The Painter of Shanghai (30 page)

‘Chen Duxiu is your teacher?’ Yuliang asks in surprise. ‘Isn’t he in Beijing now?’ She’s read about her husband’s old friend in the papers – his return from Japan to lead Beijing University, his influence in the so-called May Fourth anti-imperialist movement, his recent founding of China’s first Communist Party. Since he’s been in Shanghai, however, she’s seen him only in passing – once coming out of the
New Youth
office, once leading a protest against the recently signed Treaty of Versailles, which ceded Germany’s former landholdings in China – not back to China – but to the Japanese instead.

‘He’s been back and forth a lot since they released him,’ the girl says. ‘They imprisoned him after the riots, you know.’ Gently blotting the book’s cover with her towel, she adds, ‘Listen – just listen to this.’

Opening the book, she runs her finger down to a section outlined and starred in red ink, which is already running into the page’s border. ‘“The world will be for the common people, and the sounds of Happiness will reach even the deepest springs. Ah, come! People of every land, how can you not be roused?”’ Looking up, the girl adds dreamily, ‘I never knew Marx was so poetic. Did you?’ She straps herself into a pair of Louis-heeled two-toned slippers that are surprisingly chic for someone with such seemingly stern views. ‘Anyway, you don’t really need to come to the bathhouse, do you?’

‘Not really. No,’ says Yuliang, feeling oddly defensive.

‘Then, to be frank with you, I don’t think you should return.’ The girl slips her book into her satchel. ‘I was here this time, but I might not be the next. Find some other way to solve your problem at school.’ Walking Yuliang to the door, she adds, ‘If you’re ever interested, come to one of our woodcutting classes. Tuesday evenings. We meet on the second floor of the Uchiyama Shoten, on Bubbling Well Road. I’m Guifei, by the way.’

Yuliang suppresses a smile. Her new friend is named after one of China’s famed ‘four beauties’ – the one who so enchanted an eighth-century emperor that he left the nation vulnerable to a devastating rebellion. The Japanese bookshop, on the other hand, is well known as the meeting spot of the more rebellious youth in the city. Yuliang can’t help wondering whether Guifei’s parents know of their daughter’s new pastime.

‘I’m Pan Yuliang,’ she says. Then, on a whim: ‘Does a boy named Xing Xudun ever come to your meetings?’

‘From
New Youth
? He and other staff members come often. Are you friends?’

‘We’ve – we’ve met,’ Yuliang says quickly. ‘I was just curious.’

She leaves the bathhouse with Guifei’s address jotted down on the same sheet as her last aborted sketch. Her forearm is bruised from the farmer’s grip, and her brilliant solution has been literally ripped into pieces. What’s worse, she’s no closer to Teacher Hong’s
life force
than before.

But, she consoles herself (as she trudges slowly home), at least she’s done something that is nearly as difficult: she seems to have made a new friend.

25

Wagner’s Post Office Savings Bank, completed seven years ago in
Vienna and gloriously interweaving Teutonic [something] and classic
concepts of [something] is both a [something] manifestation of
modernist [something] and, to the outsider, quite easily accessible…

Which, Yuliang decides glumly, is more than can be said for this text. For all her studying, she grasps barely half the terms. She’ll have to have Zanhua read it to her next week.

Annoyed, she shuts the book with a snap. Then, glancing at the clock – 3:15; as usual, Principal Liu is late – she lights a cigarette, and shifts her attention to the painting over Liu Haisu’s desk.

The painting of an enormous monster consuming a man, or what was once most likely a man. The corpse’s head is gone, and so is one arm. The remaining arm is lifted in a sort of bloody salute. The monster’s eyes are wild, his mouth stretched in such gory ecstasy that Yuliang is actually feeling slightly queasy as Liu Haisu bursts into the room, papers flapping.

‘Apologies!’ he cries breathlessly. ‘Damn staff meeting. Don’t ever get yourself on a staff, madame. You’ll rue it.’ He seats himself before his cluttered desk. ‘I haven’t made you late again, have I?’

‘I have no class today,’ Yuliang lies.

‘How fortunate for you.’ Plumping into his seat, the principal pulls out his cigars. Yuliang watches him, slightly uneasy. The truth is, she has anatomy. She is skipping it – the thought of staring at pictures of bones and muscles for two hours straight was simply too unappetizing for her this morning.

Puffing on his cigar, Liu Haisu follows Yuliang’s gaze to the monster.

