Little over a century ago a Frenchman was standing in a wheatfield in central China, overseeing his workers as they excavated what he thought would be his Holy Grail, a sculptural portrait from the Han Dynasty. The Frenchman was the poet Victor Segalen, then a medical doctor with a special interest in Chinese history and a literary ambition the depth of which was then far from being recognized.

To discover this archaeological site, Segalen had investigated the ancient regional chronicles that describe the types and locations of historical remains, steles, tombs and sculptures. He had found mention of the “stone men” of the Han era in documents that had been revised during the Ming Dynasty, from which he assumed that in those times it had still been possible to find the figures. He had already made an important discovery on this expedition, yet it was his desire to find a Han portrait, to come face-to-face with an image of a man from that early era, that drove him on.

As the workers uncovered the six-foot long grey stone lying horizontally in the earth, “worn out like an old block on which a hundred generations have placed their feet,” as he wrote in his The Great Statuary of Ancient China, he observed its long tunic and that it was missing feet. A number of the peasants who assisted his men to lift the stone and rotate it, then turn it upright had begun to laugh. He assumed that was because the task of resurrecting something from the long lost past seemed absurd to them. Later he would write, with palpable excitement: “For a few oppressive instants — caused by our haste, the excitement of making this find — I cherished the hope that I was about to contemplate a Han man face-to-face!”

He had already made an important discovery on this expedition, yet it was his desire to find a Han portrait, to come face-to-face with an image of a man from that early era, that drove him on.

Then there was that realization he had experienced too many times before. The figure was faceless. It had been beheaded. Even in his document of the discoveries, The Great Statuary of China, one of the earliest accounts of its time and a book which was, along with his poems, my guide on my journey following the route of his expeditions, a book obviously indebted to his mentor Edouard Chavannes, his frustration is dramatic and of a kind seldom admitted to in archaeologists’ professional writings.

More profound than the disappointment of a persistent archaeologist who has failed to find a desired artefact, Segalen was disheartened, like a poet whom the muse has failed to visit. Any reader of that book, unlike readers of his literary works in which he imagines the history of China in various periods and through a range of voices, can’t help but feel his disenchantment. The archaeologist and poet seems to have sought in the ancient Chinese past a face that might mirror his own, a portrait of a Han man, a warrior-poet of the earliest grand phase of Chinese civilization, but instead he had found only a headless statue, an impersonal absence.

René Leys
BY Victor Segalen
PHOTO: Bibliothèque nationale
de France

The question as to why Victor Segalen was fascinated, one could say obsessed, by this desire to find a Han portrait at which he might stare as if into the mirror-image of himself, is at the heart of his entire body of work, writings that include archaeological accounts, a play on the life of the Buddha, notes towards an essay on the idea of the exotic that was published posthumously, and novels — one set in Tahiti and another, his best known book, René Leys, in Peking — and, of course, the poetry, an exceptional oeuvre, all steeped in Chinese history, so much so that only in recent years, with the West’s much more serious engagement with both contemporary and historical China, has its full import started to be appreciated.

It is not enough to see Segalen’s life, with its inner motif in his quest for the human face, as an intellectual project. Segalen’s expeditions were material insights into the history of China — that is one of the joys of archaeology, a kind of stationary, vertical time-travel — but spiritually he was searching for something deeper, a truth that philosophers have come to contemplate as that relation between one’s Self and all that is Other, whether a foreign world, God or the Cosmos. Unlike many of the intellectuals of his day and later, especially Ezra Pound, the American with whom he has some interesting parallels, whose translations — or mistranslations — of Chinese poetry have had more influence on modern English-language literature than any other single body of work, aside, perhaps from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Segalen dedicated himself to knowing the great Unknowable China by learning Mandarin and by travelling and living there. Pound’s exposition of the nature of Chinese writing, dependant to the initial work of the scholar Ernst Fellenosa, lack Segalen’s obsessive engagement with China as an Other World. This may explain why Segalen’s works are less influential on later writers than Pound’s which was, at least in terms of literary technique, revolutionary.

Village breton sous la neige, 1894
(Oil on canvas, 62 × 87 cm)
BY Paul Gauguin
Musée d’Orsay

It is usually said that Segalen first encountered Chinese culture in San Francisco’s Chinatown when he was forced to sojourn there to recover from illness when on his way to the South Pacific. Fascinated by the folk-opera and his encounter with Chinese writing, Segalen is thought to have bought himself paper and a calligraphy brush and started learning to write Chinese. He would arrive in Tahiti just after the death of Gauguin, that other great Orientalist, tempering the misfortune by purchasing a number of the artist’s works, among them Breton Village in the Snow. Despite all his travelling, Segalen was born in Brest, Brittany, and would die in a forest there in mysterious circumstances, all the signs pointing to suicide. By the time he arrived in Peking in June 1909, after having studied Chinese in Paris, he had learnt the language well enough to be employed as a naval interpreter as well as in his original profession of physician. Segalen’s belief in the necessity of an appreciation of Chinese civilization was not driven solely by a kind of awe, but also by a notion, not untypical of his age, that, as he wrote in one of his letters to his friend Henri Manceron, “the transfer from the Empire of China to the empire of one’s self is continuous.”

