Career Suicide: Ten Years as a Free Range Artist

Contents of the book:

1. Free Range

In which I compare being an artist to being being a chicken on a farm, a butterfly, and Toshiro Mifune, and I invoke both Sturgeon’s Law and Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies within the first twenty pages. I explain that the book is one result of my ridiculously retentive memory, and furthermore that this may cause less memorious people discomfort.

2. The New Forest: Local People

In which I castigate (among others) dabblers, plagiarists, the makers of blog-art, the many galleries who rip artists off by asking them to pay for the privilege of even having their work considered, and the stupidity of the artists who actually pay. An exhibition is successful and the people of Hampshire discover that some women are not ladies.

3. A Black Face in Berwick

In which my house burns down, I voluntarily and of my own free will move to Berwick-upon-Tweed, an artist outstays his welcome and proves that no good deed goes unpunished, Health and Safety regulations are violated repeatedly, and my German flatmate and I contemplate the contagious misery of the British people, AKA inselaffe (“island apes”).

4. Kyoto: Failing Upwards

In which I am flown to Japan by people who apparently have no wish to speak with me or employ me, I discover that even in Japan strangers either think that they know me and/or that I know everything about everything everywhere, I subsist almost entirely upon ramen and nutritious jelly packs, and I discuss the sad fact that Japan is the only country in the world where artists and writers are officially considered priceless and irreplaceable national treasures.

5. The Art World’s Top Quality Wankers Congregate in Venice

In which I exhibit some films at La Biennale di Venezia despite the best efforts of Frieze Magazine and an artist who has a fax from his gallery that says he mustn’t ever do any work, I am forcibly entertained at the Welsh Pavilion (whose artists are mostly not Welsh), and a party for the art world’s elite ends in destruction, a horde of nasty drunks, and visits from the local police and the local priest simultaneously.

6. Qingdao: Blue Sky Thinking

In which I travel to China, find myself dumped by the side of a Beijing orbital road, I ride in cars with total strangers who look like gangsters from a John Woo movie, become a lifestyle accessory for the new Chinese middle classes and receive the adoration of Little Emperors.

7. Edinburgh: Hello Dolly

In which I explain that Dolly the sheep is not entirely real, that Enlightenment is hard, and why even the world’s leading geneticists are not above a puerile tit joke.

8. Shenzhen: The Empire of Fuckdup

In which I masochistically return to China and face the consequences, including censorship and surveillance, smog, equipment that’s broken before you even buy it, a gallery that hasn’t been built yet, backhanded compliments about how fat I am, a party thrown by the British Council that’s like something from the colonial era, an eight hour car journey listening to the same three CDs of horrendous Cantonese AOR, and gallery staff who don’t bother turning up for their own jobs.

9. One Hundred Days of Sod All: Being an Artist

In which I visit Frieze Art Fair and discover some very bad art offered by very bad galleries for sale to some very bad people, I reflect upon the time an artist spends “resting”, and I contemplate the idea that many of an artist’s victories are Pyrrhic ones.

‘Career Suicide’

Paperback, 275 pages, ISBN 978-1-4461-5292-8

Hardcover, 225 pages, ISBN 978-1-4710-0773-6

8. SHENZHEN: THE EMPIRE OF FUCKDUP (Extract)

The problems start before I do. I get an email warning me that when I arrive I’m to take a red taxi, not a yellow taxi, or a green one, or any vehicle calling itself a taxi whether it looks like one or not. At the time this raises a smile; obviously someone’s just had an adventure because it’s the kind of stipulation that only comes after a narrowly averted disaster.

It should also act as a reminder of the way things go, since I’ve been to China before, but the intervening time had eroded away my first temporary attempt at a Chinese mindset. But it doesn’t act as much of a prompt, possibly because my first Chinese experience was with younger people, the beneficiaries of China’s opening up to the world, and some of them have rather more open minds and hearts to match. Go as little as ten years further back— look even to people in their late twenties— and for the most part it’s mainly Cultural Revolution damage as far as the eye can see.

The Chinese don’t recognise special cases, such as the special case of sitting on a plane for about twelve hours, being exhausted and jetlagged and finding yourself in a place where you’re mostly illiterate and generally have hardly any idea how things are done, no matter how many reading hours you may have logged, no matter how much interest and sympathy you may have had before you arrived; I had a lot of both. They always act as if you just hopped on a bus an hour ago to pop over from Britain to China. For obvious reasons most Chinese people have never been outside of China, never had the opportunity to walk in another person’s shoes. You can’t blame them for never having endured a long haul flight to London. Most people in the world, in fact, haven’t had that experience and it’s certainly not a black mark against them.

There’s a kind of wilfulness to ignorance in China, though, a strange national pride in some people that they know nothing and care less for what goes on outside their borders, or even beyond their own neighbourhood in many cases. Although they’ve been overcompensating recently, they missed the Industrial Revolution first time around and it didn’t bother them one tiny bit. As I mentioned previously, taxi drivers in China clearly don’t do the Knowledge. I never met a single one who knew where he was going. If you ask one to drive you to the other side of the city they’ll look at you as if you just asked them to fly you to the moon using their own fart power.

