Sometimes I wonder how I have got to know a certain person. I have got to know some people for reasons related to work, or everyday life, or simply thanks to the passage of time. It was completely a matter of fate that I got to know Yang Qian. In 1977, the college examination was reassumed nation-wide. I was a member of the “intellectual youth” (educated young people of that time) sent to work in Jinning County in Yunnan Province. I was interested in painting since I was small, so I “imposed myself on” Mr. Lin Ling, a famous painter in Kunming and “forced him” to take me in as a student. That’s how I began to study painting. In the collage entry examination, despite my lack of confidence, I got accepted by chance into the painting department of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. Yang Qian was in Chengdu at that time. It was said that he easily got into the same department of the same academy as me with a very high score. That’s how we became classmates. What I never thought about at that time was that we would remain friends until today – It’s been 28 years in a flash!

　　I remember the first time when I met him was in the school playground. It was a bright afternoon. It was a sports class. Because my acceptance letter was sent two weeks late, I had to rush to Chongqing from Yunnan and by the time I arrived at school, the school had started two weeks ago. I didn’t know any person in that class. It was the first time in that afternoon that I got to meet the other classmates outside of my dormitory. Yang Qian was called Yang Qian (Qian was another character) at that time. He was wearing a pair of black-framed glasses, a student’s hairdo with a hair bang on one side of the forehead, had a fair complexion. He didn’t talk much and seemed a bit melancholic. As his name of that time suggested, he was very modest and easygoing. I thought to myself, “this guy looked a bit like a petty bourgeois.” Qin Ming, who was in the same dormitory as me, confided to me, “he scored the highest in the test among students from the southwestern region. It was said that his sketch was particularly good, especially in-depth and he always started his painting from the part of reflecting light at the eyes.” Wow, you can imagine how amazed I was after hearing all of this. Of course, I was not completely convinced.

　　Soon enough, Qin Ming’s description of Yang Qian was confirmed in the sketch class, which I found the most painful class. Yang Qian did start from the reflecting light of the eyes and accurately completed an entire sketch step by step. He didn’t strictly follow each step of the procedure taught by the teacher, but the teacher couldn’t do anything about it, because he could make sketches of each plaster statue (including the most difficult head portrait of David) with precision, with excellence in form and tone. He never made any mistake. In a few years of time, Yang Qian always scored the highest in our class.

　　I changed to a different dormitory the most frequently in our class. I had shared the same room with Luo Zhongli at first, then Zhou Chunya, then Ye Yongqing and other students of Grade 78. The last year, I switched to the same dormitory with Yang Qian. Our beds were placed head to tail with each other. In that era, everyone liked to be the most hardworking of all and tried to compete with each other as to how late they could stay up reading. Since our beds were linked with each other, Yang Qian and I shared the same candle after the light was switched off. I realized that I usually fell tired and asleep earlier than him. Most of the time, he was the one who had the right to blow off the candle. Meanwhile, Yang Qian was one of the few fans of classical music in our class. While painting, he and He Duoling would begin to whistle some classical music masters’ tunes without knowing it. They were often ordered to stop by a stern teacher. Yang Qian and He Duoling’s musical talents were widely recognized to the point that He Duoling would sometimes admit that his knowledge of music history was better than that of art history. To be honest, I had at times suspected whether Yang Qian had got into a wrong field. Actually in terms of painting, he didn’t belong to the kind of people who wanted to be an “avant-garde” artist. Although later on he took an interest in experimenting with different kinds of practice, I felt that deep down he was still a “romantic petty bourgeois.” I could sense such a personality in the pastoral series that he created after he became famous. But even such a person eventually couldn’t escape the test of “American imperialism.” That’s how later on another Yang Qian emerged.

　　In 1984, Yang Qian finally received his visa to America. Before he left for America, he came to Yunnan to see me especially and visited Guishan, where Damao, Yeshuai and I always went. He painted a bunch of post-impressionist landscape paintings and picked out two of them for me as a present. I have kept them until today. When I was teaching in Chongqing, one of them was eaten by the rats. After graduation, especially because he went to America and we were in two different places, we embarked on an extended passage of correspondences. Through him, I got to learn about America bit by bit. While he was struggling for a living in the States, he never forgot to occasionally send me some catalogues published in America. One of them was about Mark Rothko, the American abstract painting master who I particularly admired. Those books accompanied me all through the lengthy yet gloomy years in Chongqing. I always read each of his letters over and over again, trying to make up and imagine the “great America” that we all dreamed of between the lines of those tiny words. I remember in one of the letters, Yang Qian drew a cartoon, on which both of us were looking at the moon at the same time. In the cartoon, I was saying, “Qian’r, look, the moon is so round…” while he was saying “is it really?…” There written on the moon were the two characters for “America.”

　　Yang Qian often sent me pictures of his new paintings too. He painted hazy portraits of naked females, or juxtaposed images of two different world famous paintings. His style changed completely from his former style in China. At the same time, he made some small-scale installations out of garbage, or photographed some portraits of female bodies with a rather secretive method. In the works that he made in America, his nature as a “romantic petty bourgeois” seemed to be concealed? Instead, they were a kind of “rational work” that combined the conceptual and the technical. Or perhaps the American imperialism seemed to be so powerful that it forced our romantic Qian’r into a confused yet illusive “angry youth”?

