Once Upon a Time the Zhou Brothers

Even in Chicago, where they’ve lived now for nearly twenty-five years, Shan Zuo and Da Huang are still an unusual sight. Neither one is particularly tall, but they’re both stocky and nearly bald on top, with long dark tresses that float down their backs like beards. Their eyes gleam like torches and usually they are dressed in black. To me they look like Wulin heroes straight out of the mountains and forests of ancient China.

On closer inspection, Shan Zuo possesses an inner calm and Da Huang a detached arrogance. Over the years, passing through Chicago, I’ve come to know something of their lives. Shan Zuo’s original name is Shao Li, Da Huang’s is Shao Ning. They are Zhuang ethnic minorities and were born in the city of Nanning, in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of south-east China where it borders Vietnam. Their maternal grandmother, Zhou Jin Hua, started Wuming County’s first girls’ school. She was the principal and taught music and fine arts there. Her staunchly feudalistic husband, however, didn’t agree with his wife’s liberal outlook and this caused trouble between them. One day, Zhou Jin Hua left home taking their only daughter, Yi Xing, with her. When she grew up, Yi Xing became a teacher like her mother. This grandmother, Zhou Jin Hua, was the backbone of the family. She taught her two grandsons calligraphy from when they were very small, using the eighteenth-century Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting as a guide.

But a shadow hung over the family in the figure of Yi Xing’s husband, Meng Yuan. He was a poetry scholar who drank heavily and had a wide circle of friends. Not long after Da Huang was born, Meng Yuan walked into a Party propaganda session and announced, ‘These neophytes shouldn’t be leading specialists…’ and proceeded to rant drunkenly against the state. After the session, he went to buy Da Huang a little sweater and came home to find a pair of handcuffs waiting for him. He was sentenced and sent to a criminal reform camp. After that Yi Xing allowed her children to change their surnames to their grandmother’s: Zhou. From then on, her teaching salary of only forty yuan a month had to take care of two adults and five children. Meng Yuan disappeared from the family forever.

In the time I’ve known them, the brothers have rarely brought up their father. Of the two, I’ve spent more time with Shan Zuo – but he’s uncomfortable speaking about matters of the heart, while his capacity for alcohol surpasses that of anyone I know. It’s obvious that he’s inherited both his romantic nature and his love of drink from his father.

Each time I visit Chicago, it’s as if the Zhou brothers deliberately conjure up new astonishments for me: they’ve bought a house for the land in order to design a private garden, set up a foundation, established a cultural centre, given financial aid to young artists and, most extraordinary of all, bought 160 hectares of forest land by Lake Michigan to create their own sculpture park. In these dreamless times, this is surely a kind of dream-making power.

One night not too long ago a group of friends converged in the bar in their home. Among them was a Metropolitan Opera bass-baritone, a group of black Broadway singers, some American businessmen who have dealings in China and bosses of the local Chinese newspaper. Once the music stopped people started to wander off and I walked with Shan Zuo to the studio to drink some more. We talked about the Cultural Revolution and Jia Yi’s Han Dynasty essay, ‘The Faults of Qin’, and then the conversation turned to his father. During the War of Resistance, he said, there was a day when the Japanese bombed the school and his father brought home more than a hundred teachers and students to give them food, drink and shelter. ‘Whenever my grandmother talked about this she’d always complain about it,’ Shan Zuo said, ‘but that’s just the kind of person she was.’

I thought of the fate of the two generations: one drunken slip from Meng Yuan from which, it seemed, ten thousand generations could never recover. From then on, the two brothers had feared they might never escape the shadow of their father’s fate.

In the late Sixties, Shan Zuo left home. He walked a hundred miles to a mountain village where he settled and found work. Saying little to those around him, he started painting portraits of Chairman Mao to earn money so that he could travel and see the world. In the early Seventies, when some colleges were recruiting worker-peasant-soldier students, Shan Zuo applied twice and was twice rejected because of his family background. In 1973 he returned home. His grandmother had died and the small house was dilapidated, but he was reunited with his brother, and in their elation they were inspired to make their first oil painting together. In the painting, two people row a small leaf of a boat that cuts forward through the waves, as if trying to break out of the frame – the dream vision of two children taking on the world outside.