Much later, we go with Cai Xia to her home city of Guangzhou. Huge chunks of it have changed beyond recognition since she was last there, a few months ago. We spend about two hours driving around, trying to find the place where her parents live and where she grew up. After about an hour, she realises that she can’t find it because she’s in totally the wrong area of the city.

In the same city on another occasion, at the opening of a brief exhibition that I have work in, I bump into Elaine: the artist who beat me to the residency in Kyoto five years earlier. I tell her what I’m doing there. She says “So you finally got out to Asia, huh?” and I politely remind her that I don’t want to get out to Asia as such, and that China, Japan and Asia are in no way interchangeable either in my mind or in reality. She understands this, of course, but her question also seems to suggest that I may be some kind of rice queen who just wants to be the only white person in town. I guess that she’s half justified, in the sense that there’s no failure like an ex-pat failure and there have been lots of ex-pat failures in Hong Kong and Guangdong for the best part of a century, but I don’t think that I fall into that category. This meeting also emphasises how incredibly tiny the art world is. Even in a country as vast and populous as China, in a fairly obscure art gallery, there she is, the woman who five years previously got the gig I wanted in Kyoto.

At my host gallery’s studio complex in Shenzhen there are meant to be three Chinese artists and four foreigners, including me. I’m the last to arrive because I have a commission to finish in Britain. In the typical Asian way, jetlag be damned, I’m expected to be on duty from the moment my wheels hit the tarmac. The Metro station that the gallery has always insisted is closest to my destination totally isn’t. It’s August, so I arrive at the gallery office bedraggled and so saturated with sweat that it’s actually dripping out of my clothes. The sun is merciless but I look like I’ve been caught in a monsoon. Everyone finds this hilarious, which is probably the first and the last time that I get a genuine and untempered response out of anyone in a position of authority there.

Shenzhen is a vast, boring and depressing Communist clone of its neighbour Hong Kong. In fact Kowloon and Shenzhen sprawl into each other to a large extent, despite the fact that the Chinese government maintains a distinct and strict border between the two even though Hong Kong has officially been Chinese since the Nineties. In practice it’s not very Chinese at all. Hong Kong is Hong Kong and China is China. Those who can get away with it go to Hong Kong to party, to shop, for decent food, to see films that aren’t dreary Communist-endorsed shite.

Most of the people travelling in the reverse direction out of Hong Kong and into Shenzhen are foreigners headed into the city’s immense industrial hinterland to negotiate deals for dirt-cheap manufacture of whatever they need. If they have any spare time, these very welcome running dogs of capitalism tend to congregate at the foreigners’ bars near the port in Shekou. The foreigners in turn attract ravening hordes of slutty Chinese gold diggers. I never came to a firm decision with regard to who is preying upon whom in this scenario.

My studio and living space is ridiculously huge even by Western standards. It takes me longer to walk from the sofa to the television than it did to walk through all three rooms of my flat in Edinburgh. In China they’d normally put four apartments in a space that size, then also stack an absurd number of others on top of it, and underneath there would be microscopic shops selling exactly the same things as every other block in the neighbourhood. I have it to myself, which would feel needlessly greedy and a waste of space even in the UK. The Chinese artists have thoughtfully left this studio, the fourth, to me because the number four is associated with death and therefore considered dreadfully unlucky. I never work out whether they think that Chinese superstitions are so ethnically discerning that they’ll pass over someone of European origin, or if they just don’t care about the possibility of me being afflicted with whatever it is they fear will happen. They’re in number five.

The first I see of the people who will be my colleagues for the next few months is when I do the presentation that’s been requested of me. I have a shower that completely floods the kitchen if it’s used for more than thirty seconds, then I change into clothes that immediately get sweaty again. Eventually I extract the location of the artists’ presentation. It’s next door, in the studio of the Chinese artists. I already grasp the fact that anything and everything you learn in China is strictly on a need-to-know, eyes-only basis— if you’re lucky and the person in question likes you. It’s more normal for all information, harmless or otherwise, to be guarded and doled out like rice during a famine.

The other foreigners, from Greece, Spain and Indonesia, seem wary and exhausted. Thanos, the Greek who I think has been here longer than all of us, seems particularly tense. In fact, he looks so tense that he’s about to snap himself in half, or snap somebody else. The only Chinese person there that I immediately make a connection with turns out to actually be from Hitchin and educated in Britain. As is customary in China, there are numerous people of unknown purpose and employment lurking around, none of whom are introduced to me.

The others, including the two Chinese artists, zip through what seems like interesting and diverse work, although they don’t seem terribly enthusiastic. I never found out what the deal was with the third artist. I never saw him. Apparently he was too important to actually show up for his own residency, which is typical in China.

Thanos doesn’t want to do any of this at all. “Does anyone really want to see this whole thing again?” he says. This is greeted with the kind of heavy silence we all get used to as the months go by. I hate using that old cliché ‘inscrutable’, but that’s exactly what those silences are, and exactly what I think they are intended to be.