　　There are three things about Yang Qian that I particularly admired. First of all, he is inclined to “forget.” Those who know Yang Qian well know that Yang Qian belongs to the type of person with a generous heart. Despite his gentle and unpretentious appearance, he has actually undergone a lot of ups and downs in his life. But he has always been able to quickly overcome events that would have pained another person for one to two years. At the most he would just let out, “Chui…zi!”(A cursing word in Sichuanese dialect) During his 18 years of adventure in the States, he went through the transformation from a poor student to a professional painter who could live on selling his work. He once had his house and his car, and collected a number of antiques, which could be considered a “middle class” life style. For some reasons, he subsequently experienced the darkness of his life, until in the end, he returned to China, with only 20,000 US dollars in his pocket. Such a dramatic shift in life would have rendered me sick with depression. It’s perhaps because of his healthy and positive attitude that he has been able to start afresh after so many twists and turns and to embrace the complicated and fast changing art world and life with the attitude of a “newcomer.” When we look at it today, Yang Qian has been able to survive the many changes in his life (from Chengdu to Chongqing to New York to Beijing) thanks to his knack for “loss of memory.” On the other hand, it has also enabled him to be free of the over indulgence of traditional artists in certain styles.

　　Secondly, he has a “realistic” attitude. I recall when I went to New York for the first time in 1996, Yang Qian came to pick us up at the airport. We had dinner together and as we were walking into the subway, Yang Qian warned each of us over and over again. He told us that we should each carry 20 US dollars with us so that we wouldn’t lose our life if we were rubbed. Don’t stand too close to the railway, Yang Qian said, in case some black guy would give us a kick from the back and so on. On the second day, Yang Qian took us to visit the galleries in SOHO. He gave us a very detailed introduction to the backgrounds of some of the galleries and the careers of some artists. We were all very impressed with how much he knew about contemporary art in New York. When I thought about the fact that many Chinese after landing in America, stopped practicing art, or returned to Chinese tradition, I seemed to begin to understand his style of painting in America and his fluent English. He belonged to the few of those who tried to be engaged entirely into the contemporary art world in America (while he managed to stay faithful to his inherent taste for Sichuan cooking.) Thanks to this kind of “realistic” attitude, he could carry on studying tenaciously, living positively, constantly exploring and working alone. That is precisely why after he returned to Beijing, he could quickly confront an art environment that was once again unfamiliar to him and adjust himself within a very short time to be involved in the local art scene and become a highly admirable artist.

　　Thirdly, his intellectual flexibility. In my mind, Yang Qian (yes, it’s a different Yang Qian now) is not a “very well-behaved” artist. While in university, he was already able to switch from one style quickly to another. During the period when he was working on pastoral themes, he could make folk art paintings in an intricate fashion while painting fauvist works. In America, he seemed to have found more sufficient reasons to express his feelings with different kinds of materials. After he returned to Beijing, he adopted a different Chinese character in his name and became a new person. Thus he has equally convincing reasons to begin experimenting freely among photographs, small-scale installations and paintings, all the way to his recent “kinetic paintings.” In 2002, Yang Qian left America and moved back to Beijing. He rented a small studio in Huajiadi Xili and was working nonstop every day. Almost every other day, I would listen to him talk about a completely different idea for his art practice. Until I saw his “bathroom” works, I impolitely “forcefully suggested” that he continue painting them so that he wouldn’t risk being confused by himself. Naturally until today, his “bathroom” paintings are my favorite, including those that were painted at a later stag with water drops and big faces. I still feel that these works reveal to me a Yang Qian that I have been familiar with – melancholic, sensitive, a bit “flirtatious,” (romantic). The solemnity and quietness in his work have a gray and poetic feel and a kind of fluid ambiguity. There is a love for the classic in his confusion. There is a heart that longs for transcendence underneath his intelligence and sensitivity.

　　Today’s Yang Qian has become an “overseas returnee” that many people envy. He has an American passport, married a beautiful and virtuous wife and his art career has taken off steadily. He has moved into a super size studio. He is full of great ideas for art and has earned a lot of US bills…His life seems to be moving closer and closer to the kingdom that most people dream of, and closer. Changes take place too fast in our time. Our life changes too rapidly. We linger in the state of conflict between amnesia and memory. As we are ready to embrace pains, our trend of thought is then disrupted by many pleasant surprises. From Yang Qian to Yang Qian, I can clearly sense the transformations of our times that were forced upon our generation. Maybe we should be grateful to this era of many changes. It has enabled us to experience the excitement and pleasant sensation of a multifold life in a limited time frame. Maybe we should rejoice in our fate. It leads us to constantly move ahead so much that we have no way to pay attention to the inconsequential details of our life, or have no time even to reopen those outdated dairies of ours. Maybe we should learn to understand this life that is becoming crueler, at least it allows us to repossess the “wild nature” that has already degenerated. As we are forced to accept a shifting yet monotonous living environment, our memory can only drive people into worthless misery and terror, an ancient disease that forever infects the human being.

　　In another month, Yang Qian’s first solo exhibition in China will be opened. I send my old schoolmate and old friend my best wishes for a fruitful career in a world that is full of unexpected changes.

　　The first draft was completed in Wang Jing at 1.38am on November 11, 2006.

　　The second draft was completed in Hongkou in Shanghai at 2.15pm on November 13, 2006.

　　Translated by Carol (Yinghua) Lu