BY CHENNI XU AND CHAO DENG
Inspired by The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, we penned twinned pieces in response to a shared photo of our viewing of the art installation Gathered Sky by James Turrell in 2017, Beijing. We followed this edict from The Use of Photography:
“We chose […] photos and agreed that each would write separately, in total freedom, never show the other anything until it was done, or even change a word. The rule was strictly observed until the end.”
Look Up – Chenni Xu
It is the middle of deep winter, in January. Or maybe it is just on the cusp, in November. I forget which one it is now, specifically, and can only tell you about the cold threading through me despite my peacoat, which in retrospect was probably not warm enough. Mostly I feel the dampness collecting in my boots. I’d already had an old fashioned at the Temple bar with J, before C joined us. We were given long Mao army coats and hand warmers to wear as we entered the Turrell light exhibit. Just in time to take a photograph and post it on Instagram, @jamesturrell #cray.
I wondered what Turrell’s larger scale land art was like, in another space, another time. But then and there, I submitted myself to the interplay of lights and French electronic music, Beijing’s dusk, a negative space visible through the rectangular aperture in the ceiling. We were 井底之蛙 (jing di zhi wa), frogs at the bottom of a well. We could only see what we could see, nothing further.
I was both there and not there; I was there in my body. I knew that because I was cold. But my thoughts were elsewhere — conversations with friends and colleagues, my upcoming move back to the U.S., how I became entangled in romantic relationships just as I was about to leave after seven years in China. My Blueair filter — who would be the one to inherit it as I “leave this shithole” as C reminds me I often said. I have no recollection of this, now that I see this time as the golden age of my youth.
Anyway, back to the photo. There are a few other figures within frame. A Chinese couple, intently looking at their iPhones. Are they looking at the same things C is looking at on her phone right next to them? Mostly likely not. Yet there they were, physically at the same art exhibit in the middle of wintry Beijing. That was perhaps our expat / returnee experience in a nutshell.
Those last, heady days of my extended stay in China, when I was contending with momentous change and loss, though I didn’t know it yet. I wouldn’t know for a year or so.
Our trio for that brief period: J, C and I. Hutong dinners, bumping into fuckboys, singing Hotel California.
When were our real lives going to begin? I was looking forward to it. The present was the past already. To make matters worse, J, a newly arrived editor, seemed like he was visiting from his real life, which I wondered about. But here we were, at the bottom of the well still.
And the mysterious fourth figure — who is this? Is that person me? I still can’t figure it out. The person is serene, at peace, not looking at their phone, perhaps thinking about all this, but most likely just cold.
Inside Joke – Chao Deng
C must have taken the photo from the far end of the room, before the light show started, which would have been an hour or so before dusk. The point of the exhibit, as I recall, was that colors are relative to one another. Depending on the light in the room, our perception of the sky, as seen through a rectangle hole in the ceiling, would change. The photo doesn’t show the hole though. Was the evening the crisp blue that allowed us to breathe with ease? Or the grey blue that had everyone staying indoors?
It felt like an anomaly that such a renowned show had come to Beijing, and specifically to the grey brick hutongs. We were between contemporary and tradition, East and West.
I hadn’t heard of Turrell but J was obsessed with his work. He was enthusiastic about lots of things. The fact that he was relatively new to Beijing meant that every outing felt like an adventure, although this experience was unquestionably American since the artist was from California. I appreciated J’s energy, and was glad to get his perspective on writing, reporting and life. He was a comrade in the cold.
I can’t place this evening in the timeline of my friendship with C. I think we were still getting to know each other, mired in the anxieties of the expat experience but also making fun of it when we could. How long would we be in China? What did we want to accomplish by being here? Could it ever truly be home? And there was the perennial why were there no suitable men to date? I think we saw the exhibit before a series of mediocre guys broke C’s faith that she could ever find a partner in Beijing.
When the sky turned an eerie gray, I snapped a photo for Instagram: #gatheredsky #mindfuck. C and I lay next to each other. We were not only dressed in the navy blue coats the exhibit had provided, but also wearing hand warmers. The coats were oversized and heavy, like the ones standing guards might have worn during Mao’s era. It would have been entirely confusing to any viewer what was going on.
So many of our experiences then felt like a little secret. Only other expats would know the places we visited and the odd things we posted on social media: fake Chanel bed sheets dangling in a dusty alleyway; green sprouts clipped onto young women’s heads, grammatically wrong English printed on a passerby’s shirt.
The color through the ceiling hole was just the color of the sky, turning from light to dark as the sun set. But against the hues selected by Turrell, the color of the rectangle appeared to change. Slow and steady, as if the sky were meditating. The release of one thought, the inhale of another. Maybe our breath slowed too. A bird or plane would glide by, black specs barely visible. Like a passing thought.
The little rectangle was entirely ours to perceive, magical and mystifying because we saw it as such.
About the authors
Chao Deng is a journalist at the Wall Street Journal covering economics, having served as a foreign correspondent in Beijing, Taipei and Cairo. She won the 2021 Livingston Award for Young Journalists in International Reporting for her work covering the outbreak of the Covid pandemic from inside Wuhan, China.
Chenni Xu is a board member of NuVoices and a cross-cultural communications consultant with a passion for the arts. Previously she has served as Head of the Americas, Corporate Communications for Ant Group from 2018-2022.