every direction, so much so that the origin of the sound mattered hardly at all. Things were missing; silence was full. Scenes that no one could imagine yet were being set. Yang Fudong’s friends chose to live by the blue lake. He did not. He took an apartment by the train station because he liked the whistles and the noise. Someone gave him the Chinese translation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road . Yang Fudong took to the beat of the Beats and read without stopping about young Dean Moriarty, Sal Paradise, Carlo Marx and their friends in 1947, their desire to read and write everything, their fever, their need to make tracks. They were something more than characters; they seemed to live for real. Carlo Marx had the dark soul; Dean Moriarty had come to New York City, fresh out of jail and wanting Nietzsche and “all the wonderful intellectual things,” Sal Paradise remembered, saying he was possessed of visions like holy lightning. Sal Paradise extolled a new kind of intellectuality that he could only call intelligence—an intellectuality released to the outside. They would all head West. “Somewhere along the line,” Kerouac had Sal Paradise write, “I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.” 5 On the Road had an immediate effect on Yang Fudong. It upbraided him. He stopped going to school for a while. On his return, he picked up his brush and went to work. His painting gave way. Yang Fudong’s most notable project in art school involved a vow of silence.