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INTERNATIONAL CHINA A Brush With the Master He is one of America's foremost avant-garde artists, an improviser whose entire style is built on the notion of shunning preconceptions and responding impulsively. His hosts were representatives of the world's oldest bureaucracy, at the service of a Communist regime whose philosophy precludes spontaneity. If ever there were an unlikely pairing, it would seem to be Robert Rauschenberg and the People's Republic of China. But opposites sometimes really do attract, as both Rauschenberg and the Chinese discovered during the artist's recent four-week stay on the mainland. As a result of the improbable collaboration, Rauschenberg was able to execute one of the most ambitious projects of his career--and a select group of China's own artists got a rare glimpse of Western art in action. It is a long way from the Black Mountains of North Carolina, where Rauschenberg began his career, to the Yellow Mountains of Anhui Province, where he spent the bulk of his time in China. "What attracted me," he says, "was the difficulty of working in China and the opportunity to work at the very same place where the Chinese say paper was invented." Rauschenberg made the most of the chance, creating 490 collages using Chinese ideograms and local materials such as silk and paper produced to his specifications by China's oldest paper mill. He also learned more than a few things about creative expression in a country where painters are classified as "art workers" and official guidelines for culture still echo Chairman Mao's dictum that "there is no art for art's sake, there is no art detached from class." 'Crazy Space': Rauschenberg was not certain how he would be received. "I'm not sure why they invited me," he says. "I thought my work could be either interesting to them or resented by them. It might fall into that category of innate complexity that is in the traditional Chinese work, with silks, brocades, bright colors and crazy space. Or I could represent exactly what they would hate most about America, and that is that my work is the expression of all the waste and excess in our society." At first the Chinese had trouble tuning in on Rauschenberg's very personal and quirky vision. A few eyebrows were raised when the artist and his six American associates walked into a poster store and begin licking the posters to see if the colors would run. Gradually the Chinese began to go with the flow. Chinese craftsmen and artists seemed as stimulated by the venture as the American team, agreeing to keep the paper mill open around the clock to accommodate Rauschenberg. "After the third day, we almost weren't talking through a translator," he claims. "If you're used to inventing and adjusting, as any artist should be, then you go right to whatever has to be done. Actually the translator confused us after three days. He told us that it was much easier to translate for diplomats." Rauschenberg's studio in Anhui became a local attraction, with people stopping by at all hours to watch the Americans. "The thing that struck people most was how much we enjoyed our work," he recalls. His forays onto the streets to photograph scenes and objects that caught his eye also drew attention. "I stopped to shoot a garbage can that was an absolute cacophony of color and experience and odors, with the entire visual history of the last 48 hours," he says. "Somebody passing by yelled out: 'That's a waste of film.' But after a couple of days, our interpreter would say, 'Look over here--that's a Rauschenberg'." Subversive: Some of the more established Chinese artists seemed to regard Rauschenberg's creations with a certain reserve. But younger students were more enthusiastic; at a Peking lecture, their natural inquisitiveness came bursting out when he showed slides of his works and of those by U.S. artists such as Johns, Motherwell, Kelly, Rosenquist and Lichtenstein. "You could hear the murmur in the audience when they saw Lichtenstein's bull series," the artist recalls. "They really got off on seeing that bull fall apart." Later, when their Chinese instructor was trying to get the students to the studio, "the kids started screaming that they wanted to see the photographs." This willingness to expose a limited number of budding artists to Rauschenberg's subversive gospel does not mean that the Chinese have embraced the cause of modern art. Just days before the first official retrospective of American art since 1949 was scheduled to open last fall, the Chinese requested that thirteen works by modern painters such as Frankenthaler, Louis, Kline and Pollock be withdrawn--yielding only when the American organizers held firm. "They intermittently get upset about abstract art," says one foreign cultural expert in Peking. "The other thing that jangles them is nudity." Unofficial groups of Chinese experimental artists such as the "Star" and "Grass" schools have apparently also had to disband because of their difficulty in gaining exhibition space. "I wanted very much to ask at the art school if they did another kind of work at home, just for exercise," says Rauschenberg. "But I thought, 'Bob, don't be ridiculous, you're not going to get an answer to a question like that'." 'Neon': Judging by the paintings Rauschenberg and his group saw during their stay in China, the prevailing orthodoxy continues to be a stodgy kind of "revolutionary romanticism"--or as Rauschenberg puts it, "all those paintings of tractors by a waterfall." Still, there are signs that the party hierarchy is to some extent willing to loosen its grip on the art world. At an exhibition in Anhui Province the American group saw a picture in which political slogans included as part of the background had been painted over. China's practical leaders may have come to realize that art sales can learn valuable foreign exchange--and that connoisseurs most likely to buy Chinese art abroad will probably shy away from works whose heavy ideological content overwhelms their artistic form. Rauschenberg come away from his monthlong sojourn with 80 rolls of film that can be easily folded into future assemblages and with a variety of fabrics, ribbons, kites and other Chinese materials that will undoubtedly be added to the quarter-mile-long painting he is producing in Captiva, Fla. "I am still digesting things," he admits. But he hopes to repeat the experience of working in China. "The neon here is just really insane," he says excitedly. "And along a road in Anhui we saw some wonderful tiles. I'd love to go back and work at that kiln." Having survived--and even enjoyed--one brush with the master, the Chinese just may be willing to give it another try. LARRY ROHTER in Peking NEWSWEEK/AUGUST 2, 1982 photograph Donald Staff The artist in Anui: 'Look--that's a Rauschenberg'