But to look for an archetypal warrior-poet’s face in contemporary China is not to seek out an Emperor’s visage nor any Han portrait. It is to witness the struggle to resuscitate every face other than that of Mao. Had Segalen visited the China of the late twentieth century, he would have had to contemplate not the possibility of a portrait that might mirror his face, instead he would have to hunt through the proliferation of portraits that have arisen like ghosts from the smoky air surrounding Mao’s image, minor portraits that midst the dust and shopping and pollution are return from the oblivion of censored history.

Whether the visitor, seeing through Segalen’s eyes, looks at the art of Yue Minjun, those ghastly smiling faces that epitomize the political reticence and repressed anger of the art movement called Cynical Realism, a desperate response to the crushing of the demonstrations in Tian’anmen Square, or at the less well-known paintings of Xu Weixin, whose large photorealist pictures are an attempt to reclaim the face from the era of the Cultural Revolution when the only portrait was Mao’s, or at Chen Shaofeng’s project Report on Social and Artistic Phenomenon in Tiangongsi Village, partnership-portraits where the artist paints a picture of his subject and his subject paints a picture of the artist, both being displayed together, the face “looms large” as the crux, the unanswered question, of what it might be to be Chinese. The confrontational artist Ai Weiwei once wrote in his blog that to be Chinese today is to be inhuman.

But to look for an archetypal warrior-poet’s face in contemporary China is not to seek out an Emperor’s visage nor any Han portrait. It is to witness the struggle to resuscitate every face other than that of Mao.

Segalen’s persona states, in contemplation, perhaps, of the Self, his poem addressing what he nominates as a personal demon: “I have tried all that and he remains, one and the same in his diversity — since it must be thus, O faceless one…”

More than the traditional symbols of China — Tian’anmen Square, the Forbidden City or the Great Wall — it is the strange capital of the face, both as idea and image, that is being resuscitated as the country opens up to the outside world. One can imagine Segalen would have been opposed to this particular kind of democratically symbolic rebirth as his quest for the face was for the face of singular Authority, the face that would be as recognizable as his own and arise like a Messiah from a lost past in which great men had the power both of ruler and poet. Segalen was not looking for an undiscoverable face, something like that suggested by the Ch’an master Hui-neng in his koan, “What is your original face before your mother and father were born?”. He wanted to reveal a face of power that had to be hidden, as the Emperor’s was, behind the walls of a Forbidden City.

To think of Segalen’s quest in today’s China is to confront the enormous shift that the nation has experienced during the twentieth century, from the revolutionary possibilities of Communism, in which the ideal of egalitarianism was all, which meant, at one extreme, that in its visual culture one image of a worker could stand for another, faces being exchangeable, and that, at the other extreme, there had to be the monomania of the Cultural Revolution when a single face — Mao’s — stood for every face and the making of individualized portraits was thus regarded as counter-revolutionary. The paradox of this being that Mao’s picture became a kind of holy icon with much of the usual mysticism and anxieties. Then there are the mask-like faces of Cynical Realism whose logic is captured well in a poem by its critic, the poet Yang Lian: “Masks are born of faces, copy faces, but ignore faces.”

One of the few images from the 1970s that has returned as a popular icon, appearing in many books and on posters, is Li Xiaobin’s Shangfangszhe — People Pleading of Justice from the Higher Authorities. It is a picture of an old haggard man who still seems to believe in the ideals of the Revolution, though the image almost suggests that, as a petitioner, he is very likely to become a victim of the authorities. The man is unnamed, making it a portrait in the simplest sense: We look through his face and into his heart.

In the 1990s, a period in which the demoralization and powerlessness of the intellectual class was exemplified by Cynical Realism, there was another phenomenon, lao zhaopian re or “Old Photo Craze.” During that fad a series of books, better called “albums,” of pictures from earlier times, including the Cultural Revolution, what would in another time and place would have simply been old snapshots, were massively popular. These were publications collecting photographs of people and places from the past, sometimes focused on specific themes, with a certain, restricted historical reality that allowed their viewers to reminisce on what was then on the verge of being effaced from memory. In those pages, the faces are of individuals who seem returned from the dead.