‘It’s very… striking,’ she offers.

He laughs. ‘That’s one way of putting it. One wonders what Goya was thinking.’

‘This is Goya?’ Yuliang looks at the work with renewed interest. Liu Haisu considers himself an impressionist. But he idolizes the Spanish master, whom he considers to be the first truly modern artist.

‘A copy of a reproduction of his work,’ he says now. ‘I made it years ago, when I first became drawn to his work – in the beginning, because it struck me as so uniquely Chinese.’

‘Really?’

He nods. ‘Same color schemes, same attention to brushstroke. I’m always intrigued when art reaches across cultural boundaries. I can’t recall why I chose that particular work to copy, though. I think I was having trouble working on my own.’

‘
You
have trouble?’ Yuliang asks, astonished. Liu Haisu is the most prolific painter she’s ever met. Despite his frantic school schedule and his apparent quest to get his name in every paper and art journal in China, he still produces more – and more exquisite – work than Yuliang would have imagined humanly possible. The paintings at
his last show at the Shanghai Exhibition Space had literally taken her breath away: lush yet impeccably elegant still lifes; misty, impressionistic landscapes built, when one looked closely, on brushwork that would have passed muster with Shi Tao. The blending of these two styles – of East and West, of old and new – had affected Yuliang profoundly.

‘We all have trouble sometimes,’ he is saying now. ‘The muse visits. She rarely moves in.’ He strokes his upper lip. ‘But this isn’t what I wanted to talk about today.’

Yuliang stubs out her cigarette, wondering uneasily if he’s going to bring up the bathhouse incident. He must have heard of it. She still hears her new, whispered nickname here:
Bathing Beauty
.

‘I trust you’re entering the student-faculty contest this year,’ he says instead.

‘I – I hadn’t thought of it.’ Again, Yuliang it’s a lie. In past weeks she has thought of little else. It doesn’t help that the whole school is buzzing about this year’s prize: a full scholarship to the new Sino-French Friendship Program, at Lyon University.

When Teacher Hong first mentioned it to Yuliang, she’d felt her pulse leap. She’d thought of Rubens’s soft-hued castles, Gentileschi’s lush green fields and crisp folds of fabric. She’d pictured walking cobbled streets alongside Leonardo’s limp gods and smoky women – perhaps even running into Suzanne Valadon. About a week ago, however, Yuliang finally resigned herself to the fact that the dream would remain just that – a dream. The truth is, she has no work to enter this year. And even if she did – even if she
won
– Zanhua certainly wouldn’t welcome the thought of her traipsing off to France.

‘I’ve nothing worth entering right now,’ she tells him. ‘The muse seems to be avoiding me. Perhaps she’s been listening to all the gossip.’

‘Gossip,’ he pronounces, ‘is little more than envy in disguise. You should have heard what they said of Leonardo.’

‘I’m no Leonardo.’

‘That’s not what you once led me to believe.’

He selects a cigar, nearly trims off its top. As he lights it, Yuliang finds herself dangerously close to crying for some reason. ‘I just… I can’t make them work,’ she blurts, dropping her eyes.

‘Your paintings?’

‘My nudes. Teacher Hong says my coloration is good. It’s just – I can’t seem to get the figures right.’ She sighs. ‘To be truthful, I don’t think that I
can
do bodies. I think that perhaps that part of me is just…’

He puffs, pensively. ‘What?’

‘Damaged,’ she says at last. ‘When it comes to such things.’

It is the closest she’s come yet to confessing her past, to anyone other than Zanhua. Strangely, though, the confession of her artistic failing almost shames her more.

Yuliang hears Liu Haisu’s chair creak as he leans forward to tap his cigar in the old inkstone that is his ashtray. ‘Goya once said that the dream of reason produces monsters.’ He pauses. ‘Sometimes I wonder if our monsters produce art.’

She looks up. ‘What?’

‘Has it ever occurred to you that our wounds are what
drive us to create?’ He looks thoughtfully back at Goya’s
Saturn.
‘After all, loss in one arena compels us to compensate in others. Think about the senses. The way loss of sight leads to heightened senses of smell, touch, and hearing for the blind. What if the same is true of the creative process? What if those who’ve lost something compensate for it in their work? In that case their damage helps them. It’s what compels them to create.’ He turns back to her. ‘And it might explain why the best artists tend also to be the poorest.’

‘Really?’

