ringisei

Straight off, I did not enjoy the British Museum’s vaunted The First Emperor (TFE) exhibition with its representations of war and statemaking (Charles Tilly?) type of story. More specific complaints after the jump, parallels between my ungrateful little gripes with both the exhibition and BM Director Neil MacGregor’s FT interview.

It’s somewhat ironic that I imbibe more Chinese culture when I’m here in London than when I’m back home in Sg. Two years ago, I was awed by the RAA’s Three Emperors exhibition. In contrast, the TFE seemed much less rich, less varied, less subtle even though I had already seen the BBC documentary about how the BM had painstakingly converted the hallowed Reading Room for the exhibition.

The first problem was overcrowding. I queued along the BM fence for half an hour and then another hour to reach the ticket booth (500 a day); the girl handling my transaction fatfingered it and within the ten seconds of remedying the IA, I had been bumped into a slot an hour later. I suppose good things come to those who wait. But when I got in, it was so full that you could hardly see the exhibits. Being a weekday afternoon, it was mainly OAPs/pensioners. While it was rather heartwarming to see lots of elderly working class retirees enjoying foreign culture, most of them took a pretty long time with each exhibit, standing there until their audio phone narration had ended. Fair enough but it also creates a huge backlog. There was so many people inside the darkened reading room that, even with its magnificent high domed ceiling, it was actually very warm and stuffy.

The second problem was the relative paucity of artifacts on display. I know I know it’s unprecedented and even if I went to the Xi’an museum, I wouldn’t be able to see them so close up. But the main exhibits were the crouching archer upon entry, the reproduced rubbing of the mountain (Yi?) inscription by Qin Shihuangdi, the terracotta chariot procession, the bronze carriage and… that was about it. Eye candy from the spectacularly shot but terribly narrated Channel 4 documentary projected on the walls near the entrance and the exit.

Excerpts from MacGregor’s interview:

‘They are all about the international community of inquiry, the republic of letters. And what goes between people engaged in the pursuit of inquiry is something that is quite separate from government and politics.’

The more delicate the political situation, the more important it is to keep personal contacts going., he adds. ‘It is essential to keep the channels of dialogue open. Government relations change over time.’

Ah, the republic of letters. Peter Haas’ epistemic communities. It’s a powerful ideal and an actually existing phenomenon in various areas like cultural exchange. But for the TFE? I can’t help wonder if the deep involvement of the Chinese government and embassy hadn’t projected a message that was somewhere along the lines of Zhang Yimou’s egregious Hero.

That is all very well. But culture can be also used by governments, to project an image that may not necessarily reflect reality. Isn’t there a danger that the excitement engendered by China Now, for example, encourages the casual onlooker to overlook the negative aspects of that country?

MacGregor says that there is no easy answer to that conundrum - but that ‘the more difficult political relations are with another country, the more important it is to have a historical understanding of it.’

I’m not sure I got quite a sense of Chinese ambivalence about the First Emperor from the exhibition. Or the ideational conflict between Legalism and Confucianism, particularly with the former’s ascendancy under Li Si but the latter’s predominance in prior and later eras. Not ‘a historical understanding’ but the various historical understandings that are in continual conflict.

‘The issue of political liberty in China is a very good example,’ he says. ‘The First Emperor exhibition is all about the control of the state, and that state’s very sharp sense of its own indivisibility. That idea of oneness, which has persisted against all odds, is a very important and enduring aspect to present as a historical phenomenon to the public.

‘It makes it much easier to understand the terms of the debate from the Chinese point of view - which is not to endorse it.’
…
Exhibitions, such as The First Emperor, he says, ’should better equip us to interpret those aspects of Chinese society that we find disturbing, and that are in contradiction with our own values. It asks some acute questions about the cost of stability.’

‘Man of the World’, FT: Art of our time 17 Mar 2008 supplement, pp.11-12.

One of the most striking things, and probably the best thing about the whole experience, about seeing the terracotta warriors so close was to see how distinctive each was. Each really looked and felt like the representation of a distinct individual. How does this fit into the narrative of oneness that MacGregor talks about?

And again there’s ‘the Chinese point of view’ represented by the orthodox historiography of the Chinese Communist Party. But there are myriad Chinese points of view. The hundred flowers, so to speak. Besides being more aware about the complexities of Qin China, there’s also the issue of the uses of comparative thinking. There wasn’t much a sense of what was or wasn’t relevant about that period for today; how meaningful are the comparisons, how are they used to build the political narratives and representations of today? I’d argue, not a whole lot. The CCP’s narratives are probably rooted more strongly in more modern history, the century of humiliation. Also, some comparative perspective with other polities of 500 BC would have much more useful - what kind of achievements did they have at that time relative to Qin, did they value and practice statecraft, the status of individual? Often, Western political values are traced in a straight line back to the ancient Greeks without much reference to how these values and practices existed alongside slavery and the status of women.

In the end, the thing I enjoyed most about the exhibition was the ‘extra’ outside and free to view. A little army of mini-terracotta warriors made by British children using similar methods and techniques as those of the Qin craftsmen: