My Chinese Bracelet

Gouache and watercolor on cardboard, by JD.

Some forms of beauty reveal themselves slowly. When I first met Marie, I thought she was plain. Thin as a wire, she pulled her hair back hard and flat from her unadorned face. My first impression was that she was what used to be called “mouse-y”—dull, beige, flat in tone without sparkle. Only gradually did I come to see that what I thought was dullness was actually the sheen of platinum, subtle, expensive, sophisticated. No blonde flash, no makeup, no accessories were needed. They would only have detracted from the true elegance she possessed. By then, I was smitten, in awe of her self-possession and confidence.

            She was knowledgeable in ways I had no inkling of or access to within the more limited horizons of my experience. Later, when we were deep into our friendship, she would say that one day she would take me to the patio of the Royal Hong Kong hotel and get me a dish of Cherries Jubilee. This, the most extravagant, sensually indulgent, symbol of the lifestyle she lived, was what she wanted to share. That never happened and now I cannot even track down what hotel she was referencing. Maybe it was The Ambassador, which seems to have had a gracious outdoor space. Perhaps the old colonial traces have been removed from the names, after all, this conversation took place fifty years ago. Maybe the old structures have been replaced with newer ones equipped with the expected luxury amenities for today’s international travelers.

            Marie knew how to travel, buy plane tickets, make hotel reservations, rent an apartment on her own, and take on many other adult-seeming tasks that were beyond my eighteen-year-old capacity. Her family had money, a private chef, a large estate, and all that went with it in the colony where her father was in the import-export business. Hong Kong was a world apart, and she moved between those zones of Asia and California, the British domain and the American, the elite estate and an apartment on College Avenue she had rented on her own at a time in our lives when I would have had no idea of what was involved in signing a lease. I lived in a group house with other students where one of my roles was to do the accounts each month to distribute responsibility for utility bills and shared meals. The sums were in a few dollars and carefully calculated cents. Marie came and went by jet in tailor-made bespoke clothes that, at first, to my unaccustomed eye also looked plain and dull on account of their simplicity. Gradually I understood these were the work of expert Hong Kong tailors who fit her slim frame with exquisite taste and care.

            We were in art school together, at what was then the California College of Arts and Crafts when that institution still promoted its connection to the traditions of glass, textiles, ceramics and other practices that had been part of the Bay Area’s identity during the decades  when Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan populated the landscape with their unique architectural works. The early 20^th century was the era of the workshop, of imagining a counterpoint to industrial production through recovery of skilled hand labor across the decorative and functional arts. That sensibility was still present at the school, which valued its craft heritage. The glass-blowing studios and weaving looms were still active. This was 1970 and 1971, and we learned stone lithography, etching on metal plates, and the fundamentals of drawing, color theory, and design using pencils and gouache. That training underpins my graphic work fifty years later.

            But Marie’s aesthetics were already advanced and influenced by her immersion in Asian culture as well as by her own sensibility. She introduced me to the notion of pathways into and out of the visual frame, to the dynamism of composition, the daring of asymmetrical symmetries and the importance of movement. She worked in watercolor and pastel, vivid paintings in which things darted and danced, waterfalls of light objects and deep crevices of dark absorption, a vitalist sensibility activating the whole. This was far from the minimalist and conceptual trends that dominated the art world at the time. No monochrome restraint or anti-optical approaches constrained her spirit, which flowed onto the papers that provided a substrate for her vivid visual imagination.

            But this was the early 1970s, and though Hong Kong was under British rule, it was also Chinese and Marie was wryly, but seriously, attracted to the popular graphics of Mao’s republic. She brought artefacts from that world into ours, not so much the poster images of proud workers in collective stance and coordinated effort, but works that depicted joyous parades of fat babies bearing the abundant fruits of the land. Chubby-cheeked and rosy, these infant hordes carried equally rotund peaches on overflowing platters. They pulled colorful carts heaped with grapes and melons while around them a festival atmosphere was suffused with ribbons and light. These were images of abundance and joy, celebratory and fantastical. We loved them, the blatantly propagandistic images of carefree happiness.

            After all, what did we know of Mao in those years, of China’s internal policies? This was the era in which French intellectuals were having a love affair with The Little Red Book, after Jean-Luc Godard, whom we all admired, had produced La Chinoise in 1967. The romance of China as an alternative to Soviet Communism took hold among artists like Godard who subscribed to the idea that revolutionary art forms could subvert bourgeois—and totalitarian—ideologies.[1] Godard’s influence was enormous, his philosophical education far in advance of any available to me in my art school environment, and the seductive force of his ideas meant that many of the tenets of his beliefs went unquestioned. In retrospect, his embrace of Maoism seems naïve at best, given the tens of millions of people who were murdered or suffered because of Mao. Did they not know?[2] When did the West become aware of the realities of what occurred during the Great Leap Forward? The disavowal voiced by some, that their adherence to Chinese Communism was symbolic, about a “mobilizing myth” rather than the reality of what was happening, is only a partial answer.[3]

As young American artist-writers, we were steeped in the legacy of the avant-garde, aligned with concepts that for me intensified throughout the decade of the 1970s as I encountered an intellectual scene of poets and writers in the Bay Area. That meant a combination of the formal innovations of Dada and Surrealism, the Russian Constructivists and Futurists, and theories of Antonin Artaud and Berthold Brecht. We were too young to tackle  Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and the Russian formalists, particularly Viktor Shklovsky, had not been translated extensively or made available. All of that would come later, through communities of self-styled radical poets and academic immersion in critical theory. My aesthetic formation was never formal, but emerged ad hoc amid circumstantial influences.

But in 1970-71, the Chinese poster graphics that Marie introduced did not carry obvious didactic lessons, they were simply kitsch pleasures that produced delight. Again, looking back, our naïveté was astonishing. Though we were not as seduced by Mao as the French leftists, who somehow projected a utopian vision onto Communist China, we absorbed the happy illusions of fecundity without any question or discomfort.

Marie was a conduit for these material expressions from a culture into which we had no insight or view, only a distant connection. We were children receiving postcards from another world, entranced by the novelty of their decorations. The bracelet was one such object, brought back from one Marie’s trips home to Hong Kong to visit her family. I never met them, except her brother, when she became very sick at a later point in our lives and we had to put her into the care of her family, unable to cope with her illness. But that was another phase, in this first flush of acquaintance, the silver bracelet appeared with its enamel decorations and conspicuous iconography. The fat baby with its arms around a healthy carp seems auspicious. The fish is not captive, but rather, a companion, playmate, its strength as a swimmer an assist to the infant in a cheerful collaboration. Their bodies are entwined, spirits as well.

Now the bracelet is tarnished, enamel chipped, colors faded which is the fate of things as they age. Marie is gone, consumed by the misfortunes that beset her. We were passionate friends, chaste and shy, unable to pursue our intense connection into uncharted zones. She gave me language I had never had before, about the connections of body and emotion, spirit and energy. And, of course, the most profound offering, the way to engage with the dynamism of a composition as it unfolded. Hers was the first demonstration I had that a drawing was not a representation, but an event that left a trace through its occurrence. Curiously, this is well within the terms of conceptualism of the era, except that her lively palette and decorative sensibility would have met with discouragement within the taste of the times.

I am so aware, looking back on those initial encounters with Marie, of how little one can see when you don’t know how to look. The revelation of her beauty of spirit and being came in a flash that shifted my perceptual frame. In the longer history of aesthetic education, this provided lessons that persist.

Meanwhile, as I became immersed in the domain of experimental literature, art, and independent publishing, other tenets of belief asserted themselves with dogmatic potency that took a long time to be set aside. I became an adherent to the church of the avant-garde, only later, slowly, painfully freeing myself in a fall from faith. The fascination with French intellectuals, with their chic style and hip currency in the cultural realm, also faded. How did we believe their revolutionary rhetoric, these members of the bourgeoisie who would themselves have been among the first targets of Mao’s purges? The myth of the avant-garde indeed.

I reiterate, how impossible it is to see that for which one doesn’t know to look. Innocence and ignorance are not the same, just often linked. The language Marie gave me has remained, at every moment I enter the studio, sit to paint, draw a line or make a mark though forty years have passed since I last saw her, dissolved to a remnant her former self, the platinum wire reduced to ash, all the light gone.

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[1] See Doug Eena Green and Shalon van Tine, “A Fight on Two Fronts: On Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise,” Cosmonaut, August 28, 2019 for a very useful, in-depth, highly-informed analysis of Godard and 1960s French politics and intellectual activity. https://cosmonautmag.com/2019/08/a-fight-on-two-fronts-on-jean-luc-godards-la-chinoise/

[2] “Mao-Tse Tung: Charges of 80 Million Dead,” November 1994; The Roanoke Times https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1994/rt9411/941120/11220007.htm

[3] Green and van Tine, above.