“I do!” I shout cheerfully. “Oh, of course the English guy wants me to do it,” he says, but then grudgingly goes through what is obviously a very well practised talk about who he is and what he does. He also acts as if he has somewhere else he urgently needs to be. I guess that may be why he’s so incredibly impatient with Yuan Yuan, who is our main point of contact for the residency.

If I’m totally honest, even though I think he’s being a prick, you wouldn’t even need to understand a word of Mandarin to perceive that she’s not translating Thanos’ words at all in any meaningful sense. It’s equally obvious that she’s sanitising and simplifying things as she sees fit. He’s been learning Mandarin already, and several times he stops her and makes her translate properly. Occasionally the Chinese guy from Hitchin also intercedes in both Thanos’ talk and my own. A few nods are elicited when he does this, emphasising the suspicion that he’s actually translating intelligently while she’s just talking gobbledygook about stuff she doesn’t even understand in the first place. In the process of rendering it into English I think she even censors the gallery director’s welcoming speech, which seems to be a sardonic and rather hyperbolically masculine welcome to the arsehole of the Chinese art world.

I do understand some Mandarin from my time in Beijing and Qingdao. Most people in China, however, simply refuse to believe that such a thing is possible because according to them Chinese is the most difficult language in the world. As time goes on I settle into what seems most comfortable for everybody; I either don’t let on how much Chinese I can speak, or I pretend that I can’t understand them when they speak to me in Mandarin or Cantonese. They in turn pretend that they can only understand me when I speak English, even if they don’t know a word of it. In lengthy engagements they even sometimes forget that they’re deluding themselves about the language abilities of foreigners (as indeed they delude themselves about so many other things) and talk about subjects they don’t want me to know about (or me) in Chinese as if I’m not there... because I don’t speak Chinese. Except that I do.

I’m not proud of it, but ultimately I refused to speak Chinese under any circumstances and didn’t bother learning any more because all I ever got was needless, passive aggressive resistance from most Chinese people every time I tried.

Anyway, the word “arsehole” or something similar to it is definitely in the director’s speech, several times. With hindsight I agree with him that Shenzhen probably is the arsehole of the Chinese art world, even if we disagree on everything else. I’ve never been to anywhere less artistically inspiring than Shenzhen. The Chinese men all laugh knowingly at this talk of arseholes. The very few women all look demure and pretend they haven’t heard whatever it is he’s just said. As interpreted by Yuan Yuan, the director’s matey rudeness becomes a Confucian exhortation to work hard, along with something confusing about “Beijing is the head, here is lower parts of the body, like the stomach.”

The deputy director (or something to that effect) invites us all to participate in the Shenzhen sculpture exhibition that will happen in the winter, after we’re gone. In the now familiar manner, the gallery’s director is far too important to actually converse directly with us. As a group, all the artists have between them worked in virtually every medium, genre and idiom except sculpture, so this idea seems somewhat quixotic and random. I’m also not sure why they would deliberately schedule us to set up our work after most of us have gone back to the other side of the planet. For the time being I take it at face value because I’m too dazed, hot and exhausted to do anything else.

Afterwards they offer pieces of orange and melon, with a tiny pile of cocktail sticks. The melon’s far too big to fit on a cocktail stick, but I try anyway, mainly as a way of tuning out the tension that hangs heavier than the air in the Chinese artists’ stifling studio. People mill around with no apparent purpose, on an indeterminate timescale. I have no idea what’s meant to be happening now. I obviously look lost. The Spanish artist, Jesús, is leaning against the wall near the door. He catches my eye and flashes an expression obviously meant only for me: “This is normal.”

Eventually we go to dinner accompanied by a vast number of hangers-on, most of whom weren’t at the presentations and are never seen again. This en masse dining and the directionless preamble that goes with it will turn out to be a bugbear of mine as the weeks and months go by.

Somebody insists on trying to make me smoke the horrendous Chinese cigarettes seen all over the city, the packet gold with red writing— the colours of prosperity and good fortune. Or to use my own cultural reference point, the colour of shitty old B&H from their heyday in 1970s Britain. “Happy Shenzhen cigarettes,” he says, “Make you happy.” Telling him I don’t smoke just precipitates an even more insistent entreaty to contribute to the smog that’s shrouding our attempts to see and taste what we’re eating. The pollution is so bad in Shenzhen that merely stepping outside your front door is like puffing about four packs a day. You don’t even need to smoke in China; you can get emphysema for free just by breathing. On the other hand, I suppose you could look at it from a different perspective and reason that you might as well smoke heavily and incessantly since your respiratory system is getting raped daily anyway.

“No thanks,” I say, in the hope of getting him to leave off and sit down. “I’m already happy.” This amuses him greatly, as it does some of the most vociferous smokers when it’s translated from my Chinese into their Chinese. Nearly everybody understood what I was saying already, but they still wait obediently for it to be translated into the most complicated language in the world that no foreigner can speak. China says: Happy? We’ll soon change that.

© 2010 Alistair Gentry

Continues in ‘Career Suicide’: to buy it as a printed book or download, click here.

My Career Suicide blog.