In other words, he believed that Chinese civilization could be a solution to the decadence of modern European culture. This solution was an equalization of the great civilization and the poet’s Self, the transfer being the reversal of the usual poetic act. What makes this radical is the hope it can reverse the usual assumption that the poet should give voice to and embody his civilization. Instead of the poet being, as is conventional, the face of his culture, in Segalen’s work the seen face is what is disembodied, what is focused in and by the mirror of the Other Civilization.

To enter the Chinese past, he might have written, is to pass through its mirror.

To read Segalen today is to attempt to understand a man who, despite his desire to be otherwise, was of his time — a humanist adventurer, doctor, scholar, archaeologist and poet — and it is for the reader to confront the question of what it is to feel foreign, foreign not to the Other but to oneself and one’s own culture.

Segalen’s books, most popular among them the novel René Leys and his poetic masterpiece Stèles, reveal him as someone who moves to and fro across the borderland of the Mirror. While the main character of the novel set in revolutionary Peking during the last years of the Qing Dynasty is the man after whom the book is named, the story is told by a “Victor Segalen” and this Segalen, while an observer of the times, and largely innocent in that way we must be when first immersed in a foreign world, gives the reader a good sense of the fragile and wildly fluctuating emotional states of the man than does his copious notes and letters. Stèles, a collection of prose-poems, à la Baudelaire or Rimbaud, and widely regarded as his masterwork, purports to be a collection of transcriptions from ancient inscribed Chinese stones, using the voices of many different historical personae, as if Segalen wants to try on the various masks of history.

In this, again, Segalen can remind us of Ezra Pound, of Pound’s early book Personae, although a figure with which he might also be compared is the Portuguese modernist poet and writer Fernando Pessoa whose body of work consists almost entirely of personae, or, as they are termed in his case, heteronyms.

To move through even the restructured post-Olympics Beijing while having Segalen in mind is to feel his presence as a guide to a world of illusion and history. To look at the portrait of Chairman Mao as it — or he? — famously faces Tian’anmen Square from the Gate of the same name, staring south, as the Emperor would have, as the Great Helmsman himself would on important occasions, is to realize that the entire city can be seen to have been originally built around the presence of a single man, bringing to mind Segalen’s insight early on in René Leys: “Inside, deep in the innermost centre of the Palace, a face: man-child and Emperor, Lord of the Sun and Son of Heaven…”

While this might not entirely accord with a deeper historical understanding of the city, the way Segalen presents Peking at the start of René Leys has the effect that we can feel as much inside the maze of the city as caught in the void between his two faces, between the Segalen the Writer and Segalen the Character. The latter has his own mirror-image in the dubious fictional friend who gives his name to the novel.

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.

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.

Yet Segalen was aware that there was a tradition of face-to-face encounter that he was overlooking. While not as old as the Han, nor in-the-round — Segalen persisted in the particularly Greco-Roman expectation that sculptures should be seen from all angles! — the monumental Buddhist art of China is merely, grudgingly, given a chapter in his book on the ancient sculpture, though at every opportunity he remarks on the Buddhist sculptures’ failure, that it owes too much to the sculpture of Central Asia, that it is inevitably derived from a Greco-Roman tradition, and that the sculptures are not even beautiful! Longing as usual for the purity and strength of the Han, he states that for “the second time we have been looking for a human face — so elusive, so unavailable until now — and there is no denying that here we have an abundance of human faces, but we are quickly satiated: we see the same face everywhere, always the same eyes, the same forehead, the same smiles with no hint of laughter…”

It is as if Segalen is caught on one side of a mirror through which he wishes to pass. He sees his reflection — after all Buddhism is about the illusionistic world — though fails to recognize the ambiguity of his Self, the impersonality of Being.

Then, in an anger born of frustration, he admits that after looking at hundreds of these Buddhist faces he “wished for the terrifying, unknown, areligious face of a human being in the days of the Han — or the thick lips and suffering eyes of the trampled Hsiung-nu.”

We can imagine Segalen, enflamed by face after face after face of beatitude, wanting to take a hammer to them himself. In confronting the proliferation of Buddhist faces he reveals his failure to imagine himself as Chinese, which is what he hopes to do in most of his literary writing, especially in his best poems. It is a failure Vadime Elisseeff (1918-2002), scholar and director of Musée Cernuschi in Paris, elucidates in an afterword to the American edition of the book on the statuary. That Segalen denies the contribution Buddhism made to Chinese culture causes Elisseff to ask, “Could we ostracize Christianity from our Western culture and from our arts simply because it was born in the East?”

