What Did These Chinese Émigré Artists Create in New York?
“Jackson Heights, New York, would never know that there used to be a group of Chinese having classes on world literature here,”Danqing Chen, one of the Chinese artists who took part in those classes, wrote in the epilogue of the book The Memoir of Literature by Mu Xin.
Reading the epilogue, I realized that a group of Chinese artists had come to New York in the 80s and 90s. They had left home and bidden farewell to their traumatic pasts during the Cultural Revolution in China. They had come here for freedom and the chance to develop their art. I immediately decided to write a story about this group, so that their experience in New York would no longer go unnoticed and uncelebrated.
My plan was to find anything that happened in the circle of these artists, including any exhibition they had had, and any news about them in their neighborhood, Jackson Heights, between 1982 and 1994.
Ideally, I wanted to find original documents left by them: personal letters, diaries, memoirs — anything similar to what Chen wrote in the epilogue of the book, so that I could picture the time by reading through them. I quickly found it very difficult: Where do I start? I don’t think that they kept their documents in any of the archives in New York. I believe these people wrote during that time, but my impression is that Chinese people often hide their old diaries in the dusty box under the bed instead of giving them to someone else to spread or keep. It was also difficult to find related publications — as I tried online — because China has been sensitive about the era of the Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976, even until now.
It seemed impractical to find any original document without knowing these artists in person. Still waiting to hear back from them, I decided to check online to see if they ever appeared in the local news during their stay.
I started by searching for those artists’ exhibitions during that time. Among them, Ying Ping Po had had her work exhibited at the ISE Cultural Foundation Gallery at 555 Broadway in Soho, in 1992. Unfortunately, only exhibitions from late 2000 were available in ISE NY Gallery Archive.
I then checked an online newspaper archive. It took me a while to find something useful: I first typed in each of the names and nothing came up. I then tried “advanced search,” set the time frame as “1982 to 1994,” and searched for “Chinese artists, New York.” I found that the Cumberland Times, a small town newspaper in Maryland, had reported the first major exhibition of contemporary Chinese paintings in the United States in 1987. The exhibition had reflected “the giant strides into modernism that artists have made since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976,” according to Cumberland Times. I later found that this article was originally from United Press International.
This was what I had been looking for: post-Cultural Revolution work by Chinese artists. There was other useful information in the article: I came to know that Robert A. Hefner III was the first major American collector of post-Mao Chinese art. More research on Hefner and his collection may add more dimensions to my story.
Looking at how Western media wrote about the post-Mao Chinese art was useful, too. I realized that my story is not just about these artists gathering together and discussing literature, or their individual pasts during the Cultural Revolution. Instead, it is about how their art developed during their time in New York — and how they communicated with the audience in the foreign land via their work, which is equally important.
I will continue exploring the newspaper archive. Meanwhile, I’ve been searching for the Cultural Revolution in news archives in the United States, too. But I think this story can fill in the gap between what really happened during the Cultural Revolution and how other countries understand it. Most importantly, this story tries to capture their life in New York. After all this, I have to find my characters and their original documents to tell the story.
