China and the West

Morath, Inge ; Miller, Arthur. Chinese encounters [ID D3839].
Arthur Miller and his wife Inge Morath travel as guest of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries with guide-interpreter Su Guang.
Beijing, Yan'an (Shaanxi), Nanniwan (Shaanxi), Xi'an, Nanjing, Shanghai, Hangzhou (Zhejiang), Guilin (Guangxi), Guangzhou (Guangdong).
They met Frank Coe, Sol Adler, William Hinton, Rewi Alley, Talitha Gerlach, Cao Yu, Su Shuyang, Huang Zuolin., Ai Xuan (painter).

"Our interests in China are not quite of the same order. For Inge Morath there was initially the challenge of learning the language and addint ti to the half dozen others in which she is fluent, of which she has a working knowledge. The calligraphy led her to Chinese art, and the art to history. For me, China had been primarily a political and social revolution I had followed since the thirties, when the names of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai and Zhu De were like flares shot into the sky of a human sea, a hitherto silent mass of people suddenly defying the Japanese fascists and, surely, prophesying the dawn of reason and liberty in Asia."

"The paintings on exhibition at the Nanjing artists' center make it easy to imagine what the artist's problem is in China at the present moment. Pictures of happy workers and peasants in heavy black outline, costumes and flesh tones bright and optimistic, alternate with traditional landscapes, somber and rather dark, emphasizing a stylizes verticality, the elemental failing water, the mountain and forest.
A long white sheet of rice paper is produced, and each painter sets out this clumb of brushes as well as an elaborate old inkstone. This is a kind of absorbs ink very slowly and hold enough of its seepage in a cavity so that a brush can be dipped and wetted. The painting is started by one artist, who begins at the bottom, pushing his inked brush against the grain of the soft bristles, making a clump of long half-inch-thick lines running vertically up about a thir of the paper. Then with a sharper brush he slashes in what are now obviously pine branches and we have a dense thicket. Number-two man takes over and with much lighter strokes traces a long curve, which turns out to be a waterfall beginning a little above the midway point of the picture and descending almost to the bottom, the lines splattering off in all directions. Number three artist adds a mountain, which is blocked into the upper right side. Now number two returns and adds a wash of faint pinkish gray to the falling water, and a deeper pink to the pine thicket. Number one moves in again to make the thicket a bit more dense, and three counters with another shot at the waterfall."

"A performance of The White Snake, a Kun-style opera intrigued me with its immensely suggestive symbolism and stymied any attempt to deduce a consisten subtextual story. But it is one of those very old and beloved works that will doubltess provide an endless source of contention for anthropoligists and the psychoanalytically inclined onece it becomes available to Western stages."
"Loyal Hearts by Su Shuyang [Baoding, Hebei 1938-] is the most celebrated post-Gang of Four play, and the first to reveal some of the details of that periods. Performance at the Peking People's Art Theatre."
"After the performance of Guo Moruo's play Cai Wen Ji, the seventy-six-year-old director of the Theater instisted that I must sit down with the cast for a serious discussion of the play. Cao Yu, the black-haired director, a restless bantam in his late sixties who cannot sit still or suppress a wisecrack, commanded ailence of his actors so that I could hild forth about the play itself. The play, however exotic, had bored me with its relentless repetitiousness. And from what I could detect in the audience's feeling, repetition is repation in Chinese also. Having praised, and honestly, the acting and production, which could compare with the best anywhere in the world, I hated to have to tell the truth about the play itself. "
"Of another sort entirely was the anti-Soviet melodrama Bi An by Gao Xingjian. Permormance in the Shanghai People's Art Theater under the director Huang Zuolin."

"China surprised us in a hundred ways, perhaps most of all by her pervasive beauty. There is an instinct for aesthetic harmony among the Chinese, even in the thoughtless way a woman will arrange a handful of leeks she is washing by a brook, setting them down in a fan shape. The Chinese child is a triumph of humanity, and in the aged there is a sort of dignity that can come only from social respect and a decent tradition. There is also a certain rightness of proportion, a native taste in objects held in the hand. And a poetic tradition inconceivable in the West – where else in the world is a leader's calligraphy of importance, and where could it evoke pride that it is elegant? Indeed, the use of imagery in political discours threatens to turn China into a fairyland for the unwary foreigner. And what people so profoundly understands food?
But none of these charms can any longer distract the Chinese from their dilemma. It is repeated and it seems to come from the heart – their feudal heritage still holds them. So much so that the very people who say so are at the next moment caught in it again."