For the next few years, Shan Zuo and Da Huang took temporary work as designers for the Guangxi Cai Diao Opera Troupe and for the province’s Song and Dance Troupe. Then, in 1978, Shan Zuo was finally accepted into the stage design department of the Shanghai Theatre Academy. Da Huang stayed behind in Nanning. He wrote despondently to his older brother, ‘Since you left for Shanghai, I’ve felt utterly alone, constantly lost. I often go to the places where we used to walk together. I’m full of selfish worries for the future, what to do – it’s as if fate’s strangling me… We brothers must carve out a new path together, we must struggle for art’s ultimate aspirations.’

Da Huang told Shan Zuo he had decided to become a ‘visiting student’ at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, and he didn’t wait for his older brother’s letter in reply before leaving.

Da Huang arrived at the Shanghai Theatre Academy on March 3, 1979. As Shan Zuo only had one tight bunk space, the brothers decided to take turns sleeping. Shan Zuo went to classes during the day while Da Huang slept; then in the evening Shan Zuo rehashed the key points of each lecture for him. Da Huang painted for the rest of the night while Shan Zuo slept, returning to his older brother’s bunk in the morning. But their double act was soon exposed. Their teachers, however, were so moved by the brothers’ determination that they decided to let Da Huang sit in on classes. Not long after this, because a television was stolen from a classroom, stronger security measures were put in place and only officially registered students were allowed into the dorms. So Da Huang spent his nights outside, sleeping by the side of the road, or in a playground, curled up on the platform at the top of the slide. Later he rented a bunk in a public bathhouse that locked its doors at ten and opened at six a.m.

Those two years, between 1978 and 1980, marked a significant turning point in the history of Chinese art as it began to fall under the influence of Western movements. Like most of the other students studying art at the time, the Zhou brothers were excited by everything they saw and heard. It was as if that first oil painting, which they’d titled Waves, had been a sign; as if the boat was propelled by the energy of the changing times and was actually leading them outside the frame.

After their studies ended in Shanghai they made a pilgrimage along the Silk Road, standing awestruck before the cave paintings at Dunhuang and the stone carvings at Longmen. When they returned to Nanning, they found the oppressive atmosphere of the provincial capital unbearable. They converted a deserted warehouse owned by the Ministry of Culture into a secret art studio and abandoned themselves to their work day and night.

In February 1980 the Zhou brothers found a new source of inspiration close to home. The rock murals of Flower Mountain, painted by Zhuang people over two thousand years ago, stretch along the cliff face for more than 150 miles. The largest is forty-four metres high by 170 metres wide, and there are more than fifteen hundred primitive images in all. The significance of these murals, which date back to the Warring States period between 476 and 221 BC, is deeply ingrained in the Zhuang people’s consciousness.

To study them, the brothers sailed down the river on a bamboo raft and roped together bamboo ladders to scale the cliffs. They slept on the raft or on the shore, caught fish, gathered wild herbs and drank sorghum wine. Gradually they filled scores of notebooks with sketches. On their return, from these sketches, the two brothers made over four thousand rock-mural paintings. Visitors to their studio were surprised to discover only images of nude men and women, and when reports of their work began to spread, the brothers found themselves blacklisted and in trouble once again.

But time brought a swift reprieve. In October 1982, carrying a letter of introduction, the brothers made a special trip to Beijing to meet the Dean of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Zhang Ding. He was a great admirer of their rock-mural paintings and organized an exhibition in the Academy’s galleries. Zhang Ding was the one who completely altered the brothers’ fate. In February 1983 they returned to Beijing and enrolled at the Central Academy to continue their studies. In February 1985 they curated an exhibition of Flower Mountain murals at the National Art Museum of China. On the day of the opening ceremony, Zhang Ding was in Shijiazhuang on business. He spent the whole day worrying about some unforeseen disaster until he watched the CCTV report about the exhibition that night and his heart returned to its normal rhythm.

