Moments of glad grace: China checks out Irish artists inspired by WB Yeats

It was a hot, humid evening in the 798 Art Zone, a sprawling complex of museums, galleries, junk shops, restaurants and bars on the site of an East German-built military technology factory in the northeast of Beijing. In a large, open square on the way in, dozens of stands under white, plastic canopies sold squid on skewers, meat cooked in every style, noodles, rice, sweets, fruit, beer and cocktails.

In the newly-opened LolliGo Art Space down a narrow street nearby, Ireland’s ambassador to China, Ann Derwin, was presiding over a celebration of WB Yeats’s birthday as she opened an exhibition of paintings inspired by his poems. Ancestral Houses and Meditations features more than 100 contemporary Irish artists, each of whom produced a work measuring 30cm by 30cm based on an insight drawn from the poetry.

The artists include Betty Brown, Brian Ferran and Olive Bodaker, who are already celebrated beyond Ireland, along with other, less familiar names. Originally curated by the Hamilton Gallery in Sligo, the exhibition will travel to a number of cities in China, curated by Vincent Deng of Hong Kong VA Galleries.

Deng said that while Irish literature is read, taught and studied in China, Irish contemporary art is less well known.

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“I think it’s a very good opportunity to present this exhibition to China, to let people understand how contemporary art in Ireland is now. They have more than 100 artists and no matter if you are famous or not, we will just give you 30cm by 30cm. You can only paint on that small size. It’s like an examination. That’s a good way,” he said.

Chen Li, professor of Irish literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said that Yeats is the best-known and most widely studied Irish writer in China. He was already translated into Chinese before he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923 and he was an important influence on the New Culture Movement that emerged after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.

“Yeats was introduced very early on to China in the 1940s as a forerunner of the modernist poets. He influenced the first generation of Chinese poets who wrote in simplified Chinese. Before that, we followed the traditional Chinese pattern to write rhymed poems. He influenced the new generation of poets to write what we call new style poems. So he was highly influential, in a sense,” she said.

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Chinese writers from the 1920s onwards took an interest in the Irish Literary Revival and the independence movement, which ran in parallel with China’s struggle for national autonomy and the emergence of a new, vernacular literature. Yeats returned to the university curriculum in China in the 1980s, before other Irish writers, and some of his poems have more than a dozen published Chinese translations.

Chen, who received the Presidential Distinguished Service Award from President Higgins last December, said poems such as Down By the Sally Gardens are popular among her students. But it is When You Are Old that has reached a mass audience in China through a version sung by the musician Zhao Zhao during the 2015 Spring Festival Gala, a television show broadcast at Chinese new year that is watched by more than 900 million people.

“The original is a love song but Zhao Zhao transforms it into a song dedicated to his mother. He has to pursue his singing career in big cities so that he has to leave his mother behind, alone, back in his hometown. So he wrote it as a song to remember the beautiful days with his mother. And when you are old, it’s a literary image of his mother dozing by the fireplace,” Chen said.

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After a month in Beijing, the exhibition will tour a number of Chinese cities including Chongqing and Hong Kong. But Derwin suggested that it had a special resonance in the Chinese capital.

“Beijing is the first stop on this touring exhibition and I think the city’s long history resonates with the theme of the exhibition Ancestral Houses and Meditations. I think while walking through the hutongs and Beijing parks, many of us will be struck by the ancient architecture as embodying the memory of many previous communities that lived here,” she said.

[ Inner Mongolia, where China strives to balance environmental, economic and ethnic ambitions ]