Grant had some doubts about my project. ‘Project’ was an English word I found impossible to grasp. A vague and abstract concept. Nevertheless, my project, according to the academic film anthropology style, was a documentary about a village and its inhabitants in southern China. I had been reading about the village – Jing Cun in Guangdong Province. There were two thousand uneducated workers and peasants living there. But somehow in the last few decades, just about every villager had transformed himself into a painting copyist. They could now reproduce Monet, Chagall and da Vinci at the drop of a hat. I know it’s a cliché that almost every Chinese person is a good copyist. But this was still fascinating to me. I could not even draw a proper arm or leg, or paint a tree. Let alone some Western religious figure.
In the corridor I saw my supervisor rushing in my direction. He greeted me and opened his office door, with a mocking exaggeration in his gesture.
‘The admin people want to eat me alive! They have left me no time to see my students!’ Grant pointed to a chair for me. ‘Did you read the news this morning about President Xi Jinping’s new reforms? He really is trying to be the new Mao!’
‘Well. Every leader is an emperor in China, for sure.’
‘Yes, as Tears for Fears sang: “Everybody wants to rule the world.”’
‘Who are these tears?’ I asked hesitantly. Once again I felt like a fish swimming in a new part of the ocean, unable to recognise the seaweed.
Grant started to hum in a tuneless way, but stopped abruptly. ‘Okay, let’s get going, no time to lose. Tell me where you are.’
‘I’ve been collecting materials, and made contact with the village. I think I should go there for the actual research and do some filming.’
‘That’s good to know. Fieldwork is the primary thing in our area.’ He then looked at me over his glasses, and added: ‘I need to discuss one thing with you before you go further.’
My heart tightened a bit.
‘As your supervisor I have an ethical and moral duty to monitor your film-making activities and to ensure that there are no legal complications arising from your filming. It’s part of being an anthropologist. So I have some forms for you to fill in. Your secondary supervisor has to sign as well as the head of department.’
He tapped his keyboard and began to print out something.
‘What kind of ethical and moral duty?’ I asked defensively. ‘I thought our purpose was to make a good film with narrative strength and research value.’ I remembered that this was the phrase he used the other day. ‘My film will be quite straightforward. It’s just about people in a small village making reproductions of Western art, which they then sell back to the West. What’s the issue?’
Grant looked at me with his knitted brow. His hair was a mess, his clothes dishevelled. I wondered if his wife had left him recently.
I stared back at Grant, and didn’t feel like talking any more. What did he know about China and Chinese manual workers? Ethical and moral duties? Did he mean that I should get consent forms? Even though Chinese villagers would not give a damn about this sort of formality?
Grant stood up and handed me a dozen printed pages.
‘Just fill this in later,’ he said, with a slightly impatient tone.
I was about to leave, when Grant suddenly thought of something. He raised his right hand, a Lenin-style gesture, directing me to sit down again.
Authorship
– But authorship is always an issue.
– Didn’t Roland Barthes announce the author is dead?
Grant settled back in his chair, and picked up one of the small figurines from his shelf. It was a dancing tribal woman and he twiddled her in his fingers. He appeared to be reflecting on something we had just discussed. He was breathing in and out heavily. This was usually a sign that he wanted to embark on a more theoretical course of conversation.
‘So, I’m curious, you say these workers are originally farmers without any artistic training. How did they learn to draw and to paint? I mean, what is their craftsmanship based on? If a worker makes a hand copy of a Leonardo da Vinci painting, he would need to understand perspective, anatomy, glazing, chiaroscuro and so on.’ Grant was on a roll. ‘So do they learn simply from copying? But how exactly? Do they learn the skills from their foreman?’
My professor liked to ask questions, but didn’t seem to need my answers. He went on:
‘You say they are self-taught. Do they have any idea that they have been forging classical artworks and making a profit out of it?’
‘No. It is not forging!’ I almost laughed. ‘These artisans never claim that they are selling the original paintings. They sell reproductions. There is a huge market in the world for them – in hotels, restaurants, people’s homes.’
I turned my head, looking around Grant’s office. There were no reproductions hanging on his walls here. But I spotted a small postcard of Hockney’s A Bigger Splash lying by his computer. I pointed to the postcard.
‘For example, that is a reproduction, not a forged copy.’
‘Yes, I understand. But authorship is always an issue,’ Grant claimed.
‘Didn’t Roland Barthes announce the author is dead? So what the Chinese artisans are enacting is a postmodern phenomenon. They interpret Western paintings with their own eyes and hands.’
‘Even if Barthes is right, that does not affect issues of intellectual property rights.’
‘Exactly, property rights! What a bourgeois concept!’ I found myself speaking like a little Red Guard from Mao’s time.
Grant stared at me, with a look of irritation, and said in a slightly clipped tone:
‘Okay, it looks like we’ll have to agree to disagree.’
I didn’t reply. Because I didn’t understand what he meant by we’ll have to agree to disagree.
A Landscape Architect
– But aren’t landscape and architecture opposite concepts?
– No. That’s like saying love and marriage are opposite concepts.
The hay fever season continued into the early summer. Everyone in England seemed to be red-eyed and sneezing. It was as if the whole nation was weeping out of some collective grief. The book club met again for the second and last time on a Saturday afternoon. No one wanted to talk about the book we were supposed to discuss this time either. Instead the topic of conversation was the new prime minister, who had come to power after the referendum. I listened with some interest but had nothing to contribute. And I noticed you holding the book but not engaging in the conversation. You were unshaven, but pleasing to the eye.
I turned to you. ‘I never asked what you do for your work.’
‘I’m a landscape architect.’
Oh. I thought for a moment. This was a new concept for me. I had not met a proper landscape architect before, but plenty of humble gardeners and builders in China. Then, uncertain, I said:
‘But aren’t landscape and architecture opposite concepts?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Architecture is invented by people who want to change the landscape. But landscape doesn’t need architects.’
‘No.’ Your blue-green eyes locked on to