It is as if Segalen is caught on one side of a mirror through which he wishes to pass. He sees his reflection — after all Buddhism is about the illusionistic world — though fails to recognize the ambiguity of his Self, the impersonality of Being. There is a mania latent in his pursuit of the Han portrait, an unsettling devotion to only one order of encounter.

Were he to find a Han face and see himself in it, wouldn’t he become like Mao during the Cultural Revolution, the only Person looking out over a sea of men and women working endlessly for their right to be who they are, to earn their own presence, their own faces? Wouldn’t he be in that moment like the Emperor, as is described in those opening pages of René Leys, “Lord of the Sun and Son of Heaven… the victim appointed for the last four thousand years as intercessory sacrifice between Heaven and people on earth”?

Segalen arrived in Chengdu still with some hope after the partial success of his discovery. He had also another reason to imagine that he might find his Grail for the reason that Edouard Chavannes, who had taught him in Paris and to whom he regularly sent letters reporting on his progress, had found mention of a statue of Confucius in a “hall of offerings” at the chambers of Wen Weng. From the records Chavannes had even been able to provide a description of the ancient teacher seated flanked by significant historical figures and his seventy two disciples. Segalen easily located the site, but found that a prefectural school stood in its place. In a perverse irony — as if to torment him — on the second door after the entrance of the newer building there was an inscription put up “the day before yesterday,” declaring it to be the Stone Chamber of Wen Weng.

Perhaps it was better that he didn’t find that the face he was looking for was that of Confucius, someone who Segalen, in his idealizing of empires, warriors and poets, may have felt possessed neither the reality nor the transcendent power he’d hoped to find. Of course, seen from the first decade of the twenty-first century, Segalen’s fixation on a face from the period when China was first unified, first great, can seem “doomed to failure,” inevitably only an encounter with an absence, at best the shadow-play of an European expecting to find himself Emperor on the other side of the great wall that is the Chinese Mirror.

When Segalen had opportunities to encounter the face of the China of his time he turned away, preferring the dream of an imperial past to the revolutionary present, at least once seeing the lives of contemporary peasants, the future revolutionaries, as “worms that wriggle and seethe in the dung-heap or the tapeworms that infest the gut.”

There is a moment in his classic on statuary that can’t help but make today’s reader recoil. It is when after Chao, one of the Chinese men on his expedition, exclaims on first sighting a memorial pillar they had been seeking. Segalen describes the scene: “Because of this, Chou-ma-fu had earned the right to have his picture taken alongside the pillars of P’ing-yang. Although modern Chinese individuals are deliberately missing from most of our drawings about ancient China, here the Chinese man is “giving an idea of size,” his left hand resting familiarly on the P’ing-yang buttress pillar on the right.” Turning to look at the facing page in the book, the reader sees a slim yet strong man in work-clothes standing gazing at the camera, his hand on the carved stone giving the impression he had been told to hold it there, and has kept his hand there for the awkward period of the long exposure.

It could have been exactly this, that Segalen in his monomania was failing to realize the disquieting fact that almost none can find their own face in the blurred crowd of History.

Between what that man’s frozen features cannot express and Segalen’s yearning for encounter there is a disconnection. Again the poet Yang Lian, centuries later, captures what falls between two people when one cannot see the other, when one of them, like Segalen, is searching fruitlessly for his face in the mirror of another’s face: “You are afraid to wonder: why do people always draw faces? Who are you without your face? If you ripped off that layer of skin you call your face, could you still find yourself? As you listen to others crying perhaps it is only this body of yours, claimed by no-one, that is crying. You have always been someone else, crying over a page torn off by a blank sheet of paper.”

It could have been exactly this, that Segalen in his monomania was failing to realize the disquieting fact that almost none can find their own face in the blurred crowd of History.

Yet there is always the chance of a future encounter.

On my last day in Chengdu, having followed the course of Segalen’s expeditions, as much subconsciously as consciously, as if lead through a county of ruin by a foreign ghost, I found that in a shadowy mausoleum inside an artificial hill there was, indeed, a sculptured portrait of an ancient emperor. Segalen would have been disappointed again. It was of an era later than the Han and the figure of Wang Jian wasn’t life-size, being only eighty-six centimetres tall. This first, small portrait of an Emperor, discovered five decades after Segalen’s death, is akin to a dream-image of one’s Self. The face, with a high-ridged, almost hooked nose and recessed eyes, could be my own. Staring closely at the Emperor, a man, a mere man several eras removed from today, was like peering into that image we all must have of ourselves after our pending death, that face to whom we speak when we look in the mirror while mouthing another’s poem, not unlike this one by Segalen: “O Faceless one, do not leave me whom / you inhabit: // Since I have not been able to chase you away or / to have you, accept my secret homage.”