I can remember the day in 1985 that the exhibition closed; the memory is buried somewhere among the blur of my wife’s labour and our baby’s first cries. I had been riding my bike past the National Art Museum on the way to the Union Medical Hospital for the past few days and I’d seen ‘Exhibition of the Murals of Flower Mountain’ on the promotional banner. Because these two otherwise unrelated events became linked by the birth, I remembered the two brothers with the strange names.

When the Zhous came to America in 1986, after being invited to show their work in Chicago, they had thirty dollars and fifty paintings between them. Their English was non-existent. After a month they were brave enough to be interviewed on American television, but Da Huang told me that they hadn’t even been able to understand the questions. It didn’t take them long to infiltrate many of the best art galleries. At the Chicago International Art Fair in 1988 they showed dozens of works, nearly all of which sold, including one that broke the $300,000 barrier. ‘That feeling of waking up overnight to world acclaim,’ Shan Zuo told me, ‘only people who’ve really known suffering can comprehend it.’

In January 2000 the Zhou brothers were invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where for the opening ceremony they improvised a live painting in front of an audience of world leaders and economists. On a canvas three metres high and nine metres wide, the brothers painted their simple, gestural motifs as if intoxicated, moving swiftly and deliberately. The whole process took forty-five minutes as the hall filled with applause and cheers. President Clinton was one of the many heads of state who later invited them to dinner.

Most modern success stories are the same except for a few details: the usual mixture of packaging and self-promotion. I’ve seen several of my friends sink and decay into wealth and fame, but not the Zhou brothers. Wearing their flat, sharp leather shoes, they’ve ridden the wave of success with astonishing skill. Actually, what surprises me the most is how two destitute boys managed to make their way out of China’s interior into the rest of the world. Chance has certainly played its part, but one thing that’s certain is their inner compulsion – and the stronger the compulsion, the further one goes. It must have something do with what their grandmother taught them by her example, with their mother’s perseverance and their father’s romantic nature, as well as his lingering shadow. I think it also has something to do with their ethnic-minority blood. Compared to the Han civilization which has already passed into decline, ethnic-minority cultures still possess a fighting spirit and a will to make memorable life-works. So that inner compulsion is perhaps a summoning of the blood that in their case goes back to those ancient rock paintings.

There is no doubt that the Zhou brothers’ work has also been influenced by Abstract Expressionism, the post-Second World War movement that was so central to the New York art scene. Their spontaneous paintings have the same energy and improvisational quality that marked out the New York school in the Fifties. And in the same way that Western artists often found inspiration in ‘exotic lands’ and ‘primitive cultures’, the Zhou brothers have brought the Chinese tradition of impressionistic brush painting and the ancient signs of Chinese murals into the context of modernist Western art. Perhaps this kind of exchange is just another means of self-preservation in an increasingly homogeneous global culture. But it makes it easier to understand the Zhou brothers’ art: the vast amount of white space, the ingenious touches of the brush, the free use of primitive signs that make up their paintings. When looking at them, one thinks of the works of the great Chinese painter Bada Shanren and the calligraphy and ancient pictographs of China.

And yet perhaps the greatest mystery is the way the brothers paint collaboratively. I asked them once if any conflict occurred during their creative process. Da Huang replied, ‘Conflict is a kind of tension – in the whole of the painting it is transformed into an equivalent harmony.’

As I’ve spent more time with Da Huang, I’ve discovered that his savage energy perfectly balances Shan Zuo’s passionate nature. Without his older brother’s voice to temper it, Da Huang’s energy risks a certain ruinous quality; without his younger brother’s voice, Shan Zuo lacks a necessary fierceness.

At four in the morning, Shan Zuo and I were rapidly hitting the bottom of a bottle of Cognac. The primitive figures in the painting on the wall had begun to dance and leap about. I stumbled back to my room wondering why I couldn’t walk straight. Shan Zuo held me up, leading me on as, staggering and tumbling, we made our way through the darkness.