A young Chinese artist has settled in Berlin in order to practice calligraphy, providing her with the necessary distance from the destruction of traditional Chinese characters wrought by the Cultural Revolution. It also provides the inspiration of a vibrant, artistic city, a place for art that is ‘Made in Europe‘.
Global strategist Pankaj Ghemawat published World 3.0, a book on how limited globalization really is. This condition may have its benefits. I learned that the inhabitants of my adopted city know very little about China, but they have plenty of curiosity. Being asked all the time about China by my friends, and living seven thousands kilometers distant from Beijing makes me think of my home country all the time. James Joyce lived most of his adult life in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, but he only wrote about an Ireland he could neither escape nor forget.
Nostalgia is an eternal theme of literature and art. When I think about China from the vantage point of Mitteleuropa where I have no personal history, looking back helps me to understand better the gap between traditional Chinese civilization and the tsunami of Western trends that has swept over China. On the one hand, Chinese have been excited and curious about new influences from the West. But since we are still struggling to find our way through these cultural connections and differences, we often get lost and abandon our own culture. This problem especially afflicts the young.
Studying both architecture and traditional Chinese opera in Beijing pushed me to the forefront of this clash of cultures. For Chinese students, the thrust of our studies was toward Western architecture. It was the beginning of the 21st century. Beijing was preparing for the 2008 Olympics. China became the world’s factory, and the world’s biggest construction site. Three hundred million migrant workers moved to the cities. Twenty-four hours a day, construction sites filled Beijing with lights, dust, and endless noise. Hundreds of neighbourhoods were demolished. When my book about traditional Chinese garden architecture was published in 2005, only 5.76 percent of Beijing’s old city was intact. The developments for the Olympics saw to the rest.
Nostalgia is an eternal theme of literature and art. When I think about China from the vantage point of Mitteleuropa where I have no personal history, looking back helps me to understand better the gap between traditional Chinese civilization and the tsunami of Western trends that has swept over China.
Author Jia experienced the clash of Chinese and Western cultures through her frontline study of traditional Chinese opera. Nowadays, there are less than 200 types of local opera left in China, photo: CFOTO via picture alliance.
Travel restrictions during the closed period through the end of the Cultural Revolution made it impossible for Chinese to see modern architecture in situ. Even students of my generation would eagerly make notes and drawings of famous designs from the limited books in the library. For us, Modern Architecture was, in many respects, imaginary.
Later, when I attended my first Master’s lass in traditional Chinese opera, our professor told us that in the 1950s, there were more than 3,000 kinds of local opera in China; now less than 200 remain. China’s self-inflicted cultural destruction, its frenzy and despair, combined with increased idealistic worship of the West has yielded a strange state of affairs.
The Chinese worked very hard to increase their GDP to reach fourth place in the world; but on the other hand, once the backward old China was no more, high hopes for a new, ideal system were darkened by the corrupt habits of patronage and ‘relationships’ exactly like those that have been practiced for thousands of years.
Bulldozing Harmony
Bulldozers not only demolished traditional buildings that were the essence of much of our history, but they also demolished much of the harmony, contentment and optimism that we inherited from traditional Chinese thought. Those born in the big cities during the 1980s, have found that 50 percent of their parents’ marriages have ended in divorce. My own family was one of the casualties of this trend.
By contrast, all these features of social upheaval and cultural destruction reinforce my sense of Berlin as an idyll in a way that Berliners of my grandparents’ generation would have found hard to believe. While I enjoyed studying German culture, and benefitting from its positive influences—happily discovering the similarities and differences between the two cultures—with the time constraints of daily life, I simply cannot fill my time with the Chinese language anymore. But neither can I put aside my Chinese.
Time and again, thousands of Chinese people have to clear their traditional homes for the construction of commercial complexes. Bulldozers are not only destroying the essence of a large part of Chinese history, but also the harmony, contentment and optimism of the people that are part of traditional Chinese thinking, photo: Stephen Shaver/Newscom via picture alliance.
Wittgenstein wrote that, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Having lost the environment of the Chinese language, and with the limits of my German and English, art as universal language allows me expression. In this way, I first conceived my painting series based on Chinese characters: The Chinese Version.
Chinese characters have had a history as a developed writing system for no less than 3,300 years. Unlike alphabetical writing systems, Chinese characters do not represent sounds even if they have sounds associated with them. Rather, they are symbols that convey meanings. An Analysis and Explanation of Characters written by Xu Shen at the beginning of the first century AD summarized the ways of creating Chinese characters in the earliest known stages of written Chinese. The first major criterion was pictographic. For abstract concepts not conducive to pictographic representation, early Chinese developed the indicative method. They added a symbol to a drawing in order to indicate the concept.