‘Name one rich painter worth his salt.’

She eyes him warily. ‘Is that an exam question?’

‘Not yet.’ He grins.

Yuliang crosses her legs, still unsmiling. ‘It’s not just that, though. I also need more models. Ten hours a month simply isn’t enough.’

He sighs. ‘I’m well aware.’

‘And I know nothing at all about drawing male bodies. Why is it that the male students get to sketch both female and male nudes while we women are given access only to other women?’

Like the tears, the outburst comes out unexpectedly. But Liu just smiles broadly. ‘Now
there’s
the girl I broke ranks for. Welcome back.’

And despite herself, Yuliang can’t help but finally smile in return.

‘But,’ he continues, ‘I’m afraid that’s one rule I can’t break. It’s hard enough to draw the women without causing a ruckus. If we put the precious wives and daughters of China’s elite near naked men, they won’t just shut
me down. They’ll shoot me.’ He grins affably. ‘Wonderful publicity, of course. But my painting career would be at its end.’

Outside, a bell rings. Liu Haisu looks at his wristwatch. ‘
Aiya!
I’m due in Takeshita’s class. I’m to lecture on fauvism. What the hell will I talk about? Matisse? Derain?’

‘I like Matisse.’

He frowns, giving the distinct impression that this is the wrong answer. ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter. To most of them it’s all the same anyway.’ He pushes his chair back and strides toward the door, turning at the threshold to beckon her to follow.

They cross the swaybacked floors, past peeling, painted walls. To Yuliang’s relief, the door to Teacher Lin’s anatomy class is shut, although she hears him expounding inside (‘What bone is this? Can anyone name it?’). Liu Haisu hurries on ahead, papers flapping from his half-clasped satchel, mouth moving in silence as he patches together his lecture. When he stops, it’s so abruptly they almost collide.

‘You must work through it, my girl,’ he says sternly, as though they’ve been talking all the way here. ‘The days of rich scholar-painters are long gone. Your work may very well one day be your rice bowl.’

Yuliang swallows. ‘I – thank you for your guidance. I will try.’

‘A final note: I’d strongly urge you to compete for the Lyon prize. We all agree that your skills would benefit from further guidance abroad.’

She stares at him, stunned. ‘But how can I compete if
I’ve nothing to enter? The contest is less than three months away!’

‘You must jolt yourself back to work,’ the principal snaps. ‘Some of the best paintings on earth were done in a matter of days. Three months is quite enough,
if
you stop indulging your doubts.’ The words, delivered in the artist’s characteristically calm but buoyant voice, ring through the halls like a shouted speech. ‘Find a model any way you can. A servant. A friend. Someone too stupid, doddering, or shameless to care if you turn her inside out and draw her that way. You must just
paint.
That is all.’

He puts his hand up to the door to knock, then turns back. ‘And don’t look for friends in a roomful of insecure artists,’ he adds, at last lowering his voice. ‘It’s like looking for an honest face at Versailles.’

A week later Yuliang still hasn’t been to a class. But she is, at least, finally working. Inspired (or shamed) by Liu Haisu, she has racked her brain and her contacts and finally found a model to meet her requirements. It took nerve, determination, and two mortifying refusals. But when the solution came, it seemed at once both pure genius and sheer insanity. She started that very same afternoon.

Now she chews a cuticle, studying her subject. ‘I’m supposed to live in you,’ she tells the girl. ‘That’s what Teacher Hong said.’

Her model stares back balefully. Goose bumps sprinkle her bare thighs. Yuliang rubs her own arms – it
is
chilly. The dorm she’s moved into (both because it’s close to school and because it allows her to avoid Qihua and
Ahying while she works) prohibits charcoal braziers. For good reason: last year more than thirty girls in a similar dorm died in a midnight fire, pounding on a door bolted to keep them ‘safe.’

Setting her teeth, Yuliang mixes her flesh tones: violet, yellow, earth red, vine black, Venetian red. She creates a quick and expert outline of the body’s shape on her canvas. Then she loads her brush and begins to fill it in.

As she works, she doesn’t let herself think or question. She just paints; stolidly, methodically. Modeling in the peach-tinged curves, the beige shadows. When she reaches the breasts, she hears Godmother’s voice:
If they touch the breasts directly, charge seven extra. Ten for the feet.
‘Hush, you old bitch,’ she mutters, and moves on to the hips. The belly. The puckered kiss of the navel.