Today consumerism has introduced its own ciphers and icons for the individual’s face alongside the politicians masks — models, celebrities or sports-people — and new photographic technologies allow portraits to proliferate, blooming like a million flowers. In his exhibition Landscape of Childhood at Beijing’s Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, the painter Yan Pei-Ming captured well the symbol and paradox of the Chinese face now. Instead of showing paintings on canvas as he usually does, the large portraits of Chinese children were painted onto flags that in the large gallery, a “space” like an aircraft hanger, were kept fluttering by large fans, the noise of which was like that of a plane perpetually preparing for take-off.

Had he not, in expecting to see a Han face through the mirror of the past, been seeking stasis, an escape from the modern and its violent, endless change?

Wandering to and fro between the fluttering flags, feeling as if in the Windtunnel of History, looking at faces and lives buffeted by change, I was thinking of Segalen. Had he not, in expecting to see a Han face through the mirror of the past, been seeking stasis, an escape from the modern and its violent, endless change?

It is not true that Segalen failed to discover a face of the Han era. In the province of Shanxi, on his first expedition, following the descriptions provided in a chapter on tombs and burial grounds recorded in the region’s chronicles, he made one of the most important discoveries of his time: the unusual sculpture of a riderless horse at the gate of the tumulus or symbolic mountain, of the tomb of Huo Ch’ü-ping, the great warrior who defeated the Hsiung-nu or Huns. The layout of the tomb and its surrounds are well described in The Great Statuary of China, significant detail given over to the sculpture. The sculpture captures a famous moment in a battle against the Huns when the warrior’s, then riderless, horse strode over one of the fallen enemy and with its four legs held the man down. That statue, what would long be regarded as the only free-standing statue of that era found between East Asia and Persia, tantalised Segalen with the prospect that there might be other statues that might bear the face he was longing to see. That this face was not a portrait but a kind of ancient caricature — enemies never sustain the engagement of portraiture — did not prevent Segalen from observing the trampled man with a poetic eye, seeing how he is writhing against the weight of the horse: “And from the toenails to the mask face, a struggle is going on, belly to belly and knee to knee, an effort to resist being crushed. Even the beard is vomited like a stream of petrified oaths and foams furiously over the chest of the crushing beast.”

The Great Statuary of China
BY Victor Segalen
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
BY Eleanor Levieux
(University of Chicago Press, 1978)

Then, turning the page of the book in its University of Chicago Press edition, the reader sees the drawings made by the poet. One outline drawing of the horse and the barbarian is the view from the front. Beside that there is another drawing — Segalen mentions how he had to stand beside the horse and turn himself so that he was looking at the figure upside down — solely of the Hun’s face. Segalen has intellectual distance enough to write that it is “a cynical portrait of a non-Chinese, a “slave”… Feature for feature it embodies the literary descriptions that pure Chinese wrote of the Hsiung-nu: on a squat body, a very large head, broad face, pronounced nose with flaring nostrils, heavy moustache, tuft of stiff hair on the chin, long ears…”

When I saw a reproduction of the sculpture in the Cultural History Museum in Xi’an, I was surprised by how raw the stone was and how brutally the dying barbarian had been portrayed. Our expectations of the art’s equitable role today are utterly unlike those of that era when, in the campaign in which this moment of defeat took place, it is recorded that seventy thousand men were decapitated. Can we imagine the faces of all those severed heads? His face was not even a mask, instead simply a rictus of disembodied pain, reminding me of all the beheaded statues I had seen on my journey, and of the faceless, nameless “Tankman” of Tian’anmen Square who famously hindered a tank moving towards the Square where the demonstrators were gathered during the 1989 uprising and who, one might assume, was crushed invisibly shortly after by that same instrument of state. Equally it might be the case that he was arrested and is still in prison, or that he simply slipped back and disappeared into the anonymity of the crowd. Annually the failed uprising is commemorated world-wide with a dance dedicated to him, choreographed by an Australian, based on his confident movements in facing-off against that armoured vehicle.

Reading Segalen’s accounts of his discoveries, it is easy to forget the growing excitement he must have felt once, and once only, on finding that statute, the sense that he was close to his goal. That the stone horse was riderless, might have suggested that somewhere else, maybe even somewhere nearby, the stone rider who had wandered away was standing in hiding, awaiting his discovery by this foreign, obsessed poet.