Lines, Dots and Hooks
Gradually, Chinese characters comprising various lines, dots and hooks that derived from the ancient pictographs became ever more symbolic. This organic development continued until it was broken in 1955 when Mainland China imposed the simplification of Chinese characters. This directive had two stated purposes: the simplification of the ‘structure’ or the number of strokes in characters, and a reduction in the number of characters. In this way, not only the form of characters changed, but also thousands of characters simply disappeared from the Chinese lexicon.
The pretext for this directive was to increase literacy, but literacy rates in Hong Kong and Taiwan are slightly higher than those of Mainland China, despite the fact that their administrations never adopted simplified characters, and never limited the number of characters.
From the standpoint of language, the simplification program was a much more ambitious cultural atrocity than the Taliban dynamiting the Bamiyan Buddhas or the campaign of the First Emperor of Qin, to ‘burn books and bury scholars.’ It was more extreme than censorship because it not only restricted expression, but also, to a degree, it restricted the ability to conceive certain ideas.
For artists, it was a further calamity because imposed simplification desecrated our most indigenous and distinctive art form: calligraphy. Of course some people still practice calligraphy in simplified characters, but this is a calligraphy divorced from millennia of developments that enabled the form of characters to reflect their semantic content and vice versa.
Languages are dynamic and develop all the time, following in step with history. But the deliberate destruction of so much of the Chinese written language is a symptom of a historical tendency that is ongoing in so many places around the globe right through to the present day.
Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the Silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness. – T. S. Eliot „Burnt Norton
The most original and characteristic art form of Chinese artists - calligraphy. Due to the simplification, the form of the characters can only reflect their semantic content to a limited extent, photo: K. Stange/imageBROKER via picture alliance.
There is no expressive freedom; everything conforms to a rigid order so as to be in compliance with the state standard— regardless of the individual will. In the end, these characters become the articulations of those who have lost their will. Some of the form remains, and the movement seems to be still there, moving perpetually in its stillness, like the Chinese jar in T.S.Eliot’s poem, but opposite, and dead.
From the time the industrial revolution unlocked the gates to China, to the present, when the invisible power of the Internet blunts cultural differences, part of the evident prosperity of our society is a direct fruit of scientific development.
There is an old Chinese saying that, “Using copper as a mirror, we can tidy our clothes; using another person as a mirror, we can know our success or failure; using the past as a mirror, we can compel our rise or decline”.
Today Berlin is a distinctive node in the global network. In the biggest city of immigrants in Germany, different nationalities face different problems. The increasing immigration of the young brings Berlin its vitality and leads to development, but attendant unemployment also brings social problems.
Not all change is growth, as not all movement is forward. We know that technological progress is real, but whether the progress of civilization is a reality is controversial.
English is becoming ever more the lingua franca. Germans face changes in their own cultural identity. In Berlin, we are striving to become a tech hub, the next Silicon Valley. The startup industry gives young people a new direction for their talents. But a relatively conservative social system limits its speed.
New York's Sixth Borough
New Yorkers in the art world call Berlin ‘New York’s sixth borough’. As a person who has chosen to live in Berlin, I see no reason for it to aspire to be an imitation Silicon Valley or an imitation New York. With the greatest population of artists, a profound and rich cultural base of Europe combined with influences from all over the world, why shouldn’t Berlin make its own new historical contribution to which others should aspire? Perhaps we will manage this in either case, but the lack of sufficient economic support compels the art scene in Berlin to fend for itself. Art becomes a monopolistic system dominated by a few art authorities.
Across a cultural bridge, I hold my brush to paint The Chinese Version series in Germany, my adopted home. But invariably I remember a paragraph from Lin Yutang’s book My Country and My People: “I am able to confess because, unlike these patriots, I am not ashamed of my country. And I can lay bare her troubles because I have not lost hope. China is bigger than her little patriots, and does not require their whitewashing. She will, as she always did, right herself again.”
These lines sum up not only my attitude towards China, but also my attitude towards Germany. To be critical of the current condition in order to be able to wish for something greater, something that could contribute further to global welfare is a consequence of genuine respect.
About the Author
Jia
Artist
Jia is an artist who llives and works in Berlin. She was born in 1979 in Beijing in the People's Republic of China, where she studied architecture, performance and literature. Jia often reinterprets traditional Chinese calligraphy and landscape painting in her works. Her best-known exhibitions include "The Chinese Version", a series of paintings based on Chinese characters.
Culture Report Progress Europe
Culture has a strategic role to play in the process of European unification. What about cultural relations within Europe? How can cultural policy contribute to a European identity? In the Culture Report Progress Europe, international authors seek answers to these questions. Since 2021, the Culture Report is published exclusively online.
